I was working on a literature review in the history of public health then swerved into putting the reading of Raymond Williams front and center. (Serious readers of Open Mode, I know you already know this so I’m sorry to waste your time, but there are, alas, a few filthy casuals in the mix who don’t put in the work that you do and I want to help them keep up - out of pity, of course, not respect.) At least in part that was initially because I became curious about the role of stories about the past within public health, then it was just sheer inertia - Williams has been good to read - and then it was that my semester was pretty shit so I didn’t do much of anything other than teach and seethe. (I taught an extra class, we need the money!) Now I’m nearly done with Williams (alas again! I believe this exhausts my allotted alases for the month, I shall update my ration book posthaste, as soon as I google to see if I used ‘posthaste’ correctly), which is a little sad, and I am going to get back to the readings in the history of public health soonish. I owe some people some emails related to this, if you’re one such person and are reading this, I’m terribly sorry, I don’t mean to make excuses, but I’ve been kind of overwhelmed by [waves hands wildly] everything.

Two of the things that are on my mind at present as I start to think about getting back to the history of public health are 1) Raymond Williams and 2) Tony Smith. (No surprises for the Open Mode real heads, but you casuals better get it together.) Here’s what I mean. As I’ve said often, you should all read Smith’s book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. In short, it’s a wonderful introduction to Marxism via a critical analysis of the shortcomings of the best sort of theory that the non-Marxist left can achieve. I reviewed it over at Legal Form a while ago, I’d suggest you google for the review but google’s shit now so I guess duckduckgo for it? A compressed summary of ‘liberal egalitarianism’ is something like ‘the best a nonmarxist can do, politically, because they don’t understand the social process called capital, which Marx analyzed so powerfully, and which dominates social life.’ That works, though the book is specifically about what I’d call the high mandarins of liberal egalitarianism: academic theorists. The book is wonderful and you should all read it, and like any work it has some limitations, much in the way that a hammer is not a tea kettle - right tool for the right purpose, kinda thing. I think it’s worth trying to run with the, uh, hammer... and kettle... to, I don’t know, exact our revenge Rube Goldberg style...? This metaphor was a mistake, I can see that now, but correcting it would mean working in a Mode less Open and it is my commitment to you, the serious Open Mode reader, to never work so, despite the great pain it causes me. No need to thank me, and it would be wrong to say I am, in this humble endurance, a Christ-figure. I mean specifically wrong if I myself were to say it, you’re welcome to say it if you so choose, a choice which any right thinking person would clearly make, of course.

Anyway. What I mean to say is that I think Smith’s book can be beneficially built on, and this gets me to Williams, or it will in a moment - I shall mention him, as you no doubt remember from a paragraph ago when I said I’d be talking about him. Again here I, shepherd of an ungrateful flock, aid the casuals and beg the serious reader’s forbearance, another word I need to google. Well, duckduckgo.

Again I said, anyway: building on Smith via Williams en route to thinking again about public health goes like this, I think. Liberal egalitarian theorists are not the only liberal egalitarians. The high mandarins of a political/cultural/intellectual position are not the only occupants of such a position. Furthermore, the lower and... less... mandarinny of occupants - let’s call them rank and file - are sometimes recipients, even if in very diffuse and complexly mediated ways, of ideas generated by the high mandarins, or past ones. What I mean to say is very simply that theorists exist in the world as doers and makers and what they do and make goes out into the world and is taken up in a very wide range of various ways by others. And vice versa: the mandarins in part draw on shared ideas and intuitions held less systematically by others, which is part of why it’s valuable to read them critically, because doing so let’s us (meaning we Marxists) take on stronger versions of intellectual positions that exist often in intellectually weaker forms.

At the same time, the rank and file liberal egalitarians are not simply mushier versions of liberal egalitarian elites. Each is a distinct sort. Or maybe a better way to put it is that it’s one thing to encounter crystallized or distilled versions of positions in texts, it’s another thing to encounter those positions in the world as positions occupied by - enacted, lived in, produced and in a sense partially productive of - relatively ordinary people going about the routines of their lives in this society. The latter sort of encounter, I think, is part of what Williams is for, at least some of his work, though I’m aware there are many other useful thinkers for this as well.

