The great sociologist and public intellectual Eric Klinenberg, author of books on subjects as diverse as the horrors wrought by media concentration, the increasing number of Americans happily living alone, and the importance of great public spaces, has a new one called 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed,
on the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers an
extraordinarily rich range of issues and insights, some of them
familiar, others utterly fresh. Interviewing him last week at Chicago’s
Seminary Co-op Bookstore, I drilled down on the two I found most
important. In the course of our conversation, we wended our way to a
third, in developments that took shape after the book went to press. I
found his insight one of the most striking expressions of America’s
political brokenness that I’ve yet encountered. So in this essay, we
will wend our way there, too.
The
book starts on the day the Earth stood still, four years ago this week.
For Klinenberg, that came while on the road in Cleveland, Ohio, for a
big speech marking a major civic occasion. The organizers decided to go
forward with it, despite fear of this dread new disease; the theater
ended up being only half full. Klinenberg returned home to a frightened
family worried about his 13-year-old’s fever and wondering just what
they should do: "Isolate our child in a room of his own or hug and hold
him? Establish distance or deepen the connection? How were we to care
for each other? Would our instinct to keep each other close make the
situation worse?"
From
public-health experts and officials, the answer had already begun to
arrive: "social distancing." To the sociologist, this was practically an
emotional trigger.
In Chicago, Klinenberg recalled how he immediately thought back to the book
for which Chicagoans know him best: his classic "social autopsy" of a
stretch of 100-degree-plus days in 1995 that saw 45,000 households lose
electricity, homes losing water pressure from all the opened fire
hydrants, and 739 deaths, most of them old and economically vulnerable
people without anyone to look in on them. "Social distancing, back then,
literally meant death," he reflected in Chicago. He felt compelled,
contemplating his own family’s peril, to argue it still might: As he
summarized the argument he made in a New York Times op-ed published on March 14, 2020, "The WHO is wrong, and instead of saying we need social distancing, we need physical distancing—and social solidarity."
That’s this book’s first
great theme. He writes, "‘Social distancing’ turned out to be the very
opposite of what people needed to maintain health and vitality. The
concept conveyed a strong message: Sever ties and limit contact with
friends and neighbors. Seal your domestic space. Create a bubble for the
members of your nuclear family. Stay inside of it until the emergency
ends. In a crisis, however, social closeness protects people. Social
solidarity, the bonds of mutual obligation and linked fate between
people who share a neighborhood, city, or nation, can be a crucial
resource … The call for social distancing was rooted in good
epidemiological science. Sociologically, though, it was destined to
fail."
The book’s second great theme is what happened because of this in a certain
society all too lacking in social solidarity: our own.
The book’s title—2020—is
a numeric pun. It refers to not just the year he writes about, but also
the way in which chaos unveils social norms and structures that are
occluded in normal times. As "lenses," we like to say. What we see
afresh with this lens, in example after example, is how in America,
those norms and structures favor individualism over mutual obligation,
and in 2020, caused massive unnecessary death and social decay.
I
write "in America" advisedly—very advisedly. Klinenberg was intrigued
to watch a journalistic discourse emerge claiming the imprimatur of
sociological theory, even quoting the field’s founding hero Emile
Durkheim. "We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us," as a
writer named Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic, looking back from the vantage point of 2022 in a piece called "Why People Are Acting So Weird." "In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral."
Sounds unobjectionable enough, except that it’s a terrible distortion. "People" weren’t acting "so weird." Americans were.
"I
don’t think Americans appreciate the extent to which our experience of
COVID was an outlier," Klinenberg said in Chicago. Every nation
experienced a similar change in social life. He wrote, "In most of
Europe and Asia the lockdowns and distancing mandates were far more
severe." Measures of stress and anxiety increased everywhere. "Yet no
European or Asian society saw rates of destructive behavior anywhere
near the American level. In fact, the reverse happened: most of them
witnessed a remarkable decline in violent crime."
Same
contrast when it came to
public health. Klinenberg notes a metric experts devised, pre-COVID, to
address nations’ vulnerability to damage from infectious disease
outbreaks. Under it, America was rated the best-prepared nation on
Earth. The nation of Australia was far behind us. Except, came the
pandemic, and "if the United States had the same COVID death rate as
Australia, 900,000 lives would have been saved."
Like
the U.S., Australia was then governed by a global warming–denying
president, at a time of widespread national concern about increasing
social distrust and ideological polarization. But the country was
functional enough to enact normal
good-government responses. President Scott Morrison brought together the
heads of each state and territory and their respective health
ministers, formed a task force that set forth a federal plan and charged
the states to come up with their own ways to effectuate it, subsidized
the public production and distribution of masks, initiated lockdowns far
more encompassing than ours, and initiated contact-tracing protocols.
Afterward,
surveyors found trust in government, trust in science, and trust in
other citizens went way up among Australians—as happened in many
countries. Here, all these measures plummeted.
In my own writing
on the sociology and politics of COVID, I’ve noted the psychologist
William James’s lament that the only thing that seems ever to spur
nations to truly heroic levels of sacrifice—paradoxically, to a higher morality—is war.
A pacifist and a socialist, James longed for a "moral equivalent of
war": all the heightened sense of mutual obligation, none of the
slaughter.
Klinenberg
gives plenty of examples of how Donald Trump’s particular narcissism,
stupidity, and lunacy played an outsized role in rendering that state of
being impossible when it came to our COVID war—though he stresses it’s
important not to overdo his part in the causality.
We get the leaders we deserve.
