Unpicking a mistake about social and moral imagination; notes toward a theory of covid minimizers as appallingly ordinary
Getting started on my covid zero zealot marxist agenda (CZ2M)... Throat cleared I hereby undertake a third beginning for this blog, this one intended as more (as actually!) contentful. I’m convinced, as I said before, that the covid pandemic can’t make sense without a Marxist account of capitalist society, but that account is merely a necessary and not a sufficient condition for making the pandemic make sense. Furthermore, I think the concepts are transformed or at least inflected by what one applies them to - so the way one is a marxist will presumably be changed as a result of grasping the pandemic. At the very least, building bridges from the most abstract and general account of capitalism to a more fine-grained time and place specific account of this particular moment in capitalism (and I’m most concerned with the US since that’s the specific part of the world where I live) will presumably be an intellectually generative activity. Part of my agenda for this blog is to try to advance my own thinking on these matters and to do so, as I said last time, in relative community.
For my own reference and on the off chance it’s of interest to anyone else, I thought I’d drop links here to the previous work of mine that’s relevant to my purposes here, going from most immediately about trying to talk about the pandemic to least so. I’ll put those at the bottom of this.
What I thought I’d write about here is something I’m right about (naturally!) but which I think I started off thinking through in a backward way (as usual!). Here goes.
As I mentioned in my socialism conference talk and a draft I’ve not finished and had to pause due to other responsibilities, I think covid minimizers have two facets. I talked about a related thing in my book, I said that employee injury law can be understood as having a social imagination - by which I mean an account of society and institutions operate - and a moral imagination - by which I mean an account of the moral worth of people in society. These are often present as much or more as implicit ways of perceiving the world as they are conscious and argued for. At a later date I might try to flesh this out more in relation to Goran Therborn’s account of ideology. For now, quickly, Therborn says (I’m paraphrasing slightly) that ideology is always a matter of getting people enrolled in answers to three questions: what exists or not, what is good or not, and what is possible or not. He spins that out into a set of six kinds of postures or dispositions or subjective positions people can inhabit in relation to authority and domination. The names of all six escape me just now, but they include a sense of being represented, a sense of deference to those one believe to be one’s genuine betters, fear, and resignation.
Now, minimizers - and for that matter, every decision-maker whose actions has bearing on other people’s exposure to covid! - can be looked at in terms of their grasp of actual social reality (and the biological reality of covid and its harms), and in terms of their sense of the moral worth of those most likely to be harmed. These people could not do what they do if they both a) understood reality accurately and b) saw those most harmed as their moral equals. They just couldn’t live with themselves. They need to either misperceive reality or become convinced inegalitarians, or both.
So here’s the mistake. I initially thought of that stuff this way: the system needs this, thus something is happening to meet that need. There’s an element of that which is true, but it has to be understood correctly. The need is descriptive, not causal. That’s wonky. Here’s what I mean. Capitalism is a society of unmet needs to a significant degree; it’s a society that on a terrifying recurrent basis destroys huge amounts of wealth and kills a great many people. That a need exists just says that there is some potential consequence unless something happens, and it’s not at all uncommon that consequential somethings fail to happen with really bad shit resulting. So the need isn’t explanatory. But the need is a jumping off point for how to look some things in the world. Minimizes could not do what they do if both a) and b) that I mentioned were to obtain; since minimizers do what they do, then either a) or b) or both do not obtain for them: they don’t accurately perceive reality and/or they don’t see the rest of us as their moral equals. The need didn’t cause the misperception and inegalitarian moral perspective, the need just helps us to notice the social presence of the misperception and inegalitarianism. So where are those generated? The answer to that is a handwavey ‘in ideology!’ but also it has a great deal to do with baseline realities of life in a capitalist society. In capitalism we’re relatively separated from each other in a variety of ways - if I remember correctly Tony Smith says that we live out a dissociated sociality in capitalism.
For one thing, we have limited interactions because we’re sort of siloed off into discrete locations in the social division of labor, and the siloes we do occupy are themselves hierarchical, and information, stories, experience are distributed along the lines of those hierarchies. So there’s a relative starting point of relative ignorance about or lack of perceiving or conceptualizing other people.
