The hits don't start, volume 2 (me in Peste)
Hey again friends, the greatest hits collection continues. The last post is here: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-1-me-in-lpe/, with two pieces of mine from the Law and Political Economy Blog. This post collects two pieces from Peste Magazine. The first, from February 2023 is an essay I wrote trying to get at the sense of dislocation and isolation that comes with still being covid cautious after the success of the ideological project of creating a fake ending to the pandemic. What felt to me like a lot of people found this piece pretty resonant, which I was honored and intimidated by. I also spoke on a podcast about this, in case that’s of any of interest I’ll put in a link below the essay. The second is from December 2022 and was part of a group of pieces at Peste that were giving out awards - the idea was to sarcastically acclaim various people and institutions who helped make the pandemic even more of a clusterfuck. I wrote this one at the editors’ request. I’ll add that both of these were greatly improved by the editing of the mighty Chloe Reichel. Chloe also does developmental editing so if you’re working on something and want to hire an editor, let me just say, I’ve found working with her to be really, really great.
piece 1: https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/broken-sociality
Broken Sociality: Isolation in the Pseudo-Return to “Pre-Pandemic Normal.”
Pandemic life remains terribly lonely. It’s recently become differently so. Elements of pre-pandemic normal social life have returned, but not for us those of us who aren’t going along with the so-called “back to normal.” I want a name for this painful situation. Lacking a better one, I’ve started calling it broken sociality.
The pseudo-return in the “new normal” means social life and community appear to be more available, but for many of us, they aren’t, really - no more than a meal someone spat on is really available as food. Experiences of community are offered but not actually present, in that they're present only via serious risks which are often un- or under-acknowledged. I think of this facet of broken sociality as social loneliness. This involves more time spent alone -- reduced time doing things and seeing people compared to pre-pandemic -- because fewer places are doing anything (let alone enough) to mitigate covid exposure.
Sometimes we're required to be in places in-person that lack adequate mitigation, and others in those places don't seem concerned. For instance, in my first week teaching this semester I saw exactly one person at work wearing a mask, a student. I felt terribly alone, specifically in the sense of being alone in a crowd - around people but in important respects cut off from them. (There may well be more people masking and feeling like I do and we’re just not seeing each other; in the headspace I’m in at work now, my first impulse is to move pretty briskly and disengage, compared to the place of openness and excitement I used to have at work pre-pandemic. This colors my perceptions: while I go from place to place, if I see, at a glance, that no one’s wearing a mask, well, that fits with how I’m already feeling, so it feels like confirmation.)
Social loneliness blurs into another facet of broken sociality, what I think of as political loneliness. This is the sense of a gulf in values or in understanding of some very important aspects of the world. Knowing that the return to normal means even more dying and life-altering suffering is terrible. Knowing that many people seem not to realize this, that people in officially respected positions seem to find this acceptable, that fellow travelers on the left don’t treat this as a priority, that all feels isolating to a degree I find hard to overstate. What’s happening, I think, is that there’s no consensus on the reality we’re living in: ideologically, the pandemic continues for some of us and is over for others, while, of course, it hasn’t actually ended; it feels like living in a different world from other people, but still interacting. In some cases, this means old relationships feel different, and not for the better.
What I've called political and social loneliness overlap and are related significantly. Political loneliness is less place dependent. It isn’t so much a matter where I am and who I’m around (it’s possible to feel it, as I often do, even when I’m literally alone, as I often am), but rather comes from a sense of differing from other people on the values, assessments, and explanations through which we understand the pandemic and the management of the pandemic by institutions. This comes up sometimes in casual phone calls with far-flung friends and family as we chat about our lives. I try to suppress any urge to be judgmental about individual choices and to focus my anger at those with the most institutional power, but I do notice differences on this stuff. Those differences increase the sense of isolation. This is heavily reinforced by various explicit and implicit messages from public officials and other high-status actors.
