A friend sent me a link to a piece in the New Yorker headlined: "The Case for Wearing Masks Forever." I automatically applauded, having read no further. I'm one of the few people in my social circle—and the only one in my 1L class—who still wears a mask every day in public settings, and I have long argued that routine masking should become a new social norm in the pandemic era. The article's headline was therefore one I could whole-heartedly endorse.
When I actually opened and read the piece, however, it turned out not to be an opinion column arguing for the proposition in its title. Rather, it is a profile of an ad hoc group of activists calling themselves "the People's CDC," and the author ultimately manages to make them seem rather silly. I can't tell how much of this is simply the journalists' power to shape a narrative. The piece, though it is not by Isaac Chotiner, nonetheless pursues a very Chotiner-esque strategy of allowing one's subject to speak up to the point at which they make themselves ridiculous.
The article portrays the group as not only absolutist in their convictions—any COVID infection is a public policy failing; no compromises are worth making to relieve the burden of public health restrictions—but also as inclined to adopt a conspiratorial interpretation of anyone who opposes them.
If public health officials and the Biden administration leadership have scaled back their recommended isolation periods for people with infections, for instance, it can't just be that they are bowing to political pressures and trying to tell people what they want to hear (a craven response that I do not find acceptable as a basis for setting public health policy, but which is a more plausible motivation for their actions than the conspiratorial one). Rather, it must be these officials are in the pocket of business interests that want to force people to work, because they value profit over human life.
There does not seem to be much willingness in this group to confront the possibility that many workers might actually want to go back to work, because they need the income. Of course, the People's CDC would argue that this is all the more reason why the government should pay people indefinitely to stay home. Would the absence of a workforce then create supply chain bottlenecks that would send up prices, thus making those cash stipends less valuable (as happened over the past few years)? Would this then force the government to spend more on the stipends, increasing inflation even further? Quite possibly.
The People's CDC contingent would perhaps argue that such dilemmas merely reflect the inherent contradictions of capitalism, and prove that the government ought to nationalize large parts of the economy. Who then will work these nationalized industries to ensure that a supply is maintained of basic commodities? It seems all that would result from this sequence is that the government would be forcing people to go back to work against their will, which was precisely what the People's CDC crowd was trying to avoid.
In short, if one believes that a central government has virtually unlimited power to remake society, and that solving one problem (COVID infection rates, say) can never unintentionally produce another (in other words, if one believes that "all good things go together," a phrase Albert O. Hirschman cites as one of the characteristic untested premises of progressive rhetoric), then there is no need to make any tradeoffs in addressing the pandemic. But if, on the contrary, there are multiple conflicting values in society and we have to somehow balance them as best we can, then it may well be that accepting some minimal level of COVID exposure is preferable to the alternatives.
To make this policy judgment on the alternatives, however, we would first have to know what the People's CDC is actually proposing. And this—at least as represented by Emma Green in the New Yorker piece—is by no means clear. She asks one of the informal spokespeople for the group at one point what realistic set of social policies could bring COVID infection rates to absolute zero. The spokesperson responds: "It's not our job to dictate policy [...] We're filling gaps. We're trying to change the narrative. And we're leaning into love and equity."
The problem with refusing to present an alternative policy is that you make it impossible by definition for anyone to say yes to your demands. As a strategy, therefore, it is fatal to the success of any advocacy for a cause. I'm reminded of a scene in a story by Caroline Blackwood, in which a driver is blocked on the highway by an ad hoc hippie protest during the Vietnam era. "For the love of Christ," the driver thinks, "what did they think they were demonstrating? If they were against the War, he was certainly with them. [...] How the Hell could you tell from their placards? 'Love!' 'Love!' 'Politicians take a trip!' How could they expect anyone who was sane to join them for Love?"
So too, if the People's CDC can't tell us what they are for, in practical terms, how can anyone be expected to agree with them? If they don't actually know where they are trying to go, apart from the vaguest general direction, then why should anyone be expected to follow them there? And if they do know where it is, why can't they tell us so more clearly? As David Mamet once wrote in a very different context: "What would have prevented them from a clear statement of their goals had those goals been realizable and laudable?"
Here, though, is the keenest absurdity of all: there are actually sound public health measures that can be taken to achieve many of the People's CDC's goals. Moreover, they are pretty easy to implement, and do not actually require the elaborate society-wide transformations of the whole economy and of human nature that the activists seem to demand (in their most grandiose moments). The funny thing with masks, after all, is that they are not only the most effective tool we have for limiting COVID's spread: they are also entirely compatible, as I've long argued, with "reopening" society, going back to in-person work, traveling, and most other parts of our pre-pandemic lives that we value.
If we accept that "dictating policy" is in fact "our job," so long as we are setting ourselves up as critics of existing policies, then we discover that it is entirely possible to formulate the People's CDC's core objectives as a set of coherent and actionable recommendations. For instance: encourage people to voluntarily mask up in public indoor settings (I do this every day); fight for more paid sick leave and family leave from work; extend the recommended quarantine time and require employers to allow workers to stay home for the entire period; acknowledge in public communications the dangers of long COVID, reinfection, and how much we still don't know about the disease's potential long-term effects.
If that's all we're really talking about here, then I am fully on board. I 100% agree with them. And I suspect we could persuade a lot of other people to sign onto this project as well, so long as we explained it to them in these concrete terms, and refrained from accusing them of bad faith or of being shills for corporate interests. What's more, it becomes clear as soon as we formulate these action steps that they don't actually require us to transform all of human society and the global economy in one go. We could make incremental and measurable progress on all counts, without taking an all-or-nothing approach and insisting on immediate radical change.
To frame the debates in these more realistic and actionable terms, however, would require a sacrifice on the part of the activists. It requires letting go of the belief that one is part of some transcendent and ineffable struggle. One loses mystic zeal as soon as one realizes that one's policy objectives are not really transformative love and ultimate justice and global revolution, but rather: "wear more masks." But accepting such a sacrifice of religious fervor will yield the far greater benefit that one has a chance of actually persuading others and accomplishing one's goals.
No comments:
Post a Comment