For another, there’s a baseline social indifference as well, tied to market dependency. We treat each other impersonally and to a significant degree have to in order to psychologically survive. Some people suffer atrocious deprivation and that can’t be fixed in capitalism, so one has to learn to live with the presence of that deprivation, even the most big-hearted generous person does so to some degree: while it’s good to empathize with the suffering of others, one must also bound that empathy so as not to become swamped by, drowned in the suffering of others. Furthermore, we have to move around each other, so to speak, in a literal sense in public spaces and in a metaphorical sense as we live out our lives. This is even more in force further up the food chain, as people who hire other people come to be okay with not hiring those who they didn’t select, despite the consequences for those let unemployed.
Related, there’s a pervasive tendency to instrumentalize people, especially for those higher up in the food chain and those climbers who want to get to a higher position in the food chain. This too is relatively socially normal and in some respects what’s really remarkable is the degree to which this doesn’t fully obtain! In a society predicated on using people, some people get comfortable using others.
There’s also a built in degree of or at least temptation to hostility toward others as part of competition. This is certainly the case with business competition, but it’s also true with job hunting - everyone hopes they get their needs met, knowing at least to some degree that there will be people left without their needs met. Even the most compassionate people often still hope they’re one of the ones who gets a seat when the music stops in this nightmare game of musical chairs.
All of these forms of awfulness are especially intense among those higher up the foodchain when looking downward, and these forms of awfulness both inflect and are expressed in various forms of oppression like sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and ablism. It’s only partially the case that racist, sexist, etc ideologies foster these forms of exclusion, subordination, and violence. It’s also that the hierarchies of class, command, and discarding those marked as surplus themselves foster those ideologies. Like, OF COURSE a society that marks so many for discarding will also generate ideologies that help people become okay with that discarding.
We can, of course, and should, look a lot more closely at various kinds of ideologies and processes of discarding, and how they’re present all over the place - in law, science, medicine, religion, art... What I suspect is often the case is that someone doing something awful is already in motion as a doer of that awful something and being in motion in that way gets them to generate (or look for, collect) ideological support for what they’re doing (ideology is to some degree an effect), and they also have ideologies that help their current activity have moment (ideology is a partial cause as well). Furthermore, they tend to have more than one ideology that points in the same direction regardless of apparent logical consistency - in the terms I put it above, will inaccurately perceive reality and thus not need to think about how those harmed are not their moral equals, which lets them believe they are egalitarians, and lurking underneath that will also be inegalitarian views on the (lack of) moral worth of other people, with the latter views able to step into place should failure to accurate perceive reality start to not work.
One last thought: I think in the present there’s a tremendously important role being played by not knowing in various ways, so that the Biden administration itself doesn’t particularly want to think about any of the actual realities of the pandemic and especially doesn’t want the population to think about the pandemic. As I said, for Therborn, one of the questions ideology gets people to answer in specific ways is ‘what exists or not?’, and in this case much more than an active affirmation like ‘covid does not exist as a real threat’ it’s a lot more a matter of just not addressing at all, pointing and shouting ‘oh my gosh what is that over there?!’ I think this indicates that they haven’t had the success they’d prefer to have when it comes to successfully making it seem impossible to do anything about any of this and likewise have not have the success they’d prefer to have when it comes to controlling people’s views on what is and is not good right now.
