The Defaced Image

It is time to tear off our veils

Many are saying, “Who will show us any good?”
Lift up the light of Your countenance upon us, O Lord!
Psalm 4:6

My seven years at boarding school were overall not the happiest of my life, but the unhappiest moments happened after lights out. That was when the unkindest things would be said. It is much easier to be nasty to someone when you cannot see their face, and they cannot see yours.

Six thousand miles and a quarter of a century away from school, here in Tokyo, I recently sat through eight graduation ceremonies in the space of two days. From the stage,  as the same speeches time and time again entered my ears, my eyes wandered out over what would usually be a sea of faces. These days, it is more a sea of hair and eyes, and even the eyes are often concealed by fashionably lengthy locks. Everything below eye level remains a hidden depth. For despite both the government declaring them unnecessary and the university optional, the majority of Japanese still wear masks, outdoors in the streets, in shops and, it turns out, in ceremonial halls. I noticed that, quite unconsciously, my eyes would only stop and settle on the odd island of a full and unmasked face. Elsewhere, the usual points of reference had been obliterated.

Our eyes are drawn to one another’s faces. Take away the features, and you lose your bearings. The landmarks of emotion and response are all gone. I think in hindsight that this is why I have found preaching in Japan difficult, apart from the obvious linguistic hurdle. Preaching to a masked congregation allows for so little communication between us that it can feel like speaking to the proverbial brick wall. I do not know what people are thinking. I cannot tell when they do not understand or perhaps even do not approve, cannot see whether they get the odd joke, and if not, revise, repeat or explain accordingly. Our usual communicative interface, in the most literal sense of the word, has been abolished. We have become, again literally, defaced.

But the masks are only the tip of an iceberg in the grey sea of modern life. They are the visible sign of a much greater and growing tendency to hide our physical form and communicate from behind barriers. Take social media. If the Internet is the Devil’s playground (hint: it is), then Twitter is the shadowy spot behind the bike sheds. As in the darkened dormitory, you cannot see the faces of the miscreants who lurk there, and they cannot see yours. But worse, there is not even a voice by which to recognise them: just bald words in a uniform font, all personality and nuance erased, all responsivity elided, no way of giving a mitigating smile or glance to test the room. An emoticon is not quite enough. There is little room for irony, as many have discovered to their cost. The dark art of deliberate misunderstanding has become refined beyond expectation. Communication by text alone conforms our speech to a monotonous literalism, expressed in the binary code of black and white. It makes us speak like machines, and so think like them.

The more time we communicate on the Net, the more our speech and thought patterns are conformed to its mechanical and disincarnate conventions. Even when we meet on Zoom, the cocked eyebrow or conspiratorial glance when the speaker isn’t looking, those private conversations before and after meetings or during the coffee break, all the little sideshows that make meetings bearable and many which make them most profitable are lost. If even at the best of times we see in a glass darkly, we are interposing more and darker layers between ourselves and everything else. And for all our carefully curated background pictures, a last ditch attempt at personality, we look at one another through a pretty much identical lens, similar black rectangles displaying the same application window everywhere in the world. The markers of time and space are eroded and flattened.

Our more primal means of communication is face-to-face and in a place. Without place, we cannot offer hospitality. We invite take people into the wider habitats that make us, the coffee shops or living rooms or pubs we frequent, the workplaces or churches or schools filled with the people who make us who we are and whose company we want to share with others.

If our online communications were only a supplement to these more physical interactions, there would be nothing to fear, and perhaps people my age and older will continue to favour the old fashioned ways. But what will become of a generation who have just spent several of their formative years meeting primarily on screen, permitted to share food and drink in silence if at all, and to meet in person only with covered faces? What will be the impact on small children who have spent the entirety of their conscious lives assuming that strangers always cover their faces? It is too early to answer, but we can hazard some guesses. We know already that there are young Japanese of student age who never want to take their masks off because they have grown ashamed to show their faces. They have spent years masking themselves not only physically, but behind an online persona of their own concoction. I would not be surprised to see a considerable rise in the income of cosmetic surgeons should mask wearing ever fall fully out of fashion here. We know also that truancy, anxiety and depression have soared among adolescents in the Covid years. Surely not unrelated to this culture of virtual living and physical masking is the recent surge of young people seeking irreversible surgical and pharmaceutical intervention to “correct” their bodies to their own perceived self-image – an image which the cynic might say has been hawked to them ruthlessly over the Internet.

All of this is symptomatic of a time of crippling fear. One might remark that certain agents have a financial interest in keeping us afraid. Fear drives clicks. Consequently, a new fear hits the market every month. The fears of Covid, monkey pox (remember that one?) and prospective nuclear war seem to be taking a back seat to the fear du jour of Artificial Intelligence. My greater fear is that AI is already here. I don’t mean Chat GPT and the thing I use to generate images for this blog. The AI is us. We are the artificial intelligence. Our intelligence is being artificialised. Our minds are being moulded into the thoughtforms of the machine. And if the erosion of human dependence on physical place and our physical body is part of the mechanisation of the human mind, the erosion of the human face is its crowning achievement.

