For these past six months, COVID-19 has made us hyper aware that proximity breeds contamination. We are learning to stay at home, to work remotely, to stay two metres apart from those who don’t share our household, to not embrace friends, to sanitise our hands, even to cover our faces. Our quest is not just to stay virus-free but to protect the most physically vulnerable and promote public health.

But we are also living a paradox: as social creatures, ‘social distancing’ contradicts our natural inclinations. We need one another, not only to work together but to play together. Parents are not extremely worried because their children have missed three months of schooling but because their children miss their friends. Even the most introverted among us get sick being alone. And hyper-vigilance is not only stressful for the heart: it makes our mental health suffer. To cope with the hardship of reality, we need ‘to relax’ and daydream − often at the cost of denial. 

But if the very natural process of social interaction breeds contagion, then it must also be true that contagion itself is a fact of life. Indeed, it is not just pathogens that spread through contagion. Contagion transcends our biology to permeate the fabric of social organisation itself.

Memes (and not just the social media kind), are behaviours, communication styles, cultural quirks, that, as the name itself from the Greek mimeme or ‘imitated thing’ suggests, spreads through the wildfire of almost unconscious mimicry. We naturally mirror those we interact with, whether in person or through media.

Contagion is not something to eliminate but to contain in a delicate balance between human collective behaviour and health. The key to controlling contagion is to understand how it spreads. Controlling spread is also necessary since not all microorganisms are harmful to our health and many are necessary for our survival. Likewise, not all social memes are created equal.

There are habits and attitudes that we mirror to one another that are deadlier than the worst pandemic. Greed, indifference, envy, rage, lust, gluttony… are all deadly demons that quite literally cause pandemonium and societal decline. But there are also good habits that we mirror, that, just like those friendly gut bacteria that help us thrive, allow our civilisation to flourish: kindness, patience, generosity, benevolence, temperance, courage, integrity, friendship.

Existing in a matrix of contagion puts the onus on us as rational and free beings to do our utmost to control what enters our personal and public bodies. 

Being mirrors of blessing carves oases of well-being that benefit society as a whole through a multiplier effect. These cast out the demons of pandemonium and pandemic alike. It all begins with the proper exercise of freedom as an ordering of action by that most human of characteristics: reason informed by empathy that can envision a better future for all humankind while perfectly aware of the calamities of the present.

nadia.delicata@um.edu.mt

Nadia Delicata, moral theologian, lecturer at the Faculty of Theology

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