At night, the silence from the deserted streets and boarded-up bars in my neighbourhood in London feels ominous and dangerous. Out there in the darkness, unseen, the Corona virus continues its hideous invasion. It is efficient and unwavering in executing its sole purpose: to infect, to replicate, to spread, to grow.

With astonishing speed, it has taken over our hospitals, our conversations, our news feeds. It has closed our schools and factories, bankrupted businesses, ruined lives. It has made a mockery of our sophisticated systems, our plans, our hopes and dreams. It dominates, controls and threatens our very existence. It is coming for you and coming for me. It lives on death.

Never before has something so large—human civilization—been felled by something so small. Corona is a mini-vampire, sub-microscopic, a life form a hundred times tinier than even bacteria.

The only thing more viral than the virus itself is the fear that it evokes. Fear can divide and diminish us. But when we fight and conquer it together, fear can enlarge us.  The age of Corona: the best of times, the worst of times.

In this way, the human reaction to Corona has similarly been one of extremes: either very small or very large. On the one hand, never before have people been so selfish and stupid, ignoring infection-limiting guidelines, panic-buying loo rolls, even abusing and attacking people suspected of being Chinese. Yet the crisis is also bringing out the best in people. Our doctors and nurses face the daily apocalypse with selfless care, kindness and good cheer. People around the world are volunteering, donating, checking up on the vulnerable, doing what they can.

We are completely alone, quarantined, forced into self-isolation and social distance, yet at the same time perhaps never before have we felt so connected, and in need of each other. Family and community matter more than ever. And increasingly, our family is humans and our community is planet Earth.

We truly are all in this together. However bad we feel today, however afraid, anxious, depressed or bereaved, we are actually not alone.  Instead of “othering” we might focus on “togethering.”  Instead of hating, we can choose to love.  We can reach out and reach in. We can give and receive.

Wouldn’t we expect grown-up leaders to do the same? To share knowledge, ideas, information, best practices, resources? To build bridges, not walls? To unite to fight Corona, not each other?

At such times, nationality recedes. Corona isn’t interested in your country’s borders, its reputation, history or your culture. It doesn’t carry a passport nor respect your own.

Global problems need global solutions.
​
Yet some see this pandemic human tragedy not as an opportunity for solidarity but its opposite. At a time like this, it’s pitiful for governments to blame each other, for the far-right as usual to blame everything on migrants, or for Trump to blame China, Obama, Millennials, the media, and anyone else he can think of. It’s hard to imagine what kind of person responds to the current devastating death toll in Italy with celebratory, deranged Brexiteering.

While politicians prevaricate, bluster and blunder, the virus goes on killing.

History apparently teaches us nothing. The so-called Spanish flu—which probably originated in Kansas—infected a quarter of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920, and killed tens of millions of people—more fatalities than the entire First World War.

Humans and chimpanzees are 96 percent the same, according to DNA studies. How similar then are humans to each other? What is perhaps so striking about our species is not what divides us but what unites us. We are a family. We should act like one. We should respect each other and our planet. We should tackle common problems together. We should care about family members who aren’t doing so well. We might then feel compassion and concern that 70 million of our brothers and sisters are forcibly displaced people, including 26 million refugees, half of them children. We might not feel great about a world where 42 individuals have the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity, 3.7 billion souls.

​In the words of Al Pacino, “Either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.”

Sometimes, it takes a sickness for healing to happen. ​

One of the tropes of a certain brand of conservative media outlet is that Christmas is under threat. The usual suspects are rounded up: The EU, Muslims, immigrants.

Dame Louise Casey, the government’s “integration tsar,” cited Christmas in a report in September, saying: “I have become convinced that it is only the upholding of our core British laws, cultures, values and traditions that will offer us the route map through the different and complex challenge of creating a cohesive society.”

Laws of the land are one thing; British culture and traditions quite another. For the latter, apparently the “integration tsar” doesn’t believe in integration. Shouldn’t she be called the “assimilation tsar”—or perhaps even the “re-education tsar”?

As Santa Claus might say: Ho ho ho.
• A lot of Christmas traditions, like so much of British culture, came from elsewhere. To name a few: Christmas trees were likely a German idea originally; panto came from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte; mulled wine from the Ancient Greeks. The jolly, rotund image of Santa famously began in a 1931 Coca-Cola ad.
• “British values” are often described as religious, Christian values. But for the majority of Britons, Christmas doesn’t have much or anything to do with Christ any more. People of no religion now outnumber Christians in England and Wales, and this year the number of people attending Church of England services each week for the first time dropped below 1 million, accounting for less than 2 percent of the population. Non-Christian Britons are no less British.
• Having some sort of celebration in the dead of winter has long been appealing to many people whether religious or not. It was something people did long before the idea was co-opted by Christianity—and long before any politician uttered the phrase “British values.”
• One longstanding Christmas “tradition” is that for many, it’s a terrible time of year. If you are not living the soft-focus, pastel-hued fantasy life depicted in department store Christmas ads, you feel guilty, a failure, literally and metaphorically missing out on the party. Instead of this being a time of light, warmth, food, gifts, singing, laughing and good company, for many it is instead one of darkness, cold, hunger, loss, silence, tears and loneliness. Clients complain of the stress and expense of Christmas, and the pressure to be happy. The Samaritans volunteers are especially busy at this time of year.

