The seventh card in the pentacles suit of the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck depicts a young man standing in a field, hands folded atop the handle of a long hoe. He’s resting his chin on his hands, looking pensively at a green bush, on which are superimposed seven large gold coins. Who doesn’t love gold coins? The coins suggest reward: hard work pays off. In the Thoth deck, whose illustrations are a good deal more abstract, the seven of disks card (pentacles are sometimes called coins or disks) is dark and heavy. Seven disks are held in place by a ramifying, dark blue-green structure set against a black background. The concept associated with this card, its name, is “failure.” In this light, the Rider Waite Smith card appears differently. I thought I was growing beets or potatoes or whatever, but I got a lot of metal coins? What the fuck? I’ve thought about the seven of pentacles a lot in trying to understand and make sense of my own experience of the Covid pandemic, now approaching its sixth anniversary. How can working so hard towards an intended result achieve such a bewildering and unintended other one? If that’s not failure, what is?

War and Peace might seem an unlikely source of insight about public health practice (except maybe insofar as people are dying left and right of gangrenous battle wounds, as they would continue to do for about a century and a half more). My friend that teaches War and Peace to undergrads first clued me in to the historical scope and interest of the book and its uses for teaching the history of the Napoleonic Wars. He (my friend) was incensed that the Battle of Borodino, which occupies much of the back quarter of the novel, was reduced – literally – to a subtitle in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. We saw it in the theater together, where I mostly covered or averted my eyes because, believe it or not, I’m squeamish about suffering and gore. Tolstoy would have hated Ridley Scott’s Napoleon because Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is, in the manner of La Croix seltzer, “essenced” by a flavor of historiography that Tolstoy expressly condemns, and never ceases to ridicule throughout his massive novel. It assumes that Napoleon, as history’s “great man” par excellence (reading War and Peace will have you thinking you can speak French), was the principal agent of his historical context, consciously directing the events taking place around him.

There are philosophical chapters of War and Peace that explicitly detail Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. They are sparsely interleaved with the narrative chapters over the book’s infamous length, but I actually think the narrative chapters better illuminate Tolstoy’s philosophy than the philosophical ones. At the battle of Schöngraben, early in the novel, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (the closest thing in the sprawling cast of characters to a chad) notices how commander Prince Bagration – dispatched with his small detachment on a doomed mission to hold off the French long enough for the rest of the army to beat a retreat – gives the powerful illusion of being in control of events that are fundamentally chaotic:

“As he was riding away from the battery, shots were also heard to the left, in the woods, and as it was too far from the left flank for him to get there in time himself, Prince Bagration sent Zherkov there to tell the senior general, the one who had presented the regiment to Kutuzov in Branau, to pull back beyond the ravine as quickly as possible, because the right flank would probably be unable to hold the enemy for long. Tushin and the battalion covering him were forgotten. Prince Andrei listened carefully to Prince Bagration’s exchanges with the commanders and to the orders he gave, and noticed, to his surprise, that no orders were given, and that Prince Bagration only tried to pretend that all that was done by necessity, chance, or the will of a particular commander, that it was all done, if not on his orders, than in accord with his intentions. Owing to the tact shown by Prince Bagration, Prince Andrei noticed that, in spite of the chance character of events and their independence of the commander’s will, his presence accomplished a very great deal. Commanders who rode up to Prince Bagration with troubled faces became calm, soldiers and officers greeted him merrily and became more animated in his presence, and obviously showed off their courage before him. (War and Peace, p. 182)^*

This experience of chaotic incomprehensibility dominates Tolstoy’s battle scenes especially – the dispositions and military theory are useless, and under the canister shot, no one really knows what they’re doing or what’s happening around them. Several hundred pages and many years of narrative time after the above scene at Schöngraben, Prince Andrei’s foil Pierre Bezukhov has wandered, literally, into the thick of the action at Borodino: 

“The ranks of infantrymen disappeared into the smoke; their drawn-out cry was heard and then rapid musket fire. A few moments later, crowds of wounded and stretchers came back from there. Projectiles began falling still more frequently on the battery. Several men lay there and were not carried away. The soldiers bustled more animatedly around the cannon. No one paid any further attention to Pierre. He was shouted at a couple of times for being in the way. The senior officer, frowning, moved from one gun to another with big, quick strides. The young little officer, still more flushed, commanded the soldiers still more diligently. The soldiers handed on charges, turned, loaded, and did their work with tense jauntiness. They bobbed as if on springs as they walked… 

Just as Pierre was entering the earthworks, he noticed that there was no shooting to be heard on the battery, but some people were doing something there. Pierre had no time to realize who these people were. He saw the senior colonel lying back to him on the rampart, as if studying something below, and saw one soldier he had noticed before, who, tearing away from the people who were holding him by the arm, was shouting “Brothers!” – and he saw something else strange.

