Behind The Mask
MASKS have been used throughout human history, on a wide variety of occasions — religious, celebratory, punitive, therapeutic and playful. They are used to entertain, frighten, disguise and protect. Masks can also be used to foster the emergence of new identities.
In this article I want to explore their uses and meaning in order to shed light on our present: masks help us understand what it is to be human.
Many of us wear metaphorical masks. Sometimes we feel the need to mask our true feelings in order to protect ourselves or others, or to conceal selfish, ulterior motives. We are said to ‘drop the mask’ in those rare, intimate moments in which we reveal our ‘true, inner, authentic’ selves.
Masks have a political history too. In the twentieth century, perhaps most recognisably with the hooded masks of the KKK, which act as a terrifying and intimidating symbol of white supremacy, while serving to hide or protect an individual’s identity.
In the twenty-first century, Anonymous popularised Guy Fawkes masks as a symbol of resistance to ‘neoliberalism’, characterised by the replacement of welfarism and collectivism with the free-market capitalism and competitive individualism said to be fueling grotesque levels of wealth inequality and unsustainable over-consumption, leading to global warming, climate change and quite possibly, ecological cataclysm.
Over the last twelve months, ‘Joker’ masks have been seen at mass protest movements in Beirut, Catalonia, Chile, Lebanon, Santiago and Hong Kong. ‘Arthur Fleck’ (the Joker) is told he can no longer access therapy or medication due to Government cuts and is told by his counselor that “They don’t give a shit about people like you, Arthur. And they don’t give a shit about people like me either.”
The film suggests that in our celebrity driven and hyper-individualised culture, angry, alienated and dangerous individuals, often driven by frustration with the status quo, can become a powerful political force, which may produce charismatic and powerful yet profoundly damaged leaders.
Our present is of course dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, one aspect of which is the heated debate over the wearing of face masks.
At the height of the pandemic, we all saw powerful images of exhausted medical staff, deployed to evoke empathy for and solidarity with brave frontline staff and to implore us to take sensible measures to slow the transmission of COVID-19.
While strongly contested in public discourse, the scientific consensus appears generally to support the wearing of masks, especially in indoor areas where it is challenging to follow social-distancing guidelines. Many countries have already made masks compulsory in some indoor spaces, enforceable with fines.
The widespread use of protective facemasks has given rise to conspiracy theories. Images of people demonstrating against mask-wearing or engaging in ‘ritual mask burning’ are highly symbolic, alluding to the issue of ‘freedom of choice’ and opposition to ‘nanny state’ interference in ‘personal liberty’, located at the political fault lines between collective and individual responsibility.
The wearing of facemasks becomes a political and moral argument: is refusal to wear them expressing resistance against our freedoms being curtailed by a tyrannical government? Or in wearing them, do we signal our concern for and solidarity with others, especially the more vulnerable members of our society?
Masks allude to the ‘surveillance state’, ‘surveillance capitalism’ and the controversial technology of facial recognition, acting as a reminder that some new technologies have outstripped our ability to properly consider or regulate their implications.
Another area of contemporary society where ‘masks’ intersect with technology, is in thinking about how online platforms shape our sense of self.
Most people use a variety of digital platforms to present mediated, edited or improved versions of ourselves. Yet the potentially harmful psychological consequences of the pressure to conform to idealised representations of cultural, political or identity-based affiliations, and to accumulate likes, clicks and followers, are little understood.
Transgender issues also relate to masks: do those who feel trapped in a body of the ‘wrong biological sex’ want to exchange what they perceive to be an ill-fitting ‘mask’ for one more in keeping with their perceived ‘gender-identity’? Are people with what they conceive to be a ‘fluid’ gender-identity liberated by their ability to select and change their gendered appearance on a regular basis? Or might we perhaps consider people who want to profoundly and permanently change their physical appearance victims of a society overly concerned with outdated views on gender and surface appearance?