Another element of all of this is a disconnect over the status of the tradeoffs, so to speak. We need community. Those of us who can’t be in a space due to the covid risks are forced out of those spaces. Those of us who choose to weigh the costs and benefits are forced to do the weighing, and when the balance comes out that it’s not worth it, we’re also forced out of those spaces. Each of these brings its own particular kind of distress. Some of these situations force us to keep reaffirming our absenting ourselves from those settings of broken sociality because of the covid risks and because of our political objections. This isolation can feel like it’s our own fault, and it also can feel to other people like it’s just a preference, or quirk, or us being too worried, or weird, or whatever. (Some friends of mine in these situations feel a lot of self-doubt, hoping they're doing the right thing and that it's worth it. I think they are, but saying so doesn't erase all their doubts. Myself, I mostly feel sad, angry, alone.)
Being forced out of social spaces or forced to do the risk calculation is a kind of coercion as well. For those of us required to be in spaces with more risk than we’re okay with, like me teaching face-to-face and my mom at her retail job, the added risk is coerced, but none of this kind of coercion is widely recognized as coercion, let alone recognized in that particular setting. So it amounts to having to eat shit and smile about it. (To cope, my mom and I have talked on the phone about how everyone with a boss has to eat some shit at their job, it’s just a built in part of capitalist society, unfortunately. As with so much else, the pandemic is a particular, and especially bad, inflection of basic patterns in capitalist society.) Obviously the harms of covid infection are the worst part - I’m very aware of that; my mom’s in rough shape from her infection and has what looks to be some potentially permanent loss of vision. I think the coercion we’re expected to smile through feeds the sense of loneliness, though, and this distress is real.
It’s my impression that all of this is getting worse, as a result of an intensification of what Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant have called the sociological construction of the end of the pandemic as a crisis. The supposed “return to normal,” is creating a lot more suffering, inequality, disablement, and death, which would not have happened but for the pseudo-return. This is by far the most awful thing about this return. (I want to stress that I know this. My point here is to try to think through what is for me a less-examined aspect of this current nightmare; this is not at all to say I think the stuff I’m examining here is more important than the deaths, hospitalizations, and other awful harms. Those atrocities are clearly more important.) The Biden administration has recently doubled down on its brutal, inhumane approach to the pandemic. Its main goal in doing so seems to be to continue to normalize processes of social murder.
I think it’s possible that the sense of isolation right now is serving as an ideology, in the sense that it’s acting as a shaping force that helps further tilt the playing field politically to the advantage of the powers that be. This is not only, or even primarily, a matter of explicitly held beliefs, but rather is, to an important degree, how life in the pandemic is experienced for a lot of people - something that is, in effect, exuded spontaneously from pandemic life as organized by the prevailing institutions. The isolation resulting from broken sociality could be, to borrow a phrase from the political economy scholar Peter Burnham writing in a different context, a matter of “ideological effects of changed material practices.” This may also create social conditions for an elite-led backlash against those of us who remain more cautious than the new dominant norm.
I think the fact that some of us now are turning down invitations, or entering social spaces with what appears to be unwarranted caution, or some of the time appearing as or voicing an unwelcome reminder of potential threats and past traumas from covid, may mark us out as different and as more subject to derision. At least, from the looks I sometimes get while masking, I feel like my caution marks me as a social weirdo. (I will say, I have, in some other settings, been able to explain in a non-confrontational way why I’m masking; this feels better in the sense of closing some of the gap I feel between me and other people insofar as it gets rid of the sense that they think I’m weird for masking, but it also opens another gap, in that I want to engage them on masking themselves, but I don’t, because it feels like it would go back to them thinking I’m a weirdo. And so at best I can pick a flavor of loneliness.) Of course, it’s hard to read a worldview off of a look, and my sense of isolation primes me to read things this way. Here, as with all of this, I’m very unsure, which is itself unsettling.
It certainly feels like the division between people with different outlooks on the pandemic has gotten more intense on social media lately, and it seems like there has been a raft of op-eds depicting people like us as irrational or worse. I’m conflicted here: I sometimes think that if pandemic life organically produced derision for those of us who aren’t onboard with what the Biden administration wants to be the new consensus normal, then there wouldn’t be any need for the derisive op-eds. On the other hand, the descriptions of us in those derisive accounts do seem to have a ring of truth for some people such that it seems to speak to their experiences of us.
