In a perfect world, I am using this pandemic as an excuse to work on my two books, and also to write daily blog posts and build out my email list. But alas, a month before this whole shitstorm kicked off, my wife and I had our second child, and the little bit of relief we had — daycare and sleepovers with grandparents for my toddler — disappeared.
What follows would have been lovely as several blogs, but I had to write them one-handed with a colicky infant laying on my chest. So please: forgive the scattershot nature of what follows. But as someone who is writing a book about coping with the "apocalypse," I feel I have a few things to share that might be worthwhile.
I’m counting this as my first entry in a column I’m calling “Book Rex.” I even drew a mascot for this column. Meet Noam Chompsky, the Bookasaurus Rex.
We're going to be fine
One of the most persistent and demonstrably wrong narratives around disasters like the one we're living through is that they reveal just how tenuous civilization really is. We all like to think that, if you take away the parental authority of the government, we all descend into a Lord of the Flies scenario where we consume each other until all that remains is a putrid skull on a stick.
We get this, I think, from the hideous 20th century. It was a traumatic hundred years for a society to live through -- two world wars, the invention of world-ending bombs, the creation of economic systems that could consume the entire biosphere, depressions, totalitarianisms, the crumbling of colonial empires and the dozens of ensuing wars for independence, genocides, holocausts, mind-shattering drugs, mind-shattering science, and the collapse of every conceivable order into mind-boggling chaos.
We could be forgiven for taking a dim view of humanity in such times, but we've now made it the only view of humanity that can be held by thoughtful people in the 21st century. And it's just not correct.
The essential reading in any cataclysm is Rebecca Solnit's 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. In it, Solnit makes the case -- supported by most disaster research -- that disasters actually reveal the opposite of our “every man for himself” imaginings. Civilization is, in fact, quite resilient, because what makes civilization strong is not massive institutions, it's not strong leaders who are ready to commit acts of breathtaking violence, it's not rough men in uniforms forming a thin blue line between order and chaos.
It's just people. Not heroes, not superhumans, not Great Men of History, but everyday people who notice that something needs doing and then do it. Solnit points to the civilian flotilla of boats from Staten Island and New Jersey that crossed the bay on September 11th and evacuated half a million people from the cloud of ash, debris, and human remains choking Lower Manhattan. This totally decentralized effort did this work in less than nine hours. Fewer people were evacuated from Dunkirk.
Or take the fact that our first responders -- who we rightly admire -- actually save fewer lives in major disasters than bystanders. An article on the topic in Scientific American made it clear why:
““In fact, during disasters, the survivors themselves are the first responders, because they were already there when the disaster happened. The decisions survivors make can and do save their own lives and the lives of the people around them. It can take a while for help from the outside to arrive, but people don’t just sit around waiting. They begin to organize themselves into groups, identify the resources they have, and use those resources to help others. In fact, this spontaneous response is so reliable that research from around the world has found that people are often more likely to be rescued by these emergent, informal groups than they are by official search and rescue teams.””
If you look around during this pandemic, I suspect you will see something similar unfolding: despite all of the governmental failings at the federal level, people are banding together, sharing information, distributing resources, and are working together to come up with positive solutions. They are arranging impromptu relief funds, they are using 3-D printers to make PPE equipment, they are reaching out to isolated friends for digital happy hours.
The idiots who are playing two-hand-touch football games in the park are, in fact, a small minority. Most people are trying to help. And a good chunk of those people are doing active good in this nightmare. That doctors and nurses are doing good is perhaps not surprising, it is literally their jobs to save lives, but will you ever look at a grocery store clerk the same way ever again? Or a mailman? Or a janitor? These people are literally saving us, and all they’re doing is stocking shelves, dropping off packages, and mopping floors. It is not glamorous deeds of derring-do that keep a society functioning.
The cool attitude to adopt, of course, is that people suck. That they are stupid, that they ruin everything, that they can't be trusted. Your doors are to be locked at night, your neighbors to be viewed with suspicion. Faith is to be placed in a benevolent dictator, or perhaps in a more educated elite.
What is not acknowledged is that this educated elite is precisely the group that created a system where a psychopath could be elected to the Presidency with a minority of the votes. It is elites that start the wars, it is elites that tank the economy, it is elites that dismantle our public health infrastructure so they don't have to pay higher taxes, it is elites that block healthcare for all, it is elites that pick apart the natural world and sell its scraps for change.
It is the elites that have adopted a totally nihilistic worldview, where nothing matters and all is for sale.
How is it cool or realistic or edgy, then, to simply agree with them when they tell you people suck? The most subversive thing you could possibly do in disaster scenarios is to believe in your neighbor. It's not even that risky: anyone who's lived through a catastrophe (9/11, Katrina, Sandy, Trump) knows that when we need each other, we show up.
The powerful created a lot of the problems that caused COVID. Some of those in power will do good things, will be good leaders. But the people who do the real life-saving work will be the ordinary people who take the fate of their community into their own hands.
The value of a hard day of no work
One of the recurring themes on political social media during this shutdown has been "HEY, THIS IS WHY EMPLOYER-BASED HEALTHCARE IS STUPID." Because obviously: yes. This whole system falls apart when 6 million people lose their jobs and health insurance in a matter of weeks because of a public health related emergency. This flaw was always in the system, but it was only happening to one person at a time, rather than everyone at once. And it's a good point: fuck any future system that doesn't give literally everyone healthcare.