The often heated debate around transgender rights has also helped to bring the issue of ‘free speech’ into focus, and specifically the issue of ‘cancel-culture’ and the tactic of ‘no platforming’: do some opportunistic ‘alt-right’ people mobilise the concept of free speech to mask their desire to express unacceptably regressive or bigoted views and/or boost their public profile? Or is free speech being eroded by ‘intolerant snowflakes’ who are ‘too easily’ offended, jeopardising a foundational principle of our democracy?
Almost everyone accepts there should be at least some limits on free speech, for example to prevent the grooming or exploitation of children, the glorification of terrorist atrocities, or incitement to violence, and many people are understandably concerned to curtail what is considered inflammatory hate speech.
However, as Evan Smith demonstrates in his book ‘No Platform’, the ‘free speech in British Universities’ debate is certainly not a new phenomenon: the practice of no-platforming can be traced back to the actions of British anti-fascists in the 1930s and 1940s.
There is significant overlap between some proponents of free speech and some ‘anti-mask’ campaigners: both subscribe to the belief that people are being deliberately ‘muzzled’ by a tyrannical Left determined to impose ‘cultural hegemony’ by silencing dissenting views which deviate from a perceived ‘woke liberal ideological consensus’.
While the rhetoric of this far from ‘silent majority’ may not match the reality — these viewpoints are regularly amplified in almost every available print, broadcast and especially online media platform — ongoing debates around, for example, Brexit and transgender rights, have revealed that significant numbers of people, rightly or wrongly, feel that they must mask their true feelings or opinions for fear of being labelled bigots.
As Freud hypothesised, the ‘return of the repressed’ can have devastating consequences. Feeling silenced — like any form of perceived oppression — can lead to a sort of feedback loop of resentment and frustration, and unscrupulous populist politicians know that these feelings can be exploited to achieve political goals, thus fueling the dangerously destabilising polarisation infecting democracies across Europe and the world.
We must never forget that free expression without fear of reprisal is a foundational principle of modern democracies. Nor must we forget that people are very concerned — especially in the aftermath of Nazi Germany — about the very real dangers of scapegoating minorities and bigoted hate speech.
Balancing these conflicting goals takes courage, understanding, nuance and great leadership — attributes that appear to be in short supply in our current crop of political leaders.
However, there is no neat Left/Right dichotomy of those currently foregrounding the perceived erosion of free speech, which involves people from a very wide range of backgrounds, concerned about a very broad range of issues, including: the effects of representations of European countries’ colonial legacy in statues or history books; the effects of migration on ‘indigenous’ cultures; anti-discrimination policies and practices such as women-only shortlists or unconscious bias training; the unintended consequences of the PREVENT programme; restrictions on political activists criticising the actions of Governments across the world; censorship of Grime and other artists, and; longstanding ideas about biological sex.
Diverse individuals and groups, participating equally and respectfully in public discourse, is a noble goal and important component of a well-functioning public sphere in tolerant and pluralistic societies.
However, all too often nowadays, anyone expressing an opinion on an important issue is attacked and demonised by people with differing views, and consequently many people feel they need to mask their true thoughts and feelings about controversial issues.
This should concern all of us.
Perhaps the most significant ‘mask’ of all is skin colour, a relatively immutable feature, determined predominantly by geography and genetics rather than beliefs, values, culture or politics.
Many incorrect and misleading assumptions are still made about a person’s qualities, attributes and character, based on skin colour alone. That so many absurdly reductionist and harmful negative stereotypes still circulate, tells us that racism remains a highly problematic issue.
The objective of removing biases arising from skin colour is commendable, but remains stubbornly elusive. The killing of George Floyd has brought the issue of racism once more to the fore, not least through the Black Lives Matter movements and protests taking place across the globe.
One issue arising from these protests has been to question the role and function of statues of slave owners and other colonialist figures.