I’m fumbling as usual. Trying again: rank and file liberal egalitarians are a) not always adherents of their liberal egalitarian positions exclusively because convinced intellectually and b) not always consistent adherents of their positions. Regarding a), I mean that things like gut level feelings, a sense of right and wrong, a sense that a certain view is what’s expected in a given community, and so on, are part of why people hold the beliefs they hold. Regarding b), I mean that people don’t have to be consistent and that while in a narrow eggheaded intellectual way inconsistency is a weakness, in a lived setting inconsistency is sometimes a benefit because it means one can change track sometimes. That feels vague and I’m not sure how to put it better, I don’t know if this analogy will help: if I hate the look of a building downtown and I want you to hate it too, I might argue that it’s unpleasing to the eye, and then I might drift and find myself ranting about how the company that occupies it are evil monsters. The latter view doesn’t intellectually support the former view, but in real speech situations it can rhetorically - ‘and another thing...!’ kinda thing, so to speak, if you get my drift? On b), I’m thinking, in addition to Williams, of Goran Therborn’s short book on ideology, which I’ve written about on here before. (Duckduckgo get it, friends! To be clear I am not sponsored by Duckduckgo, I just have an annoying personality. As you already knew. Even the filthy casuals. The shame, my god...)

So, we have real people in the world - remember, I’m calling them rank and file liberal egalitarians for now - holding positions that approximate to the theoretical positions held by liberal egalitarian theorists, but for complex reasons tied to how ideology works in their lives and to how they live and what they make of their experiences. Furthermore, the rank and file liberal egalitarians are likely to often simultaneously hold (or to have available if need be in a moment of certain kinds of duress, whether being sort of cornered in an argument or getting mugged by life in a ‘what the fuck just happened, how do I understand this?!’ sort of way) other positions than liberal egalitarianism.

That’s part of what I’ve been trying to work my way toward, that liberal egalitarianism is simultaneously i) a position that coexists with others in a complex, cacophonous cultural/intellectual/political situation, ii) a position that people can move into and out of kind of suddenly, without necessarily having to be consistent in a narrow intellectual sense of ‘consistent’ but that likely does make sense within their life course/situation/lived experience (very simply, people’s intellectual-political biographies like ‘well I was raised with this view and then later I came to that view and then after that I came to this view...’ can sound like just random positions drawn from a grab bag if written out in list form, but when presented as a narrative and contextualized they often are pretty straightforwardly comprehensible; some of us who are more theoretically focused and who prize consistency in the narrow limited sense often develop gut reactions that can make this feel more weird and confusing than it actually is); and iii) a position that is often alloyed or blended or hybridized with other positions. In addition, I suspect - and let’s calls this iv), because fuck it, yolo - that actually existing liberal egalitarians will also tend to (and only tend to, to be clear) hold other positions that aren’t part of liberal egalitarianism in a narrow sense but that have a kind of lived consistency with it, such as ideas about representative over direct democracy, expert rule, etc.

On iv), I’m of two minds. One view is that I suspect that having an outlook on the world that fails to grasp the society-dominating social process that is capital makes some views about how to go about the world individually and collectively more plausible and makes others less plausible. I don’t mean this mechanically or automatically - just a matter of tending to, as I said, or, leaning on Williams, having a liberal egalitarian outlook will exert pressures and set (overcome-able) limits on the other beliefs someone holds. The other view is that just that society is lousy with a host of views of various kinds (for instance, I’ll be 48 this summer, I grew up in a blue collar mixed race Christian family in the midwest, and I’m a straight, white, and CIS-gendered man, all of which means I’ve been subject to various pressures and limits influencing me over time - we’re all products of our times and places, but not reductively so), and so actually existing liberal egalitarians will tend to hold some of those views, and many but not all of those views will be compatible with the dominant culture. And at least some of those views will change over time. This goes for the high mandarins of liberal egalitarianism as well but I suspect that the process of doing liberal egalitarian theory serves to, so to speak, filter out some impurities (I don’t love that metaphor but it’s implied in my earlier metaphor of the theory as representing a ‘distilled’ form of widely held views so I should own up to it), so in some respects, the high mandarins will hold such ostensibly extraneous-to-liberal-egalitarianism-proper views to a lesser extent. On the other hand, insofar as the high mandarins tend to occupy relatively rarefied institutional positions like being fancy faculty at fancy universities and so on, there are other classed social processes in play, as part of the pipelines and gatekeeping that influences who does and doesn’t get to be in those prestigious locations. That suggests that there are likely some ‘impurities’ that correlate specifically with being a liberal egalitarian mandarin, but still, I suspect those are more in their general views on the world more than in the theoretical distillations that exist in their academic work. Unsure about some of that - other than the class resentment, which is one of my life’s few certainties, sorry/not sorry! - but it doesn’t really matter for present purposes anyway.

