Nonmasking derives from context not beliefs (ps - Bartleby feelings)
I had masking, and mostly not masking, on my mind and thought I’d sit down to type about it because it was distracting me from some other tasks, and because I start back to teaching on Monday which means I’m going to have less time and energy to toil away down here at the bottom of the blogging mine (‘newsletter’ still sits wrong in the mouth, I dunno). So I figured I’d type up a thing to send out now while there’s a little heat before teaching freezes me over. Here at Open Mode Industries we are deeply committed to the idea of the shitty first draft, but this time I edited more than usual. (Here at Open Mode Industries we do not honor our deep commitments, we contradict ourselves, we contain mulleted dudes.)
I sat down with an actual thought or two that I was trying to dig out of the ground but for some reason wrote a long thing just kind of lamenting for a while, before getting onto the idea I actually wanted to sketch out (.drawkcab gnihtyreve od ew seirtsudnI edoM nepO ta ereH) and when I got to the idea it was significantly briefer than the lamentation. (Here at Open Mode Industries we vent long and think short). So what I decided to do when it was all typed up is put the idea at the front and the venting at the back so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. (Here at Open Mode Industries we respect your right not to read. We all like a quiet life.)
In brief, here’s the idea. Masking and similar behavior is less common now than it should be and certainly a lot less common than those us who are more covid cautious and who think of the pandemic politically think it should be, and among us there are some different explanations for that reality. I think there’s one general kind of explanation which is, for lack of a better phrase, methodologically individualist and which implicitly treats ‘structural’ as meaning ‘widespread.’ (Here at Open Mode Industries we are committed to repetition of unfunny jokes but for what it’s worth I don’t make this joke anymore after this. You’re welcome. Here at Open Mode Industries we take your gratitude for granted.)
What I mean to say is, I get the impression that some people think that lack of mask wearing is really a product of conscious beliefs and choices people are committed to. I think that’s not really the case. I think people are a lot less consistent and self aware than that in a lot of contexts. Instead, there’s a kind of broad and unreflective social inertia in the direction of masklessness. That’s been actively cultivated by the Biden Administration and its proxies. I know I’ve said a version of this before but I don’t recall where - for a while I said that the powers that be were manufacturing consent for mass death in the pandemic in a way analogous to how they manufactured consent for the Iraq War. But that’s not really what’s going on with regard to the larger populace. It’s one thread, but not the main one, I think. I think the administration has not succeeded nearly as much as it would like in making people be okay with covid harms and the concentration of those harms on especially hard done by populations. That is, Biden and co are much more okay with all the killing, dying, and disabling, than most people are.
Instead what’s happened, and I think this is filling in for manufactured consent, is a lot of ideologically sweeping away. To use Goran Therborn’s typology, ideology makes claims on what is good or not (normativity), what exists or not (ontology), and what can or can’t be done (possibility). (By the way, I assume all of you are subscribed to Abby’s newsletter but if not, do so. Her last post on Therborn is great, as per usual. https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/therborn-2-interpellation-boogaloo/) Manufacturing consent is fundamentally a matter of normativity (‘it is good that we invade Iraq’), though that’s related to claims on ontology and possibility (‘Iraq has WMDs’ and ‘we have no other options’).
Politicians’ and their proxies’ efforts to normatively code covid deaths and other covid harms as good or untroubling have not succeeded as much as they would like. Instead, we get huge emphasis on possibility, which Biden has done since day one - if memory serves it was inauguration day or shortly after that he said nothing could be done to alter the trajectory of the pandemic. This is tied to the focus of the administration on depoliticization, as I wrote about a while back at Bill of Health. (Hi Chloe!) If that’s of interest it’s here: https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/21/depoliticizing-social-murder-covid-pandemic/ They’ve also put a ton of emphasis on the ontological direction, but instead of ‘Iraq has WMDs’ it’s more like ‘Iraq? Is that even a real place?’ or something.
This has taken various forms, from misleading data presentation of the kind that David Leonhardt specializes in (I wrote about that here, https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2023/07/24/running-cover-for-death-pandemic-minimizers-normalize-an-inhumane-baseline/ if that’s of interest), where he tries to get people to notice relative changes to the exclusion of absolute continuities. He recently trotted out this same evil horseshit to apply to the deaths of Palestinians. The guy’s a monster, straight up. Anyway, that’s one form: look at this graph, the line is going down not up, so mission accomplished! The attenuated presentation matters too - it’s not a surprise these ghouls tend to be graph guys and quants, lawyers, physicians, all of whom in various ways specialize in abstracting away concrete realities of lived contexts of power, conflict, suffering, injustice. As the old phrase goes, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Converting a tragedy to a statistic is an escape from normativity, so to speak, but, again, they do it to a significant degree because they can’t make us approve of the tragedies. The magician waves a wand to distract us because of the power, not the failing, of our critical faculties: if we actually see the hand do the trick we’re far less likely to fall for it.