But there's a story here that I think many will miss: A lot of us do work that society doesn't even remotely need.
The designation of "essential" and "nonessential" work is obviously a little bit heightened at the moment, but the truth is, most of us will stay at home and not do all that much work and our society and the planet as a whole will actually be the better for it. Not only are we slowing the spread of disease, but we're also giving the earth a chance to breathe.
The Atlantic did a breakdown of some of the ways nature is responding to our little civilizational pause, and it is pretty staggering: air pollution, for example, kills millions of people a year. Air pollution has plummeted during the quarantine (it's also made the skies a lot clearer: a Facebook friend of mine is posting pictures every few days of how clearly she can see Long Island from her home on the Jersey Shore: it is not usually visible underneath the New York City smog). Boat noise in the oceans has been linked to higher stress levels in marine life, and thus lower levels of reproduction. Those oceans are now quiet.
Anthropologist David Graeber has made the point that the only significant drop we've seen in carbon emissions in the past few decades was during the global recession in the late 2000s. The reason for this -- when we've been doing so much to try and innovate climate change away with our technological advances -- is that climate change is a direct result of economic growth. We will probably see a similar, or perhaps an even greater drop in our emissions for this year. Our economic pain is the world's ecologic gain.
The question becomes unavoidable: if most of our jobs aren't essential, and it's our economy that's killing the earth… shouldn't we fundamentally change our economy? If our jobs are useless at best, and actively detrimental to the planet at worst, shouldn't we reconsider our relationship to work?
At the moment, it's an impossible question to answer, because the only way we can feed our families is through jobs. But plans like Universal Basic Income could give people the opportunity to skip working at a pointless job, and Universal Basic Income is suddenly, in this Year of Our Lord 2020, being temporarily advocated by no less a radical than Willard "Mitt" Romney.
Graeber himself famously diagnosed our country's reliance on what he calls "Bullshit Jobs" in a 2013 article for Strike! Magazine, but we as a country need to do something trickier than just realize that our jobs suck and are also not remotely essential to the functioning of mankind: We need to come to terms with the fact that one of our deepest held beliefs, that there is dignity in work no matter what the work may be, is wrong.
There may, in fact, be more dignity in doing no work at all.
The death of the individual
Social media loves a good intergenerational war, and COVID-19 has been a doozie. There was, at first, the glib Twitter jokes about COVID being a "Boomer Remover," then the recriminations of Millennials who refused to skip their Spring Break by amateur social media pundits, then the inevitable backlash when Millennials pointed out they weren't in school any more, they weren't on Spring Break, the real villains were the younger Zoomer generation, those were the fools killing our grandparents.
Which… is anyone shocked? Everyone sucks when they are a teenager. If you say you didn’t, then you definitely sucked. You probably still do.
On the other side of the intergenerational war — which, let’s be honest, is mostly just an attempt to abstract our concrete personal issues with our parents — has to be some sort of realization that it’s not one group of people but the culture as a whole that’s causing these problems.
““It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.””
Steinbeck wrote this in 1945, and it’s gotten truer by the year — look at the President. When humans build societies, they start with their values and work their way up. There’s basically no ceiling to what a group of people can do if they can collectively imagine it. Our society can put a man on a moon but it can’t imagine giving a janitor healthcare. Who is surprised at that? The Platonic ideal of an American is a murderous loner like the cowboy, or ubermenschen fascists like a superhero, or ruthless self-made Masters of the Universe like Gordon Gekko.
Why wouldn’t a teenager raised in this society go on spring break? We've taught them since day one that they should buck the conventional wisdom, break free from the crowd, follow their bliss. Self sacrifice is for suckers and saviors. The real heroes are the lone wolfs.
Of course, if we’d asked an anthropologist while constructing our society, they could’ve told us that humans evolved not as rugged individuals, but as small communities, and that’s how we function best. If we’d asked a biologist, they would’ve told us that even wolves aren’t loners — a lone wolf is an unhealthy, desperate, distressed creature that has lost or been rejected by its pack. If we'd taken this into consideration, we'd perhaps have a better understanding of that Most American of All Creatures, the Lone Wolf Shooter.
Separateness, a pandemic might conceivably teach us, is an illusion. We trade cells and atoms with other humans and other creatures constantly all day long. Selfishness does not exist in a vacuum. Nothing we do exists in a vacuum. We’re part of an ecosystem, our actions — even actions as inconsequential as handshakes — have repercussions. If a handshake can eventually kill thousands, what do we expect to happen, for example, when we dump an entire continent of plastic into our life-giving oceans will do?
The implications of this new reality are massive, and if we want to survive in our brave new world, we’re going to have to adjust to it. We just won't be able to unsee what we've seen: that there is no such thing as an individual.
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
-John Donne
To build a better society, we should first decide what it is we value most. I propose, in this time of social isolation, that hell is not other people, that we are at our best when we are with our families, our friends, and our communities. It is from there that we can start to build something better.
Ideas aren’t enough, of course, but you can't build something if you can’t imagine it first. All that we can collectively imagine right now is apocalypse and collapse. If we can’t fathom anything better, that’s all we’re going to get.