* Many thanks to Nate Holdren for his feedback on this post. He does a companion newsletter to mine which you can read and subscribe to at: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren.
* Also, a disclaimer at the top: I am no longer affiliated with Death Panel and none of my views expressed in this newsletter reflect the views of the show.
“Catastrophe — to have missed the opportunity.” - Walter Benjamin
The above quotation from Benjamin, which opens Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout, is how I have been feeling about COVID for the last year or two (I don’t know exactly, time moves so weirdly now). For years, even before COVID, I had been devoting all my time to trying to figure out how to “do” public health in a leftist way, and to bring some of the tools of leftist social critique into the atheoretical quantitative world of epidemiology. (Seriously, the level of the debates wracking the field just before the arrival of COVID — “is race a cause?” — would astound you.)
COVID, macabre as it has been, presented an opportunity (a “portal” per Arundhati Roy; or if Winston Churchill is more your bag, “never let a good crisis go to waste”). We missed it. Not for lack of trying. I ran my entire life into the ground finishing my dissertation in epidemiology and finding a job in 2020-2021 while spending nearly every waking moment of my life engaged in some kind of COVID work or other.
Not popular COVID work, either. I alienated myself from my professional community, and I would do it again. I was right. Being right is not enough, and being right about what a deadly disaster COVID would prove to be in the US was sickening. It’s not a good feeling, there’s no “I told you so,” it’s too much brutal reality for a single person to hold. I have been through countless embittering experiences of political defeat; COVID was the biggest and the worst. I understood what was happening in nauseating, high-fidelity detail, and it didn’t fucking matter.
During the first few years of the pandemic, obviously, there were more protective measures in place, including mask mandates. Masks work, and so do mandates (I am pro-masking). Even still, when mask mandates were in place across much of the country, a huge number of people still contracted and died of COVID. Not as many as would have in the absence of those mandates, but masking practices, even when embedded in a larger network of COVID mitigations, did not make COVID go away. This is the social murder of it all: mitigation measures are good, but necessarily limited when deployed in an economic structure in which everyone must participate and which produces an irreducible dividend of death even in “normal” times. COVID is not just a discursive event; the “normalization” is not simply rhetorical or ideological but almost guaranteed by the structures and rules of the political economy.
Engels called it social murder, Marx called it “mute compulsion,” Foucault called it “biopower.” The violence embedded in the wage relation itself, in capitalist social relations themselves, collided with an airborne pandemic to predictably horrific ends. This was the time to dig in and really fight for Medicare for All, for better workplace safety, for income supports — all left-liberal reforms to blunt the sharper edges of capitalism, but definitely worthwhile proximate targets, strategies to make the social structure even a little bit less punishing and deadly. My background in public health prevented me from exceptionalizing COVID, but I feel I could have done more, differently, better. I am fairly haunted by this. Some of the fighting I did around COVID was really worthwhile. Some was petty and pointless. It’s still a little hard to distinguish the two. But of course, this whole line of thinking is so American-individualist, that if I had just worked harder, things would have worked out differently. It doesn’t work like that.
Proctor describes in her book a few different strands of “left melancholy.” I thought her characterization of Wendy Brown’s was interesting: “a left clinging to outdated orthodoxies in the absence of ongoing revolutionary movements.” And of Jodi Dean’s: “a left that has abandoned the totalizing goal of revolution for smaller, more dispersed activities, ‘sublimat[ing its] goals and responsibilities into the branching, fragmented practices of micro-politics, self-care, and issue awareness.’” One motivating question of Proctor’s book is “What happens when hope curdles?” This melancholy is one thing that happens.
