Our deaths don't alarm them / rationality in bad contexts
Tonight I saw someone who works on climate policy say something like the following: ‘you’re painting a dire picture of where the environment is at and that’s hard to believe because if it was really that bad then surely the government would be doing something about it.’ Abdullah Shihipar said something similar about covid early on, something like ‘a lot of people trust the government and the government isn’t sounding any alarms about covid, so people think they’re safer than they are.’ That all seems right to me.
To my mind, this means people are being eminently reasonable about both climate and covid given their actual meaningful social context - the information, analysis, understanding, etc that they’re equipped with. The rest of us are in some respects being unreasonable, that is, relative to the relatively normal social context, in relation to which genuine critical thought is situationally unreasonable. I think that’s in large part because we don’t live in a normal social context. Due to issues of life experience, social position, and being plugged in to networks that are outside the norm, we think about matters differently.
Life these days has often felt like inhabiting parallel universes and it can be profoundly lonely, among other things. To some degree that’s not just a feeling but a reality. We really do live in a social world that is fractured into different segments so that we understandably have very different equally rational responses to the world - equally rational locally, I mean, relative to specific life contexts. Some locally rational actions when added up become profoundly irrational, whereas some local actions that are in some respects irrational - in the specific sense that critical thinking is often not immediately a smart move in a lot of social contexts, it’s something we do against and despite our immediate context a lot of the time rather than something we do in line with that immediate context - when added up become much more rational. That’s a very wonky way to say that what we are isolation is one thing and what we are collectively in movement is another.
There are two things rolling around in my head that I’m fumbling the expression of here. One is that the baseline normality of ordinary life is far more vulnerable than is often understood, and the other is that this baseline normality sets us up to be very unequipped should risk eventuate into actual harm, unequipped both individually in the sense of processing and being able to respond, and collectively in the sense that there really are very few resources on hand and few people and institutions who will be there to fish us out if we should fall into a crack - hence the quality of misfortunes hunting in packs, one harm tending to make a second harm more likely.
I talked above about what’s locally rational. I think part of what happens with social murder, put very abstractly, is that there’s a tendency for new violent intrusions into some people’s local contexts, with the perceptibility of those intrusions not necessarily being a given: you might not know the factory by your house is killing you until it’s too late; you notice the intrusion only after it’s irreversible. Those intrusions, when perceived, are out of people’s frame of reference which is destabilizing in some ways, and all the moreso because we’re talking about really awful and often fatal harms, which are often time, energy, attention, and money intensive to endure too. So in some respects we start off fighting the last war, so to speak, when social murder reaches into our individual lives - we’re already behind and having to play catch up, in really hard circumstance too.
The state, meanwhile, is not oriented toward those intrusions of social murder so much as it’s oriented toward the baseline social normal, the social contexts where it’s locally rational to keep going along and not think critically or act disruptively. When social murder intrudes and people get organized, they can force state action to help them to some extent, but that all takes time and the tendency is for the state to cabin those instances off as distinct from ordinary life and what’s locally rational in ordinary contexts.
Again, too abstract. Trying again: we live one way in relation to the state in ordinary times, and are encouraged to do so, arguably compelled to do so, and there’s a lot of ideological pressure to not focus on the possibility that in effect the earth might open beneath us at any time (some more than others, of course, the threats aren’t distributed equally across all social locations). When the earth does open, when social murder does intrude, we scramble and realize how little was there for us all along, but not having grabbed for those resources previously, their absence was less perceptible before the earth opened up.
This is not to say most people trust the government. I don’t know about that, I’m agnostic. Certainly some do to some extent and others don’t to some extent, based on lots of factors including social position, experience, ideology and networks one’s tied to, etc. But it is to say that many people tend to have some sense that the government sounds alarms sometimes, and I think assume that we and our loved ones matter institutionally or politically enough that our deaths would be reason to sound that alarm. I’m not sure about this, I’m having the thought while I type, but I think there’s a pervasive sense that we do matter - a little, not too much, but also somewhat - as people, that the state cares about us to some minimal extent, and that sensibility is part of being a political subject in a liberal democratic society. So we expect that an alarm would ring in conditions that are serious enough. The actual reality is much more unsettling, which is tremendous indifference to our well being, our deaths are really not alarming much of the time, are not serious enough for any alarms to be triggered, not nearly as often - the bar defining ‘conditions that are serious enough’ to ring the alarm is much higher relative to our and our loved ones lives than many of us realize. They literally don’t care if we live or die. They map out scenarios strategically involving different sized large numbers of us dying, and train at ignoring our deaths, looking directly at them and not blinking. Failing to understand that and take appropriate collective action in response to that reality has been very significant in the world, and failing to understand that is also, unfortunately, very reasonable - locally rational - in the immediate contexts a lot of people live their lives in.
As ever there's more to say and I wish I'd said it better but I have to stop here. One more thought for now: my talk about local contexts can sound like it's just the raw facts of what occurs in people's lives and that's far from the whole story. It's also what the occurrences are made to mean - Abby's been writing about meaning-making over at hers, as usual it's smart stuff - with that meaning and (in)capacity to make meaning itself being a really important part of the local contexts that define what's locally rational. (If I remember correctly - always a big if, that - EP Thompson has a bit relevant to this in his discussion of the different meanings of experience in his great flawed book The Poverty of Theory. I may try to chase up those passages and write a note on them here later.) Something terrible can happen in someone's life and they can underrate how terrible it is initially, in part because it's not treated as alarming by any authorities yet - and they can be sure individually it is terrible but be denied concepts to understand it and terms to name it and communicate about it with others. Contextual incapacity to make sense of the intrusions of social murder is something done to people, part of the lives we're consigned to, not something people do ourselves.