In an article a few weeks ago at American Greatness I wrote about the dark effect of mask-wearing:
The face we present to the world is our “sigil,” our flag of individual distinctness. Our faces, and the richness of expression they make possible, are the primary medium of interpersonal communication. [The old expression “Smile when you say that!” shows that what we say with our faces trumps the words we use.] They are the book from which others instinctively read our characters, our thoughts, and our moods. To “show one’s face” is the most basic act of participation in civil society; to “lose face” is always and everywhere painful and humiliating. When we face one another we connect as social beings; there is a reason why popular social media and communications platforms have names like Facebook and Facetime. Moreover, why do fundamentalist Muslims insist upon covering the faces of their women? It is precisely to prevent this connection, this humanizing and socializing interaction. It is a means of possession, of control.
Now, like the burqa-clad women of the Dar al-Islam, we all must cover our faces, except in the isolation of our homes. The effect of this is powerfully leveling and atomizing; it works in an insidious way to break down the horizontal ligatures that bind us together as a society. And as we sit unemployed at home, awaiting our relief checks, the result is an increasing deflection of all social connections from the horizontal to the vertical: away from the people around us, and toward the sovereign power above us, from which all blessings increasingly flow.
In this way, with every faceless and “socially distant” passerby now a potential carrier of pestilence, attraction gives way to repulsion. We see fewer and fewer people in person, and keep more and more to ourselves, until it all begins to feel normal. We have lost another essential feature of American life: the richly rewarding human experience of being a distinctive and self-reliant member of an organic and multidimensional civil society.
All of this — for what? For nothing, argues Daniel Horowitz. Here.