Clarity

How are you feeling? If you are like me, you've been in lockdown in your house for several weeks now. 

Likely, your experiences are unlike anything you've felt before. Because of the ubiquity of your experiences--weird as they are--they seem too banal to write down. Yet, it's important to do so. Keep a journal. We know a lot about the Great Plague because people like you and me chose to keep diaries, not letting the narrative be dominated by the few. Look back on what you have learned later. Hopefully there is a later. 

Initially, you might have tried to soldier on as you did before, synchronously teaching your classes through Zoom, and getting utterly exhausted in the process. You might have tried to remain a productive scholar, maybe even crank up your productivity, because that's what Newton did, apparently. Maybe you've started baking, knitting, doing your own home repairs, cutting your own hair. 

But now, as the weeks wax on, all that busyness cannot take away this growing feeling of clarity. This clarity is not merely an intellectual feeling. The ubiquitous sound of cars has all but died away. The air is crisp and clear. The birds have never sung more loudly than before. The streets are all but abandoned. 

There are lots of things presenting themselves to you that you have always known, but that you have never truly known. You always knew that departmental meetings are mostly not needed. Now you really know how many meetings we need (it seems more than a few a year, but fewer than weekly. We met weekly in the months leading up to the closure and all those meetings that seemed so important seem like they can often be handled through a vote by email).

On the other hand, there seems no perfect replacement for face to face teaching. Our incentive structures, for tenure, promotion, prestigious jobs do not value us being present for our students in the classroom. Our students need us. Being there for them in person is the best way to serve them. There is something about the physical proximity of student and teacher, the gesture, the eye contact, gauging their faces (did they get it?) that is hard to replace. 

You already knew things were hard for grad students and our contingent faculty, but we now feel it even more. A postdoc I spoke to recently has been receiving emails with heartfelt appeals from his employer with pleas to donate some of his spare earnings to the institution. One should not take it personally--they send this to all their employees, the cushy ones in tenured positions, but also those who will lose their jobs, their health insurance, this summer. What is the mission of our universities? Is it to empower the people through education? Or are they just machines for endowments and tuition fees? How do we turn things around? 

You might feel a sense of shame as you furtively navigate through the aisles of the supermarket, getting your supplies for the week when you see those underpaid workers, showing up day after day. You knew that they are unfairly treated. You've always known their wage does not reflect their true contribution in society. But now, you truly feel it. You know it. Don't try to repress the sense of shame as you go back to the safety of your home. We ought to feel this shame. 

You ready knew that racism is a societal ill that harms people. But now you see it ever more starkly. In Saint Louis, the city I live in the statistics are as follows (at the time of writing): all but three of the nineteen or so people who died of Covid-19 are black. In the UK, BAME (black and minority ethnic) people are disproportionately likely to be diagnosed with, and die of Covid-19. Again, the disparities in health between ethnic minorities and white people in the UK and the US are not news. But now, we witness it in a way we haven't before. In the NHS, the UK national health service, BAME doctors and nurses are bullied more, and face more medical scrutiny. And now, the first ten medical doctors to die of Covid-19 in the UK were BAME. 

You already knew that democratic governments are in crisis. Now, you really feel how they are letting us down. It turns out candidates high in entertainment value, lovable clowns or self-styled businessmen, aren't any help to us right now. The middle class has been largely shielded from the adverse effects of bad government. That's why you might have put up with them for so long. 

You already knew that companies such as Amazon and Facebook have little accountability as they control lots of aspects of our lives. But now, with your options limited, you really feel it. I left Facebook, but like others unhappy with Zuckerberg's policies, I'm back. A lot of social interaction takes place on social media and this is especially the case in a lockdown situation. I've had to use Zoom like most academics, and learned that Zoom was sending data to FB, even of users without profiles. Given how FB governs our social interactions and how Amazon is governing our buying patterns, should we not have more public control in how this all works? 

You already knew that governments have shamefully abdicated their responsibility. But now, with lives lost and no game plan, you really feel it. They bought into the individualism narrative, as Dewey already noted (1927), not acknowledging our interdependence and how our individual actions can harm others. Their laissez-faire attitude has left a power vacuum in its wake.  "Nature abhors a vacuum", Dewey points out, "When the public is as uncertain and obscure as it is to-day, and hence as remote from government, bosses with their political machines fill the void between government and the public." (1927, p. 120) We see it now with Amazon, whose response has been more nimble and swift than the dithering responses of most western democracies. 

Reflecting on the industrial revolution, Dewey remarks: "was a movement, which involved so much submerging of personal action in the overflowing consequences of remote and inaccessible collective actions, reflected in a philosophy of individualism?" (Dewey 1927, 98). The essential workers, our bus drivers, grocery workers, healthcare workers, are now having to choose between foregoing pay and ability to stay alive or to expose themselves to the virus. So much for individualism. 

The ineptitude of our leaders is on full display. I hope no hagiographies of Boris Johnson--and I wish the man well and am glad he recovered--will cover up the massive damage his cabinet did to the country, the thousands of preventable deaths. We can no longer ignore it. Sure, we will be gaslit into believing this didn't happen, as Gambuto says. Our minds will be massaged into ignoring the mass graves, the nurses in corridors mourning dead colleagues. But we should keep this clarity. Write it down. Remember it. 

Comments

[Kate Norlock]

My studies of past evils include marveling at how determinedly most humans run to normalcy, bury the past and eagerly act as if it did not happen. But this is all the more reason to value your post. Like you I hope that more will remember this and act on it than not.

[Marcus Arvan]

This is a really great post, Helen. I am really curious to hear about other people's experiences of ostensive clarity.

I've had some of the same experiences of clarity as the ones you express here. One other piece of (seeming) clarify I've experienced, though, is just how royally screwed up our pre-COVID way of life was at a fundamental level--its hecticness, competetiveness, rat-raceishnness, etc. I mean, I think I always knew this at some basic level, but it never seemed as crystal clear to me as it does now.

For the first time in ages, I've seen parents out walking with their children (rather than shuffling their children from one organized after-school activity to another), couples outside walking and talking with each other, people simply sitting outside in the quiet air, etc.

Life has slowed down in a way that quite frankly reminds me a bit of what life was like during my childhood. Days go by much more slowly now, and although in obvious ways COVID-19 life is incredibly stressful (people losing jobs, getting sick, worrying about loved ones, how to pay the bills, etc.), in other obvious ways people have been suddenly removed from the hecticness and stresses of our normal daily lives. Most everything we normally do has been stripped away from our lives almost overnight.

In my own case, this has resulted me in being able to actually sleep well for the first time since grad school. Although serious insomnia runs strongly in my family, it has really hit home just how much of the hecticness and stress of my pre-COVID life seems to have affected that very basic biological need and process. I expect that the insomnia epidemic (https://www.sleepdr.com/the-sleep-blog/cdc-declares-sleep-disorders-a-public-health-epidemic/ ) is at least in part a reflection of just how at odds with our basic psychological needs and desires our modern way of life is.

Anyway, that's been one of my own felt points of clarity. I don't know if others feel it too. But I do.

[Helen De Cruz]

Marcus: it's interesting how you mention (in the many points you talk about - sleep has been so much better for me too!) the parents walking with their children. It seems to me a genuine culture difference between the European countries I lived in and the US, the culture of ferrying your kids back and forth to clubs (we don't do that, the kids both attend one club in their school - not now obviously, as school is running remotely). I found the expectations of parenting here as hectic as the rest of American life!