Mask World

Driving through the drug store parking lot today, I was struck by the fact that all of the people walking toward the store were wearing masks. That’s the first time I’ve seen that. I felt a sense of relief at seeing, just for a moment, all of the the humans in my visual field united in a very thoughtful, intentional action, choosing to be a responsible member of the community. Of course, this is exactly what any decent person should be doing. But I live in the deep South where this not a common sight, so it was heartening. But I have to admit that just for a moment, somewhere mixed in with those feelings of humanitarian solidarity, I did feel a pang of sadness, and maybe even a tinge of horror at some level. The men in the stiff black masks looked vaguely robotic. The other masks looked clinical and evoked memories of hospitals and death. For a moment the world felt, for lack of a better word, dystopian.

I’m totally pro-mask, but I can definitely understand the negative emotional reaction some people might have. I think this explains part of the reason many people have been resistant to wearing masks — then the issue got politicized and misinformation spread widely, and now the motivations are all over the place. But at the heart of it, I think the emotional resistance to covering your face is an important factor.

To physically cover a part of the face is to change the outward-facing social self-image that each person presents to the world and has developed over time, since infancy. I know that for me personally, my face and its expressions form a big part of my sense of self, part of how I connect and communicate with people in person, as well as my inner perception of how other people see me, which helps me move through the world comfortably.

So in a way, when we wear a mask, we are covering up a part of ourselves that is central to our self-identity. We are also covering a body part that we never have in this society, but have only seen in foreign cultures that to some people possibly feel threatening. So masking can feel uncomfortable in both an essential emotional way as well as a culturally learned way. Emotionally, you’re interacting with people with one hand behind your back, so to say, without the full use of facial expressions that you’ve used your whole life. And culturally it feels unfamiliar, perhaps as if you were wearing a turban or neck coils.

And people differ widely in their inherent tolerance for the unfamiliar. Neuroscientists have found, using FMRI to observe which areas of the brain light up in response to certain stimuli, that some people find new things exciting and pleasant, whereas some people find new things and ambiguity threatening. It’s interesting to note that these automatic responses seem to line up with political views to some extent, which provides much to ponder when we consider the political tendencies that tend to be associated with mask-resistant people.

Aside from the neurological differences that might make certain people more or less likely to don a mask, there is also the outright political ideals of individualism vs. communitarianism that often butt heads in this country. That’s a topic I’d like to explore one day soon, but it’s much more complex than the scope of this article, because the parties seem to fall on very different parts of the spectrum depending on what the specific issue is. In this case, some conservatives argue that mandatory masks violate their individual rights, whereas liberals are more likely to argue that masking up is a duty to the community.

But right now I’m just feeling gratitude toward the people behind the faces that are steadfastly complying with this emergency communal need that requires them to present themselves to the world in a very unfamiliar way. It’s not a huge sacrifice, but it is a sacrifice all the same. I guess masks are just an unfortunate but temporary necessity, an extreme form of one of those things that you have to do when you’re the adult — like when the kids don’t want to take the bad-tasting medicine or leave the fun party, and you don’t really want to either, but you do it anyway because you know that’s what needs to be done. Even if it makes the world feel, for a little while, kind of bleak.