Levinas and Post-Pandemic Masking

Adam Birt tells us why Levinas wants us to throw off our face coverings.

- Adam Birt

When we naively believed we could spy the pandemic's demise stumbling over the horizon of 2021, we took to entertaining some spectacularly premature questions-for example, should we keep these wretched masks on our faces, though the disease itself might recede? Did we gain anything beyond a first line of defense against COVID - anything good and otherwise unobtainable - by finding ourselves forced to don these hot, moist, suffocating... things? If so, what is this rare, and otherwise unobtainable, upside? Perhaps concealment from the probing gaze of the other; distance in that concealment; safety in that distance; and finally, relief in that safety - relief from the psychological discomfort that can arise when we look upon other people, and especially when they look upon us.

The British newspaper the Guardian published a piece on the matter, entitled, "The people who want to keep masking: 'It's like an invisibility cloak". Masking, the article's author, Julia Carrie Wong, informs us, protects against more than disease. It protects too, against unease. "It's about the fact that there are more things that can hurt [us] than viruses," Wong says, “including the aggressive or unwelcome attention of other people - or even any attention at all." But it's not obvious that remaining masked absent a literal mortal threat like COVID is the right choice to make - by which I mean the morally right choice.