Indeed,
by my lights, the best exemplification of the unique and deep-seated
cultural manias that rendered America’s response to the pandemic the
moral equivalent of a war of all against all was the mayor of Las
Vegas—a former Democrat, now an independent—who insisted casinos should
reopen as soon as possible and let the market sort out the rest:
"competition will destroy" the resorts where "it becomes evident that
they have a disease."
But, yes: Let us not forget Donald Trump.
Klinenberg
tells a tale of two cruise ships. The Diamond Princess, sailing from
Japan, gets permission to dock, and a team of epidemiologists gets to
work testing and quarantining passengers, armed with state-provided
phones and tablets and Wi-Fi so scientists can track the disease course.
That let them study how those contracting the disease related to the
physical layout of the ship, and to
conclude, very early, that the pathogen circulates through air and can
be spread by those without symptoms. They then unfolded a slow and
deliberate re-entry program of these citizen research subjects. Leaders,
meanwhile, educated the public in a crucial, basic reality of
fast-moving emergencies: that experts would get things wrong. That,
in exercising the precautionary principle, there might be overreach,
toward which people proved largely forgiving, not casting about for
blame: that trust thing, again.
Then, here.
The Grand Princess, sailing from San Francisco, did not get
permission to dock, because, the president of the United States said,
"I like the numbers where they are." When it did, it was commanded to
dock not in San Francisco, but Oakland—hiding the embarrassment at an
unglamorous industrial port in a majority-Black city. Passengers chose
whether to stay or leave, under the principle that mandatory testing was
a violation
of individual rights. The American way, right down to the denouement:
"And the whole thing ends with lawsuits."
Meanwhile, our leader
primed his followers to think like he does, to only see the world
through a friend-enemy distinction, always casting around for others to
blame. Which became a sort of contagion as well: a social one. For "our"
side cast around for someone to blame, too, with ever-heightening
bitterness. |
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You see it in a fascinating New York Post article
from two months ago. Anthony Fauci made the ex post facto observation
that the six-foot social distancing recommendation "just sort of
appeared … likely without data." President Biden’s current COVID adviser
ungraciously seemed to complain this proves "dissenting
opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely," and that
in future pandemics "America’s response must be guided by scientific
facts and conclusive data"—as if careful data-sifting under sluggish
peer review was desirable or even possible amid the fog of pathogenic
war.
Rupert Murdoch’s Post, meanwhile, weaponizes the entire "dispute" as proof of Trump’s critique of government as teeming with
deep-state monsters, dedicated day after day to smothering us all within their totalitarian maw.
Which
is where we are now, in the midst of a presidential campaign that
somehow finds us—"I don’t know if you’re reading the news," Klinenberg
remarked to a bookstore’s worth of guffaws—with the same candidates as
in 2020.
A
campaign, he concluded with genuine anguish, in which the previous
pandemic, where competent leadership could have saved 900,000 lives, and
the next pandemic, which in all likelihood will be both epidemiologically and sociologically more catastrophic yet, is hardly even an issue.
On "both sides," as the pundits like to say.
The
former guy opened an Orwellian memory hole within the architecture of
his campaign speeches, with his customary feral brilliance. He now asks
listeners if they were better off five years ago.
"It
wasn’t an accident," Klinenberg stresses. "He’s said it on several
occasions. It’s a strategy. And the idea behind it turns out to be quite
a popular idea in America: 2020 shouldn’t count. It wasn’t fair. Nobody
could have seen this thing coming; everything was fine before that;
don’t count this against him. If it wasn’t for 2020, the country would
be fantastic, and I was obviously unlucky, it’s not fair. I’m a victim.
I’m a victim."
And then there’s the current guy.
Our
interview was the night of the State of the Union address. We weren’t
able to watch, but Klinenberg pretty much predicted it based on what
Biden had been saying to this point. It was about 8,000 words long.
Little over 1 percent of those words concerned the preventable loss of 900,000 American lives.
Effectively less than that, if you don’t count the parts about the
attendant economic crisis, which seemed the main reason he brought it
up. Both were over and done with, was the point: just one more component of "the American people … writing the greatest comeback story never told."
Maybe
the White House divined from focus groups that "the American people"
just don’t want to hear about it. Maybe it would "step on his message"
that the American people can accomplish anything they set their minds
to.
On both sides, it’s all of a piece. 2020, and 2020, are the lenses that let us see this. "Something gets whipped up, and intensified, and locked in during that year. And because we’ve all been so eager to just get 2020 behind us and get on with our lives, and because we allowed the
previous president to say 2020 doesn’t count, let’s not worry about,
this has not really surfaced as a topic in our current politics."
What
Klinenberg said next needs exclamation points: "a list of some of the
things the next president will be dealing with: Russia and Ukraine!
Israel and Gaza! Nuclear Iran! China! Taiwan! AI! Climate change! And
maybe a new pathogen! It occurs to me that one would want to know how
adept a leader is at managing a crisis. That this is something that you
might want to select for."
Your
Infernal Triangle columnist adds: Agenda-setting elite political
journalists might want to cover this as an issue—maybe, if it’s not too
much to ask, with one-eighth or so the careful devotion to how Biden’s
supporters are reacting to him using an antiquated word to refer to
undocumented immigrants.
It’s like that New York Times front page
on May 24, 2020, listing names, names, names, names: "U.S. DEATHS NEAR
100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS." Ten times those deaths, however,
nine-tenths of them entirely preventable, is now, apparently,
calculable. Or at least, not the
obvious center of discussion about who next will lead the free world.
There is something truly broken about that. Hardly less insane than
going at the problem with bleach or bright lights or horse
tranquilizers. |
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