The hits don't start volume 3 (me in Bill of Health)
Me again - greatest hits collection installment three. Installment 1 is here https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-1-me-in-lpe/ and installment 2 is here: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/the-hits-dont-start-volume-2-me-in-peste/
The three pieces below are all from the web site Bill of Health and again were greatly improved by Chloe Reichel’s strong and skilled editing. These appeared in March 2022, September 2022, and July 2023, respectively.
For whatever it’s worth the first two of these felt like breakthroughs in my personal understanding of the pandemic. Of course your mileage may vary. If memory serves I had already written my book chapter on Engels and Marx on social murder (my talk on my chapter is here https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/my-talk-from-the-capitalist-state-book-event/, which includes a link to the book) but I hadn’t really connected that analysis clearly to the pandemic until writing these pieces. I’ll add that in early September 2023 I gave a talk virtually at the Socialism conference, on a panel with Abby Cartus and Artie Vierkant, both from Death Panel, sort of connecting these threads. I thought I’d already put that talk up here at Open Mode but I was wrong. Instead I put it here: https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/socialism-2023-conference-talk-on-social-murder The audio from that event is here in case that’s any interest, including Abby and Artie’s contributions as well: https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/dp-x-s23-how-capitalism-kills-social-murder-and-covid-19-session-2
Piece 1. Depoliticizing Social Murder in the COVID-19 Pandemic
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/21/depoliticizing-social-murder-covid-pandemic/
(Somebody kindly translated this into French, that’s below the English version at the link above if that’s any interest.)
The present pandemic nightmare is the most recent and an especially acute manifestation of capitalist society’s tendency to kill many, regularly, a tendency that Friedrich Engels called “social murder.” Capitalism kills because destructive behaviors are, to an important extent, compulsory in this kind of society. Enough businesses must make enough money or serious social consequences follow — for them, their employees, and for government. In order for that to happen, the rest of us must continue the economic activities that are obligatory to maintain such a society.
That these activities are obligatory means capitalist societies are market dependent: market participation is not optional, but mandatory. As Beatrice Adler-Bolton has put it, in capitalism “you are entitled to the survival you can buy,” and so people generally do what they have to in order to get money. The predictable results are that some people don’t get enough money to survive; some people endure danger due to harmful working, living, and environmental conditions; some people endure lack of enough goods and services of a high enough quality to promote full human flourishing; and some people inflict the above conditions on others. The simple, brutal reality is that capitalism kills many, regularly. (The steadily building apocalypse of the climate crisis is another manifestation of the tendency to social murder, as is the very old and still ongoing killing of workers in the ordinary operations of so many workplaces.)
The tendency to social murder creates potential problems that governments must manage, since states too are subject to pressures and tendencies arising from capitalism. They find themselves facing the results of social murder, results they are expected to respond to, with their options relatively constrained by the limits placed on them by capitalism. Within that context governments often resort to a specific tactic of governance: depoliticization.
Depoliticization is an attempt by government “to place at one remove the politically contested character of governing,” in the words of the political scientist Peter Burnham. This might be called rule in denial: making decisions without seeming to make decisions, treating consequences as inevitable, and trying to displace authority elsewhere so as to avoid accountability for what occurs.
Burnham’s analysis is helpful for understanding the Biden administration’s pandemic response, in several ways. First, he places depoliticization in a larger theoretical and social context by stressing that governments must manage the potential political consequences of problems that are fairly predictably generated by capitalism.
Depoliticization helps withstand demands for government action by presenting some events as inevitable (as when President Biden said two days after taking office that “there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months”) and others as impossible (as when Press Secretary Jen Psaki scoffed in a December press briefing, “should we just send one [covid test] to every American?”).
Other depoliticization strategies deployed by the Biden administration trade on the abdication of decision-making power, such as delegating decisions to state and local authorities; and rhetorically scapegoating others (the list includes the Supreme Court, the unvaccinated, Republicans, coronavirus variants, and the supposed recalcitrance of the population in the face of largely non-existent mitigation measures).
According to Burnham’s analysis, these tactical choices should be understood in a context of social conflict. Social conflicts are sites of the potential eruption of politics from below. Governments depoliticize in part to retain control over who sets the terms for what is and is not political, and, above all, to prevent the politicization of what are ostensibly routine aspects of life in capitalist society. That kind of politicization always challenges the state, and depoliticization as a tactic is an attempt to defuse that challenge.
Take, for example, low-waged work as a particularly relevant site of social conflict. The redistributive policies pursued early in the pandemic seem to have encouraged the so-called Great Resignation. As Abdullah Shihipar has detailed, earlier in the pandemic “in the attempt to stem the tide of death, unprecedented reforms were enacted” by local, state, and federal governments, including eviction moratoria, better unemployment benefits, and an increase in free lunch programs in schools. These policies were forms of relative — and, I would stress, attenuated — politicization of existing conditions through policy. One important result was a dramatic reduction in poverty. As a presidential candidate, Biden called for more of this kind of policy, as well as criticizing the Trump administration for not doing more along these lines. These earlier approaches to the pandemic offered small glimpses of possibility and a chance of loosening some of the degree to which people’s lives are made secondary to serving the good of accumulation. The Biden administration has since abandoned that approach and opted for depoliticization.
Of course, a driving force behind the “Great Resignation” has likely also been people not wanting to get sick at work. (I can say personally, my mother quit her job at a warehouse due to fear of COVID-19 exposure and took a lower paying job in a retail establishment with better infection mitigation measures.) Constraining people’s economic options in order to rein in the Great Resignation seems to have been part of the reason Biden did not continue the mildly generous redistributive policies from the pandemic’s early days.
This leads to a final relevant aspect of Burnham’s analysis: when governments engage in tactics of depoliticization, their goal is not to solve social problems, but to solve their own political problems, often by trying to render social problems no longer political liabilities.
The people working in the administration are not naïve. They know the consequences of their actions, yet they take those actions anyway. Presumably they are not monsters, in that they do feel bad that some people have died and more will die as the result of their decisions, but they make those decisions nonetheless. Those of us with populist inclinations are tempted to attribute capitalism’s ills to the greed and inhumane indifference of the rich and powerful. While our social superiors may well be like that, those character flaws are far less the cause of social harms than they are effects of underlying social patterns (put the most big-hearted people in such positions, and see how long they remain big-hearted!). Businesses face competitive pressures which compel them to treat employees, customers, and the environment badly. Forced to act in such ways, managers look for rationales and slowly re-make their moral character to fit. Capitalism produces both mass death and people in positions of institutional authority who are able to live with mass death. As such, moral appeals to the administrations’ consciences will not get us very far.
The Biden administration’s response to the pandemic will be only as principled and humane as the political consequences that humane, principled people can impose on the administration via collective action. Thus any serious effort at mitigating this catastrophic episode of social murder in the short term can only take as its starting point how large numbers of ordinary people can create serious consequences for those at the heights of power. In the long term, we must find our way to a society that is not fundamentally murderous.
I was blessed to get to talk with the fine people at Death Panel about this essay. If that’s any interest, our conversation’s here: https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/social-murder-w-nate-holdren-unlocked
Piece 2: Pandemic Nihilism, Social Murder, and the Banality of Evil
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/09/19/pandemic-nihilism-social-murder-and-the-banality-of-evil/ (This one’s also been translated into French, at that link.)
Every day in the pandemic, many people’s lives end, and others are made irrevocably worse. (A contrarian may rush to argue with me about what exactly constitutes “many” deaths — an experience I’ve often had in response to my book about workplace injuries — to which the answer with the most integrity is that, as far as any person of conscience is concerned, one who gets out a ruler to argue that what they see before them is in fact a short and not a tall stack of corpses is a ghoul beneath contempt.)
These daily losses matter inestimably at a human level, yet they do not matter in any meaningful way at all to the public and private institutions that govern our lives. Our suffering is inconsequential to the machinery of power and to those who compose and operate that machinery. This has been the case all along, but in this phase of the pandemic, our suffering has been nihilistically recast as not just inconsequential, but inevitable by the administration and the voices it has cultivated as its proxies. Consider, for example, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s remarks during President Biden’s July 2022 COVID-19 infection: “As we have said, almost everyone is going to get COVID.”
The nihilism that the Biden administration displays is both convenient and necessary for the personnel who help intensify the avoidable harms of the pandemic, which amount to what Friedrich Engels called social murder. The goal of much of the administration’s policy is to depoliticize those harms, so as not to face any responsibility for them. There appear to be no built-in limits on what the administration will attempt to achieve this goal: anyone waiting for officials’ consciences to kick in should prepare for a long, hard winter.
To that end, the government officials, employers, and middle managers helping to cause preventable harms exhibit a variant of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil: a willful thoughtlessness and lack of imagination cultivated by the demands of bureaucracy and pursuit of professional success — they are people with “no motives at all” other than looking out for professional advancement. Institutions select for officials who are capable of the appearance of sincerity in doing what they’re told and of rationalizing uncomfortable orders. The more time people spend in such positions, the better they get at these mental operations, and the sincerity becomes more than just appearance.
The point of such officials, in part, is to help institutions navigate the larger pressures generated by what the philosopher Tony Smith calls the valorization imperative, meaning the requirement in our society that all social activity be made compatible with the ongoing generation of profit. Much of the banal evil of the pandemic arises from institutions not wanting to bear various kinds of costs that capitalist society generates, even if the result is suffering and death for others.
Indeed, an organization that comes through the pandemic relatively financially unscathed at the price of other people dying is a successful organization, according to capitalism’s social standards: this kind of society selects for antisocial behavior, and this selection pressure acts all the more intensely up the food chain.
I know all of this, but for some reason I still continue to greet the latest twists and turns of the pandemic with disbelief and a gut level sense that surely now public officials will do something. This takes a particular and tiring mental toll, and I know I’m not alone here — I have lost count of the number of friends who have quietly asked me “do you ever feel like you’re losing your mind from all of this?” Perhaps we feel what the powerful refuse to. I’m unsure.
The philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin once wrote that “the astonishment that the things we are experiencing (…) are ‘still’ possible is (…) not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”
I continue to find myself surprised and appalled all over again each time authorities act consistently with their longstanding pattern of treating the effects of the pandemic as political consequences to avoid, rather than as a health catastrophe to substantively address. In keeping with Benjamin’s observation, I continue to learn from this repeated and distressing astonishment only that I am still in the grip of some myths about the ruling class and their functionaries.
As I repeat the unpleasant realization that help is not on the way from above, and attempt to think my way out of the assumptions that set me up for future unpleasant astonishment, I keep returning to two works of art.
The first is a scene from the film “And The Band Played On,” based on the book of the same name, about the AIDS epidemic. During a congressional hearing, a representative of the blood industry scoffs at the idea of spending a hundred million dollars merely “because we’ve had a handful of transfusion fatalities and eight dead hemophiliacs?” (The film is a bit dated in that some of the heroes work at the CDC … imagine!)
The nihilism of the cost/benefit calculation expressed in that scene — that the dead are simply too few to be worth the cost — is as appalling now as when I first saw it, but it took me some time to realize the degree of elite consensus on that nihilism, both then and now. The same nihilism led to inaction on AIDS, the workplace accidents that regularly occur in the economy, and the government’s response to the COVID pandemic.
The second is “It’s About Blood,” a song by Steve Earle about a preventable mining disaster in 2010 that killed 29 miners. “Look me in the eye,” Earle demands in the opening line, imagining a confrontation with someone responsible for the safety violations that helped cause the disaster, and fantasizing about really getting to them as he concludes the song’s first verse: “before we leave here you’re gonna understand.”
Earle’s song expresses justified outrage over these preventable deaths. As the song’s title and refrain stress, “it’s about blood,” a point he elaborates on by contrasting two sets of value systems: “the state of the economy, fiscal reality, profit and loss, none of that matters once you’re underground anyway,” adding that after the deaths of the 29, anyone concerned with such narrow economic matters “damn sure can’t tell me nothing about cost.” It’s powerful.
