Before 2020, nobody knew what epidemiologists did -- I can track the normalization of COVID-19 by the number of people who, upon meeting me, ask if that's like, some kind of skin doctor or something. The beginning of the pandemic was a weird, sudden intrusion of everyone in the world into my cozy little academic space. A similar thing happened last year around this time in a very different corner of my life. The reality show I had religiously followed since its 2013 debut suddenly became national, even international, news following the spectacle of a cheating scandal among the cast members. The Scandoval, while pretty run of the mill drama for Vanderpump Rules, took over the actual news cycle for awhile and catapulted the cast members into realms of fame they weren't ready for. Tom Sandoval, the titular cheater, became (as a days-old New York Times magazine cover story put it) the most hated man in America. Rachel Leviss, his affair partner, was skinned alive in the media, by her fellow cast members, and in every possible public venue and wisely checked herself into a trauma treatment facility in Arizona. And Ariana Madix, who Tom Sandoval cheated on, has been rather puzzlingly lionized and showered with lucrative career opportunities, doing sponcon for real brands now (like Glad and Lay's and Uber Eats) and playing Roxy Hart on Broadway.
Just to get things out of the way, I am Team Rachel to the core. Yes, she did a bad thing. But it's a bad thing that has to be understood in its proper context. It really is Tom Sandoval's MO to scoop women up right out of deeply abusive relationships and kind of love bomb them (Rachel had been engaged to a very volatile cast member, an alcoholic DJ named James, for a long time). In fact, this is what he (Tom) did with Ariana, the woman he would later cheat on: it was a major plot point for several early seasons that Tom Sandoval cheated on his previous girlfriend Kristen with Ariana; he and Ariana both, as a united front, spent years (literally years, on national television) calling Kristen crazy and dragging her name through the mud. This is just scratching the surface of the reality TV drama in the background here, but these swirling questions of guilt, responsibility, and atonement are what make Ariana's utterly imperious attitude towards everyone so hard to take. Everyone who has ever been on Vanderpump Rules is guilty of the exact same behavior (and worse -- remember when Jax tried to dump Laura-Leigh moments after her Narcotics Anonymous meeting?). What has made the show work for all these years -- some years better than others -- is that there are no lines in the sand, no untransgressable boundaries, and really no consequences for any of these folks' incredibly fucked up and harmful behavior towards each other. (Keep it coming, I do not care about these people or their lives except insofar as they want to debase themselves for my entertainment!)
It might seem like kind of a curveball to bring in 19th century Russian literature at this point -- but hear me out. I've been working my way through The Brothers Karamazov for the last few months. I suppose it's my One Big Book for this winter (I always have exactly one every year). I've read it before but it was a long time ago; now, as a grownup, I'm really struck by how hilarious and real it is, and how funny and idiosyncratic Dostoevsky's sensibility is. He has an incredibly sympathetic knack for seeing the absolute transcendence at the heart of even the most degraded and ridiculous human drama. I think he would have absolutely loved Vanderpump Rules. I also think he would have loved really miserable airport travel -- the more delays and the bigger the crowds, the better -- for the same reason. The depths of human wretchedness and the heights of human transcendence are one and the same. A phrase that recurs throughout the book is "for all and on behalf of all," from the Russian Orthodox liturgy, meaning that we are all guilty of all the world's sins, in front of God and everyone. What this really means is that we are all really connected, we are all responsible for each other. This idea recurs again and again, in the words and actions of different characters, from the monk Father Zosima to his disciple, young Alexei Karamazov, to the group of schoolboys that look up to Alexei, to Grushenka, the "fallen woman" common to Dostoevsky's works, to Dmitri Karamazov, accused of patricide.
I have been trying and struggling to write an essay about Emergent Strategy and what rubs me the wrong way about it. Writing this just now has clarified one thing. We are all connected, we do all share in each other's guilt and responsibility. In Emergent Strategy, this idea hinges on a worn-out appropriation of the concept of a fractal. Because fractal objects are self-similar at different scales, the author argues, this is also how reality actually is, and small actions are the same as big actions -- e.g., being in an annoying workbook polycule and intentionally trying to form "Liberated Relationships" is exactly the same thing as political work and urgent struggles for justice on the macro scale because "micro is macro."
But I like Dostoevsky's version better. I don't pretend to be any kind of expert about Christian spirituality or Russian Orthodoxy but it's guilt -- our capacity for guilt -- that forms part of the connective tissue fixing our place in humanity. Recognizing our guilt is the first step towards atonement and sincere love. How can we sit in judgment of anyone when we are all the same, when we are all connected, when we share in the guilt and responsibility of others just by being human? In this version, every interaction, no matter how large or how small, is an opportunity to practice forgiveness, atonement, mercy, and love. Easier said than done, surely, but much more moving than yet another metaphor about underground mycelial networks. We don't need the metaphor. We aren't mushrooms, we are something much weirder and, in my opinion, even more beautiful.
Now, what the fuck does this have to do with COVID? I hesitate to even write this here. There is one reading of "we're all connected" that I do endorse, in some ways: we all share the responsibility of protecting everyone, even people we don't know, from the virus. There is another sense in which this sentiment has devolved in practice into a whole lot of imperious judgment that is, in my view, unproductive and unwarranted. The true killer of the Karamazov patriarch is [spoiler alert] Smerdyakov, heavily implied to be his illegitimate son, conceived by what could only be rape, and consigned to servitude in Karamazov's house. Smerdyakov is guilty, but surely Fyodor Pavlovich (his father) is too. It's a common saying in transformative justice circles that no one's initiation into violence is committing it ("hurt people hurt people"). We do not live lives of isolation, nor can our deeds, bad or good, be isolated from the truly complex, one might even say emergent, churn of a human life. Constructing a scaffold just for Rachel Leviss to mount alone might feel good, but on the part of the other cast members it's a declamation of responsibility, a rejection of guilt, a firm repudiation of the invitation to transcendence through love and forgiveness that is open to all human beings. This actually feels hopeful to me. Curiosity and humility are the foundations of compassion, and I think compassion is something we could all really use a lot more of these days.