Sociological musings on the “new normal”
Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 has my fellow sociologists springing to produce and collate materials on the pandemic. The website The Syllabus indexes podcasts, magazine articles, and other resources to create a series of coronavirus reading lists. The American Sociological Association (ASA) is collecting its pandemic-related journal articles. Everyday Society, the blog of the British Sociological Association (BSA), is publishing posts about the pandemic from members of the sociological community. The BSA-supported but independent blogs Cost of Living and Discover Society are doing likewise.
The examined aspects of society or social life in the pandemic vary considerably. One popular topic is how the present “state of exception”, with governments introducing emergency restrictions on civil liberties in the name of public health and safety, might take on a more permanent form if we in civil society fail to stay alert and organised. Another is the political-economic context of the pandemic, placing it in relation to class, capitalism, and decades’ worth of governments pursuing neoliberal policies. As Alfredo Saad-Filho puts it:
“Neoliberalism was quickly shown to have hollowed out, fragmented and part privatized health systems in several countries, while it also created a precarious and impoverished working class that is highly vulnerable both to disruptions in their earning capacity and to health scares because of their low savings, poor housing, inadequate nutrition and work patterns incompatible with healthy lives.”
Similarly, sociologists have situated the worldwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in response to the killing of George Floyd in the immediate context of COVID-19, as well as the longer history of systemic anti-black racism and police brutality. As Reza Nakhaie and F.S. Nakhaie note, in the US “COVID-19 has exacerbated the problems of racial injustice, isolation, frustration and stagnation and caused higher unemployment”, especially among black Americans. While I had previously supposed that lockdown measures and people’s concerns about contagion would hinder traditional forms of activism, the BLM demonstrations have made clear just how much I overestimated that hindrance.
From all this, one can see why Graham Scambler describes the pandemic as a large-scale version of what Harold Garfinkel famously termed a breaching experiment, disrupting the ordering of day-to-day social life to provide insight into how ordered living is achieved. The hope is that this disruption will prompt us to question our perspectives on the nature of society and our existence within it. As Steve Matthewman and Kate Huppatz put it in their introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Sociology, “the pandemic forces a reimagination of the social”.
It is in that spirit that I wish to put forward some initial speculations about the “new normal” we are experiencing because of COVID-19. More specifically, I wish to consider how the circumstances of the pandemic might continue to shape human sociality and social being in the short-to-mid-term.
This is because, while the coronavirus vaccine candidate being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca has already shown promising Phase I and II clinical trial results, it will take longer to complete the larger, randomised Phase III trials, which will produce more comprehensive knowledge of the vaccine’s immune response duration, possible adverse reactions, etc. Additionally, a recent report from the Academy of Medical Sciences warns of a second COVID-19 wave this coming winter. As such, it seems likely that, even if we make the most reasonably optimistic predictions as to the development and distribution of an effective vaccine, COVID-19 will be a major part of the backdrop of our everyday lives for quite some time.
To begin with, I wonder about the social significance of our increased reluctance towards physical contact. While many states have eased lockdown measures, and people vary significantly in how often they wear face coverings and how much they maintain what is misleadingly termed “social distancing”, there appears to be greater aversion to bodily contact than before the pandemic. This wariness of touch affects not only our interpersonal interactions, but also our relationship to our built environment because we become conscious of how handrails, pedestrian crossing buttons, and similar inanimate objects might be fomites for the virus.
As I have previously argued, decreased physical interaction and increased online interaction in response to COVID-19 vividly illustrates the deeper paradoxes of social distance and proximity that the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel identified over a century ago. Simmel’s observation that every interpersonal relationship contains a “union of the near and the far” seems especially apt for understanding our efforts to stay physically distant yet socially close to others.
Rafael Wainer also draws on Simmel’s writings to understand social life in the pandemic and lockdown. He considers how Simmel saw the metropolitan blasé attitude as a “protective organ” formed in response to the overstimulation of the modern metropolis. One could similarly understand our blasé attitude towards lockdown, quarantine, and COVID-19 as a kind of protective organ against the overwhelming flood of often bleak information about the pandemic that pours through our media, especially online.
Initial attempts to gather data on personality changes in lockdown suggest it is premature to say that a collective “lockdown personality” has emerged. Nevertheless, it is plausible that our adaptation to new norms during lockdown, as well as our more idiosyncratic development of personality traits in specific lockdown circumstances, will present challenges as we try to readjust to “normality”.
Given how fundamental touch is to human relationships, as well as how even the pervasive fear of bodily contact we observed at the height of the AIDS crisis was not enough to make absolute touch-aversion a permanent feature of social life, I expect that people will return to physical proximity soon enough, albeit with wariness.
In the meantime, I hope that a more positive element of the “new normal” will be our increased consciousness of humanity’s interconnectedness, which COVID-19 has revealed starkly. That certainly seems optimistic given the global political resurgence of the nationalist-authoritarian right, but if there is one side of humanity that has shown promise throughout the pandemic, it is our capacity for finding new ways to interrelate.
