‘Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?’
Things are there for a purpose. If something has been around for a long time, there is usually a good reason for its existence, and it would be folly to remove it without fully understanding the historical rationale for its genesis. This is the principle of ‘Chesterton’s fence’ – based on a quote from the writer, J.K. Chesterton in 1929 – where the moral of his story was: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
Human faces have been on show since the origin of our species, over half-a-million years ago, and have remained so – at least in liberal democracies – until the covid event. In the early summer of 2020, a pro-mask alliance of scientists, politicians and mainstream media clamoured for us all to cover our faces with strips of plastic or cloth. We can all recall the tropes to justify their unprecedented mandates:
‘It’s only a mask’
‘It’s not much to ask; a small inconvenience’
‘If it helps a little, it’s worth it’.
‘What harm can it do?’
We all now know the harms. Anyone with a brain and eyesight can recognise that humans need faces. If these mask zealots had only heeded the principle of Chesterton’s fence, we would have been spared the calamity of: dumb toddlers who fail to recognize the meaning of smiles and grimaces; a health service delivered by anonymous, robotic personnel, devoid of compassion and empathy; the cruel social exclusion of the millions of hard-of-hearing people; and the re-traumatising of many vulnerable individuals with histories of sexual and physical abuse.
In homo sapiens, faces are there for a fundamental reason: to convey the essence of being human. For extended periods during the covid event we lost our humanity:
NO CHUCKLES
NO JOY
NO FLIRTING
NO RAPPORT
NO HUMOUR
NO RESONANCE
NO CONNECTION
NO SPARK
NO ‘S/HE GETS ME’
NO ATTRACTION
NO SMILES
NO EMOTION
NO FUN
Chesterton was right. We should be very cautious about discarding something that has been around for a very long time without first understanding the reasons for its being. And – ironically, given her subsequent promotion of the dominant covid narrative – Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from the song, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, are salutary.
‘Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?’
Photo courtesy of Cordell Kingley at Unsplash