The elite consensus on the pandemic and the government’s effort to create and sustain a popular consensus has shifted very far to the right – we’ve gone from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘you do you’ to ‘the pandemic is over.’ As part of that shift, there has been an attack on the elements of a popular consensus about the pandemic among ordinary people. To varying degrees, some of us are living in keeping with an earlier consensus that explicitly recognized danger and at least to some degree shared a solidaristic set of values regarding how to respond the pandemic. Meanwhile, some of us are living in keeping with the new pseudo-normal, again to varying degrees. This fractured lack of consensus generates loneliness as I talked about above - or, to put it another way, loneliness is, in part, an emotional experience of that fracture. It can also generate what are, in my view, conflicts that are a dead-end - battles that don’t win wars - and I suspect it can give rise to or reinforce mistaken explanations of the pandemic.
Personally, the loneliness that results from all of this tends to feel like a depleted energylessness (I get home from teaching feel totally wrecked and can easily fall into the deep sleep that comes from exhaustion) but sometimes it wells up hot. This seems to be the case as well for people who participate more in the new pseudo-normal, in the form of the occasional derision I mentioned and some periodic heated exchanges. I understand all of that; I have moments when I want to yell and to swear at people. In that mood, I’ve been pretty rude to some people on social media occasionally. It doesn’t feel good, or at least not for very long, like after an initial sugar rush. I try to remind myself that yelling at powerless individuals isn’t accomplishing anything worth accomplishing, that other people need to yell sometimes too as part of trying to live with the unlivable, and that no amount of yelling at anyone I interact with is going to change the pandemic. I don’t meaningfully interact with anyone with real institutional power or serious influence on any powerful social movements. We’re all just small nobodies trying to keep on keeping on amid a world-historical clusterfuck.
I’m worried that all of this will get worse, that more people will lash out against us - some of them as an organic part of their emotional lives as they, in their own way, try to process the horrors of the present and their lives and roles within it, and others of them for money, as functionaries and talking heads and propagandists. I’m worried that small differences within the communities of people who are relatively likeminded on the pandemic will fracture, leading to more isolation. Obviously those of us tending to abstain from what I’ve here called the broken sociality of normal (pseudonormal, funhouse mirror normal) life amid the ideological but not actual ending of the pandemic need to continue to find and make alternative sources of sociality, simply in order to sustain ourselves in this intolerable situation.
A friend who, like me, has spent many years in far left circles said recently that they think they’ve only processed a small fraction of the shock and trauma of seeing that over a million covid deaths made so little difference in the world politically, and is not a more widespread scandal, even on the far left. I’ve resisted letting the ramifications of this to some of my relationships sink in.
And then there is processing the grief -- for the dead and harmed that we know, for those we don't know, for the changes in our relationships, for the way the world will never be the same -- which I think has barely begun. These aren't all equivalent losses, but they are losses, and the sense of being alone while facing these losses, the sense that only some of us experience all of this loss, further amplifies the loneliness. I find myself periodically getting books from the library on grief, or browsing them online. I never read them. At most I open them, glance down, shut them or close the tab. It's too hard.
I grew up around a lot of old, working class people who were alive in the Great Depression of the 1930s. They talked about it all the time, especially at meal times. It changed basic parts of their lives, like how they ate. The memory shaped how they perceived and interpreted events for the rest of their lives. This is going to be like that. I try not to think about it and I’m desperate for community with whom to think about it.
Me chatting with Patrick on his podcast about this essay: https://soundcloud.com/lastborninthewilderness/nate-holdren
piece 2: https://www.pestemag.com/first-row/mta-creativelicense-2022-s94bn
Achievement in Creative License in Public Health Communication: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority
In September, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority made masking newly optional, a change publicized via new advertising designed "to eliminate confusion for riders."
The advertisements nodded toward pro-sociality, saying "masks are encouraged, but optional," then undermined that message with the slogans “you do you” and “let’s respect each other’s choices,” suggesting masking is a matter of mere personal preference.
