What happened to us?
A book for the first five years
If you like this newsletter, don’t forget to preorder my book APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. Every interesting thought I’ve had for the last five years is in there!
I thought a lot about if and how to make the COVID pandemic part of my book on apocalypses. On one level, it’s in every sentence; writing a book about apocalypses, during an apocalypse, changed how I imagined the texture of living through such events. On another level, though, I knew I didn’t have enough perspective on COVID to write about it like I did the Black Death or the Classic Maya collapse. I will never, as long as I live, have enough perspective on COVID to see it like an archaeologist is able to see those past apocalypses. The Classic Maya collapse took 300 years to play out; the Black Death was still reverberating in European societies two generations later. It’s folly to think that, looking back from a remove of centuries, we could ever know the whole story of how those apocalypses felt to the people who experienced them. But we do know the end of the story, in a way those people never could.
I feel confident saying we’re nowhere close to the end of COVID’s story, and not just because we’re still in a pandemic. Everyone reading this will be dead before history understands what the pandemic did to us and our societies, before the new roads it set us on have been traveled to their conclusions. All we get to see is the beginning. But what a beginning it’s been.
Having recently come out of years of post-COVID symptoms myself, I wasn’t planning on doing much reflecting for the five-year anniversary of the North American quarantines. I just stopped feeling trapped in an alternate, worse life by COVID; I want to enjoy my escape for a while. And then, by coincidence, I chose this week to start reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, about her experience being confused with Naomi Wolf. Klein is a progressive author and political analyst; Wolf started in a similar (but not identical) place but has drifted into the land of conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine activism, and Steve Bannon podcasts. “I have come to accept that, for plenty of folks glancing at social media during the boring bits of Netflix shows, we’re just a blur of opinionated Naomis,” Klein writes. It’s literally a meme.
I had heard a lot about Doppelganger, but until I started it, I hadn’t grasped that it’s a pandemic book, and the best one we have so far. Doppelganger follows Wolf into what Klein calls the “Mirror World” that had begun to shimmer into existence before 2020 but quickly and irreversibly coalesced in lockdown, when we all got online and lost it to varying degrees. Wolf lost it perhaps more severely than anyone (“No! No!!”) and shows no signs of returning to reality. Except, uh, there isn’t a reality to return to anymore.
I’ll be the first to admit that I ignored a lot of this stuff as it was happening. The anti-lockdown protests, the resistance to vaccine mandates, the diagonal drift of what Klein calls “the far right” and “the far out” toward each other and into a new political coalition whose power few saw coming. It was and is nonsensical and stupid, and that doesn’t stop it from having terrifying consequences. “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously, and too serious to be ridiculous,” Philip Roth once wrote about doppelgangers, words Klein uses to understand the world COVID made.
Doppelganger zooms out more than any news story can but stays close to how it felt to experience the twists and turns of the pandemic, both for people like me and her, and for people like Wolf. It’s not the archaeological, bordering on mythological, perspective I take in my book, but it does assume enough distance to analyze the arc of the story (so far) and propose some explanations and meanings. I hope it’s the book future archaeologists read to understand how we felt during those first years, when we’d already been through so much but still didn’t know what was coming next.