Masks & the economy & Teen Town & The Canoe & the pandemic.
If a journalist, a biologist, & a political philosopher sat down together to talk politics & science it is unlikely that they'd run out of things to say for weeks because they'd have to practically invent a new language.
Pandemic Papers Parts 1 & 2 were about what everyone could see was happening in the first 3 months of the pandemic. It was dedicated to perception. Now, a person with a curious brain is always at work trying to make sense of what we see & media messaging. Everyone detects some media nonsense somewhere. Spoiler: media nonsense is a feature, not a bug. Since we can't go out & see everything first hand, then we have to work out what is really happening the best we can.
Pandemic Papers: Thinking Parts 3 & 4 are about where the cultural messaging about the pandemic is open to criticism. It suggests some strange answers. I have so many questions.
Masking & social distancing
Almost before social distancing came up on autocomplete the media was putting out alerts that the term was outmoded. Social distancing is out. Physical distancing is in because, you know, zoom. And even Mirriam-Webster just dgaf anymore and admitted irregardless to the fellowship of words. Truly, 2020 is what we thought 2012 was going to be.
One of the strangest issues of the pandemic politics has been masks & social, er, physical distancing. It was bad enough that the WH Task Force policy was based on the incapacity of “just-in-time” production to deliver anything but profit, but then it had to be reversed based on some actual, basic science realities.
Masks both do, and do not, protect us from Sars-cov2. If the virus is in a droplet, then they do. If the virus is aerosolized, then they do not absolutely. But the probability of having a Sars-cov2 virus land in your nose or mouth is reduced.
But focusing on policy based on economic realities is just a past-time compared with the implications of mask-wearing on something else: the effects on children and their social development capacities.
To save time in disputation with Margaret Thatcher, let’s just say that society does exist and that children develop to live in it well or poorly. How do they do that though? Mainly by taking cues from or imitating adults that care for them. I think Paul Goodman was right when he said that you don’t have to give children speaking lessons as long as you talk to them a lot in a coherent way. He was using that as an example of why they don't need to be taught to read with school methods, but more on that later. Likewise, what the social sciences technically call social competence is developed in children by living in a stimulating, resource-rich environment. That will include having lots of contact with facial expression & variety.
I don’t know what people are thinking will happen with young children who experience a year of their very compressed developmental years with adults whose faces can’t be viewed. In my last Pandemic Paper I didn’t know what was about to develop when I said then that going out in public with masks was like seeing people stopping at the store on the way home from a black bloc action. Hoo boi.
I believe that if Sars-cov2 is as virulent & deadly as it seems in the culture, then of course, the tradeoff is good enough: a child can’t become socially competent if they can’t live to adulthood. That’s for real.
But so is the cost of denying children their developmental needs to become fully human, humane compassionate, intelligent beings in a big, strange world.
The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic had its version of this controversy that fall & developed an Anti-mask League in San Francisco that drew around 2000 people. The public health authorities had tried earlier in the year to market mask wearing as a patriotic duty b/c covering the face with fabric was considered effeminate, & it hampered spitting and smoking, traditionally masculine things. But after the WWI armistice in October 1918 the patriotic appeal was lost & masking faded.
Next time, ask a historian. It was a historian that busted the Galileo rare book—
Siderius Nuncius —hoax in 2012 by just checking a lunar calendar for February 1610 in the weeks before Galileo’s publisher had his proofs. He did with that what experts from 14 art and antiquities institutions had not been able to do. Unless. . . hmm. And in the process he introduced a little empiricism into the world of Rationalism and abstractions. *reaches for the smelling salts. Funny how empiricism just cuts the legs right out from under rationalism.
Is the pandemic the result of a plan or incompetence? Isn't that the question that is driving a lot of the antagonism over what should be done? The unsexy, but very real, answer is that it's probably a mix of both. So the real problem is tramping our way through where it is likely to be one, or the other.
