May 2020
Wearing a mask can be a lot of fun. Combined with a fancy dress and the donning of a mask, you can set the scene for a night of frivolity, mayhem and a lot of laughter, and this is mostly because you can play being someone else and while only being partly recognizable doing so.
The wearing of fancy dress and masks in the Carnival of Venice, a yearly celebration that ends with Lent, forty days before Easter, is meant to protect Venetians from anguish and hardship. What a stark irony that this year the whole country of Italy was brought down by the covid-19 epidemic during the carnival. Now everyone there are having to wear masks all the time, as are many across the world.
What will be the effect on the quality of human interaction when we cannot take off our masks? This question was posed to me by a friend the other day. My response is that the increased mysteriousness of the quality of interactions will likely breed suspicion and paranoia in some people. This is because human interaction depends mostly on how we read the faces of the people we are talking to.
Jonathan Cole, a neurophysiologist and author, has observed this in his book About Face. A lot of the trust we have in one another comes about through our interest in the facial expressions of others. When someone doesn’t, or can’t, show much expression our tendency is to treat that person as inherently untrustworthy and thus to be ignored or avoided. Interestingly, the one who is being ‘read’ this way, comes to feel blunted emotions of their own, because we come to know ourselves through our interaction with others. The result of this blunting of interaction is an isolating process that can lead to loneliness and depression.
Some people cannot engage in the lovely dance that is human interaction through facial mobility because of nerve disease or damage, as can occur in those with Parkinson’s Disease, Moebius Syndrome, Stroke, and the by-product of oral and other facial surgery, for instance. Wearing a mask is pretty similar. A facial paralysis is mask-like, after all.
When we cannot ‘read’ the expressions of others, we very readily assume that the other person doesn’t have much personhood and thus much integrity. The blandness of the mask, whether worn or stuck there by disease or neurological damage, or even just as a matter of personality trait, becomes a ‘blank canvas’ that others can ‘read’ whatever they are inclined to do. I’m remembering right now the trial of Lindy Chamberlain, whose baby was taken by a dingo. Her lack of facial expression was ‘read’ by practically everyone as guilt. Where were the tears, the anguish, the wailing and gnashing of teeth in this cool, collected woman? She literally was deemed guilty by omission.
When someone is wearing a surgical mask it is as though they are somehow not a person at all, present and absent at the same time. Normally faces are lively and our expressions dance around in response to what we are talking about. In a face that is hidden behind a mask or stuck in a mask-like fashion, there is none of this vibrancy and it’s hard to know what they are thinking or feeling, or if they have any feeling at all. When coupled with words like, “Good to see you,” or “I like how you’re wearing your hair,” or whatever, spoken by a masked one, the words are often treated as though they are sarcastically said, because instead of a friendly smile, there is nothing. In the face of sarcasm, we usually retreat. In the face of no facial mobility, a paranoid response can emerge. What is this person hiding, what are they concealing from us, do they know stuff we don’t, and so on. These are words that spring from the imagination when little actual information is shared. Sharing, without masks, is playful, caring, and – the containment of this virus aside – this is why I hope we can soon take off our masks and be gloriously responsive again with one another.