Nearly always white, often cast somewhat ironically in black metal, these figures appear to some to deliberately mask or at least disguise the atrocities and injustices of Empire and colonialism. The highly controversial masking practice of ‘black-face’ also focuses attention on the relationship between representation and perception.
I recently watched a moving and heartfelt interview with Jamaican born, West Indies cricketing legend Michael Holding, who talked candidly about his experiences of how Empire and colonialism shape perceptions and give rise to institutional racism.
Michael raised the controversial concept of ‘white privilege’, which is not intended to mean that if you are white you are automatically a racist, or that if you are white your life has been easy, or that you don’t face struggles or discrimination.
Of course, while middle-class black Oxbridge Graduates are privileged compared to many white working class people, ‘white privilege’ is shorthand for the simple fact that unlike for non-white people in predominantly white societies, white people’s lives are not made harder by the colour of their skin.
However, the concept remains contested and controversial, not least because one unintended consequence of its deployment is to fuel resentment from some white people who understandably do not feel remotely privileged.
Using the concept of ‘white privilege’ can and sometimes does aggravate the sense that there is a relatively clearly delineated ‘hierarchy of privilege’, when in reality, while ethnicity can be and often is a powerful influencing factor on a range of life outcomes, the determinants of opportunity, discrimination and privilege are always multidimensional, complex and contextual.
Candid discussions about important issues such as racism, transgenderism, free speech and individual versus collective responsibility are essential for a functioning democracy — but the spaces available for nuanced and mutually respectful discussion are increasingly hard to find.
‘Gotcha’ journalism and ‘shock jock’ radio shows, which manufacture and feed off controversy in order to attract audiences, clicks and advertising revenue, add to the immense pressure to ‘take sides’, to publicly perform narrow and restrictive tribal loyalties and too often, to mask our real feelings — as well as fuel the ever-growing polarisation.
The recent and dramatic polarisation in our society and across many countries, combined with the long-term erosion of trust in politicians, CEOs, bankers, pundits and journalists, appears to be increasing exponentially and is reaching dangerously destabilising levels.
The situation is aggravated further by people with nefarious ulterior motives, who opportunistically and ruthlessly exacerbate and exploit this growing division, which makes engaging in ‘good faith’ with people who have different views, risky, difficult — and sometimes dangerous.
The essential task for us all — and perhaps especially for our leaders — is to work hard to find ways to reduce this dangerous polarisation, and the tensions it inevitably exacerbates.
There are common themes which cut across all of the issues related to ‘masks’ discussed so far, around authenticity, freedom, identity, responsibility and trust.
In an anonymous 1980 interview, shortly before his death, entitled ‘The Masked Philosopher’, controversial French Historian and public Philosopher Michel Foucault candidly discusses freedom, the power of ideas, authorship, his hatred of labels and the quest to not be misinterpreted or misrepresented.
Throughout the interview, the liberation he derives through the mask of anonymity is palpable:
“Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard… A name makes reading too easy.”
At one point he proposes a ‘game’: “that of the “year without a name.” For a year books would be published without their authors’ names. The critics would have to cope with a mass of entirely anonymous books.”
During the interview, Foucault returns to and develops ideas initiated in his 1969 lecture on literary theory ‘What is an author?’, itself in part a response to Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”. In that lecture, Foucault questions our tendency to imagine “authors” as individuals somehow isolated from the rest of society. Authors are not, he argues, a source of entirely original thought or infinite meaning, but rather part of a larger, interconnected system of beliefs that serve to limit and restrict meaning.
Elsewhere in the interview he discusses a friend of the French realist painter Gustave Courbet, who used to wake up in the night yelling: “I want to judge! I want to judge!”
Foucault says “It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps it’s one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible.”
I feel this interview can shed light on our current situation, broadly characterised by the perception that society has become dangerously polarised, that many people are scared of saying the ‘wrong’ thing for fear of reprisal, and that too many people consequently feel compelled to mask their real opinions or identity. It does not take a psychotherapist to acknowledge the emotional and psychological harms that repression can cause.