Incompetence, or catastrophe, is a good cover for opportunism. And advertising since Edward Bernays marketed cigarettes to suffragettes tells us our minds will fill in the blanks of suggestive pictures with a balm to our anxieties. Capitalist realism somewhat aside, when there’s money to be made the free marketeers are right about this: there is genius in marketing to separate people from their money. And if advertisers can persuade people to save money by spending money, then what can they not do to subvert human autonomy? Powerful people are making a lot of money off this pandemic. And I don't just mean filling online shopping carts. Which is funny because the economy is about to be in even more dire straits than it already is. At least for most of us.
Except for this guy. It was reported yesterday that Jeff Bezos just added 30 billion to his fortune. That’s billion with a ‘b’. If you don’t have a feel for how much that is, here’s a cool guide, best experienced on your phone.
That little guide could make a person a dissenter.
Closing the Economy & Making It New Again: Guarding the Wall Street Bull
Isn't having the economy closed for 3 months bad for corporations, too? Yes. But only if they get no other longer-term gain from it. I don't know, more complete corporatization of the economy and simplified production and markets? Call me not-an-economist but I don't see how you can't see this coming.
The Mossack and Fonseca-ing of actual Main Street. Stay tuned.
If America hasn’t been a political project, but an economic investment from the get-go, then this would just be a new chapter in an old story. Charles Beard said that, but by the Cold War the world was divided between the Alger Hisses & the Whittaker Chamberses. And there it has mostly remained. The old Dulles brothers admiration for Leni Riefenstahl films hasn’t budged. Some would say it has even grown.
Just-in-time stock production methods failed to produce enough PPE for hospitals, but the ratio of supply-to-need was obscured by policy fights over federalism, free markets, & executive power. You know the military has a whole agency whose job it is to procure things & get them where they need to go in time, right?
In the hospital surge crises no one talked about comparative hospital bed availability.
Wikipedia even has an entry for hospital beds per capita by country. But it's in the Talk tab where you'll find a plea for expert advice about how to actually count ICU beds in the US since numbers are reported by region & not compiled in any centralized way, which suggests that it’s either hard to find the real figures, or the real figures don’t actually exist in any centralized form at all.
It’s like trying to find cancer clusters in the US. The reason the Erin Brockovich story is compelling is because it was both simple to add up, and difficult to find out, the real numbers.
It takes persistence and a sense of analytical coherence and completeness to cut through bureaucratic & media noise. Remember the part of the SAT test that used to be called Analytical? I'm not completely convinced that SATs measure much, but still. That part got substituted by Evidence Based Reading. Look, if you are on Tik$Tok for 5 hours a day you are going to get a lot of spurts of dopamine, but it’s going to destroy your focus for reading seriously, or looking around, while it hoovers up your information & drops it off in a mailbag somewhere, it could be China or it could be at the NSA, who knows? Snowden probably knows, but I don't know. I do know that nobody needs to hide the books in the Vatican library anymore. That’s just old skool.
Working from home means households bear the cost of incidental expenses for you during the work day. I can wear my pajamas to work and pay more for electricity & office supplies. And. . .toilet paper. Have you noticed yet that when the inventory for your favorite products are gone that the ones left are the more expensive ones?
Under the influence of a pandemic, the efforts to bring manufacturing back to the US have worked. Just not the way we imagined. Now consumerism is compressed, narrowed, & more.
People are now getting used to shopping for groceries online & at the discount markets. And even the full-line groceries still don’t have the stock varieties and inventory they had even 6 months ago. Sure, dairymen don’t want to pour out their milk. But they will get government subsidies. Factories, however, simply won’t need to produce as much of a variety of goods as they once did, they won’t need the skilled labor or variety of tooled machining or software, packaging, or delivery systems, if the gross domestic stock is simplified. And we won’t need to rely on imports as much if wages are depressed here but they are increasing in labor-rich countries [China]. Hayek wasn’t wrong when he said that prices convey knowledge instantly. Now our prices will convey how much has been lost in material richness of the marketplace. It’s utilitarian minimalism through and through now. Like having a futon for a bed and a sofa. Nevermind that those make terrible beds and terrible sofas.
Begin with a pandemic, end with a super-corporatized, leveraged economy.