I lied, that was one more second to last thought, THIS is one more last thought: part of what I think is happening in the pandemic is that really capitalism is capitalisming normally and what's throwing a lot of us is that we expect something different from business as usual to be happening simply because the fact that many millions have died and many continue to die doesn't seem all that normal! We're right in the moral impulse there, and wrong in our social expectation that capitalism and the capitalist state and our employers really care much at all about what it is in the present that is so horrifying not normal. And in the awful nightmare fun-house-mirror normal we're living through (dying from), a lot of what's going on is the application of rhetorical tools and concepts and practices and institutions from the ordinary life prior to the pandemic to this terrible reality: people are using law, stats, medicine, state power, their authority over us as our employers, etc etc to do what they've always done, and the ways they lived with their actions before are the same basic ways the live with their actions now. If anything, that there are efforts to restore the efficacy of the old normal ideologies, rhetorics, ways of being in the world, speaks to how far from normal capitalism still is right, to the consternation of the various ghouls in power. I'm basically going 'they're saying what their sort has always said' which I absolutely do not mean as saying 'the ghouls don't need to be explained' but rather what I mean to say is that explaining the minimizers and other pandemic ghouls is far less a matter of explaining anything exceptional about the pandemic and is far more a matter of explaining the ordinariness of ghoulishness in capitalist society both pre- and mid-pandemic. I suspect there's also something in this about how being subjects of liberal democracies wrongfoots us, I talked about this a bit in my social murder talk (link below), I want to think more about that. I think this has an important tie to the bit where Walter Benjamin writes about the sense 'wow this is STILL possible TODAY?!', (which quoted in my Bill of Health piece on the banality of pandemic evil, linked below), sorting that out is for another time though, must sleep.
Of course all of the above is provisional and all of the above could and should be concretized much more in various ways, but that’s beyond me at the moment. Alright, enough (too much!), it’s late and I have work tomorrow so I’ll stop there. Below is the list of links I mentioned to previous work of mine:
My social murder talk, the text that was the basis for it - https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/socialism-2023-conference-talk-on-social-murder
this was part of a panel, the audio for which is here - https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/dp-x-s23-how-capitalism-kills-social-murder-and-covid-19-session-2
This is my stuff at Bill of Health - https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/21/depoliticizing-social-murder-covid-pandemic/ and https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/09/19/pandemic-nihilism-social-murder-and-the-banality-of-evil/ and https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2023/07/24/running-cover-for-death-pandemic-minimizers-normalize-an-inhumane-baseline/
That stuff is all drawing on and developing the argument I make in a bit longer form and more Marx-nerd tone in my chapter in this edited volume - https://link.springer.com/book/9783031361661 (I started work on what eventually became this chapter in January 2020 and have repeatedly set it aside for a long time then come back to it, finishing it fully (to the degree I ever finish anything, damn) in early 2023.)
I think that stuff is the most relevant to what I want to do here.
There’s also my stuff at Peste - https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/broken-sociality and https://www.pestemag.com/the-snowzzies/mta-creativelicense-2022
me on the court case NFIB v. Department of Labor at the LPE Blog - https://lpeproject.org/blog/seven-reactions-to-nfib-v-department-of-labor/ and on Marta Russell - https://lpeproject.org/blog/moral-equality-marxism-and-outraged-empathy/
A little further afield, in this piece I summarize my book, present a summary of how I understand capitalism, and use those to argue capitalism is a necessarily disabling society - https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol170/iss7/6/
This is my book - https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/twentieth-century-american-history/injury-impoverished-workplace-accidents-capitalism-and-law-progressive-era?format=PB
My friend Abby also suggested that my chapter in this edited volume is relevant as well, though it requires some bridge-building to be so and she’s done most of that bridge building mentally than I have. Parking it here as a mental note to remember to think more about it - https://www.elgaronline.com/display/edcoll/9781788119856/9781788119856.00020.xml The gist is that there are at any given moment arrangements that promote governability within capitalism - institutionalized forms of class collaboration (often the emergent product of prior class struggle and also the context in which some current class struggle occurs), which serve to help confine the working class’s aspirations to capitalist society (this whole sentence is basically me cribbing from Simon Clarke), and at certain moments those arrangements get called into question from above, often in response to capitalism’s crisis tendencies.
I have also have some old notes on my writing to think blog - https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/blog - like some my notes on Goran Therborn’s book on ideology and my notes on how Søren Mau's book Mute Compulsion and Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton's book Health Communism relate to each other, which I should go back over eventually. (How does that lil blog relate to this one? I dunno either, other than I’m hoping to be more focused here, with more random shit going over there maybe? Or maybe I’ll drop that old blog entirely, again I dunno either.)