Last week, Trump announced the appointment of Jay Bhattacharya to head the NIH — we all knew it was coming. I didn’t have any kind of plan or destination in mind when I started writing this a few hours ago; it’s not heavily considered, chewed-over, or edited, just some general thoughts about where I’m at today. Read in that spirit.
I don’t know what to say about Bhattacharya that I haven’t already said. Way back on October 11, 2020, Justin Feldman and I published a deep dive into the now-infamous Great Barrington Declaration, of which Bhattacharya was one of the three fringe authors — joke’s on us now, I suppose. I’ve done some smaller-scale investigations into Bhattacharya’s discredited COVID “seroprevalence study” (discredited and also corrupt — remember how a JetBlue executive funded it? to show that COVID was already widespread, mostly asymptomatic, and not very deadly, and thereby undercut the case for nonpharmaceutical interventions?) of Santa Clara County, CA. I could note that the scientific arguments characteristic of Bhattacharya’s COVID career explicitly contradict some of his earlier research, such as this 2010 NBER influenza modeling study that highlights the effectiveness of early adoption of “avoidance measures,” a.k.a. nonpharmaceutical interventions. If anyone reading this would be interested in a deep dive analysis of Bhattacharya’s scientific publications, email me. I’m happy to do it if people would find it useful. I’m not sure I find it useful for myself at this point.
I’ve talked about COVID as a political defeat. This is it. I’m so glad I didn’t become a professor of epidemiology. Don’t get me wrong — what I really want to be doing is teaching and writing. I’m still trying to figure out a way to do that; being a professor of epidemiology would not have helped. While teaching and writing are what professors in most disciplines do, it’s not the case in epidemiology. What professors in epidemiology do is write grant applications to the NIH to fund their own salaries and their universities. (As an aside, I think this contributes to the structural tendency of epidemiology programs to produce astoundingly ignorant graduates and to the structural tendency of the discipline as a whole towards irrationality, ignorance, and myopia. Since grant writing is the only metric of success, no one is trained or hired for their ability to think, write, or teach, only for their “demonstrated track record of securing extramural funding,” to use the tired stock phrase of every academic job description.)
Bhattacharya is about (to try, anyway) to take an axe to the NIH, which means that a lot of people’s careers are about to get a lot more precarious. It’s way more than just long COVID research that will be affected if Bhattacharya and the interests he was appointed to represent get their way — my intuition tells me infectious disease research, particularly of a population/epidemiologic bent, is possibly in big trouble. The experiences of the past several years have made me a bit of a nihilist about the science the institutions produce as well as about the institutions themselves. But this is really pretty bad. My guess is that a lot of academics who maybe signed the John Snow Memorandum out of some vague sense of wounded expert authority are going to suck up to Bhattacharya and reconfigure their research agendas to be more attractive to Bhattacharya’s NIH, once it becomes clear what the funding priorities of the institution will be under him. It’s understandable, but it’s sad.
It’s pretty bad and I’m really disheartened. What is the actual utility of the modes of analysis we’ve been using? I would say at this point there isn’t much. It sort of feels good (only sort of) to rehash some version of “I’m right, and [they] are wrong” ad infinitum, but it’s not really getting anyone anywhere. I have felt this acutely in my own life. At some point around the 2-3 year mark of COVID, I started to feel like there was no reason for me to be on Death Panel anymore (probably should have listened to that intuition) — how many ways can you say “they are wrong” or “this is bad”? I felt like the only contribution I could make was a vigorous, “expert” head-nod in agreement that the bad things are bad, and that didn’t seem to me to be a valuable contribution. It amounts to an inert, unproductive way of engaging with political developments, and it feels bad — demoralizing and demobilizing. What is to be done besides rehearse the constantly growing list of bad shit?
Thinking about this today has brought me back for what feels like the 20th time to Wendy Brown’s “Resisting left melancholy” from 1999. This essay is a reading of Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall through Freud. Brown starts with Stuart Hall’s diagnosis of the UK Left in the shadow of Thatcherism; he attributes its perpetual defeat and back-footedness to its own “failure to apprehend the the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character” (Brown’s words). Bringing in Walter Benjamin, Brown continues:
“… left melancholy is Benjamin's unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal — even to the failure of that ideal — than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In Benjamin's enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical historical grasp of "the time of the Now," left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than ‘empty time’ or ‘progress.’”
She goes on to connect this to Freud’s notion of melancholia as unconscious object-loss — I am way out of my depth with Freud, so my apologies if this is a clumsy paraphrase. For Brown, the unconscious loss at the “hollow core” of the laundry list of other left-wing defeats from which this left melancholy radiates like throbbing pain from a strained back muscle (heyo) is the loss of the “promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true.” I mean, damn. I feel like we can see this all over the hopeless, joyless Sturm und Drang of The Discourse(TM) as it relates to public health and science politics in the COVID era.
I’ve fully pulled the eject lever from being a Public Health Voice for a lot of reasons. For one, I left academia, a decision I’m still pretty ambivalent about. For another, being a Voice is fucking awful, just on a personal/experiential/parasocial level. For yet another, the stuff I mentioned before — the feeling of dead airlessness in the discourse, the imperative (imposed externally by the weird financial incentives of having to Be A Voice for a Patreon or other audience that pays for and expects for a certain type of “content”) to repeat the same Correct Takes and stale condemnations over and over again that ultimately starves the discursive space of the oxygen that might spark some original or dynamic thinking.
