We were promised a summer of physical inhibition and prudent distancing. Instead we Americans got crowds. We just couldn’t resist one another. Love was too weak or antique a pretext for coming together in a plague year, so we landed on fury instead. During protests, with their mosh pits and riot police and fire-eyed cyclists charging through cities like Mongolian cavalry, we seemed hellbent on crashing against one another.
Maybe we had simply been starved of other bodies after a long, dry season. In June a pastor in San Antonio, angry that some in his flock were withering away for lack of Christian company, instructed church-goers to hug one another. They gregariously shared microbes and 50 of them, including the pastor and his wife, contracted covid-19.
“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown,” wrote Elias Canetti, in his 1960 masterpiece “Crowds and Power”. But quarantine has revealed one greater fear: the prolonged deprivation of touch.
This summer crowds slaked that thirst and overwhelmed our primitive flinch away from the grubby hand of the other: “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched,” Canetti continued. “The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him.”
Crowds beget bigger crowds. Canetti describes humans as iron filings before a magnet: “A few people may have been standing together...Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming...Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are.” The disinhibition that’s obvious in pictures – no masks! Promiscuous sneezing! – can come to seem like a bacchanalia for the end of the world.
The disinhibition that’s obvious in pictures – no masks! Promiscuous sneezing! – can come to seem like a bacchanalia for the end of the world
All this time the sick, the terrified and the scientistic – those who compulsively profess a “belief in science” – have kept sequestered. This was considered the progressive position but it has created a certain dissonance. Among people who had formerly prided themselves on cosmopolitanism and broad-mindedness, a dreary, beetle-browed ideology of personal isolationism took hold.
Against this ideology even orderly church crowds seem like rebellion. But the militant maskers intent on seclusion faced a dilemma when crowds began to form in late May to protest against police brutality and the throttling of George Floyd.
Now you could join crowds that weren’t merely protesting against prohibitions on crowds. Black Lives Matter (BLM) was worth braving swarms of pathogens for, so progressives got their own chance to crush up against other spines, shoulders and bellies.
These crowds soon attracted other counter-protests and copycat ones that further diversified the germ pool – armed antagonists (as in Portland, Oregon) and reformist fellow travellers (as in Parliament Square, London). These crowds still gather to recite in unison the names of those slain by police: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Dion Johnson. It’s an incantation. When assembled, people chant.
The decentralised BLM protests have taken place everywhere from Biarritz to Senegal. The wide distribution has led to differing principles and tactics, including extremist ones, but it has also kept the numbers down at any single protest. No one’s trying to hit the million-person mark. Because it’s been hot, and because not everyone can elegantly forfeit his or her individualism to the collective, the demonstrations periodically tilt into quarrels, vandalism, skirmishes, violence and rioting.
Among people who had formerly prided themselves on cosmopolitanism and broad-mindedness, a dreary, beetle-browed ideology of personal isolationism took hold
Governments’ responses to unruly crowding, the dread referred to as “crowd control”, frequently involves the clashing of one crowd against another, and piles on the agitations of batons, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, curfews and roadblocks. The protests are dangerous. And though they imagine they’re defying the current contagion, they in fact reproduce its most fearsome conclusion: bodies are pressed together in mass graves as well.
With schools beginning to open, it now seems clear that most in America have chosen to deafen themselves to the Greek chorus forecasting more tragedy. Crowds are apparently irresistible. Maybe because they’re so thrillingly deadly. We have no cinema, no theatre, no concerts, no football, no NASCAR. The church-goers in San Antonio had no communal singing or prayer. And crowds always breed something of interest.
What’s more, as life-or-death disease and social upheaval crackle in the air, the 2020 crowds have become charged with superstitions about freedom, contagions and cultural identity. It’s the superstitions that really vanquish the spirit. What do the pastors and anti-maskers even mean when they refuse masks because they have a “breathing problem” or believe that Jesus is a vaccine? What about the people, the American president among them, who propose a cure for covid-19 lies in debunked quackery and intravenous bleach?
In July President Donald Trump boosted the research of a doctor who made her name arguing that demon semen and alien DNA are causes of disease. She also believes reptiles run the government. Sure, these are captivating fictions, and they take the edge off another season without live sport. But have we lost all reason?
“Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, published in 1841 by Charles McKay, is still the most rollicking chronicle of how humans go bonkers in groups. Some of what concerns McKay are gaggles of speculators who grow frenzied with greed as they over-value stocks or commodities, which happened during the Dutch tulip mania and the South Sea Bubble.
He’s also disturbed by the wild-eyed passion of those crowds who, at regular intervals in history, go crazy for prophecy, fortune-telling, magnets or alchemy. Surely a fair chunk of the 13m or so viewers of the Trump-endorsed video that features the doctor who warned about demon semen claiming covid-19 has a cure are in thrall to one of McKay’s “popular delusions”.
These crowds soon attracted other counter-protests and copycat ones that further diversified the germ pool
McKay reckons that three causes have particularly excited “the discontent of mankind”: “These are death, toil and ignorance of the future – the doom of man upon this sphere.” Crowds are craziest when they make a collective run on a cure for mortality. Forming a multitude during the pandemic may, paradoxically, have seemed like another way to stave off dying.
McKay’s wry style, which brings to mind Mark Twain, is exemplified by his description of the heyday of fortune-telling and astrology in London. It was 1523 and a prophecy circulated that the Thames would flood in the next year. Many fled the city. On the predicted day, those who remained waited to see “the bosom of old Thames heave beyond the usual mark. But...the Thames, unmindful of the foolish crowds upon its banks, flowed on quietly as of yore....The obstinate river would not lift its waters to sweep away even one house out of the ten thousand.”
Believers in QAnon, a conspiracy which regularly predicts a cataclysmic revelation about something or other, are likely to end up similarly disappointed. “Where We Go One, We Go All”, is the QAnon motto. The movement openly admits to the madness of lemmings and humans. But at a moment when we’re continually being told to back up, go away, mask up and quarantine, maybe it makes a kind of sense. Some of us need to believe that we only appear to be alone, when in fact we’re in tune with tens of thousands of like-minded spirits. Or so says Q. Whoever they are.
McKay’s tales of lunatic crowds are highly diverting. And it’s comforting to know that this is not the first time entire populations have lost their damn minds. But none of this ends well. “Whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit...until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.”
Those of us who are lying low until there’s a vaccine or new leadership or the long-promised Thames flood to wash our troubles away have become aloof spectators. Some crowds in cities can be seen from windows. But most appear on the TV news, where they can be scrutinised at length “from the comfort of your own home”, as the ad copy used to go. Hatewatched, in more recent parlance.
We wise loners who “believe in science” know better than to bust out of our hermitages to spend time with delusional humans. Instead, we’ll comfort ourselves with the madness of the individual – an energising sense of superiority savoured in our disinfected cells – as we survey the doom of man upon this sphere.■
ILLUSTRATIONS MARK SMITH
"crowd" - Google News
September 09, 2020 at 06:25PM
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Come gather round people: why we risk death to join the crowd - The Economist
"crowd" - Google News
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