Jorge Freire -- Imitative glare

The family gathers to celebrate grandfather's birthday. A woman overcomes her sister's apathy and embraces her in a tight embrace. The uncle makes the adolescent nephew drink from his glass, arguing that he "knows a lot about this". Children and grandchildren crowd around the table like chicks in the nest. A cluster of vocal heads intones the Happy Birthday half a metre away from the grandfather, spurting countless droplets of saliva.

This is the announcement that the Canarian government launched at the beginning of the summer to avoid contagion. In it, the small coercions of domestic life, unaffordable to any external regulation, were appreciated. To walk in unison with the group, one must submit to the rhythm of its tuning fork. The advertisement closed with a picture of the hospitalised grandfather.

We have known since Hobbes that fear is a useful social regulator. A recent Ministry of Health advertisement, which overlaps a children's song with disturbing images, closes with the slogan "this is not a game". Will it do any good? Remember the campaigns presented a month ago by the Community of Madrid and the Government of Aragon: one showed a crematorium oven and the other compared moving around infected with the disease to carrying a loaded gun. Fear may be, as the saying goes, a bird of flight, but there is no advertisement to serve as a wake-up call for more distracted citizens.

Who does not have a family member or friend who refuses to wear a mask or to keep his distance when he is in his domain? Asking them to do so is like throwing a glove in their face. Private space is a trapdoor through whose hatches the basic rules of civility are poured. Eloy Fernández Porta stated in Get excited like this that, as the outside is filled with rules, the personal becomes a "ritual evacuation space". Hence, the rules of civility only seem to govern outside its walls.

It goes without saying that the civic-minded person is not obliged to absolve discourtesy. Smoking cigarettes or shouting on a terrace are clearly rude behaviour, while refusing to wear a mask at a meeting, under the pretext of being easy-going and casual, is unacceptable impudence. It would be idle to brandish contagion figures or complex virological terms to admonish such behaviour. But when it comes to awareness-raising campaigns, none is as effective as example.

Javier Gomá maintains that bad example absolves us and good example points the finger at us. As the great theoretician of exemplarity affirms in Imitation and experienceWe move in a web of mutual models: negligent behaviour is an excuse for vulgarity, while responsible behaviour generates discomfort around it. If a majority of people are inclined to be lax, if one stands firm in one's prophylaxis, one risks being labelled a "killjoy". However, it may well be that others will follow suit.

The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde coined the concept of "imitative radiance". When this gleams in a human group, certain behaviours become generalised as if by magic. Both the outbreak of wars and the spread of fashion were, in his view, explained by this notion. Although he was one of the founders of French sociology, his conflict with Émile Durkheim, who emerged victorious from the struggle, pushed Tarde to the margins of the discipline. It would be good to rescue some of the suggestive intuitions of the forgotten author of Laws of imitationfor whom human behaviour could not be explained without reference to imitative flows.

In his novel Fragments of a future historypublished in 1896, the Earth was suffering a new glaciation. Led by a certain Miltiades, a group of people decided to hide in the centre of the planet. A seemingly ridiculous idea which, thanks to the charisma of Miltiades, whose name recalls the hero of Marathon, was received by all "like a brilliant flash of lightning". Moved by this imitative radiance, they advanced steadily into the bowels of the earth, like Ulysses, like Aeneas and like Dante, and there, against all odds, they founded a new civilisation. Through tunnels, grottoes and spelunks, the survivors, inspired by the character of their leader, erected sumptuous hypogeums reminiscent of the great palaces of the surface.

If we do the right thing, others will follow. You don't have to be a Miltiades to do so. There will be time to celebrate all the festivities that confinement has forced us to abolish. As Machado wrote in the most beautiful of his poems, everyone who waits knows that victory is his. Mimesis, an essential concept of classical Greece, is what the Latins translated as imitatio and what we know in English as emulation. To be worthy of it is not only an ethical imperative, but also a matter of public health.

This article has been published in El País. You can access it by clicking click here