Masks to Malebolge
When salvation status is paramount, the mere sight of your mask can send someone to hell
If you see me in a crowd, I’ll have on a mask. I don’t have any disabilities. I’m not immunocompromised. I just don’t want to get sick or carry the burden of sickening others. It’s very unpleasant and I don’t like suffering. My life is pretty even-keel, so a week of mouth-breathing night sweats is likely the worst week of my year. It doesn’t help that illness has an amnesic effect; once you’re through it, you immediately forget how bad it was.
Even without the misery, COVID seems especially dangerous. Have you read a single study in the past five years that said, “It’s actually not that bad”? I haven’t. Every one I find says that even if you didn’t feel sick at all, you permanently lost the equivalent of 3 IQ points. “Permanently” because no study ran long enough to see full recovery. Sick for over a month? The average lost almost half a standard deviation on most measures of cognition. You may draw an imaginary line around your homunculus and say you’re still you, just foggy. I do not.
Seeing a mask pisses off more people than you’d expect, especially in places where masks are rare—unless I’m confusing cause and effect. The hostility feels out of proportion to any one explanation. If you’re worried about “sheep,” we’re the least of your concerns. No one in power is asking for this and almost no one else is doing it. Think it’s dumb? We all think some affectations are dumb, but no one shouts “m’lady” to roast fedora wearers, so why the fake coughs around maskers? If it’s about spotting a guaranteed liberal, blue hair and piercings correlate more strongly while drawing fewer sneers.
Maybe you think it’s cheating to get the benefits of community without the risk of illness. That’s at least coherent, but such nuanced criticism rarely produces instant hostility. I suspect part of it is a conspicuous display of social wealth. You’re almost gloating. “Oh, you don’t have the clout to buck trends? Not me,” the mask proclaims. “I am so secure that I can skip prostrating myself to fit in, while you would be left friendless and unemployed if you tried the same.” If that’s what people hear, I can see why you’d want to knock them down a peg.
At a formal event last year—a thousand guests, zero masks—a professional rival called me out. “Take that off! The pandemic is over!” In the interest of welcoming disagreement, I went on the defensive. “No, I’m scared!” He later found me to admit he wished his public-facing job let him mask after a bout of pneumonia laid him up for months. But if status display drives the reactance, why don’t five-figure watches and handbags or six-figure sports cars get the same rage? I see a lot more Louis Vuitton than masks, and hear far less about backlash—not for what others won’t afford, but what they can’t afford.
Everyone in our culture, Christian or not, runs on a binary good and evil. Not a continuous spectrum with blended ratios, but bins. You either go to heaven or hell. Wherever the tipping point, there is a line. Yes, Catholicism has Purgatory and mortal versus venial sins, but in American moral practice, we collapse back to two buckets. There’s no ‘90s mall you get to hang out in if you’re 70% good and a DMV lobby you’re stuck in if you’re 70% evil. It’s hellfire or eternal bliss. We apply it everywhere. Either you’re sexist or you’re not, a good person or a bad person. The only alternative is somehow even more Christian. “We’re all racist.” In other words, we’re all fallen. Confession is step one.
Even lifelong atheists raised secular aren’t immune. They use the concepts of invincible and vincible ignorance without naming them. These are Catholic words for “you can’t get in trouble for what you couldn’t know,” but culturally, they’re universal. Think about your attitude toward sweatshop goods. Unless you’re an unqualified free-trader, it’s morally better to buy non-sweatshop goods than sweatshop goods. Yet we all go out of our way not to learn which brands are which. We say it out loud: “Don’t ruin it for me!” What precisely is being ruined? The shift from invincible to vincible ignorance. Once you know, you’re responsible. If I don’t know, how can the “evil” I subsidize be charged to me?
This extends from knowledge to action as “Copenhagen ethics.” If knowing incriminates you, intervening only worsens it—even when intervention saves orders of magnitude more lives than it harms. COVID vaccine human challenge trials were the clearest example. Utilitarians, deontologists, virtue ethicists, contractarians, bioethical principlists, and consequentialists all agreed that the expected value looked overwhelmingly positive. It didn’t matter. We never undertook them in the U.S. because on the other side of the scale outweighing them all was the hidden moral software we all run.