The Brexit referendum, ostensibly about the UK’s relationship with the European Union, about sovereignty, democracy, the economy, also unleashed a fierce national debate about something else: the hot button-issue of immigration. For some, the word "Leave" was an instruction not just to the UK but to foreigners within it, too; a message to new arrivals, a giant metaphorical sign to be hung at ports and airports around this sceptered isle. Theirs was a protest vote; their internal rallying cry was: There are too many of “them” coming over “here” and “we” don’t like it (ironic fact: the U.K. has more citizens living abroad than any other EU country). The objections were primarily economic or cultural. If you live in a neglected, underfunded town with scarce resources, and your job has gone to someone from another country, or you can't get a doctor's appointment or a school place, and your home town feels crowded and different, your choice is obvious—it's a matter of survival.

Most people who voted Leave did not do so out of racism. But no opinion poll is needed to hazard a guess at the voting preference of those who are unabashed racists. Regardless, the Leave vote sparked a resurgence of racism across the land. There was a 5-fold increase in hate crime within a week. Synagogues, mosques, schools and community centres were vandalised. People were attacked and verbally abused in the street. Racists stood outside multicultural schools flicking victory signs and telling people who didn’t look like them to “go home.” Sinister notes—and worse—were pushed through letterboxes. Suddenly closet racists were out and proud, emboldened in their everyday conversations, not even bothering with the standard prefix of “I’m not a racist but....”

Not that racism was dormant prior to June 23. According to the Home Office, 52,528 hate crimes were reported in 2014-2015, over 80 percent of them racially motivated, and that was an 18 percent rise in a year. In general black Britons are chronically under-represented in the professions, and over-represented in the prisons. In the field of mental health, young black men are far more likely to be referred to secure psychiatric settings via the courts than their white counterparts; black people of African and Caribbean heritage are six times more likely to be sectioned than white people. In therapy consulting rooms, clients tell shocking stories of violence, oppression and abuse.

5. Racism: part of human psychology?
There isn’t a great deal of writing or research on the psychology of racism, perhaps because it is such an emotive issue. But there is an argument that prejudice is a part of being human. Our survival has depended on a certain level of anxiety, vigilance and distrust towards the unknown, and an affiliation with the safety of the known. Malcolm Gladwell says we navigate through life with the help of “thin-slicing,” in which we use our senses, our experience and our beliefs to process a given situation very quickly, largely unconsciously, and take action.
Sometimes thin-slicing can be completely wrong, with disastrous consequences, such as when white policemen gun down an innocent nonwhite civilian like Jean Charles De Menezes. Last year in America, young black men were nine times more likely to be killed by police, with a total of 1,134 such deaths.
A number of studies have shown just how easy it is to create “in-groups” and “out-groups” based on the most meaningless of differences, and the hostility towards the out-group can escalate with depressing ease. Examples are the Lord of the Flies-like Robbers Cave experiment with two arbitrary groups of 12-year-old boys, Jane Elliott’s classic schoolroom blue eye brown eye exercise, or Saturday afternoon tribal violence between people who support different football teams.
Using the power of projection, the out-group is demonised: “we” are good; “they” are bad—deviant, dangerous, dirty, lazy (and any number of other aspersions). The more unknown “they” are, the easier it is to imagine them as devils. Racism—and concerns over national identity—are strongest in the least diverse parts of Britain.
This crude scapegoating of people from foreign fields, or “othering,” is vigorously and cynically exploited by poisonous politicians (Farage, Donald Trump, far rightists like Marine Le Pen), newspapers (the Daily Mail has been peddling xenophobia for a century), apartheid regimes (South Africa), dictators inciting genocide (Somalia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia), or western governments seeking to justify illegal overseas interventions (Iraq, Afghanistan).
The message used to be that the Russians were the primitive barbarians who want to take over the world. Now it is Muslims (the idea that 1.6 billion people—more than a fifth of humanity—speak with one voice or think with one mind is patently foolish).
Writes Mark Salter: “The ‘barbarian’ represents a rhetorical well from which politicians have drawn throughout the twentieth century and from which they still draw.”
 
“Race” is a construction: There is no basis for making sweeping assumptions about groups of people—positive or negative—based on skin colour. Farhad Dalal defines racism as: “The manufacture and use of the notion of race.”
​
But racist stereotypes are nevertheless hard to escape from; they are embedded in our culture. We unwittingly enact them, reinforce them, and hand them down. They are part of our social unconscious. They can be made conscious, and the othering, denigrating stereotypes and those who promote them can be treated with the contempt they deserve. But the history remains. No amount of whitewash will change that.
 
NEXT TIME: No. 3. Misinformation

No. 1: ALIENATION 

All was not well in the Kingdom.
Times were hard. People were angry, a lot of them with good reason. After the global financial crisis and six years of government spending cuts, the age of austerity had sent a chill wind through the hills, valleys and high streets up and down the land. It was bleak, especially in the poorest, most neglected rural areas and forgotten, boarded-up English towns, far from Westminster. Unemployment was low, but zero-hour contract arrangements were increasing, and this green and pleasant land now had 1,000 food banks where previously they were rare. Depending on which study you believe, roughly a sixth, a quarter or a third of Britons were living in poverty. Meanwhile, in an already increasingly unequal nation, the richest 1% were getting ever-richer, ever-faster.
Whose fault was it? It must be someone’s fault?
 
The blame game
Human interaction can be a complicated dance around a “Drama Triangle”—the three points of the triangle are labelled persecutor, victim and rescuer. Where are you on the triangle today? And why? Are you a rescuer? Do you ever become so strident in your complaints on behalf of the victims that you become persecutory? Or do you need to be needed, so you do all that you can for the victim, who is as a result disempowered—a classic codependent relationship? Or are you a victim? Do your demands for help become so unreasonable that you become the persecutor and turn the rescuer into a victim? The roles can change in a second.
Whether within families, between work groups, cultural groups or even between countries, these roles are remarkably fluid and heavily dependent on the eye of the beholder. This was the case in the run-up to the Brexit referendum a week ago as the actors took up their positions on the stage: