Intimations: Six Essays

by Zadie Smith

In England, we were offered an infuriating but comparatively comic rendering of this virus, in the form of the Prime Minister’s ‘ideas man’, Dominic, whose most fundamental idea is that the categorical imperative doesn’t exist. Instead there is one rule for men like him, men with ideas, and another for the ‘people’. This is an especially British strain of the virus. Class contempt. Technocratic contempt. Philosopher King contempt. When you catch the British strain you believe the people are there to be ruled. They are to be handled, played, withstood, tolerated – up to a point – ridiculed (behind closed doors), sentimentalized, bowdlerized, nudged, kept under surveillance, directed, used, and closely listened to, but only for the purposes of data collection, through which means you harvest the raw material required to manipulate them further. At the press conference, you could see Dominic was riddled with the virus – had been for months. Only his mouth went through the motions. His mouth said that he had driven thirty miles from Durham to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight. The rest of his face was overwhelmed with the usual symptoms, visible to all. Boredom, annoyance, impatience, incredulity. His eyes, refreshed by the driving test, spoke volumes: Why are you bothering me with this nonsense? Contempt. Back in February, ‘herd immunity’ had been a new concept for the people – or that broad cross section of the people who are neither epidemiologists nor regular readers of ...

Brilliant!