The events of the past year have posed new and, in certain respects, unprecedented challenges not only for the Church and the body politic, but also for individual man and his relationship to both. In the early days of the pandemic, governments surely had just cause for concern in the face of this highly contagious and largely unknown disease. One year on, however, it seems that a more sober analysis is in order.

Certainly, 2.7 million global deaths is a tragic milestone. And yet, with cases finally on the decline, we are only just beginning to come to terms with the untold socio-cultural cost of lockdown policies, mask mandates, and enforced social distancing. Whatever one thinks of the governmental measures put in place to slow the spread of the virus, one point is clear: the societal fallout of COVID-19 has been such as to rapidly hasten the socio-cultural decline already well underway across the Western world during the past few decades. A direct and dire consequence of this state of affairs is the sustained degradation of man in his social, political, and spiritual nature, a degradation which will only be reversed by recourse to a sound anthropology rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Naturally, there will be those who claim that the health benefits of COVID-19 restrictions have outweighed the side effects, that the mask mandates and other equally invasive policies were ‘necessary evils’ in this time of crisis. Maybe so. But that shouldn’t distract us from the broader point, which is that they are evils, in both their immediate and long-term effects.

Doubtless the damage to physical health caused by the virus has been considerable. But the full social costs of massively increased mental health issues, suicides, alcoholism, obesity, pornography usage, and divorce—all brought about in no small part by state-instituted policies in response to the pandemic—are yet to be fully determined. More troublesome still are the serious threats which these policies have presented to our individual civil liberties and to the social fabric of the nation. Lurking behind it all, a confused and flawed anthropology lies hidden as if in plain view.

In surveying the scale of the problem, it is worth reminding ourselves how far—or how low—COVID-19 has brought us. As Peter Hitchens rightly observes, the state has already thrust itself into every corner of our lives in the name of combating this virus:

It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren. It has denied us funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned us (unless we are Left-wing) from holding or attending public meetings. (Daily Mail, 19 July, 2020)

The crisis must not be understated. Never before in the history of English common law have the masses so willingly gone along with all manner of pervasive and intimate governmental overreach. In an insidious contortion of Christian ethics, “Love your neighbor, and especially the vulnerable” is now replaced with “Surrender your liberties for the sake of the community, or else we’ll turn you into a social pariah.”

The issue of facemasks is especially instructive. We now experience a situation where, by executive edict, the all-powerful state not only requests but actively demands, almost without exception and under penalty of fines or something worse, that every man, woman, and child cover their faces with a soggy cloth. Of course, facemasks may well carry some health benefit in the face of this disease. But we would be foolish to ignore the other, less benign effects that flow from their statewide enforcement. In a culture prone to what Neil Postman has described as “The Great Symbol Drain,” the symbolism of the facemask still retains a remarkable potency. To wear the thing is to submit, and visibly so, to the proposition that the Big Brother arm of the state knows our human needs and priorities better than we do.

Christopher Dawson, in his classic work The Crisis of Western Education, asks how it is that the people of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia were, by and large, willing to tolerate the murderous abuses committed at the hands of their civil leaders. The answer? “[T]he instinct of social conformity is stronger than the instinct of humanitarianism. When the state decides that inhuman measures are required for the good of the party, the individual accepts its decision without criticism and in fact without recognizing what the state is doing.” By nature a social animal, man will always naturally seek to conform to the herd mentality, and it typically takes a significant amount of effort and moral resolve for him to counteract this proclivity.

The cultural elites of our day understand this facet of human nature all too well. Media brainwashing, as well as public shaming of celebrities who dare contravene the established edicts, are just some of their preferred methods for attaining ideological uniformity. Together with Marx, they tacitly deny human nature, positing in its place the Gattungswesen, or “species-essence,” defined solely in terms of social relations. Man is not, in the final analysis, an individual with unique value and worth. Rather, he exists merely as a cog in the social machine working toward an agenda which the higher-ups have already set.