Throughout his prolific historical and philosophical works, Foucault demonstrates how in relation to subjects such as madness, punishment, medicine, and sex, our current taken for granted assumptions are often the result of multiple, dispersed, unintended or accidental origins and causes, and how addressing challenging problems and finding innovative solutions to them requires us to invent new ways of thinking about them, which in turn leads to social, personal and attitudinal change — something which is undervalued in contemporary society, and something to which we have generally become far too resistant.
We appear to have become slavish to an increasingly narrow and polarised range of opinions, to the point that we automatically condemn or approve of what someone says based on the extent to which their view echoes, validates or reinforces our own preexisting views, or the extent to which the individual concerned represents ‘our side’ in any particular debate.
All of us think that our views are the correct and appropriate ones, otherwise we would not hold them! Yet while we know that not everyone can be right about everything, very few people are genuinely open to having their opinions challenged or, God forbid, changed, even slightly — let alone dramatically.
We expect students and school pupils to be open to having their minds changed by new ideas or new evidence, and it should be a highly valued attribute in any civilised, democratic and well-functioning society. But nowadays, should you change your mind about anything significant, you’re likely to be labelled a ‘sell-out’, a ‘hypocrite’ or even a ‘traitor’.
Foucault goes on to articulate what has become my favourite quote from his entire oeuvre, in which he valorises an important human attribute: curiosity. It is worth quoting at length:
“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to know; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and levelling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks.”
We are right to be suspicious of people who have a track record of speaking untruths, of telling people only what they want to hear, of deliberately spreading disinformation, of scapegoating vulnerable groups, using unnecessarily provocative or inflammatory language, or opportunistically offering simplistic solutions to complex problems in the form of slogans.
But we are wrong to dismiss what someone says simply because they represent an often imagined Other, or because what they say challenges our own views and makes us feel defensive, or especially if what they say represents a genuinely new, innovative way of thinking about something.
Very unusually, Foucault has been blamed and claimed by both progressives and conservatives, and by socialists and neoliberal free marketeers. I like this! It offers the hope that instead of judging a person by who we think they are, or what we think they represent, we might instead move nearer to a position that takes more notice of what they actually say.
Finally, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, there is still a widely held misconception about the Chinese word for “crisis”: the popular interpretation of weiji is “danger” plus “opportunity”. While the first character wēi (危) does indeed mean “dangerous” or “precarious”, the second character jī (机; 機) does not mean “opportunity” in isolation, but something more like “change point”.
Crises like the pandemic afford not simply ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, but rather the suggestion that it will force change, which could be good, bad, or both.
We are undoubtedly living through dangerous times, facing not just the physical danger of the pandemic, but also the existential risks of rising levels of wealth inequality and global warming, which could lead to ecological catastrophe, as well as risks which echo pre-occupations from 1930s Germany — not least the destabilising polarisation in many societies, manifested in conflicting impulses between nationalism and internationalism, between democracy and authoritarianism, between individual and collective responsibility, and, perhaps most disturbingly, in the continued scapegoating and demonization of vulnerable minorities by authoritarian charismatic populist leaders prepared to subvert or dispense with the rule of law.
The increasing polarisation of decent people, and the constant refrain of “whose side are you on?” is deeply concerning.
We must find ways to reverse the polarisation and reduce the dangerous and destructive tensions.
If humanity is to thrive, we need to urgently rediscover or find new ways of working together to solve the problems that we all face. The technological means exist, but the political will is too often absent.
The coronavirus pandemic offers an opportunity to pause, take stock and make the radical and urgent changes necessary to address the great challenges of our times.
But in order to achieve them, we all have to work much harder at being less judgemental, at creating environments in which we treat each other with mutual respect, and in good faith, and to treat new ideas, evidence and arguments with an openness and curiosity befitting them, where we can all feel safe enough to drop the mask and reveal our authentic selves, without fear of demonisation or reprisal.