Part of what I wanted to get at regarding iv) is that I suspect that liberal egalitarian influence on social movements will not only tend to shape the aims of those movements - no need for, say, a tenants’ union to consider adopting a social revolutionary outlook if the dominant views in the organization are that capitalism can be made just! - but also the sense of process and practice in the organization: say, toward representation and away from direct democracy. I suspect the latter is a matter of both influences arising from not grasping capital and influences from the, I don’t know, hybrid and polyphonous character of the actually existing liberal egalitarianism of the rank and file liberal egalitarian (this is a little weaselly on my part, to be fair, since all things being equal all rank and file versions of political positions will tend to be hybrid and polyphonous - part of the purpose of Marxism in social movement settings is to try to clarify that and its stakes).

As for people, so for institutions. Which is to say, there can be shifts in the policy and practice of organizations that are analogous to what I’ve said here: a state agency or NGO for which a specific flavor of liberal egalitarianism may be a pretty important ideology may have that ideology hybridized with (or switch to) another flavor or a different ideology altogether. This can happen with some regularity for instance in changes of official leadership, like after elections when the people at the top change but a lot of the career employees are still there.

In flipping into and out of different positions, people and institutions can become less liberal and/or less egalitarian. I think the ‘less liberal’ can mean ‘more authoritarian’ and it can also mean ‘having a greater grasp of capital, its logic, and its effects,’ which doesn’t necessarily mean a leftward move. A great deal of what I’m flailing around gesturing at just requires historical or other empirical inquiry, but I do suspect, as I’ve ranted about here on Ye Olde Open Modee before, that there are, so to speak, two axes or avenues here, which I think of as moral imagination (that’s the egalitarianism part) and social imagination (that’s at least some of the liberal part), the former meaning something like ‘degree of relative commitment to human dignity and concern over suffering’ and the latter meaning something like ‘degree of having an accurate account of social processes as they actually play out.’ If people get more empathetic and respectful of other people (improved moral imagination) but don’t get that social structures impinge on other people’s fates, then the greater empathy and respect only go so far politically. If people get a better grasp of the unfolding logic of capitalist societies over time (improved social imagination) but are relatively okay with the harms to people conceptualized as Those People Over There, then the better grasp isn’t a political improvement - and arguably it’s worse in the sense that we now have a smarter opponent.

Okay, so, having said all of that, I suspect that a great deal of the time (at least in, for lack of a better term, a political moment and/or over the relative short term, and maybe over all regardless of time frame, I’m unsure) all of this exists less as a matter of distinguishable axes or clear thoughts like ‘yes, now I realize those plebs too have dignity’ or ‘oh now I see that this product or production process just is going to hurt a lot of people’ and instead we get something closer to a set of narratives or narrative conventions, tropes, myths, images, etc. Like, while I do of course think that I’m right in saying ‘see look all this stuff breaks down into sets of explanations of social phenomena and sets of valuations of those phenomena’ it’s pretty important that this stuff prior to being broken down doesn’t exist in that straightforward a way. To put it another way, people don’t have bass and treble controls (‘lets turn up the concern for dignity and push the “accurate social explanation” button’). At any given moment the ‘dials’ for our ‘settings’ with regard to what I’ve been calling moral and social imagination were initially set by very complex ideological/socialization processes - and the ‘settings’ aren’t stable but can vary a great deal by context: for instance one might be terribly big hearted about the well being of stray dogs yet terribly hard hearted about people in poverty; one might be very empathetic to people who feel like part of whatever ‘we’ one identifies with and actively hostile to people who feel like part whatever ‘they’ one is identified with opposing, and so on. So there’s things that we react to in one way now given where our ‘settings’ are, and there’s also things, often the very same thing, that work at least to some degree on our ‘settings’, making us more callous or less, making us more accurate in our explanations or less, etc. And those ‘things’ are ideological, discursive, often narrative in character: accounts of what is and isn’t happening and why.

