The Furor Over Facemasks Explains Why I Did Not Wear One

Graphic by James Gocke

On Monday, Sept. 28, Dr. Paul Mueller decided to teach his in-person classes without a mask, violating COVID-19 guidelines. On Oct. 8, Dr. Mueller wrote an op-ed on the matter, which Professor Glader responded to. This is the third article in this “Mask Discussion Series.” Dr. Mueller is as Associate Professor of Economics and Department Chair of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) Program at The King’s College. The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

Professor Glader is entitled to his opinions and his feelings – it is left to us to judge their substance. I find the abundance of non sequiturs and strawmen in his op-ed truly alarming, but I console myself with the thought that this is rushed opinion rather than reasoned argument. Apparently, he has a few axes to grind about President Trump, sex scandals, cover-ups, shouting racial slurs, and even my alma mater - all find their way into the piece. What those have to do with me or the issue at hand is rather hard to see.

My recent op-ed protested abuse on Twitter, which I largely ignore, because it is wrong and worldly, not because of my “fragility.” I am concerned about the mindset among students and alumni (and obviously faculty too) that decrying actions or ideas or principles we do not agree with is superior to trying to resolve them privately first. I invited my students to share their concerns with me in class earlier this week, and they did. I am grateful for that. I apologized to them for not giving them advance notice or explanation that I would not be wearing a face mask or face shield.

I believe my students and I have moved towards reconciliation. I realize that a conversation and an apology do not simply erase being inconsiderate on my part or their being upset. I trust they know I care for them and I encourage them to tell me if they disagree with what I do or say. 

My comments about not releasing my class email to the world had to do with hoping to avoid all the “sound and fury” of the past week and a half. But nothing I have said publicly or privately could reasonably be construed as “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” I asked that we be respectful of how we share what goes on in class and what people say, not that it be kept a secret. 

The issue here is not primarily about safety. It is about control and conformity. Some claim I am not following “the experts” or local, state, and national guidelines without highlighting any. Are such authorities infallible? Do they even agree? A quick glance at guidance from the NYC department of health shows that they think face shields are “not acceptable” substitutes for face masks while the college’s policy says that for faculty, they are.

Fortunately, neither a face mask nor a face shield for the lecturer is terribly important or helpful under the classroom conditions. If a student is genuinely concerned for their health and safety because I was not wearing one, they should also be concerned about sitting in class with my colleagues who are wearing face shields without masks. I encourage them to consider which policies are designed to increase everyone’s safety and to comply with local and state regulations and which policies are neither about increased safety nor regulatory compliance.

I did not, and do not, believe that I put my students in harm’s way by not wearing a face mask while lecturing. Everyone was wearing masks, seated, and socially distant, with the closest student more than six feet away and many students 20 or more feet away. Because the risk of spreading Covid-19 in this situation is basically nil, for months now even restrictive states like NJ have allowed speakers at public events like worship services to speak without wearing face coverings if others are socially distant. 

But reasonable people can disagree about this – or perhaps only foolish or selfish people would have the gall to dissent. But were my actions selfish? Certainly, some people did not like them or agree with them. Is that what makes something selfish? The question answers itself…

I am troubled by the widespread lack of awareness of the moral, cultural, and social costs of mask-wearing and other Covid-19 mitigation policies. Is there no possible moral issue at stake here, or conviction about mask-wearing causing genuine harm, worth considering? Some people may not be able to fathom any, but I hope most of us can see and recognize them once they are raised.

Let me also restate something I have said both publicly and privately: I believe there are appropriate situations in which to wear masks given what we do not know while also trying to honor a multitude of guidelines. I wore a mask to and from class and while walking around campus that day like everyone else. I wear it on the train or in the grocery store. 

So why not in the classroom?

I chose not to wear it because I thought that was the right and loving thing to do. Contrary to what some may think, love is not primarily about doing what other people want. It is about seeking their good. Social distancing and facemasks generally harm human communities and the people in them. The only reason our society has been engaging in these harmful practices is because of the even greater health benefits we believe they bring. In this, we are exercising judgment about tradeoffs – greater anxiety, loneliness, depression, suicide, and less economic opportunity versus reducing the harm and death from the disease.

In this sense, Covid mitigation is similar to chemotherapy. The treatment is bad for your body, but people undergo the treatment to get rid of something worse: cancer. Making life and death decisions around when to undergo chemo and for how long are agonizing and difficult. Deciding whether to undergo chemo when the health benefits are small to negligible, however, is not.