One ad made light of the matter with a depiction of someone with a mask over just their nose. The implication: not only is masking something we can agree to disagree about, it’s a lighthearted matter. While the ad was clearly intended for comedic effect, what was the punchline? That COVID-19 is among the top three causes of death in the U.S.; that pediatric deaths from COVID have almost tripled since September 2021; that rampant circulation of flu and RSV is filling up pediatric hospitals?
The real problem, the new ads implied, was people having any opinion on others’ anti-social actions. In conveying this political message, the MTA also encouraged people to be ill-informed and unreasonable in a way that carried grave consequences.
Thanks to the organizing of disabled and high risk New Yorkers, the MTA abandoned this campaign toward the end of November. But the episode nevertheless deserves public scorn, not just for the damage it surely has done, but also for the broader failures it so neatly encapsulates.
Consider: this campaign at the MTA came under a city and state government controlled by Democrats. The MTA’s public disservice on COVID reflected the bipartisan elite consensus in the United States on the pandemic; an ostensibly bloodless but genuinely violent consensus that continues to amplify the pandemic’s harms and to treat those harms as at most a political hot potato for which to avoid responsibility, rather than as an actual matter of human life, suffering, and death.
Giving up on effective promotion of masking in public transit piled harms onto the populations already most harmed. Compared to people who use cars as their main mode of transit within the MTA’s area, public transit riders are relatively lower income and people of color. These are the populations hit hardest by the pandemic. These are also among the most pro-masking populations in the U.S., according to a recent YouGov poll.
Of course, one major use of public transit is to travel to and from work, meaning many riders in effect have to be there, and in riding the train they are engaged in unpaid work, delivering their labor power to the employers who consume it. It made a cruel kind of sense for the MTA to abandon the safety of riders commuting to and from work, given that workplace safety in this pandemic has been abandoned as well, or never prioritized at all.
The “public” in “public transit” and “public health” could be made into an area of relative freedom — constrained, minor, insufficient, but still real — by prioritizing human well-being. Instead the MTA, like many other public authorities, decided the term should mean something closer to “human resources,” an inert mass to be used for economic benefit and palace intrigue within the Democratic Party. Belligerent ghouls run, well, everything.
The MTA is a paid workplace as well. In 2020, workers in transportation and warehousing died of COVID at a rate of just over 43 people per 100,000. That year, the average deaths per 100,000 for all industries was just over 25 — for essential industries it was 30, and for non-essential it was just under 16. That means transport workers faced more COVID danger than many of their fellow essential workers, and far more than workers in non-essential industries. Reduced masking in public transit will continue to pile harms on the populations already harmed most by the pandemic. I will add that while numbers and rates are helpful for getting a sense of larger patterns, there’s a risk of individuals getting lost in the big picture. On its web site Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, the local with jurisdiction over the MTA in New York City, lists nineteen of its members who have died of COVID. The site underlines that every person killed in the pandemic was a unique individual whose suffering and death is not a mere statistic.
Health, like wealth, is a social product, and providing it to anyone who is, for whatever reason, lower on the food chain is not a social or political priority. To put it another way: class is a category of harm. To be lower in the ranks of the class structure is to be harmed. Those harms build up over time and interact with each other to produce greater vulnerability. As the authors of one study wrote, racialized minorities with health conditions that make them particularly at risk from COVID “were more likely to live in households with essential workers and workers whose jobs cannot be done from home,” and COVID outbreaks in workplaces “disproportionately affect workers from racial and ethnic minority groups.”
It is no surprise, then, that the majority of the dead on Local 100's page are people of color — and how monstrous that this is the unsurprising normal for someone who understands how this society works.
The MTA's public disservice was to go along with that monstrous normal. By doing so, it helped cause more infections among populations already disproportionately harmed by the pandemic, among both riders and transit workers.
Might they be pardoned for the about-face last month? No. Those in charge are shameless — if they could be chastened, the deaths thus far would have already done so — but it is good for the rest of us to shame them via rituals like the public disservice award. They’ve earned it.