But he had no time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that the one shouting “Brothers!” was a prisoner, that before his eyes another soldier was being bayoneted in the back. He had only just run into the earthworks, when a gaunt, yellow man with a sweaty face, in a blue uniform, with a sword in his hand, came charging at him, shouting something. Pierre, instinctively defending himself against the shock, because they were running into each other without seeing it, put his hands out and seized the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with another. The officer, letting go of his sword, seized Pierre by the collar. 

For a few seconds, the two men looked with frightened eyes into their mutually alien faces, and both were perplexed about what they had done and what they were to do. “Am I taken prisoner, or have I taken him prisoner?” each of them thought. But evidently the French officer was more inclined to the thought that he had been taken prisoner, because Pierre’s strong hand, moved by involuntary fear, squeezed his throat more and more tightly. The Frenchman wanted to say something, but suddenly a cannonball came whistling, low and terrible, just over their heads, and Pierre fancied that the French officer’s head had been torn off, he ducked so quickly.

Pierre also ducked his head and released his grip. No longer thinking of who had captured whom, the Frenchman ran back to the battery, and Pierre ran down the hill, stumbling over the dead and wounded, who, it seemed to him, tried to catch him by the legs. But before he got all the way down, dense crowds of Russian soldiers appeared before him, who, falling, stumbling, and shouting, ran merrily and stormily up to the battery…

“No, now they’ll stop it, how they’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!” he thought, aimlessly following behind the crowds of stretchers moving off the battlefield.

But the sun, veiled in smoke, was still high, and ahead, and especially to the left near Semyonovskoe, something seethed in the smoke, and the roar of gunfire, musketry, and cannonades not only did not abate, but intensified to the point of despair, like a straining man crying out with his last strength.” (War and Peace, pp. 795-798)

All there is is the thickness of immediate experience, where it is rather impossible to say what’s happening and why, who is Russian and and who is French, and so on. As we abstract away from particulars to broad historical trends and movements, historiographical explanation serves to retrofit this confusion with conscious intention or narrative cohesion. Tolstoy thinks this is all wrong. He compares Napoleon here to a lamb being fattened up to be slaughtered (the other lambs thinking, wow, he’s getting really fat, he must be our leader!), there to a child holding the reins of a carriage imagining himself to be driving it. People rush about mostly concerned with immediate and personal matters, and the total of all these minute actions – their “integral” in Tolstoy’s elegant metaphor – is later underwritten by historiographers as the fulfillment of the will of this or that sovereign or general.

Critic Isaiah Berlin wrote a very famous essay about what he saw as the paradoxical notion of history at the heart of War and Peace and of Tolstoy’s philosophy: the belief that there must be something like historical truth (else, why write War and Peace at all?) struggling against the equally strong conviction that writing history per se is impossible without improperly attributing overdetermined or chance events to the conscious will of important men. In Berlin’s essay, this is Tolstoy’s “fox” nature (his gift for describing people and events in minute, exacting detail) chafing at his aspiration to be a “hedgehog” (someone who can unify the heterogeneity of experience into an overarching pattern or explanation). Tolstoy endlessly stresses that the soi-disant great men like Napoleon or Kutuzov assumed to have the most agency in the unfolding of history actually, owing to the great number of historical circumstances underneath them and present constraints pressing them from all sides, have the least. Berlin highlights Tolstoy’s skepticism that anyone can understand history with the reductionist techniques of other sciences, isolating bits of the “flow” of experience and subjecting them to hypothetical manipulation, even in the mind, through “conjecture” about what “might have occurred” without the mucosa of “various circumstances” (Berlin, 2013, The hedgehog and the fox: an essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, p. 80). Even our ability to imagine “might-have-beens,” Berlin writes, “soon reaches its natural limits,” these limits being that “our thoughts, the terms in which they occur, the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of the world” (Berlin, 2013, p. 81).

