After Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care last Tuesday, people across the country issued heartfelt messages of support. Figures across the political spectrum — including now former leader of the opposition and Johnson’s ideological antithesis, Jeremy Corbyn — have understandably seen fit to hold back on direct criticisms of Johnson, instead offering their sympathy and best wishes over social media.
As Johnson exited the ICU at St Thomas’ hospital on Thursday, however, critical voices continued to scrutinise his government’s decision-making over the past six weeks. It is rightfully pointed out that those many hundreds of UK residents currently losing their lives to the coronavirus will have first become infected around three to four weeks ago, at which point members of the public were still gathering in pubs, clubs and other large venues, before guidelines were set out that merely advised us to stay at home. On the 13th of March, for instance, crowds of 60,000 were said to have attended Cheltenham festival. While it is wrong to wish the illness on anybody, on the surface at least it seems bizarre that his having become ill should precipitate an upsurge in public approval – sympathy, maybe, but approval? The Prime Minister’s direction of government policy over the last couple of months has been a confused shambles.
And yet Johnson’s approval rating — as measured by YouGov — went up over twenty points between the middle and the end of March, coinciding with both a rapid increase in deaths from Covid 19, and the sudden strategic shift highlighting the government’s earlier mishandling of the crisis. His hospitalization will doubtless have contributed to this surge of support. In Europe, heads of state in Italy and Germany have also seen an improvement in their ratings, while in the USA, polls suggest that Donald Trump gained support during March – this, despite a series of increasingly unsettling daily news briefings, which one might be able to find funny if they didn’t so glaringly reveal the President’s complete lack of suitability to meet the demands of this historical juncture.
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While this seems baffling, I think the salient point is that in times of crisis, people generally want to feel well led. At a time when we might experience what feels like a frightening lack of control over our lives (economically, for instance), when the structures that we all rely on to meet our day-to-day needs appear vulnerable and the ultimate frailty of human life is apparent, we look to leaders and figures of authority for reassurance. Even if that reassurance is ill-founded, it seems better to go along with it nonetheless; to believe through authority figures, or have them ‘believe for us’. In other words, even in this highly secularised social landscape, we are often sustained through faith, to the point where we’ll ignore — and even seek to suppress — evidence to the contrary.
Humans ‘narrativise’. From stoned shitposters to the most esteemed intellectuals, we confabulate more-or-less illusory stories from which we take meaning, fashioning cohesion out of chaos. Often, especially over the last thirty years in countries where models of the self-as-object-of-project-management have percolated through consumer culture, we conceive of life as a story of self-improvement; as a series of tests, through which we, the heroes, battle to overcome obstacles and achieve mastery over our circumstances. The stories we tell ourselves are often those of progress, growth and unlimited potential, where we pursue significance and fulfillment through enacting business-inspired regimes of self-improvement. Repeat after me: We Are All Tony Robbins…
A problem, however, occurs when our linear ascent runs up against circumstances that confound the cult of meritocratic fulfillment. During economic downturns, people might lose their jobs. They might stop being able to afford rent and become homeless through no fault of their own. When this happens, others — realising that their confabulations of endless personal growth are in fact susceptible to extrinsic factors — begin to question their faith in that publicly lauded cultural narrative. We risk becoming, as it were, affectively un-tuned.
These stories have always been, to some degree, dependent on their reiteration through public channels. So when we, the public, begin to lose faith, we are more likely to subcontract our pursuit of control and personal mastery to a figure of authority. As we become more anxious, we cede our own propensity to narrate and instead invest in the readily accessible and (usually) attractively simple narrative of a leader. Whether the leader is trustworthy or competent is of lesser importance than our desire to be led. Ultimately, It is nice to think that there are adults in charge of the house, even if those adults are incompetent, arsonists, or both.
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Part of what comes to inform processes of ‘narrativization’ are the myths we share, and the way we choose to emphasise certain elements therein. American exceptionalism, for instance, finds its basis in tales of original settlers venturing West, taming wild landscapes in a spirit of fearless entrepreneurialism. These stories achieve their cultural potency because they consist almost entirely of myth — told and re-told, adapted to new times and sometimes cleverly twisted or inverted — and continue to loom large in the national imaginary. In the UK, we’ve elevated an account of the Second World War that colours the way that Brits relate to the disruptive dynamics of globalisation. Hence ‘plucky’ sovereign Britain’s antipathy for meddling Brussels Bureaucrats and feckless French intellectualism.
In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, James Meek casts a critical eye over the role of myth in debates over the UK’s membership of the European Union. After outlining the prime importance of cultural mythology in binding imagined communities, Meek discusses the myth of St George, where the hero tames and slays a dragon, saving more townspeople from being sacrificed to the beast. It isn’t difficult to interpret the myth’s subtext, and indeed it stands as a neat political allegory for those wishing to highlight the presence of a harmful, alien element. The implication that if only a troublesome group were removed (be they immigrants, students, ‘chavs’, Brussels Bureaucrats) then our problems would disappear, has served British politicians for generations, essentially easing scrutiny on systemic issues through scapegoating. But just because a rhetorical strategy is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t also highly effective.
The Prime Minister’s recent call to “send the virus packing” bore more than a whiff of St George, attesting once more to the myth’s durability. The rhetoric of war also pervades everyday discussions of Covid19, whether we’re referring to ‘front-line’ workers, ‘doing our bit for the effort’, or paying tribute to the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ of NHS staff tragically losing their lives. I can see that war language has its uses in emphasising the magnitude of this crisis and encouraging vigilance, and am definitely not trying to police the turns-of-phrase people find themselves employing.
However, I feel we should be wary of ubiquitous war-analogising for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it obfuscates political scrutiny, at a point where it is most necessary in shaping the national response. Sincerely hoping that the government responds effectively to this crisis in the coming weeks and months does not preclude such scrutiny, it necessitates it. ‘Pulling together’, then, entails the ongoing practice of political agonism – not thoughtless fawning and the suspension of public debate a la much of the Murdoch press.
Secondly, war-language sheds light on the way that mythologies filter into our speech and the way we comprehend significant events, defining us through their iteration. So if you’re lucky enough to be stuck at home at the moment, it is a good time to consider our ongoing fascination with war, and what it might say about our collective psyche that we should continually return to this guiding metaphor. In his book, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy maps the genealogy of an affective landscape amusingly captured in the football chant, “Two World Wars and One World Cup” (the “Ten German Bombers” chant would work as well). An ongoing fixation on war and lost imperial preeminence (‘Britannia Rules the Waves’) is, Gilroy suggests, emblematic of a nation ill-at-ease in the modern world, defined by “an anxious, melancholic mood”, as much as warm beer or cricket.
However you feel about Gilroy’s stance, I think it is no waste of time to think about the myths that shape us, collectively and as individuals. Moreover, as we look to the future, at a time when we will emerge from this crisis, it will be worthwhile to glance backwards through history at pieces of our past. In the UK at least, progressive political forces have struggled to take seriously, much less approach creatively, the deep, universal human affinity for myth. As Meek points out, this failure has played into the hands of their political opponents, who have happily seized on the opportunity to cast defining marks in this territory.
This post is republished from: https://tossobservations.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup-how-myth-and-language-structure-our-comprehension-of-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR3g64yXOvHaqIlwYu2h-adk2ZOHY1WQG9l3KfbMxYnHlamYIUBO7xCNW6g with the author's permission.