We have seen in the conservative tradition a tension between abstraction and context, or definition and circumstance, which perhaps has its foundation in the lateralization of the brain. Abstraction has seemed dominant in certain cultures; one such was that of the French Revolution, and another is our own. Consider Villeneuve’s “Matière à reflection pour les jongleurs couronnées” (above). McGilchrist has this to say of the image:

“[T]his engraving embodies perfectly the most important aspects of the left hemisphere triumph that it depicts…it represents the right hand, the left hemisphere’s tool, taking ultimate power…It demonstrates not just the production of a fragment, with its congeniality to left-hemisphere preferences, but specifically the head from the rest of the body, a metaphor that could be said to go to the very foundations of the left-hemisphere world, with its tendency to reject the physical and retreat into an abstracted, cerebralized world disconnected as far as possible from the demands of the body.”

Note also that the head is turned to display its left side—the chief organ of the right hemisphere’s expression and interpretation of emotion. 

The vaccine and lockdowns can be regarded as weapons of abstraction’s total war against (the body’s proxy) coronavirus, waged regardless of the social, emotional, and economic (i.e. bodily) collateral damage. We have an emblem of this project, as apt as Villeneuve’s engraving: the mask. Emotional expression obviated in the name of science’s hysterical denial of death is abstraction’s quintessence.