Another very significant form of the ideological work in the ontological aspect here is in data and tracking. Some information just isn’t being gathered, and some gathered info isn’t being presented as publicly. We’re genuinely in the dark to a bigger degree now, as a result of deliberate policy choices. We get a normative position pushed at us - YOU are INDIVIDUALLY responsible for YOUR choices - without any ability to make actually responsible informed choices. The imposition of individual frame of reference too is an ontological move and one that precludes a lot of normative matters by putting individuals and institutions and power basically out of sight.
In this kind of context, with the success of those ideological moves, it makes sense that a lot of the population behaves to a significant degree in line with the agenda of the Biden administration and their analogues around the world. Of course lots of people don’t mask and so on, they’re not in the right oppositional contexts to go against all of that. (I will say I am troubled by some people on the genuine left who do have the critical faculties and the time to go against all of that, and whose failure to do so seems to me significantly more willful.)
This is all to say, to a significant degree people are creatures of their circumstances and the government’s managed to shape those circumstances to elicit behaviors it prefers to some degree more than behaviors it doesn’t. Again, not as fully and not in the manner it would prefer - it’s had to obfuscate the pandemic more than build consent to it. This is a different explanation than one I sometimes here, which goes more like this: people who don’t mask and so on act as they do because they approve of the deaths of and other harms to disabled people and the otherwise especially hard done by. I think that’s just empirically not accurate for the most part. I don’t mean to minimize the real social presence of those awful bigoted attitudes, they do exist, I just think they aren’t especially significant drivers of what’s happening. If anything I think it’s the other way around - our current reality that marginalizes and harms so many is not primarily an effect of conscious attitudes to those many but rather is fundamentally a matter of other pressures and systemic imperatives, and that reality in turn generates those attitudes, which then serve as feedback loops worsening things further.
So them’s the thoughts. If you want to hear the vent that was bound up with this and preceded it in the order I typed, that’s below. No problem if not, I get that you might not want to hear it. (Here at Open Mode Industries we understand that we are annoying and yes I made that joke again, I’m not sorry. I mean, about this particular thing. More generally I am fundamentally sorry as a mode of being. Here at Apologetic Mode Industries we disappoint all involved.)
I’m back to teaching Monday and I’m excited to get to know another bunch of students and to work with them over the semester, I’ve always liked teaching and that hasn’t diminished. Unfortunately there’s now some bad feelings and distracting thoughts clustered all around and to some degree overlaid on top of my love of teaching, so I have a lot of dread as well.
In a way I now think was naive I expected a lot better of my employer on covid than how things actually worked out. That expectation scales upward - I expected better basically across the board - and the disappointment hasn’t abated. It also just sucks being out of step with so much else. I’m sort of used to that, having been a weirdo nerd in various ways for basically my whole life and being into kind of nonconformist, and in some cases genuinely contrarian, cultural and intellectual milieus, but I guess I’m not as used to it as I thought. Or maybe it’s that the massive ramping up of that sense of being out step, and particularly with people I thought I was at least a little more on the same page with, is still a heavy weight regardless. It’s very lonely, as I wrote about in my “broken sociality” essay.
It’s also very tiring in my teaching. I teach in a relationship centered way. Obviously that involves trying to establish a relationship with the students. It also involves trying to set up lots of opportunities for the students to connect with each other in various ways in the hope that some of those relationships take - I imagine it being a sort of spiderweb of lines across the room connecting different people to each other - and, related, I try to cultivate a general tone of politely friendly trust in the room as a whole, and the idea is that early on they have more of a relationship to me but after while that relationship with me becomes less important than (because it became a resource to help foster) their relationships with each other and the classroom community as a whole.
This is in large part instrumental on my part, to be totally frank: when this works the students are more active in discussion and they carry more of the course. I teach a lot and if I have to fill all the time the preparatory workload’s higher, unsustainable really. There’s also a view of education underlying that: a mentor of mine said early on, the person who does the most work does the most learning. (This is part of why a lot of college faculty like to lecture, I suspect. Writing lectures is a ton of work but at least if it’s on current or new material, the lecture writer learns a great deal, and many faculty like to learn.) So if I can get the students tied in to the class by relationships, they’ll work harder and learn more. I also teach on difficult subjects - issues of race, gender, inequality, and similar fairly charged issues are present in a lot of the readings. That goes better with more trust in the room.
