With all the panics that we have had here, what Shaftesbury would probably have called ebullitions of enthusiasm, I haven’t seen any reference to his epistolary essay on the topic of enthusiasm its genesis and his proposed remedies. Enthusiasm from the Greek en theos - the god within refers generally to the excesses of religious fervour which can overwhelm individuals and groups causing them to become detached from their normal sober selves. One thinks of Holy Rollers, snake handlers, and the ecstatic devotees of the ancient forms of religious fervour. Shaftesbury would include all sorts of mass psychosis which can be spread through mimesis. He also refers to it as a form of panic having its origin in melancholy or black bile which may affect the body politic as well as the human body.
“ may with good reason call every passion ‘panic’ which is raised in a
multitude and conveyed by aspect or, as it were, by contact or sympathy. Thus,
popular fury may be called ‘panic’ when the rage of the people, as we have
sometimes known, has put them beyond themselves, especially where religion
has had to do.”
“For vapours naturally rise and, in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions happen in nature, storms, earthquakes or other amazing prodigies–––at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it.”
The major panic which we have had recently due to Covid follows precisely the pattern observed by Shaftesbury in his epistolary essay ‘On Enthusiasm’. The arguments put forward for its grave nature were of the solemn foolery type which he called ‘formalist’. This is the presentation, by very serious people who follow the science, of a chilling message which may not be trifled with.
“Perhaps so, but let us see first whether they are really grave or no, for, in the manner we may conceive them they may peradventure be very grave and weighty in our imagination, but very ridiculous and impertinent in their own nature. Gravity is of the very essence of imposture”
Now the normal way or the wise way of dealing with such societal vapours is ridicule and persiflage. In other words ‘don’t be silly, you are imagining things’. The problem with Covid though was that the ‘magistrate’ instead of letting it go or having the black bile vent itself and thus be exhausted rather chose to amplify the panic. Moving more than 5 km away from your home was restricted and entry into a cafe or public house was on the basis of a QR code which assured your vaccination status. The remedy of ridicule was voided by the fact that you had to remove your mandated mask to eat and thus open yourself to the certainty of contagion. Shaftesbury saw what would happen when heavy handed remedies are applied by the legal system to stem the excesses of panic enthusiasm.
“For to apply a serious remedy and bring the sword or fasces as a cure must
make the case more melancholy and increase the very cause of the distemper.”
The mention of fasces brings to mind the close union of the great corporations with the Fascist Italian government. In Ireland too our tax bonanza from the multi-nationals that avail of our tax haven, the pharmaceutical industry being most salient during the time of Covid, made the government very attentive to their needs. We are after all home to 19 of the top 20 pharma giants. Sententious assertions of the wisdom of ‘following the science’ became a quasi religion, a melancholy that lay on the nation like a miasm or ‘pestilential exhalation’. The proposers of those nostrums such as vaccination which did not prevent infection but somehow magically lessened its effects, Ashley-Cooper, the 3rd. Earl, calls formalists. A footnote to my text defines this species of jobsworth:
“In Shaftesbury’s vocabulary, the formalist was the person who sustained his views through self solemnity and what Shaftesbury regarded as the imposture of gravity”.
Babes we have been here before. It is likely that at any time in the history of any individual country there may be festering a pustule of pus gathered round a mental obstruction, a malign fidget that becomes contagious. The saurian watchful grasp the moment to launch a factory reset towards the fata morgana of transhumanism, transgenderism or any transformation that draws us away from the image and likeness of God.
