We still live with the baleful psychological consequences of lockdown. We see it from the number of people unwilling or unable to enter into the workforce, to the persistent levels of school absenteeism among children who also feel daunted by the outside world, to the high levels of antisocial and criminal behaviour – most notably the increased incidents of shoplifting. For two years whole tranches of the populace lived isolated from one other, deprived of human contact, and the mental scars still show.
We are literally losing touch with each other as embodied human beings
On Wednesday it was reported that the number of parents claiming disability benefits for children with ADHD and autism had risen by 200,000 since lockdown. It is entirely feasible that this partly mirrors a growth in mental health issues among children and teenagers – from anxiety to depression – that have come in the wake of those disruptive years of 2020-21.
The ongoing preference for working from home is another malign legacy. Sure, some found it more convenient to eschew the need to trek to the office, but some also found it desirable to avoid having to deal with other human beings altogether. They still do.
One innocuous casualty of this shift has been the decline of after-work drinks. What with rising levels of abstemiousness, and fewer people in the office in the first place, that ceremony has become imperilled. In its stead, recommends a report this week from Lancaster University’s Work Foundation, employers should hold social events either during the day or online.
This might be an acceptable solution for minor problem. But we are faced with a far more weighty, wider issue, one made more acute and critical by lockdown: we are literally losing touch with each other as embodied human beings. In doing so we are becoming less empathetic, reflective, cerebral and altogether less human.
The digital revolution that began in earnest three decades ago entrenched a centuries-old philosophical assumption that what mattered foremost about ourselves, what determined who we are, was our ethereal minds. The internet threw up utopian hopes in the 1990s because it promised to hasten the exchange of our thoughts through words, rendering the body, that cumbersome vehicle which merely contained the mind, even less important.
Lockdown rudely jolted us from this conceit. Deprived from passing too close to strangers, forbidden from congregating in numbers, from meeting, shaking hands, hugging, even having sexual relations, it dawned that the body was not just a fleshy conduit. Our bodies didn’t just carry around who were were. We *were* our bodies.
If the best minds in the West hadn’t spent so many of the previous decades fawning over the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, and paid attention to another, neglected, French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we mightn’t have needed to be roused so abruptly from our Cartesian slumber.
Merleau-Ponty was an editor at Les Temps modernes, the magazine he helped to establish with Sartre in 1945. But unlike his more famous contemporary, he didn’t follow the Descartes doctrine. He placed no fundamental difference between mind and matter. He believed that thought and perception were embodied in what he called the ‘body-subject’. The body is never just a body, it is always a ‘lived’ body.
Unlike Sartre, who held that human interactions ar necessarily hostile encounters between inviolable entities, between the Other casting his oppressive and judgement ‘gaze’ upon the Self, Merleau-Ponty saw human, physical one-to-one interaction as desirable, amenable and a source of solace.
The self stuck in bodily isolation can never be transcended
This he outlined most vividly in his best-known work Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), in his description of a dialogue between two people. ‘In the experience of dialogue,’ he imagined, ‘my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.’ In this dialogue, hitherto unknown thoughts cause the exchange to take unforeseen directions – ‘the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no I idea I possessed’ – and to lead to unexpected conclusions. Each party reads nuanced physical cues and vocal intonations in an unplanned act of mutual collaboration. ‘Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world.’
Merleau-Ponty also spoke of the comparable dynamics of a dance for two. This dance can’t be learnt by each individual beforehand: it just has to be done in the moment through one-to-one intuition. This process of unspoken, spontaneous, synchronised creation, in which the boundary between Self and Other melts, is replicated in team sports, in the orchestra and the choir – and in the office. In all these arenas the subjective self is transcended.
In the opposite scenario, the self stuck in bodily isolation can never be transcended. This is why working from home is so limiting. As a Times leading article on Tuesday reacted to The Work Foundation’s proposals: ‘Proscribing the pub starves the young of work’s lifeblood: the chance to connect and learn from colleagues away from the suffocating strictures of work.’
Merleau-Ponty would also have understood why social media can be such a hostile environment for political discussion. Without the embodied presence of others, it is impossible to transcend our subjectivity. There is no scope for unspoken, mutual collaboration, no dissolving of the Other and Self, no means to convey nuance. Each party remains secluded, rigid, exchanging bald statements with no resolution, each left only with escalating anger and frustration. Everyone remains remote, disembodied, dehumanised.
The cyber-utopians of yore were hopelessly naïve. Lockdown showed us why. More screentime means more misery. Thus any future for humanity should ideally rest on a re-discovery of ourselves as ‘body-selves’ among others. That means returning from cyberspace into the physical world, returning to the high street to buy objects from people, foregoing texts and engaging others in telephone conversation, heading back to school and back to the office, and heading to those arenas best suited for political dialogue: the cafe and the pub.