Imagine a post-hoc intercessor—St. Peter, History, your conscience—deciding your fate after a brief in which you present arguments. You immediately get the two rules our culture actually applies. First, the preponderance test for knowledge. Did you or should you have known? If a reasonable person would have known, your “I didn’t know” defense fails. This is what shifts invincible to vincible ignorance. Second, the one-drop rule for action. Did you deliberately do the thing? If yes, even one harm counts against you, no matter how much good you did. “Challenge trial death” is enough to convict.
No other moral framework nails this two-rule combo so neatly. Pure consequentialism wouldn’t overweight the single deliberate death. Strict deontology wouldn’t care about statistical knowledge thresholds. Virtue ethics doesn’t offer a step-by-step decision rule for either test. Law borrows both but only because the culture already believes in the intercessor. It is the downstream realization of our built-in moral software. The intercessory model predicts the preponderance-for-knowledge and one-drop-for-action rules with eerie accuracy. That’s why it feels tacit rather than reasoned.
Vincible ignorance, Copenhagen ethics, binary bins—they all point to one thing. Whatever your theology, you act as if you’ll be interviewed about your life at the end, given the chance to argue, and then sorted not into guilty or not guilty, but heaven or hell. If you’re secular, you can say “history will judge,” but it’s effectively the same thing, only via an imaginary future textbook review committee. The millions who died because you wouldn’t run challenge trials? Who cares, because St. Peter is going to look foolish in the cross (examination). “I’m in trouble for what I didn’t do? What kind of kangaroo court is this?”
“I don’t believe that nonsense!” would be my comeback, but we behave as if we do. It’s the same kind of effective belief as we share about someone’s last moments. We act as if they continue on forever. We’re obsessed with whether someone died in agony or went peacefully. Sure, it’s helpful for our last memory of them, but it’s only rational if you imagine last moments are some sort of steady state etched into eternity. If they simply blink out of existence after death or even go up to heaven, why prioritize the last five minutes over the previous 80 years? It’s a religious-like belief etched into our culture that even the secular share.
Likewise, you don’t have to believe in a literal cosmic interview to operate as if moral accounting works the same. Closing your eyes to faraway harms so you can better enjoy things is exactly that. When St. Peter asks why you saved $10 on sneakers, you can say you didn’t know. In this schema, harm isn’t utilitarian accounting of atoms your choices rearranged, but your knowledge and intent—and, crucially, what you can argue to an intercessor who can’t read your mind and must sort you into a bin.
If you want a winning argument for being put in the “good” bin, you must guard what you learn about the harms you create. There is a novel virus that killed over a million Americans, and it isn’t an acausal force acting at random. Someone has to blow it into another’s face or fill a room with the pathogen. Depending on your moral framework, those million deaths lie on a spectrum between accidental death and negligent homicide.
On a pure atoms-and-outcomes ledger, you might be the person who aerosolized the pathogen that saturated and scarred their lungs, suffocating them. That won’t look good on your death résumé. If you’re getting into heaven, you need this squarely under invincible ignorance. “You visited your mom in a nursing home with a cough on July 12, 2020 and…” “I had no idea! I’d never do that on purpose!” The clincher defense to silence St. Peter? “No one else was wearing a mask! How could I have known?” “Are you sure?” he asks. “In the replay, you saw two, hesitated, and kept walking. I think you could’ve known. Sorry, this goes under ‘evils you could’ve prevented.’ You’re over the line.” A lever pulls; a trapdoor opens to a fiery drop. End scene.
This fear of ignorance turning vincible is baked into all of public life. We made sure to oppose strong ventilation standards for businesses and public spaces that would save enormous quality-adjusted life years. Feel a sniffle coming on? Oh, we’re out of COVID tests; must be allergies. The pandemic must be memory-holed for our collective good. Play your part and keep your mouth shut. Deviants who keep bringing it up are effectively threatening our very souls, condemning them to eternal damnation.
The anger isn’t at your conformity to a forgotten rule, your social wealth, or the reminder of that month we had groceries delivered. It is that merely seeing a piece of fabric in public risks sending them straight to hell.
what an excellent piece of criticism, hits the nail on the head chefs kiss!
Look at all the triggered people in these comments, proving your essay's point.