Another word for those “might have beens” is “counterfactuals,” and thus Berlin’s description wiggles, like a tongue on a loose tooth, the counterfactual notions underpinning causal inference in epidemiology, the dubiously empirical science with which I make my tilt at understanding the world. Contemporary epidemiologists have worked out a prodigious formalization of a hybrid of the counterfactual theory of causation (attributable to David Lewis, distantly via Hume) and manipulability theories involving so-called “potential outcomes” associated with philosopher of science James Woodward. The causal inference-specific definition of causation (which I am at pains to clarify is not the only one used in epidemiology) involves formulating and attempting to estimate the outcomes that individuals in the study population would have had, had all of them been exposed or unexposed. A causal effect is derived through the application of various estimation procedures that try to work out, formally, what would have been the case for a counterfactual “pseudo-population,” a mirror image of the actual study population where everything is the same except for the treatment or exposure. 

This type of conceptual procedure works better in some contexts than in others. I’ve used these techniques successfully myself, especially in observational clinical settings. In social epidemiology, however, this approach can yield undesirable results. Does it make sense to ask what the Black-white disparity in average blood pressure would be if all Black people in the United States were white instead? Well, what are we assuming if the relevant counterfactual is someone’s skin color in isolation from all the social correlates of race, like access to education, wages, geographic location, and so on? The assumption that gets in through the analytic back door here is an unpalatable, biological-essentialist one: that race is a phenotypic property of individuals rather than the social process that we know it to be. Transferring the counterfactual from race to racism only takes us further into this confrontation. What is the point of calculating the Black-white disparity in blood pressure in the counterfactual world where anti-Black racism does not exist? Why would we expect there to be a disparity in such a world at all, if not for fundamental biological differences between “races” – that is, between social categories of people? All this is just to highlight that there is a disjunction between causal inference or other quasi-experimental approaches to complex events, and Tolstoy’s historical nihilism flourishes in this disjunction. Questions like “what is the public health impact of racism?” are not easily amenable even to the hypothetical manipulations of the causal inference framework because these questions arise not from artificial experimental or clinical settings but from the thickness of social totality, from the way things actually are. 

Should things be as they are? Is this a question that can be answered counterfactually? Aspects of social structure and of previous history (“men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”) constrain what people can and can’t do, what people want and don’t want. (Moscow will be abandoned to the French, and not defended, because a defense of Moscow is simply not possible however much it is desired by various factions.) At some critical threshold of complexity it really does become impossible (or at least futile) to disaggregate reality into component causes. Causal inference about social phenomena, like historiography, is mostly an interpretive procedure, though in the case of causal inference it is glossed with calculations and mathematical notation. Can we really say – do we really want to say – that the various evils and abuses of the United States represent an inevitable historical unfolding, the “integral” of individual private interests? Is it possible to write the history of Covid and all its failures and grim resonances as a mere unfolding without feeling like justice has been violated? 

Historiography that attributes events to the wills of “great men” also encourages the attribution of blame for things that couldn’t possibly have been any one person’s responsibility, and this attribution is mostly as silly and counterproductive as Tolstoy insists. Mostly. The demand for blame is only a partial function of the “great man” mode of historiography. It’s also derived from a fundamental need for sense-making, and the role of responsibility and accountability in making sense of horrible events. With a strong sense of injustice comes a correspondingly strong impulse to find someone to blame. In trying to process my own experience of Covid in a morally consonant and bearable way, I tried to fit this impulse into a grand narrative about “the logic of capitalism.” Instead of Napoleon’s personal qualities, the impersonal “structures” of capitalist social organization, the way that the political economy constrains the actions of the powerful people assumed to be in charge of different things. It’s extremely easy (too easy) to do with public health, because social inequalities and capitalist logic are precisely reflected in patterns and distributions of disease and mortality. 

For the public health professional, it is all too tempting to think that the information we generate is important and that someone (if not necessarily me) holds the magic incantation we call “power” that can transmute the information into meaningful action. This is just a fancier version of what historian of public health Christopher Hamlin calls “cholera forcing,” the implicit philosophy of history in public health holding that when conditions get sufficiently bad they, by their own accord and with no agents involved, “force” action to correct or ameliorate them. Against this, the logic of capitalism is clearly superior as a global sense-making system for the messy events of the pandemic, but much to my chagrin, this encourages taxonomy of social problems in place of a critique just as often as it yields genuine insights. The curiousness of public health historiography compounds this difficulty. The workings of power, and of politics, and history, are abstracted out so that we have thoughts without many thinkers – see this piece which touches on the strange history of the concept of the “demographic transition.” Where the popular cholera forcing narratives are almost entirely void of historical processes, my preferred Marxist ones are equally sparsely populated by human agents. If it doesn’t feel right to ignore the structural in favor of personality traits of those we call leaders, neither does it feel adequate to treat human agency like a nuisance parameter. 