But now we come to the rub – am I right to compare face masks to chemo? It seems outrageous on the surface – how are masks harming me or harming others? You might think: “Look, I put it on and I took it off. I wore it here and I did not wear it there. Everyone is doing it and we are getting along fine. Chemo? Give me a break!” 

It turns out, however, that not everyone feels or thinks that way. We should consider what we lose by not seeing other people’s faces in person. Besides communication, consider how our faces are part of our identity, part of knowing others and being known by them. In the Bible, we find passages about seeing God face to face as our ultimate reward, about veiled faces being the result of brokenness, and about how God hiding his face as a sign of displeasure, abandonment, and even rejection. I highlight these simply to reinforce the point that our faces are significant and should not be treated otherwise.

Wearing face masks and seeing others wearing face masks, and the norms around wearing them, affect our psyches and our relationships. Many people, including myself, are greatly concerned about the moral issues at play with face mask policy from the effects they have on human interaction to how various rules transform the landscape of what is acceptable, to what one must do, and to how we police compliance. The most recent op-ed in the EST is Exhibit A.

Should we sacrifice seeing one another’s faces when there are no health benefits? What about for very small uncertain health benefits? At some point, we must draw a line in the sand about what kinds of precautions we think are reasonable and at what cost. We make this decision every day in deciding what to eat, what transportation to use, and what activities to engage in.

Since when did ‘safety’ become the most important thing in life? 

And people around the world are asking hard questions about whether governments’ Covid-19 policies, and by extension, the policies of many private institutions, are actually making us that much safer. Recently, doctors from Harvard, Oxford, and other universities around the world have issued a statement challenging the conventional political approach to mitigating Covid-19. Their arguments are not about disliking face masks but about much deeper cultural, social, and health problems created by our current approach. 

Suicide, alcoholism, anxiety, depression, and deaths of despair are all up since lockdowns and social distancing and face masks have been implemented. I recognize that these are complex problems and not solely the result of wearing face masks or Covid-19 mitigation measures. Yet evidence is mounting that the approach to containing Covid-19 has generally been destructive in every way but health – though unintended health costs are rising too.

Attempts to mandate strict standards force people to do mental gymnastics to conform or lead them to inconsistency. Why should people wear face masks on sidewalks but not while eating in close proximity in a restaurant? Does it really make sense to require people to wear masks when they walk to their table or when they walk ten feet to the bathroom but not while they are eating, talking, and laughing at the table? Restaurants and dining out are far more dangerous than sitting in the classroom with one unmasked presenter because the odds of someone having Covid-19 and transmitting it while not wearing a mask increase dramatically with the number of people. The odds of an individual person having it are quite low (in my county it is something like .05%).

How do we navigate new norms and changing guidelines? How long is it acceptable to leave one’s face mask down while drinking or after doing so? Are there other acceptable reasons to remove one’s mask temporarily? For how long? When does it become “unsafe?” How do we “punish” violators?

There are healthy ways to encourage reasonable precautions. We can certainly work together to be prudent and be courteous to those who are anxious. But we should exercise judgment and reflect how our actions, small as they may seem, perpetuate the bigger problems created by Covid-19 mitigation and whether they are worth the cost. Trying to legislate what should be done in as many situations as possible is not healthy or wise. Neither is dismissing dissent as selfish and uninformed.

Finally, let’s talk about how acquiescence involves a basic level of agreement, and thereby complicity, with the practice or idea we acquiesce to. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident and Nobel prize laureate, exhorted his fellow Russians to “Live not by Lies.” He argues that when we go along with claims or policies that we believe to be false, we become complicit in them, regardless of how we feel or what we say privately. We begin to live by lies.

What is the lie I choose not to live by? That Covid-19 mitigation tactics like social distancing and face masks are costless, harmless, trivial inconveniences. It is not true. Erring on the side of caution is not always the safe or right thing to do. Nor is it true that wearing face coverings is always an act of loving our neighbor. To continue to act like these things are true by engaging in Covid-19 mitigation activities when they produce little or no safety, like when lecturing in a socially distanced classroom, lends support to the lie. I find the increasing divide between what many of us say and do in private and what we say and do in public deeply troubling.

That is why I did, and still do, think it would be wrong for me to don a face mask or a face shield in the classroom under our current policy and its current justification. I will not pretend that wearing a face mask or face shield in class makes my students safer and causes no social, cultural, or relational harm. 

I would be lying if I did.