I mentioned the other day that I read Brian Goldstone’s book on homeless people in the US, as I said I definitely recommend it. One of the bits I found very striking in the book is the way Goldstone talks about old, I don’t know, tropes - shorthand, thought stopping cliches - about how homeless people are ‘crazy’ and/or addicted to this or that substance. That trope serves simultaneously as a bad explanation (homeless people are homeless because of some quality intrinsic to them) and as something that hardens hearts (it being harder to empathize with people depicted as ‘those defectives way over there’).

I don’t like ‘tropes’ because I’m not entirely sure I’m using the term right so I’m going to try to remember to say ‘scripts’ instead. I like ‘scripts’ better in part because I remember liking Natalia Molina’s book on race in the US where she refers to ‘racial scripts’ (among other things, she points out how processes or resources for demonizing one group tend to then get deployed to subsequent groups: very simply, oppression takes some work and when oppressors figure out how to do some of that work more effectively they tend to keep those effective techniques a while). I also like script because I think the way this stuff tends to work out in real time in the world a lot is that there is something of a narrative or dramatic arc to it: I encounter some potentially troubling phenomenon, I’m handed or cast into some script, I follow the script and I become by the end less troubled by it. (Note to self: think more about this ‘script’ metaphor, and the social practices I mean for the metaphor to name, in relation to Williams’s discussion of aesthetic/literary/genre conventions. I suspect ‘scripts’ are closely related to but not reducible to conventions.) I may be unnecessarily belaboring the point (as is my right! from my cold, dead hands...!!) but I do so because it matters to me to underline that this isn’t a matter of specific words clicking people into and out of headspaces like changing channels so much as it’s a matter of getting people to do some work on themselves and their understandings of the world, instead of some other work on themselves and their understandings. Anyway.

That aside, I’ll note as well that in my research and reading on occupational safety and health and related institutions there are a lot of phenomena analogous to the scripts about the homeless that Goldstone discusses. One that I’ve seen a lot regarding the history of workers compensation laws is a presumption that work is safe enough - ie, the level of hazard is acceptable - as long as the workers have enough masculine intelligent competence. That presumption tends to mean that harms under conditions taken to be normal are of lower moral concern and aren’t investigated as much in terms of social explanation (social and moral imagination interact, operate in tandem) and harms under abnormal conditions are likewise when the ‘abnormality’ is understood to be some individual defect - this person wasn’t manly-and-competent enough, kinda thing.
There are lot of other analogous example, and that’s not surprising: the tendency to social murder is a general presence always present in specific concrete forms that express the tendency, and generally responses tend to focus on the concrete specifics in ways that make the general tendency either less perceptible or less morally urgent or both. Part of the point of the theory is to help identify the connecting threads that help make clear that the concrete particulars are specifically particular forms of that general tendency.

Another way to put the point is that it makes sense that an oppressive, death dealing set of social relations will include a set of cultural practices for making those social relations and their effects something people can in various ways live with, though that is of course also contested (aiding or enriching the contestation is the aspiration behind the theoretical account of social murder). That murder-minimizing and/or murder-misunderstanding culture, and efforts to push back against it as part of contesting the violence of social murder, is part of life as actually lived and fought through and reflected upon in capitalist societies. And it’s part of what informs the distilling activities of the high mandarins.

As I said this is in important respects all background - extended throat clearing, terribly sorry! I’m painfully aware of many of my very many limitations! - to my getting back into treading and thinking more on a sustained basis about public health historically and today. I think generally public health practice can probably be sifted into degree of opposition to particular instances of social murder and social murder in general, degree of accurate social explanation, and degree of adequate moral valuation, though I’d stress that the ‘sifting’ involves analytically separating out matters that likely exist all mixed together (they’re not ‘pre-sifted’, so to speak, which makes sense because if they were then doing the ‘sifting’ would be unnecessary), so the ‘sifting’ is to a significant degree of reading/interpreting. I suspect there are important limits on what can be had via the sort of ‘let me just unspool this thread...’ kind of theorizing like I’m (admittedly roughly, all jumbledy) attempting to do here and that the work is in important respects necessarily theoretical. Alright, enough for now. I’ve followed the thread to its unsatisfying end - look for the harms, the attendant scripts, and the positions informing the scripts; barely feels like a starting point? ah well - so I am going to stop. Riiight… now.