Allow Mask Decree to Expire

The following letter was submitted to Moscow mayor Bill Lambert and the Moscow City Council by Dr. Christopher Schlect.

TO: The Hon. Mayor and City Council
RE: Allow Mask Decree to Expire

Dear Mayor Lambert and Moscow City Council,

Please let your mask decree expire. I am gravely concerned about a decree that ostensibly supports health, but it actually burdens the normal human interactions that are necessary for human health and flourishing.

Faces matter to human health. It’s that simple. Your mask requirement imposes a restrictive burden upon human health. I am not a health-care professional, but I do hold a Ph.D. and my research field considers the ways that human beings form bonds—in our intimate relationships and in our communities. Why are the depictions of human faces so central in the great artwork of many human cultures? Why do we represent human faces on coinage and statuary? Why have entire industries formed around facial hygiene and make-up? Why do religious communities devote so much attention to questions of propriety surrounding the public and private display of faces? Why does the Judeo-Christian tradition deploy the metaphor “face” to describe attributes of an invisible God—as in, “we come before the face of God”? 

The answer is that faces—unhindered faces—are central, not peripheral, to healthy human relationships.

Your mask decree defies human health. If you prolong the mask decree, you inflict harm upon mental health among those in our community. I know, you may worry about our hospitals being inundated with COVID cases. So do I, believe me. COVID is as COVID does. Yet you have it in your power to prevent our mental-health infrastructure from a future inundation—months and years from now. Extend the mask decree and expect an uptick in suicides. Extend the mask decree and expect maladjusted and poorly-socialized children. Extend the mask decree and expect a rise in incivility and abusive relationships in our community. In short, extend the mask decree and ignore public health. 

Let the decree expire. Stop using our faces as sites of your perverse and inhumane social experimentation. 

Cordially,

Christopher R. Schlect, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow of History
New Saint Andrews College