Yet, at the same time, what the song imagines in its anger is unrealistic, because it is too optimistic: The fiction of looking the powerful in the eye and having them look back — really see us — is satisfying in part because it helps avoid the ugly reality that they don’t look at us at all, but only through us.
The people responsible for the deaths in the pandemic do not really look anyone in the eye — certainly not when it’s inconvenient for their professional aims — and so they will never understand. They, too, cannot be told anything about cost in the sense that Earle rightly focuses on. That fact — of our lives and loved ones being so inconsequential — is hard to keep in mind, because it is so appalling. (Of course, the persistent political and managerial gaslighting doesn’t help either.)
I would like to believe this sketch is a bit of an overstatement, and to hope people in government and middle and upper management are, in fact, uncomfortably aware of the harms they help inflict on vulnerable people. Feeling some level of squeamishness at their own actions, I’m sure they would try to think about something else, perhaps by pointing to some good they do elsewhere in their sphere of influence (the limits of which they are quick to emphasize).
We know from the Spiderman principle that responsibility is directly proportional to power. Hence the powerful, when in need of restored legitimacy or an eased conscience, minimize the extent of their power. (If I may, the final chapter of my book is about a physician cut from this same cloth, by all accounts a sensitive man and devoted father who built a program of employment discrimination against disabled people, his personal misgivings apparently figuring not at all in what he actually did.)
Government and employers will provide only as much justice as they are forced to by the political consequences we create, no less and no more. To borrow from an old activist slogan, there’s no justice, there’s just us. Our challenge is to figure out what sorts of activism and organizing can create meaningful consequences for the various banal functionaries enacting and abetting this latest evil. Our goal should be to bring the pandemic to a substantive end — by promoting justice and actual human health — rather than by bringing it to a merely ideological end by normalizing social murder. In the longer term, our goal should be to end the social patterns that make this society murderous in so many ways — to make this the last such catastrophe, rather than what threatens to be one of many as the global climate emergency continues to worsen.
I admit I find all of this an incredibly daunting prospect. Still, aside perhaps from sheer luck, there is no other starting place from which we can reasonably expect this nightmare to truly end.
Once again it was a great honor, very exciting, and super generative to talk with the Death Panel crew about this essay. If that’s of interest, it’s here: https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/pandemic-nihilism-and-the-banality-of-evil-w-nate-holdren-092922
Piece 3: Running Cover for Death: Pandemic Minimizers Normalize an Inhumane Baseline
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2023/07/24/running-cover-for-death-pandemic-minimizers-normalize-an-inhumane-baseline/
Last week, David Leonhardt took to the pages of the New York Times to celebrate the latest COVID death figures, which he claims mean the U.S. is no longer in a pandemic, because there are no more “excess deaths.”
The hunger for good news is, of course, understandable amid this ongoing nightmare. But to respond to death with “smile everyone, it could have been more deaths!” is grotesque because of the disrespect to the dead and those most affected by the deaths.
It also lets the powerful off the hook, which is Leonhardt’s primary motivation, I assume. In other words, looking for good news is a political position.
The sociologist Goran Therborn has argued that ideology is always a matter of assertions about what exists, what is possible, and what is just. Leonhardt (I’d call him Lyin’ Heart, but it seems wrong to imply he has a heart) and other ideologues like him start from the position that the Biden Administration has succeeded, and they fold assertions about what exists (few deaths! and only among nobodies!), what is possible (nothing more than what has already been done!), and what is just (Biden is good! Masking is bad, so is work from home, aren’t you TIRED of all the RESTRICTIONS!?), in order to create a depiction of policy success. There is no level of contorted reasoning they won’t engage in. It would be funny if it weren’t so ghastly.
We should resist the temptation to respond to death and injury by looking for ways to say the present level of death is better than some counterfactual. Unless COVID deaths are genuinely at zero, no level of death is actually good news, it’s just the absence of even worse news. It’s especially important to not get pulled into calling a number of deaths “better” when we know that the government, employers, and other powerful institutional actors have chosen to let preventable infections, and thus some avoidable COVID deaths, just happen. In the face of all this, we must remain critical, insist on identifying the terrible shortcomings of the powerful, and demand far more for all those harmed by the continuing disaster of the pandemic.
