Losing face

John Waters writes in FrontPage Magazine,

...Increasingly, beholding one another in the street — masked, visored, alert for the slightest incursion into our personal six foot of space, jumping out of our skins at the slightest cough, sniffle or sneeze — it is becoming clear that we no longer look upon one another and perceive the iconic shape of the human being in history — limbs, trunk, head, face, gaze, smile — but see instead a moving blob of festering matter, biofluids, glands, adipoctytes, viruses, microbiota, fungi, yeasts, acids, maggots, phage, proteins, stool and mucus — oozing, sweating, belching, snorting, wind-breaking, weeping, puking, seeping, urinating, excreting organisms riddled with mostly imperceptible orifices, from which are expelled unpleasant and deadly liquids, substances, gases, odours and pathogens. To paraphrase the Killers' song, are we human or are we (bio)hazard?

How strange that, while emotional incontinence is increasingly valued and praised, physical human effusions are ever more anathematised. Where once human beings aspired to being gods, we now appear to have entered the final phase of our self-degradation: perceiving ourselves predominantly as a pestilence on the earth.

...I have dignity as a human person because I am a human person. Christianity elided this circularity by declaring man to be made in the image of his creator, entitling each individual human to be regarded as possessing inviolable rights and entitlements, in particular imposing on his society the responsibility to respect and protect his moral and biological needs. But, more and more — and acceleratingly in the time of the virus — we see ourselves not as unity of body and soul, but as hunks of potentially infected meat, each of us striving every moment to protect ourselves from the others. Where this will take us we can for the moment only guess. Already it has taken us to places we could scarcely have dreamed about six months ago. We queue six foot apart, speak to one another through strips of cloth and dance like Elvis to avoid one another as we pass in the street. Are we moving towards a world in which Hazmat suits will be mandatory at all times, where organ lofts will be dismantled for fear of deadly aerosols dropping from on high, where bubble kits will be banned as lethal weapons, where moshing will be looked back upon as we now look back on slavery? One thing is for sure: the consequences of all this for romance — which is to say for human regeneration — can scarcely be exaggerated.

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