Some requisite housekeeping: I have been sick, depressed. Physically sick but also spiritually ailing, it has been bitterly pipe-freezing cold and the SAD is SAD-ing, as the youth would say. So I’m way behind where I would want to be in terms of writing, and most of the days lately I find I need to recalibrate my expectations way down to simply existing and getting done what must get done. This is all to say, I hope the micro-conditions of my daily existence improve soon, and I have good reason to think they will – the sun is out, I’m sitting in the library (not at home!), it might be warm enough to take a walk this week!
Of course, the macro-conditions are absolutely rancid. I don’t want to rehash everything that has been going down at the federal level or pretend I know what it all means. But I am considering this the first in a series of posts about an issue of serious public import (avian flu) that takes the ignorance of the general American public as the object to be worked on directly rather than as an unfortunate constraint to be accommodated. Am I calling you, dear reader, ignorant? Not exactly. What I’m thinking is more like – our slop-world information environment is increasingly dominated by takes and preprocessed interpretation that presume increasing unfamiliarity with any kind of subject matter. I have noticed this even doing the small amount of “pitching” I’ve done in my life over the past few years: it seems increasingly the case that a successful pitch is one that is written to the level of the zero-information reader. I hope to do something different here – wild, I know – and use the medium of writing to convey information that any given reader may or may not have.
Basically, I want to do this in the spirit of popular education as an end in itself, even if (especially if?) not a remunerative one. It’s hard to break out of the strictures imposed by the valorization imperative, especially in these lean, mean times. There’s just not any money floating around the economy to support any kind of independent work of any kind, and people no longer really have much wiggle room to do things for free. I am going to try. It’s not that I have the right answers, which I don’t. It’s that I have some stupid education that I paid for. I think there is shit going on in the world that you should know about, and I think that the more educated and informed the general public is, the better for us as a society. I’m under no illusions about how many people this newsletter reaches – it’s not many – but let a hundred flowers bloom and all that.
I want to offer some context for how I am thinking about public health in terms of the evolving threat of avian flu. I feel like we’ve all well demonstrated how capitalism impacts public health. It’s kind of the whole thesis I and Nate have been working out on our respective newsletters over all this time: social murder, in all its various faces, is the expression of population health under conditions of capitalism. As Trump’s second term gets underway, I can already feel the popular discourse lurching in more of a “libbing the fuck out” direction, and thinking of capitalism in very moralizing terms. This is very good in terms of generating outrage, which drives subscriptions and engagement on the dominant platform model, but it is pedagogically empty and politically worse than useless. It’s demobilizing, which is just about the worst thing it could be.
When thinking about the interpenetration of capitalism and public health, we need to get back to the more old-school mode of thinking about capitalism as a historical process that is constantly in motion and in which we are all caught. Avian flu is a timely illustration of this total-process notion, and I want to draw up the demonstration I have planned not as a conclusion as happens so often in public health scholarship (smugly, as in, look! I’ve assigned the problem to capitalism and I’ve got an inviolable armor of citations!) but rather as a starting point for thinking about what the fuck we ought to be doing here. I don’t want of us to think of H5N1 and the pandemic potential it represents as a distinct thing that is out there, fully formed, ready to strike us down with religious rectitude if we commit the moral errors of “capitalism” or of failing to keep track of all the gentle reminders about how bad things are. Rather, I want to think of it as an ongoing part of several planetary processes, all of which implicate and are implicated in the unfolding of capitalism as a mode of production and “logic” for interconnecting and organizing ever-larger numbers of people.
Some context for how I am thinking about public health in terms of this series. I feel like we’ve all well demonstrated how capitalism impacts public health. But what I want to do is actually stop thinking about capitalism in this arena in such moralizing terms. It does nothing but generate outrage which drives subscriptions and engagement on the platform model but is pedagogically empty and politically useless. We need to think of capitalism not as a bogeyman but as what it is, a historical process that is in motion and in which we are all caught. Flu is a timely illustration of this total-process notion but I want to draw the demonstration not as a conclusion (smugly, as in, look! I’m assigning the problem to capitalism and I’ve got a litany of citations backing me up!) but rather as a starting point. There is no outside of it and there is no refusing it. The negation of the negation is not identity – we can’t just rewind our retrace our steps back out of capitalism and the mess we’re in, and analyses that leave the implication hanging (the problem is capitalism, the implied solution meaning we just stop doing whatever it is or that we shouldn’t have done it in the first place) are not gonna cut it anymore. These are concrete processes against which moral outrage is meaningless.
I am going to plan to start the next post about this at the molecular level. (I was gonna do it today, but my parking is gonna run out, and I kind of have a migraine, and I want to go and get some lunch somewhere. Plus I think with this format it’s better to keep things short ‘n sweet, Heather Chadwell style.) You are gonna learn about some basic biology whether you like it or not. But as we’ll see, this isn’t because the molecular level is more fundamental than any other – none is more fundamental in the totality, baby! I’m going to start there because I do think some basic scientific knowledge is just good for you to have, and because I think some knowledge of what’s going on at the molecular level is important in order to see how the natural/social distinction ultimately breaks down, and how deeply inscribed these unfolding social processes are in biology and vice versa.