Since I too am now playing the role of worrymonger, what I find most alarming is the compliancy with which people have accepted it, along with all the other Covid measures. It strikes me as absurd, looking back three years, to think that in England, I was prohibited by law from having my own parents enter my house, on pain of a heavy fine. It angers me that, on the pretext of what MPs’ text messages strongly suggest was not ample scientific consensus, for the ostensible preservation of the lives of the elderly, we continued far longer than necessary to sacrifice the mental health, schooling and economic prospects of the young. Nor is the irony lost on me that we are promoting SDGs whilst pulping trees for face masks and filling oceans with their plasticy residues. Yet most of us accepted the media and government narratives swiftly and uncritically, even to the point of denying the obvious. Remember those swivel-eyed loonies who thought that Coronavirus emerging on the doorstep of a massive laboratory which experimented on Coronavirus might not be entirely unrelated, and how governments, NGOs and teh media instantly dismissed them as cranks and conspiracy theorists? In future, the harder and faster the denials, the less inclined I will be to believe them. So, while I cannot comment on the scientific efficacy of masks, I am increasingly sceptical to those who continue to insist on them. The limits of my credulity are long exceeded. But many people will go on believing. The mechanical response, it seems, has been thoroughly conditioned. We are assimilated. We are obedient. We are where the markets and their vassal governments and their AI daemons want us, ready to receive the next set of orders.

It pains me to say that the Church, by and large, seems all too ready to be a minion. Apparently forgetting that the truth shall set us free, our bishops have kowtowed to authority and spun the mainstream narrative through this whole sorry mess. We must not forget that Church of England Bishops prohibited clergy from entering their churches even alone to say morning and evening prayer. Organists could not go in, alone, to practise. It has become clearer still in the wake of controversies over same sex marriage, whatever position one holds on that matter, that when government ministers threaten and cajole, the bishops will do their best to accommodate, without any need for prior theological reasoning. And now, here in Japan, despite vaccines, despite a complete lack of evidence that any of this makes a shred of difference any more, we are told to continue to wear masks in church. Many churches here are still not singing hymns, despite plenty of studies showing no connection between singing and spread of Covid whatsoever. Of course we should look after one another’s health, but when fear becomes our overriding motive and we refuse to allow churchgoers to take even the slightest risks into their own hands, one might be forgiven for thinking that the Church founded in the Resurrection of Christ has reverted to thralldom to death.

Enough pessimism. This week, we Christians approach the Cross with particular intensity. The liturgies of Holy Week are resolutely physical, demanding touch and taste as much as sight. In traditional churches, we have engaged in a limited, annual sensory deprivation, veiling crosses and images since Passion Sunday almost two weeks ago. This week, the senses slowly return. Feet are touched on Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, against the background of a stripped altar, the Cross of Christ is gradually unveiled. We look upon His face again. We kiss His wounded feet. And then, at the Easter Vigil, the light of the Paschal candle illumines the darkness; the song of the angels, the great Gloria supressed throughout Lent, resounds again; the veils fall from crosses and images; the waters of Baptism are blessed; the body and blood of the Lord are offered, received and tasted in bread and wine at the first Mass of the Paschal Feast. As far as they are able, our entire bodies are occupied in their highest work, the worship of God Almighty. And in the best of churches, the first champagne cork will pop soon after. This, need I say, is not best enjoyed online.

Now is the time, if it is not too late, for the Church to remember its purpose. Ever since Moses was told, “thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Ex 33:20), God’s people have sought, undaunted, precisely teh Beatific Vision of the face of God. As the Psalmist (105:4) exhorted, “Seek the LORD, and his strength: seek his face evermore.” And as the Lord promised to the prophet Ezekiel (39:29), this will be possible: “neither will I hide my face any more from them: for I have poured out my spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord God.”

In time, the first followers of Christ did see the Face of God. They saw it in the face of Him, their Lord. The Face of Christ is the perfect reflection of the Face of the Father. Because our faces, the faces of Jesus’ fellow humans, bear the same features of the same humanity, we too share albeit imperfectly in that image. His is a perfect mirror, ours flawed and dirty. But my masking our faces, we deface the image of God. We lessen the potential for others to see God in us, the communication He would make through us, and we become less receptive to the communication He would make to us through them.

Our purpose is to see God, and while there are other vehicles for that vision in this world, other people are the main conduit. Vultus populi, vultus Dei. To veil the divine image for a time is one thing, in necessity, but three years is too long a time, especially for a child or adolescent. To raise a generation of masked youths is to put yet another barrier between them and God, as if any more were needed. It is time to remove the masks.

As the Apostle wrote (1 Cor 13:12), “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.”

So, dare to bare. Dare to make yourself known.