On top of this, to just be brutally honest even though I know it is inviting hate to say this, whatever left-ish discourse there was about the pandemic and what it means has descended into volleys of aggressively cruel (and often scientifically inaccurate) tweeting, a lot of it about masks. About masks! A neoliberal personal-responsibility intervention if ever there was one, a literal symbol of the individualization of the pandemic response under Biden. What has been lost (been abandoned) in this process? What opportunities for thinking about the pandemic (or health generally) in politicized, collective terms have dissolved in the tear-blurred backward-looking attachment to this object of melancholic desire?
Brown, in her essay, surveys the “substitutive objects” that the left “hates” and “punishes” to preserve its melancholic attachments to past ideals and guarantees. She identifies identity politics and postmodernism/poststructuralism as two such substitutive objects coming under fire from leftists in their broader political and cultural defeat at the end of the 1990s. Those two things aren’t super important for our purposes; I’m more interested in drawing a loose analogy to the present on the eve of the Bhattacharya Era. (“I’m in my Bhattacharya Era,” I say as I’m put on a nationwide enemies list for conducting degenerate scientific research. “It’s brat.”) Ultimately, Brown will recommend examination of the feelings that “sustain our attachments” to already-ossified left analyses and objectives for their ability to “create potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims.” But before she gets to this conclusion, which is also not my main concern here, she returns to Stuart Hall’s analysis of the success of Thatcherism, which I’ll again reproduce in full (this is Hall, from The Road to Renewal (1988), quoted in Brown (1999), emphasis mine):
Now we are beginning ... to move into a "post-Fordist" society- what some theorists call disorganized capitalism, the era of "flexible specialisation." One way of reading present developments is that "privatization" is Thatcherism's way of harnessing and appropriating this underlying movement within a specific economic and political strategy and constructing it within the terms of a specific philosophy. It has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual "logics" with some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics of capitalist development. And this, in part, is what gives it its supreme confidence, its air of ideological complacency: what makes it appear to "have history on its side," to be coterminous with the inevitable course of the future. The left, however, instead of rethinking its economic, political and cultural strategies in the light of this deeper, underlying "logic" of dispersal and diversification (which, after all, need not necessarily be an enemy of greater democratization), simply resists it. If Thatcherism can lay claim to it, then we must have nothing to do with it. Is there any more certain way of rendering yourself historically anachronistic?
This is what I mean when I say things like, I am trying to think through what it actually means to take the MAHA movement seriously. What is the “privatization” of the MAHA cabinet — that is, how is it “harnessing and appropriating” the dominant currents and logics of “the Now” within its weird conspiritual/pseudoscientific framework? I have some ideas about this, and a post developing some of them in the works for later this week.
Wrong as it is, Great Barrington Declaration Thought is about to be the mainstream, guiding logic of the institution that funds and administers biomedical research in this country. Are we ready for this? Have the listicles I’ve compiled or helped compile about what an unserious bootlicker Bhattacharya is helped to get us ready? Has the degraded state of the discourse about the pandemic? No. We absolutely, in Benjamin’s diagnosis, lack a dialectical historical grasp of “the time of the Now.” We are totally unprepared to even see, let alone to challenge or reformulate, the articulations of health, public health, and science that the right is mobilizing as it prepares to sweep the entire government. (Brat.)
The concept of the “dialectic” is so misunderstood, nowhere more so than on the so-called American left. Dialectical doesn’t mean “two things opposed” or “two things becoming one thing.” It really refers to how any process in motion — a pandemic, a state, world history, the capitalist mode of production, the development of a mature organism from a fertilized zygote — contains within it the dynamic tensions and potentialities, or in other words the “seeds,” of its own qualitative transformation. (To quote Levins and Lewontin, one of my favorites: “things are the way they are because they got that way.”) This is why I want to take MAHA seriously. The process is in motion whether we engage it politically or not. What contradictions are ripening now within the scientific establishment, the scientific-political-economic complexes of public health and biomedicine, that we might be able to exploit? (I’m ashamed to say that I don’t think I really know. Another symptom of my personal failure.) This is the object of politicizing science. Discourse, talking, argumentation, convincing, browbeating, bullying, whining — all the modes of the American left, all things that can be done in full disengagement from or denial of political reality — are not the grounds of making social change. Analysis is, but only insofar as it identifies those points of contradiction, tension, and instability in the dynamic unfolding of the social order, and strategizes explicitly about how to exploit them.
Sadly, I think the American left has deprived itself of the tools necessary to apprehend this, or to seize and identify opportunities for change and transformation in the present. Really. The energy-sapping futility of internecine fighting aside, we’re so fucking mean to each other, but we call it radical love. In actual fact we have no language or practice of love, or even empathy, which means that we have no actual praxis of solidarity, and only a thin, mean-spirited, and puritanical structure of moral accounting. We take things like joy or care seriously only in an abstract and instrumentalized way (they are “important” to the extent they further some political end or another, or keep us from “burning out” on the free work we do for fucking NGOs or high-demand political groups), which again thins out the concept of solidarity — it’s not an expression. I think this really needs to change, but at the present moment, on the cusp of my Bhattacharya Era, I’ll be honest that I am feeling pretty daunted.
Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far. As I mentioned, I have a post I’m going to share later in the week that touches on some of these themes, via Carl Sagan and a few other things. Hope you’ll stay tuned for that!