Has lockdown unlocked the UK imagination?
(Photo by Steve Taylor / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)
Although it’s something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, I highly recommend a period of temporary homelessness. The main difficulty comes in not knowing just how temporary your situation is likely to be — in my own case it was two years, some of it spent on the street, the majority in hostels.
Why would I recommend it? Partly because when you are catapulted into a subculture it’s hard not to be impressed by how it has developed its own language, etiquette and general “form of life”. Homelessness is primarily an existential, rather than an economic, condition; the crisis is a spiritual challenge, both for the person on the street and the person who walks past her (this is why the Big Issue initiative is a form of symmetrical charity: it is good not just for the magazine seller, but for the person who stops to buy from her).
Living like that is to live according to a sort of Darwinian protocol: you adapt, or you don’t survive. We are all born with gifts of the imagination, few of us have the time or the inclination (or indeed the need) to cultivate them. Those gifts, however, become essential for the homeless person who is trying to fight off the biggest threat of all: boredom.
The Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed out that for thousands of years there was no word for what we mean by “boredom” (“sloth” has a different connotation). It is a fairly modern malaise. It is insidious, soul-destroying and we are under an obligation not to give in to it. To meet that obligation, it is necessary to dig deep. When you are on the street 24/7, you are given the time to do that. It is imperative that you do.
Homelessness can kick start latent capacities of creativity and imagination; and because there is a necessary connection between imagination and empathy, it’s not unusual (although it might be surprising) to find within that subculture acts of kindness that are far rarer outside of it. Such is my own experience, anyway.
And now, under the jackboot of lockdown, I see something like an awakening of the imagination in the population as a whole. I’m a “lockdown sceptic,” on the basis that it is causing forms of harm that do not neatly fit onto a Downing Street graph. But I also have to accept the corollary of that: there may be forms of good that are similarly hard to quantify.
People, many of them at least, are being imaginative in their responses to the (for the sake of argument) necessary curtailment of their normal liberties. From rainbow artwork in the windows of houses to respiratory masks shaped like Chris Whitty (I made that one up but give it time) the public has tapped into its creative capital, as it adapts to its own existential crisis. People have been given the time to dig deep. Many of them are putting that time to excellent use, by devising strategies to fight off the Modern Malaise of Boredom.
This is all the more impressive because the pubs are shut. The much- missed Roger Scruton was fond of pointing out how the pub is a generator of social and imaginative capital. As was his wont, he was being mischievous, but, as always, he was correct. It is in pubs that many of us have our best ideas (and all of our worst ones), in part because we have (un)willing soundboards, but also because they are (or used to be) territories from which the tyrannies of political correctness were banished.
As I said at the top of the piece, homelessness is a spiritually good thing provided you know how temporary it is likely to be. At some point it will tip you into despair. Likewise, with lockdown. I applaud the creativity of the locked-down public and I hope it will be preserved when the awfulness ends. But there is a danger that we move from imaginative acceptance of the government remedies into a form of Corona-inspired Stockholm Syndrome. There is some evidence that government ministers have developed a form of this in relation to their chosen “experts”. It is rarely a good thing to follow the example of government ministers (how long an example list do you want?). In this case, that is especially true.
It’s important that we don’t get too comfortable.
So, two cheers for the UK public. And if the pubs ever open again let’s meet up. I’ll tell you about my latest scheme, a definite improvement on the one that made me homeless in the first place.
