The moral injury of lockdown

Revisiting Keble College for the first time since February 2020 brings home what has been lost

In the final volume to his autobiography Making The Most Of It, the philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee describes his Oxford days as tainted by being at Keble College, rather than his preferred Balliol. The problem, says Magee, was entirely aesthetic. He writes: 

‘I had been horrified when I first saw it, and never got over that reaction. It seemed to me monumentally ugly, hideous, gross, crass, an affront. It was built on a huge scale, as one of the largest colleges in Oxford. It vied with St Pancras Hotel as the apex of high Victorian vulgarity, and was built in garish red brick at a time when all other Oxford colleges were in grey stone. The whole place was a mistake.’ 

Magee goes on to say that the college buildings were so cold and gloomy ‘that it was as if those mock-Gothic windows had been designed to shed darkness in the interior’ and that he ‘never ceased to be disturbed’ by the building. 

Keble, like the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement from which it emerged, has always divided opinion. Contrast Magee’s views with those of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who said of the William Butterfield building in a documentary about his love of the Pre-Raphaelites: ‘Yeah, I know people have had a go at it over the years, but it is just, I think, amazing, staggering. I mean if you really don’t like this get a life, because it’s a superb statement.’ Though he does acknowledge that to many the college building can seem ‘like a whole load of teddy boys arriving at some kind of tea dance.’ 

I must confess to being firmly on the side of Lloyd Webber on this. The red brick is indeed overpowering at first, but when you take a closer look you see a building that is made with grace and poise, and what at first seem to be repetitive motifs are actually filled with joyful variation. Keble College has a calming and soothing impact on me, just as the watercolours and vigorous oil-painted imagery of Dante Gabriel Rossetti do. It was precisely this gentleness of spirit and finely tuned sentimentalism that I remember from my final holiday before lockdown in February 2020. 

I had taken a guest room at Keble to work on my Open University Classics masters essay on Catullus. My birthday is in February so I decided to treat myself to a ‘Romantic’ couple of nights at the college and pretend I was a nineteenth century scholar of Literae Humaniores. I remember the frosty mornings and the chapel spires soaring into a cold winter sky, and the crisp sun slicing across the patterned red bricks. For a soggy old Romantic like myself, it was heaven, and it helped me get a distinction in my essay. 

Then lockdown happened. When I emerged from my Victorian dreamworld in Keble, the world was already starting to tumble into a dangerous cascade of hysteria and wrong-thinking panic. Little did I know that it would be years before I could return to Keble and revisit the peaceful grandeur of the quadrangle and the unapologetic spiritual power of the pinnacles and gargoyles and the sparkling mosaics in the college chapel. 

In fact, it was only this weekend that I returned to the college, and I was moved to tears. It wasn’t the beauty of the college itself, nor even the sense of nostalgia I felt for that small study break I gave myself in 2020. No, what upset me was a less obvious sense of loss, a haunting feeling that something crucial and creatively important had been robbed from me by the last three years of enforced terror and technocratic government overreach. 

Much of the criticism that surrounds lockdown focuses now on the health costs and the economic costs. Peter Hitchens has rightly reminded his readers that he predicted the mass inflation and contraction of civil society we are now witnessing, all the way back in March 2020. Every day there are new reports about how the NHS is struggling to cope with the waiting list backlogs after reopening services for non-covid patients, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the neglect and isolation of prolonged lockdown has had an effect on excess deaths. 

However, there is a deeper, more hidden cost of lockdown that is as equally important as these more immediate costs. Critics of the cultural impact of lockdown tend to seize on the managerial elites grandiose plans such as the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum. However, there is also something more sinister at play here. We might call it ‘The Wee Reset.’ Lockdown was not just a series of physical restrictions. Assaults on liberty are not just clampdowns on our bodies, but on our minds and our spirits too. Though we seem to have put the physical horrors of lockdown behind us (for now at least), the psychological impacts will be long-lasting. 

We have been inured to mass government intervention in our lives. Surveillance and paranoid safetyism have become a normalised part of civic life, and we have become psychologically habituated to expect restrictions. Most importantly, the global managers have attuned us en masse to no longer presume the fact of our own liberty. There has been a loss of innocence, a loss of care-free abandon in how we go about our lives. The forces of the state, of invigilation by the guardian class, have been internalised in each one of us. The ‘new normal’ does not mean we will be living life as if we were in early eighties Romania. It is more subtle than that. 

As I was walking around the quadrangle of Keble College on a bright, glistening November day, I was acutely aware that something ineffable within me was stifled and raw. The moral injury of lockdown is similar to the crisis of meaning that might strike someone after a terrorist attack, or even after sexual abuse. On top of the physical cost, there is a cost to the spirit, an internal, psychic wound that is as permanent as it is intangible. 

The upper limits of of freedom have diminished. The assumptions of future possibility have been suffocated. It is exactly this hidden inner space of liberty that makes Western civilisation such a point of envy for those fleeing totalitarian regimes. It is the sense of an inner psychic horizon that gives people hope and promise when they come to Britain or the United States. All the more tangible aspects of a free society such as our institutions of balanced power, our busy civic life, our democratic processes, are outward symbols of this unseen, inscrutable aspect of liberty. 

The moral injury of lockdown is a psychic wound that damages the very essence of what it means to live in a free society, the breathing space of the soul within a citizen that gives him or her the sense of creative potential necessary to individual and collective flourishing. If we are to reclaim ourselves and truly put lockdown behind us, we will have to demand back this inner, moral horizon. Without it, what makes Western civilisation uniquely liberating will be lost forever. 

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