It is highly visible in some COVID discourses that (in my opinion) have outlived their political utility and overshot their bases of empirical support. Masking discourse is perhaps the best example of this I can think of. Masks work, but they don’t work perfectly (through the looking-glass of this discourse, the fact that masks don’t work perfectly is alchemized into the demand that people should be masking with KN95s or “better” at all times — this is an extreme of personal responsibility and personal assumption of significant expense even in a discourse rife with it, and nugatory as public health advice let alone as a public health intervention in that it completely ignores the significant cost barrier). More than just the material dimension, masking is, however anyone personally feels about it, a complex social practice with many meanings, some of them contradictory, and not all of them positive — disease prevention strategies always conceal a number of affective and ideological arguments (Sylvia Tesh wrote a whole book about this, called Hidden Arguments). I am guiltier than most people of ignoring this reality because I thought it was politically expedient, and of contributing to the shape of this discourse. I have complex feelings about it.
Given this, what do we do if the goal is to mitigate the population impact of COVID-19? I don’t purport to know, but I do feel confident that attachment to the demands, discourses, routines, and practices of the first two years is not bearing fruit. There’s a really strong temptation to think we can bootstrap our way out of the pandemic by individual actions in our own lives. This is understandable given that we’ve basically been abandoned by anyone with any official power. It’s also plausible to think this because from one perspective politics is just lots of individual actions, but that perspective is as misleading as it is true. This could and should be the subject of a post of its own, and I won’t get into this in detail here, but I do want to emphasize that individual actions of participation in collective action are different from individual actions of navigating the world. By analogy, taking steps to lower my own “carbon footprint” is a totally different and lesser order of action than taking steps to participate in protests against companies and policies that worsen climate change. A lot of COVID discourse focuses on the first kind of action while mistaking it for the second kind, and I most definitely include things I’ve said and done in this.
Earlier in the pandemic, I took major issue with lib public health professors utilizing “harm reduction” to talk about going on vacations to the Caribbean and things like that. In 2024, in the midst of all this abandonment, I think this ethos is a lot more appropriate than I used to because masking some of the time really is better than none of the time, and only masking some of the time doesn’t make you complicit in mass death. (Neither, in fact, does masking none of the time: no one person is in control of the spread of COVID, no one person can be responsibilized for it, and that is scary. The whole category of individual complicity in mass death when what we’re really talking about is individual behaviors in going about the world doing ordinary business seems very wrong to me. I know there are terrible stories of masked people being harassed in public, and that’s appalling. My point is that someone who goes to the store unmasked isn’t the same as someone who does that kind of thing, and that the actions that matter much more right now are those of policymakers.) A surgical mask is better than none at all; wearing a surgical mask doesn’t make you a brainwashed piece of shit.
In any case, the crucial question is what does a political strategy to make masking more accessible and acceptable to more people look like? I don’t know, but I don’t think we can figure it out through debates over individual behavior. We can’t answer that question in presumptive and Protestant-individualist terms. In those terms there isn’t any “we,” or at least not the right kind: there are lot of individual I’s that are assumed to sort of add up to a “we,” but that’s miles away from a collective practice. (There are deep parallels to the structures of scientific rationality that potentiate all of this discourse, but I won’t go into those here either.) Real answers to the strategy question will require actually talking and listening to people about what masking means to them and how they feel about it and about a great deal more than that.
This isn’t a post about masking (though I’m sure I’m going to get some hate even for these paragraphs anyway, and that’s okay) — it’s a post about political defeat. I think the defeat has already happened with COVID; I think everyone in the country is fucked up and transformed by the experience of the last four years, in ways that are completely individual and rich with the texture of experience. What do we do? Give up? Try to go forward? How do we do either of those things? This confusion is what seems to be coming out as interpersonal grievance. It has been my contention throughout Biden’s term as president that his administration’s COVID strategy had the effect (beneficial to the administration, natürlich) of displacing the potential for political conflict into the actuality of interpersonal strife. This continues.
We actually are all in this together — the realities of airborne viral transmission ensure that. COVID has been “out there” and out of control for several years. COVID infections happen; they are not anyone’s fault, and they do not carry any kind of moral valence or judgment. What do we do in the face of this? How do we operationalize some kind of ethic of solidarity in the year 2024? I don’t know, but I’ll let you know if I think of anything. In the meantime, good advice (?) from Gilles Deleuze: “There will be no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”