Return to ‘normal’ will not be quick

As the COVID-19 pandemic upends our lives and we struggle to adapt, we look forward to the end of this episode and returning to “normal.” But some are beginning to ask whether that normal will be the normal it used to be. Some of the answers are obvious: Our economy is not going to recover overnight, and lives lost can only be mourned. But day-to-day life will resume as it was, right? Not necessarily, or at least not soon. Our norms and expectations are based in the small everyday actions of people. The scale of this pandemic and the fact that it has overturned the daily routines of millions of people means that it will indeed have impact on our lives for some time to come.

Much of this impact will be based on our emotions. Emotions are our primary motivations for behavior, and we manage our interactions with other people in ways that make us feel “normal.” That means we seldom notice our habitual emotion because it is typical of how we feel most of the time — except when unexpected things happen to disrupt our routines. Then our emotions become noticeable, and we act to try to control the disruption that has pushed us out of our emotional comfort zone.

This is the premise of Affect Control Theory, which was developed by sociologist David Heise in the 1970s to explain how people attempt to control their interactions to confirm the affect (or emotion) they expect to feel. According to Heise, how we feel about the world around us is governed by our cultural sentiments (or meanings); most of us agree on our sentiments about mothers, for instance, and how they should behave toward their children. But if a mother is told by a doctor that she is feeding her children wrong, that will disturb her sense of being a good mother and she will try to regain that. She may just disparage the doctor, or she may try to change how she shops. She may come to define foods as “good” and “bad,” effectively changing their meanings and the emotions they evoke.

The coronavirus pandemic affects most of us by impacting our interactions with others, and this is exactly the way it will most likely influence our usual sentiments about people and behaviors. Because coronavirus infection can be spread unknowingly through interaction, it has injected a sense of “stranger-danger” into every encounter outside of our immediate family circles. Each “other” person, no matter whether neighbor, co-worker, salesclerk, plumber or customer, has now an extra layer of meaning added to their identity, giving them a sheen of risk — the potential power to hurt us, even if unintentionally. This aura extends not only to individuals, but to certain actions as well; the handshake, once an indicator of trust by showing one was not armed, has become itself a potential means of doing harm. Handshakes are likely to be viewed for some time with suspicion, and offering one may be awkward, even insensitive.

What is particularly troubling is how certain cultural influences such as some media outlets and politicians try to shape sentiments about this threat, turning it from a relatively passive object — dangerous but avoidable — to active maliciousness located in particular groups of people. Such tactics are problematic because of the way they manipulate affect and thereby motivate behavior. As mentioned above, in response to a disruption of their routine emotions, people will work to bring their feelings back into line.

Defining groups as active threats promotes anger and fear, prejudice and discrimination, and may even spark attacks to reduce the sense of menace. Luckily, most of us recognize such attempted manipulations of our sentiments for what they are and disregard them. And happily, we also have new words in our vocabulary with positive connotations, such as “essential worker.” Perhaps we will see this positive public sentiment translate into support for such workers in obtaining better working conditions; something that they have been unable to achieve in a less appreciative environment.

But even for those of us not on the front lines, we will continue to have heightened awareness of what anthropologists call “contamination.” We may continue to worry about touching surfaces others have handled and about the air we are breathing in crowds. All those cloth masks we acquired will probably get stuffed in a drawer, but not thrown away. The next pandemic is out there somewhere, and we now know this can happen all again. “Normal” will not be quite the same.

Linda E. Francis is Interim Chair of the Dept. of Criminology, Anthropology, and Sociology at Cleveland State University.