Fintan O’Toole: Way pandemic has unfolded makes mockery of punishment and reward

There are two Christmas stories. One of them is religious, mythic, cosmological. It is about salvation. The other one is a kind of fantasy of justice. Usually, we manage to keep both of them going. This year, we have to choose between them.

The salvation story is the Nativity. You don’t have to be religious to be moved by it. It’s about people who are, in the eyes of the world, almost nothing, becoming almost everything. A child is born to a homeless couple. This birth is a fissure in the rock of hard reality. Through it, something radically new enters the world. Humanity is saved from itself and gets a second chance.

The other story piggybacks on this myth but has nothing at all to do with it. It’s often denounced as a debasement of what Christmas really means, but it’s actually an entirely different kind of fable.

This second myth is the one Miss Prism explains in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

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We know damn well that this is fiction. The whole of history and of everyday experience tells us that the bad eat well while the good starve. The reason religions have to invent the afterlife is so that there is somewhere else to mete out the justice that is so conspicuously absent in this one.

But the second notion of Christmas is one we’ve invented to get ourselves a foretaste of this simple justice. It starts out as a way of telling children the big fib of just deserts: Santa is making his lists, dividing the naughty from the nice. The nice will get presents. The naughty will get nothing.

The specific ways in which the pandemic has unfolded, here as in most Western countries, has made a mockery of punishment and reward

We don’t stick to this, of course. Maybe it’s a sign of progress that we now think that anyone who would withhold a Christmas present for bad behaviour must be an awful swine.

Or maybe it’s just that, as adults, we want to get in on this plenary indulgence. We decree for ourselves that we “deserve” to have a bloody great time at Christmas. We reward ourselves, not for any specifically heroic deeds, but just because we need there to be a time when boundaries and waistlines expand.

Christmas, in this frame, is a truce in the war with reality, a time when we put on hold its often cruel randomness. We become our own judges in a fantasy court of justice and sentence ourselves to all the fun we have proven ourselves worthy to handle.

The problem, in this blasted year, is that we can’t even pretend that deserve means anything. The coronavirus had done for deserve.

The plague has made short work in a general way of our primitive sense of merit. It doesn’t give a dry cough whether you’ve been naughty or nice. We’re all on the list for its sack of ashes.

More than that, though, the specific ways in which the pandemic has unfolded, here as in most Western countries, has made a mockery of punishment and reward. The bad – those who flout the rules – may not be punished at all. Worse, the consequences of their misbehaviour are at least as likely to be visited on those who are innocent but vulnerable.

We are all waiting for something new to come into our lives. We are all aching for a second chance to live our lives unshadowed by fear

And in a more specific sense, it seems at this stage of the saga that the virus is playing a cruel game with our efforts to do the right thing, to make sacrifices, to be good. Those efforts are in reality making a vast difference. But when we keep being hit with another wave every time we come up for air, it sure doesn’t feel that way.

The story of Christmas as a time when the inequity of life is suspended has itself been suspended. If anything, the raw deal seems even more bloody unfair this week. For crimes we didn’t commit, we are all being made to wear mental ankle monitors that will activate an alarm if we venture too far into the joys of connection and relaxation.

In Puritan Ireland, the Church used to rail against the dangers of “company keeping”. In Pandemic Ireland, company keeping is a literally mortal sin.

Even worse, we know that, this time, the virus will actually punish us, not for being naughty, but just for being together. The momentary opening will be followed almost immediately by a cruel closing.

So, with that second idea of Christmas all but cancelled, what can we do but go back to the first? For many religious people, of course, it has always been the only one. But for most of us, it has functioned primarily as an excuse for the other one.

This Christmas, we are all praying for salvation. We are all following a star of hope towards some place outside of the world as we have known it in 2020. We are all waiting for something new to come into our lives. We are all aching for a second chance to live our lives unshadowed by fear. If we hold on to that sense of anticipation, we may not get what we deserve. But we will get something much better: the hope we need.