Let’s return to Berlin, who posits Tolstoy’s core paradox thus: can the idea of individual agency in history coexist with historical truth? Can we have historical truth without any agents at all? Can we render things intelligible as history without recourse to human agency, buried somewhere in human experience, as a narrative device? With public health, involving agents and processes that are not and will never be under full technocratic control (like novel pathogens), how do we negotiate questions of responsibility? Is “not at all” a satisfying answer? Is the sense of injustice at mismanagement of Covid just an epiphenomenon of the passage of infectious disease and death from the spiritual to the technical realm? It seems to me that it can’t be, but then how do we avoid blame for things that are no one’s fault or responsibility while still expecting truth to prevail, or at least to make things intelligible as history? The networked, globalized, “informational” experience of Covid exacerbates but didn’t create the challenge here – the problem is deeper than information technologies specific to our period of history. 

Prince Andrei ends up at the Battle of Borodino as the result of a long succession of personal happenings. From the outside, it looks like he’s following the war around Europe. It only looks this way, because what he’s really doing – what the reactivation of his military career and reengagement in the service is a pretext for – is attempting to track down and challenge his romantic rival. Through his considerable personal trials (which by page 700 or so have, unfortunately, only just begun – in Russian literature the chad suffers too), Prince Andrei becomes disillusioned with the great projects – military career, legal reforms – that once compelled him. Visiting the army’s headquarters, he observes the factions around the emperor Alexander and that the biggest one by far is made up of the people motivated by fulfillment of their own personal desires.

 “Prince Andrei arrived in the general headquarters of the army at the end of June… But the question of whether this camp was advantageous or not remained unresolved for Prince Andrei…. To clarify this last question for himself, Prince Andrei, using his position and acquaintances, tried to penetrate the character of the army’s administration, of the persons and parties participating in it, and arrived at the following idea about the state of affairs… 

Among all the ideas and voices in this immense, restless, brilliant, and proud world, Prince Andrei saw the following more sharply distinguished tendencies and parties… 

The eighth and largest group of people, which was so enormous that it outnumbered the others ninety-nine to one, consisted of people who desired neither peace nor war, neither an offensive movement nor a defensive camp in Drissa, or wherever it might be, neither Barclay nor the sovereign, neither Pfuel nor Benningsen, but who desired only one thing, and that the most essential: the greatest benefit and pleasure for themselves… All the people in this party were pursuing roubles, crosses, ranks, and in this pursuit merely followed whether the weathervane of the tsar’s favor pointed, and as soon as they noticed the weathervane turning in a certain direction, all this drone population of the army began to blow in the same direction, so that it was harder for the sovereign to change it for another. Amidst the uncertainty of the situation, with the threat of serious danger, which gave everything an especially disquieting character, amidst this whirlwind of intrigues, vanities, clashes of various views and feelings, with all these people of different tribes, this eighth and largest party of people concerned only with personal interests brought great confusion and perplexity to the common cause.” (War and Peace, pp. 632-636)

This observation leads into a meditation on the impossibility of so-called military science, and a barely-implicit critique of empiricism in social/historical matters:

“The debate went on for a long time, and the longer it went on, the more heated the argument became, reaching the point of shouting and personal remarks, and the less possible it was to draw any general conclusion from all that had been said. Listening to this multilingual talk, and these suggestions, plans, and refutations, and shouts, Prince Andrei was simply amazed at what they all said. The thoughts he often used to have long ago, during the time of his military activity, that there was not and could not be any military science, and therefore there could not be any so-called military genius, now acquired for him the perfect evidence of truth. “What theory and what science could there be in a matter of which the conditions and circumstances are unknown and cannot be determined, in which the strength of those active in war can still less be determined? No one could or can know what position our own and the enemy army will be in a day later, and no one can know the strength of this or that detachment. Sometimes, when there’s no coward at the head who shoulds ‘We’re cut off!’ and runs away, but a cheerful, bold man who shouts – ‘Hurrah!’ – a detachment of five thousand is worth thirty thousand, as at Schöngraben, and sometimes fifty thousand flee in the face of eight, as at Austerlitz. What science can there be in a matter in which, as in any practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on countless circumstances, the significance of which is determined at a certain moment, and no one knows when that moment will come?”” (War and Peace, p. 643)

