Most of us have a long history of seeing seatback videos or printed illustrations of what to do if the plane you are traveling in experiences a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Usually it’s a mother logically securing her own breathing device before affixing a dangling oxygen mask onto the child beside her. Before March, I doubt anyone watched those videos with anger, thinking “No airline is gonna make me put on a mask!”

As the life-giving conduit of oxygen, masks have long represented protection amid catastrophe. Infantrymen in World War I lived in mortal dread of the shout for “Gas!” Gas masks became the symbolic escape hatch of battlefield carnage well beyond the next world war. Scuba divers and snorkelers, astronauts in Ad Astra—they all seem to “get” the importance of masks. And of course the masks that protect people from contamination on both sides of a medical procedure. From the perspective of science, it’s complete logic, this effort to prevent possible death. It’s hard to imagine politicization.

The Washington Post attempted to rationalize the politicization of masks by suggesting that we are a nation of individuals. Yes, Americans are “individuals” who like to gather in great numbers in the same football stadiums and sports bars, drinking the same label of beer, wearing the same caps. You can see our history of individualism in those aerial photographs at the beginning of the twentieth century: the sea of straw boaters at Brooklyn ballparks and the sea of bowlers in front of the Stock Exchange. If we have a history of anything, it’s believing we are a nation of individuals while behaving otherwise.

I’ve thought a lot about America’s mask-denialism, wondering if it’s simply a manifestation of our anti-intellectual/anti-government MAGA mentality, or if there is something inherent to masks themselves that make Americans shun such a simple but potentially lie-saving choice.

The connotations and associations of masks are like a facial Dutch door. The bottom half may be purely functional, but the top half is where the cultural weight is carried. The Greeks’ theatrical uses of masks gave Western culture the liberating obsession with pretending to be what you are not. Masks were the rage in ancient Athens because they allowed male actors to embody all the people who weren’t considered “citizens”—women, for instance, or the vast majority of enslaved populations. Masks were also practical: you could see them from the cheap seats and it was believed that they helped amplify voices. The big draw, though, was the transformation: an “ordinary” man could become a god, goddess, or demon.

The Greeks saw a lot of interaction between pandemics and masks, since plagues were part of their performative history. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex includes narrative about the Plague of Thebes, with the Chorus pleading for help from various gods. That was around 429 BC, the good old days in terms of Greek civilization, before the city-states had civil wars that went on and on until the Romans swept in to snatch their gods and change all the names. Fortunately, the Romans liked the masks that went with Greek theater. Behind them you could say and do things you could not in everyday life, present ideas and portray actions that your audience might consider horrifying, fantastic, or absurd.

While masks augmented written texts for the Greeks, in other cultures they were themselves the text and the vector of myth. We only know of the Greeks’ use of masks from drawings on pottery, since none of the coverings have survived. In The Way of the Masks (1975), Claude Lévi‐Strauss examines some masks that are extant—the painted wood artifacts of American Indians in the Northwest Coast—to explore how masks served as dialogues between neighboring tribes. His focus is the bold, vividly colored Swaihwe mask of the Salish people of coastal British Columbia. The eyes, the mouth, and other features of the Swaihwe mask that the Salish used to convey myth are almost perfectly inverted in the features of the Dzonokwa mask that the neighboring Kwakuitl people used for the same purpose. It’s fascinating that this stark duality in anthropological study is the way of Western history: Athens and Sparta, Catholic and Protestant, Union and Confederacy, Communist and capitalist, Muslim and Christian, Israel and Palestine, red state and blue state.

Dramatic literature is rife with mask metaphors, with “masque” becoming a theatrical genre. Shakespeare used disguise as a powerful narrative technique in Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and As You like It. Concealed identity made for humor but also provided an innovative means to explore gender on a stage that did not allow women. Three centuries later, Dumas père cashed in on the mask motif with contes like The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask. Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, Gaston Leroux’s 1910 melodrama, gave the world a meme that has accommodated popular tastes for 110 years and counting. In the decade after the First World War, Dadaists like Hugo Ball concocted theatrical masks swiped from every cultural context—African bush to Verdun trenches.

When we got to the comic book culture of the 1940s, the stock superhero was identifiable by his harlequin disguise. Probably the last tier of mask ascendance was the face of evil in the evolving teen horror genre of Friday the 13th. The mask announces that it is concealing something much worse, but somehow the mask itself scares us more as a symbol of unknowable and unstoppable fear.

I suppose you could say that today we wear a mask all the time via the identity we maintain online. Even our daily makeup has become stage makeup as we present performative selves to be consumed onscreen. I often think of the term “save face” in regard to our digital masks: when we no longer confront one another in person, “face” (a thing that exists in real time) has been lost to “profile” (a thing that is curated). We want to be “seen” but we also want the option to “ghost.” Sometimes I think that our sudden embrace of the ugly falsity of augmentations to our faces and heads came from the presidency of Donald Trump. Sometime in middle age, he pulled on the mask of 1983, the year Trump Tower opened and he was still young and golden. The hair implants and the bronzer forced on us a look that strenuously attempts to bully the passage of time into submission. Twenty years ago, the Trump mask made us turn away; now, we’ve resigned ourselves to the horserace of fixing up our physical shortcoming by going burlesque. We opt for a mask that covers up humanity itself—humanity and all of its failings. The fact that the hair implants and bronzer render Trump gilded, not golden, is precisely the reason his people love him.

It’s ironic how masks symbolized a temporary freedom from the politics of ancient Greece and Rome, whereas in our own republic, masks have become politics itself. You might conclude that America’s current mask-denialists are mixing up the top of the Dutch door with the bottom. The mask that we all need to wear on the bottom has been contorted from its purely functional purpose to a harlequin strap of deceit and propaganda at the hands of people we don’t like. This is what you call social demoralization, and the fact that masks are the 2020 metaphor for this phase in America’s decline is strangely analogous to the prominence of theatrical masks in ancient Greece, a performance-loving civilization whose flame-out was caused by repeated plagues and other drawn-out internal strife.

A survey conducted in June by the Brookings Institution found that “the number one reason given by Americans who are not wearing a mask is that it is their right as an American to not have to do so.” That’s 40% of the people who don’t wear masks. In contrast, of those Americans who do wear masks, 60% surveyed say they are doing so to “protect themselves and others.” The Brookings authors conclude that “the core principal of individualism in American culture is leading to significant health consequences across the country.”

But what does “individualism” really mean when the choice is between one action sanctioned by the official government and another action sanctioned by a frustrated figurehead’s cultish followers who number in the tens of millions? And why do the mask deniers feel such hatred and resentment toward people who choose to wear masks to “protect themselves and others”?

I had a conversation with a mask-denying relative who said he got angry when he saw people driving alone in cars while wearing a mask. He got even angrier when I asked him to explain why that made him angry. All I could think of was a child on the brink of a tantrum brazenly telling an adult stranger to stop making some sound that he didn’t like. That made me realize it was all about the fear of losing control. Children snap when they begin to intuit the complexity of the world—and of course they don’t like it. They want to go back to when they could make people go away by not looking at them. Medical masks like the N95 can make you think of the gift of life or the threat of death. And for many, it’s like with Jason Voorhees: the mask itself scares us more as a symbol of unknowable and unstoppable fear.

The best I can come up with is that the deniers see mask-wearers as stagecoach bandits trying to steal from them in an unknown frontier. After the alien concept of a pandemic had upended their capitalism-based sense of order, seeing mask-wearers everywhere is upending their sense of security. If you can convince yourself that mask-wearing is more of a threat than the virus itself, then you have a way to feel that you and your side are winning. Shadow boxing it used to be called. The ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about that. §