I just read through Nate's posts and laughed so hard, holy shit. Then I got insecure and freaked out because my first post on here was so serious and unpleasurable. While I'm not a people pleaser, it's still important that you all know that I'm actually SUPER CHILL AND FUNNY, ACTUALLY.
I kid. I have no idea what I'm actually like and this isn't the place to speculate. I do have a bit of a special place in my heart for the brisk rap of a ruler on a desk top of it all, though. I like to be taught in a manner that is unflinching, arbitrarily exacting, and emotionally withholding, which maybe means that I am some kind of people pleaser after all, albeit in a very fussy way.
The coolest thing about rigor, or structure, or constraint or whatever you want to call it is that learning how to work with it also teaches you how to transcend it in a really emotionally satisfying way. If I were a filmmaker, I'd make a grueling experimental opus about Jacob Bernoulli or how the Annunaki were extraterrestrials or something like that. But since I'm (mercifully) an epidemiologist, this kind of level-up takes me instead into the realm of epistemology in the abstract. How do we know what we know, how valid or reliable are our ways of knowing -- certainly compared to each other, but also as faithful representations of some kind of absolute reality? It's a fucking mess in there, but it's also pretty fun -- the history of humans trying to know stuff like a junk shop with the most amazing and demented and cruel and outlandish and kind and avaricious and essentially human bullshit all cluttered together. Some fucking 11th century wizard obsessively boiling his own piss is, however indirectly, responsible for our entire way of life. You can thank him for your scented candles and moisture-wicking polymers.
That's funny even though the subject matter of actual human experience is often... not. We are really stressed out monkeys, trapped in a reality that we are fundamentally limited in our ability to comprehend and have no choice but to deal with. We can't know ultimate reality, we are in a profound state of ignorance, and we let our thinking minds delude us about all sorts of things, most specifically that they are us. So far, so good. The mind is infinite, but even mystical experiences are still experiences... right? Are our minds imprisoned in the squishy physical architecture of our brains? Whether we're photons of divine light, parcels of the Godhead, or simply selfish monkeys who think we're doing something, can the mind transcend its physical limitations? Fucking woo woo enough for you yet? I told you this shit was funny. (Just kidding, I jacked in to Source earlier -- by which I mean I banged 400 mg of Benadryl and thumb wrestled with the Hat Man -- and it told me with solemn seriousness to tell you to subscribe to my fucking newsletter.)
Homo sapiens -- knowing monkey -- more like homo patiens, amirite? Long-suffering? We are cursed with consciousness, consciousness to suffer. If the map is epistemology, be it the most ruthlessly deductive or the most new-agey and diaphanous, the terrain is always human suffering. The wheel of samsara, baby! It's a tremendous wheel! Luckily for us there's such a thing as knowing enough. We don't need to know ultimate reality to know right from wrong, or what to do about it, right now, in the cosmological shutter-click of time and space where we find ourselves as conscious mammals.
How we knew what we knew about the pandemic, how what we "knew" and what we really knew were different things, how so much of this happened at the level of the tools we supposedly use to manipulate reality like sadistic little dauphins scorching ants with a magnifying glass... it's important, it requires some thinking to figure out, it seems like it's a good idea for someone to do it, and I think it might be helpful to at least some people in terms of working our way through what to do about any of it.
When I say "knowledge production" I don't just say it to sound smart. I'm trying to emphasize that knowledge literally is a product; like all products, it solidifies conceals a dense scribble of economic and social relationships. If the experience of COVID has taught me anything is that knowledge production is an open, and an antagonistic, front of struggle. That sounds so drab and Pete Seeger, but it's true, and it's not just ideological struggle either. It has material antecedents and material consequences.
So, the project that Nate and I are developing of theorizing the pandemic in an unimpeachably correct Marxist way kind of dovetails, through this epistemological fixation, with my interest and genuine curiosity in every flavor of alternative epistemology. Some of these are nutty, outright menacing, culty, and otherwise negative; some are silly but benign; some are genuinely interesting. Most are some combination of all three, and more... marvel at the infinite complexity of humans' ability to make truly deranged sense of things, for better and worse. ("Life is a rich tapestry!" I exclaim heartily to the guy who walks his gigantic cat on a leash in the park; he scowls and ignores me.)
Thanks for being on the journey with me and have a great Friday night.
Love & light,
Abby