Masking isn't a medical question anymore, it's a question of cultural allegiance

The use of masks as a social signifier is hardly new to the COVID-19 era. Face-coverings and head-coverings have featured in the social and religious life of Muslims (hijabs and kufis), Christians (mantillas, wimples, zuchettos), Jews (tichels, kippahs), Hindus (ghoonghats), and many others for centuries. The head-covering and face-covering impulse is partly rooted in modesty (both sexual modesty and modesty before God), but it also has a community-building aspect. When the Sikh spiritual master Guru Gobind Singh ordered his male followers to forgo cutting their hair and to wear turbans, he did so in order that, as he put it, his “disciples will be recognized among millions.” Outward signs of community and solidarity inevitably take on, to some degree, a depersonalizing role, as with the military uniform, which makes soldiers exactly what the adjective promises. In our secular time, we have reinvented a great deal of ancient practice, from community-identifying dietary rules (back to those vegans, but also paleo and keto enthusiasts and many others), modern takes on sumptuary laws, lightly secularized versions of apostolic succession, and shrines of many kinds. And, in our current plague years, we have rediscovered the religious veil in the COVID-19 mask. The people who say “listen to science” already are finding reasons not to. It isn’t a genuinely scientific question now — this sort of thing almost never is. The reason for the kashrut prohibition on eating pork wasn’t, as is sometimes suggested, trichinosis, which wasn’t even discovered until the 19th century — a more likely explanation (though by no means an absolutely certain one) is that that Jews weren’t supposed to eat pork because Egyptian Osiris-worshippers did so at religious festivals, as reported by Herodotus. Pork-eating wasn’t a medical matter — it was a matter of cultural allegiance, of us and them.