Smarter people than me have criticized Leonhardt’s deceptions, and I recommend those criticisms to readers, such as those of Justin Feldman. I just want to note a few additional things. First of all, a critical thinker would point out that COVID death figures remain too high, rather than search for a reason to say the current death figures are reason to party. I would, of course, never say Dave was either critical or a thinker, let alone both — I would instead say the Times has a problem of excess Leonhardt.
But back to correcting his deceptions. Let us not forget that all COVID deaths are in excess of the pre-pandemic normal. To point at excess deaths and say that now they are lower than they could have been under certain hypothetical conditions is to turn the concept of excess deaths into yet another device to aid the powerful in dodging responsibility. The concept of excess deaths has real critical force for helping identify how things are worse than they could have been, such that action must be taken. To reverse that, and to say that now things are better, at a time when COVID deaths still continue is an attempt to urge further inaction; in other words, to get people to care even less than they already do about COVID deaths. This rhetorical move by Leonhardt reminds me of the writer Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Before experiencing the pandemic and its minimizers, I used to think that sounded a little over the top.
A hostile reader would no doubt respond that Zero COVID is impossible, urging that we must learn to live with the virus, which is to say, learn to stop caring about anyone killed or otherwise harmed. Ghouls like that want us to forget that the only ethical response to the pandemic is to make the maximum possible effort to prevent harms. Some people argue that preventive measures can become intense enough that they do more harm than COVID — the cure worse than the disease, as the cliché goes. I’m skeptical, but in any case, we have never been anywhere near that point during the pandemic.
In any case, if there is a line where prevention measures should stop because they become harmful, such a line is a political one: a matter of values and analysis, to be deliberated upon and determined democratically. We have had no such politicking in the pandemic. Instead, the government, aided by its nihilist flunkies like Leonhardt, has sought over and over again to avoid politics about the pandemic, treating it as something natural and inevitable for which no one is responsible and about which nothing can be done — after all, if nothing excessive is happening, then there’s no need to do anything. It’s a rhetorical move that tries to get people to believe that everything that could be done to prevent COVID harms has been done, such that there’s nothing more that could or should be done and there’s no responsibility on the part of the government. And, crucially, the point of the rhetoric is to get people to come to believe all of that without anyone ever having to present an argument to that effect. It’s a deeply manipulative kind of writing that belongs more in advertising and infotainment than in serious journalism.
Finally, the concept of excess deaths itself has some limitations. That is, in thinking about excess deaths, we must resist the normalization of the baseline. We know society is hierarchical and unequal; we know health is socially determined; we know those two facts combine such that the most vulnerable, least powerful members of our society die younger and in larger numbers than people above them in the food chain. That reality is outrageous; the pandemic is an especially intense and nightmarish example of that reality. In measuring the specific additional deaths added by a particular bad set of events, we should not let our focus on those additional deaths make us numb to the other deaths, the ones that are not “excess.”
Instead of following Leonhardt’s urging to applaud a non-zero number of deaths, when we strongly feel our need for good news, we should focus on activist efforts to push back against the imposition of COVID harms. That kind of good news reminds us the pandemic is political and contested by people acting out values of solidarity, and reminds us we have at least some degree of power through collective action. That’s bad news to people — and I use the term loosely — like Leonhardt, who prefer a docile population that can be pushed into the ballot box, workplace, woodchipper, whatever.
Against the Leonhardts of the world, and the institutional decisionmakers like Biden who they exist to serve, we must insist on starting with the view that in a capitalist, racist, sexist society the conditions of our and our loved ones’ lives and deaths are political and inhumane, and that the powerful should be held to account for the ways they facilitate those harms. Of course Leonhardt would never recognize this, due to both character defects and the fact that he’s well paid to help people with blood on their hands to have an undeserved easy sleep. This is why Leonhardt should be treated as the opponent of justice that he is, working to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. His words, and those of his ilk, should be read critically, rather than credulously, which means identifying his distortions, inaccuracies, and omissions, and also being careful to maintain a critical distance from his attempt to reframe our basic understanding of the pandemic.