I’m not saying the grocery store gods are writing this into the Book of Love. I am saying that a tendency in big, bureaucratic systems running on low margins will be to minimize breadth of investment & increase margins by doing away with fixed costs of consumer movement we used to call shopping. In a few years you'll be able to say to children, Yes, we used to shop by going out of our houses. No, really.
The policy talk has stayed mostly at the close-or-open, sooner-or-later level. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Every working person recognizes the power of the big corporation, whether that’s in price-fixing, union busting, or the simplified version of Wall-Street vs Main Street. The more complex issue is whether the economy can be changed to work in favor of the actual working majority. Since the electoral system is struggling to aggregate the true majority, it won’t be through voting. General strikes by organized labor were criminalized in 1947, which is why longshoremen striking on Juneteenth had to have an internal labor dispute justification to do that. Whatever your ideological commitments, lawful protest will be criminalized if it slows the creation of debt & collection.
The direct actions in the streets against racism in America started to happen. The old New Leftists thought, "It's going down!" They think possibilities for peace & compassion & experimentation are reviving. The new Old Leftists thought, "It's going down!" They think Jacobin & Counterpunch are lame b/c change isn't coming closer faster. There are a few tankies in there somewhere. Some are just trolls who like Stalin-waving memes. And somewhere else adjacent to all those were others, also called "Leftists," who thought the protests were overwhelmingly against systemic racism & rewriting history & politics from a neglected point of view. The left has been as fractured as the right for a long time, but that has mostly been obscured by conservatives thinking critics of liberal centrism have just changed their minds.
Today it was reported that a group of people signed a petition to *cancel Cancel-Culture*. Several sources called the signers 'liberals' & then went on to say some version of, "Welp, so much for 'Republican' & 'Democrat,' those just don't mean anything anymore." Reportedly the signers included Gloria Steinem, J.K. Rowling, & Noam Chomsky.
Have all the life-long leftists gone conservative? No. It's just that the cultural developments that put identity in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, culture, or any other particular human identifier ahead of class, privatization of property, capital free market critique in the same ideological stew are breaking out again. It makes for strange bedfellows. Okay, that's a hopelessly mixed metaphor. But that shouldn't be a reason not to talk in good faith.
Some people called leftists think class is the most fundamental problem. They think if property were more evenly distributed then all the other inequalities would either be mitigated, or go away. This is the view that says something like, "I don't care about an apology. I want you to send me a check." Their view is that identity politics is a capitalist critique with extra steps.
They don't think identity politics is wrong. They think it is not getting at the inequalities that perpetuate the discrimination in the first place. I mean, Bernie Sanders might be sighing in relief right now that he got out.
Other people, also called leftists, see racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and other discrimination as either too urgent to wait for an economic sea-change, or they don't want an economic sea-change, they just want less discrimination & more equality.
If you call them all Marxists then you can homogenize their dissent & bring back the 1950s Red Scare all in one word. Handy. There's probably a loyalty oath form in your faculty mailbox right now. Just kidding. Email.
Media are feeling their salad days again what with a pandemic, racial unrest, liberal guilt, intellectual conservative hauteur—which in any honest dissent in the university setting is small compensation for two generations of being closed out of consideration in nearly every form. [Even David Graeber, who lost tenure b/c he sided with unionization of grad students at Yale--but the settlement is confidential--said to Charlie Rose before Rose left public life by way of #metoo that more intellectual conservatives should have been inside the universities. And he's a real anarchist.] They weren't there. And neither was there an abundance of tenured professionals who happened to be people of color.
The faculty had taken the universities to be the centers of humanism, but somewhere along the way they lost the part of that that might have been good faith disputation. Probably b/c it had become an industrialized marketplace. But not a marketplace of ideas, the one place where the principle of a marketplace might have been based on generosity & compassion, & not the opposite. What the faculty didn't realize was that they had become the outsiders in an enterprise in which it was the students and donor class that were the allies.