I said a moment ago that if the students don’t engage then the workload’s higher on the preparation side. That’s not really true. What I mean is that a course planned for lower student engagement is higher work on the preparation. A course planned for higher student engagement is less work on the prep side but is often more work in the conducting of the actual course - not in time but in intensity. That intensity is rewarding and it’s also super tiring. A course planned for higher engagement and which fails to get that engagement is even more work still, the intensity goes up more, at least for me, as I try to supply the missing energy and keep coaxing the students to get on board. That coaxing sometimes works, I’m pleased to say, I think not least because I try to really stand solidly on the fact that I genuinely like students and interacting with them, but it also only sometimes works, and that same fact makes it harder when the course doesn’t work - basically I can like the students more than they like me, and I can also like the students in a different way than they like me: they can all individually like me in a class that just isn’t working. Nightmaresville.
What this has to do with masks is that I teach in a mask and my students are pretty much universally unmasked each semester. I generally have 50something or 60something students a term and from one to five total will mask. I don’t love that for the added covid risk. (I mitigate the risk with a corsi-rosenthal box and whatnot.) I will say, at this point I’ve sort resigned myself individually to that risk in my life. I still think it’s a risk that shouldn’t be there and I’m angry about various decisionmakers having fostered this condition, and I do have some health concerns that make me not want to get covid, but over all my outrage on this social situation isn’t one where I personally feel aggrieved over something done to me personally so much as I think this is a super appalling way that other people are being treated. More briefly, my anger on this stuff is more heated out of concern for others than it’s heated what I’m personally subjected to. For myself I mostly just feel sad and tired.
That’s a new thought for me, just now as I type it. Here’s another, and one I’m not sure about: I wonder if this ‘personally I’m just sad and tired’ thing may be a common condition, as in something lots of people experience, and one that has a politics that’s not necessarily positive. What I mean is that I suspect the ‘god I’m just so tired, I feel so deflated and sad’ feeling pulls in a direction different from the direction the anger pulls in. At least it does for me. It pulls toward a more thoroughgoing practical resignation - throwing in the towel on concern for covid as a political issue and individual covid precautions. I’d definitely say liberalism is a sad, tired ideology but maybe liberals are also sad and tired experientially. (Happy and energetic? In THIS economy?!)
Again, continuing to follow a line of thought I’m having in the middle of typing... feel like there’s something in this about sense of collectivity, solidarity, lived and/or imagines community... Hmm. I’ve long thought of collective action as boring holes in the veneer of fixedness that the world can take on, creating small local melting of frozen social relations and also in doing so revealing that the apparent rigidity of those social relations is an artifact of their having been iced over, a condition that isn’t permanent or eternal but subject to reversal, potentially. ‘All that’s solid melts into air’ (non-derogatory), if you will. I think a lot of liberals and a nontrivial number of people on the left lack this sensibility in general and certainly around covid.
Anyway where I was planning to go with this, the thought that was on my mind that led me to start typing, is masking and not masking. My students won’t be masked. I’m not allowed to make them mask and I’m not willing to start a fight over that at work given the current situation and how I think that fight would play out (we pick our battles). I’m wearing a high quality mask and have other mitigations in place for myself and some for the students as well, like the C-R box, and I make an effort to always teach in a classroom with windows that will open. I feel terrible for the students and I do try to articulate why I make the choices I make, but I’m just one voice to them against a lot of other voices and a very loud subtext of social practice, all of which largely drowns out my little voice. I think the best possible scenario regarding that - what I say to students and what they make of it - is that I plant a seed and it sprouts if they run into the conditions that promote that sprouting. That’s generally the case and given what I teach about, and when it comes to covid stuff in particular, I often hope that few of them as individuals run into those conditions, as they tend to be unpleasant.
Part of what this means though is that I’m just standing on the other side of a relative gulf from my students regarding masking and that’s an obstacle to the relationship-focused teaching that I do. And at a gut level, I just want to connect with them, that’s part of what has made teaching rewarding. I don’t enjoy being The Knower in front of The Ignorant, expertise doesn’t really appeal to me - as a thing one has or position one occupies, what appeals to me about this kind of work is doing puzzles, the pursuit of curiosity (hey it’s the open mode again!) and ideally in a way that is embedded in, constituted by and also constitutive of, some level of community. I also really enjoy seeing other people develop, I like mentoring so to speak. All of that’s harder being on the other side of masking relative to my students and I can feel myself, pre-consciously, not having decided it just doing it, being cranked up so high in the classroom, pouring out energy trying to cross that gulf. It works, eventually. I also just address it head on, naming the elephant in the room, so to speak. And it makes teaching even more exhausting. I hate that aspect of it.