Maybe it doesn’t make sense as philosophy or a way of thinking about historiography to have Prince Andrei convinced that empiricism is a fool’s errand, but it does make sense as an experience that a person in his position would have. This is clarifying for me. I realize that in trying to render Covid intelligible I’ve been clinging to a pretension to historical significance; I have insisted on trying to read personal events historically and historical events personally. Following N.I. Kareev, historian and contemporary critic of Tolstoy’s that Berlin cites extensively, it seems obvious that there is a dual significance to all of our actions, personal and historical. We leave one footprint in each realm, and the footprints are related, but parallel and chiral. They don’t connect at the ground level, and they don’t superimpose onto one another. I have been trying over and over to historicize Covid using big social categories and archetypal representations of personal experience rather than personal experience itself. I’ve been looking for the pattern that will explain it all in the single set of footprints on the side of outer history, an effort that has yielded inedible coin after inedible coin no matter how hard I try, because I’m starting from narrative intelligibility on the social level and expecting it to give me narrative intelligibility on the experiential level. It’s dawning on me that this is foolish. This isn’t Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, it’s real life. 

When I think about my personal experience of the pandemic, uncomfortable as it is, it becomes more intelligible where my felt sense of the need for clarity, sense, and responsibility comes from. (And how much those things are properties of my outlook, not universal principles.) The personal setting for me was the implosion of an unhappy marriage. That was the context in which all of my professional and political experiences were unfolding. As it turns out, a collapsing marriage can feel like an accretion of injustices too, and thus enticingly parallel to how a mismanaged pandemic of world-historical significance feels. I have learned that some of my “symptoms” (episodes of anxiety, for example) are expressions of a primary emotion that can’t, for whatever reason, be openly expressed. A few provisional hypotheses present themselves with this in mind. Doing Covid work was my only outlet for strong emotions and the only context where they were admissible and allowed to make sense. I could, for example, be justifiably angry about Covid policy; angry at systems, of course, and never at people – is it any wonder why the logic of capitalism was such an appealing global explanation to me? Anger was an important inexpressible emotion in my personal life, but it wasn’t just that. The work was an outlet for more positive emotions and talents too, for vitality in general, which also had nowhere to go, no way to be expressed, lived out, or understood in my emotional or relational life. As I poured these vital energies more and more into a totalizing and increasingly doomed quasi-political project, I was feeding my own alienation and disconnection without realizing it. 

I’m not saying that the logic of capitalism wasn’t important. It was supremely important, and I still think my analysis of it vis-à-vis Covid and public health generally is right. But I think I’m getting clearer on what I should expect of explanations like it. I can expect them to make sense of deep constraints on policy decisions, or particular grim and predictable public health outcomes, but not the particularities and texture of my own experiences and my own suffering, or anybody else’s. Maybe I’m a “fox” too, and maybe it’s okay that there is not a global explanation for everything, or if there is such an explanation, that it will always elide our ability to fully understand it. The logic of capitalism can (Tolstoy would approve here) help me understand more clearly that “we” failed because at some level we had to fail, constrained as events were by historical circumstances, economic interests and realities, by choices made early in the pandemic, by subsequent adaptations necessitated by those choices, and so on, infinitely. It can’t make me understand my feelings, the minute moments of my experience. Public health shares a conceit with history in that we expect patterns of events in complex reality to make sense, but patterns are not the sense we make of them. They’re just patterns. 

I’ve lived a lot of my life under the belief that it is possible, and desirable, to change the thing we call “history.” Public health struggles with the tension between particularity and generality just as much as Tolstoy did in dealing with history. (Indeed, the entire project of quantitation and mathematization – which begins with encoding particular instances as members of this or that class – has been a successful project to resolve this tension.) I agree with Berlin that this “paradox” between particular and general bothered Tolstoy greatly, but I disagree with the erudite pessimism of Berlin’s conclusion that Tolstoy never really overcame his tormenting inner conflict. He (Berlin) would probably never do this, but if we posit the tension between particular and general as a dialectical one, between individual experience and historical narrative, then it’s easy to see War and Peace as a productive synthesis. The book is an attempt – beautiful and I think successful – to convey the emotional truth of history.

* Page numbers refer to the first Vintage Classics edition of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (2008).