And now the pandemic means that they are fighting for their actual lives as well as their intellectual power on the campuses. But the logistics of pandemic-teaching and its endless bureaucratic details obscure the kind of talking that should be going on about campus life: What about systemic racism and what does that mean for what counts as knowledge? That's the kind of question universities were purported to be made for.
Only they weren't really. Sure, they had invented scriptoria, books, & libraries & the quiet, ennobled environments in which to dispute interesting, central questions. But how much had they done that really, rather than hold the line on the way power was arranged? Because if you look closely it begins to seem like universities are not so much the centers of avant-guarde-ism as they are lagging indicators of power relations. . .with unwilling faculty being harnessed to the project & distracted by tasking that prevents their better critiques.
Evading this, everyone is frantically posting to try either to avoid, instigate, or cut a narrow path through the acrimonious bush country. Advertisers are in a rush to capitalize on the messaging. What America means is shifting. Re-examination is at a premium. The oligarchs are getting indigestion from their champaigne.
Bill "Just a Genius in the Garage" Gates was looking weirdly certain in all the uncertainty.
I was recently reminded that the Evergreen State College's 2017 Day of Absence controversy is about to be central again. Just to catch you up: Bret Weinstein had been on the biology faculty there. His real work is on the biological inadequacies of using the mouse model for human experimental prediction in drug effects—he’d tried to break The Steinbeck—but that was overshadowed by his 2017 dissent from the suggestion by students of color that the White students & faculty should absent themselves from campus, rather than the longstanding action there of students & faculty of color absenting themselves by their own initiative to demonstrate their contributions to the campus mission. A way to see their absence & feel their contributions. Weinstein had no problem with the Day of Absence. He had a problem with being asked to leave his campus outside his own initiative to do so. The two types of action were different.
What happened next was Weinstein was characterized as being part of an Intellectual Dark Web, which was then popularized by Bari Weiss. Then that became its own controversy. “Hey, Alexa. What’s the ideological weather outside?” Now umbrellas mean something besides rain and the American conservatives are claiming solidarity with Hong Kong protesters on the basis of their shared animosity toward the Chinese Communist Party. As Diotima said to Socrates, "My child, try to keep up."
Mike Nayna’s film Grievance Scholars communicated & made visible the Evergreen controversy from Weinstein’s point of view. The film is about a year old, so the subjects of this film are now in 2020 entertaining a certain amount of gasconade at the civil unrest and the uneasy alliances on the Left. On other campuses, the hard problem remains, Are you going to be in The Canoe or out of The Canoe? It's this generation's bus.
But that issue had to stand in line while faculty signed petitions and tried to prevail on administrations to use some of those billions in endowments to prevent a collapse, not of the universities it turns out, but of the faculty component of them. They hadn't gotten advanced degrees in software platform integration but that is their job now. Their expertise had become an afterthought in a culture that was a good example of the ship of state metaphor, states without philosophers. The central question is still whether humanism should be relevant or not to public life.
One solution to the social closeness of campuses in this pandemic is to create college Teen Towns. Hear me out, I think I might be serious about this. Why can't herd immunity begin with a population that really wants to socialize anyway? Arrange for the accommodations & services for the students, but let the faculty work remotely. Instead of gap years, what suburban students with tuition access wouldn't want to socialize on a campus with less direct faculty supervision?
Truth: If the evolutionary biologists are correct, then the young are biologically driven to socialize. Even if it is risky.
Seriously, if the media were not at the very moment pumping out stories about Sars-cov2 now attacking teenagers at an alarmingly higher rate than 2 weeks ago, Teen Town campuses could even become the tiny Swedens of America. And BTW, Anders Tegnell is the opposite number of Anthony Fauci and getting the same treatment. Tegnell's face is now a tattoo design and he's getting death threats.
Coincidentally, one news outlet reported today that Sweden paid a heavy price in lives for letting discretion prevail while the virus spread socially. Others are saying that Sweden is fine with that. We should ask them.
The residential students could become regulated, and regularly tested isolation pods, establishing their own herd immunity. I would never suggest that as a public service or for credit though. That would be inappropriate.
©Celise Schneider2020