This essay from The Covid Underground offers three plausible positive endgames for the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the three ‘positive’ scenarios includes this:
In the next three years, the majority of the world population will be infected 6 or more times.
That leaves billions of survivors biologically aged, brain-fogged, bedbound, and betrayed by weakened immune systems. As in past pandemics, the millions of dead and disabled will create a labor shortage that empowers surviving workers.
Those who manage to minimize our Covid exposure will have the advantage in pushing for these changes.
We will start to see our numbers grow as more see the wisdom of avoiding reinfection.
I agree that this is a plausible scenario. Highly unlikely, but plausible. But to me it’s not a ‘positive’ endgame, it’s a nightmare.
I just don’t see how a future in which ‘billions’ of survivors are brain-fogged and bedbound is positive. Sorry.
Well, I suppose there’s an even worse alternative, the one in which billions of people are brain-fogged and bedbound yet the numbers of people who ‘see the wisdom of avoiding reinfection’ is going down, not up (a scenario which I consider to be just as plausible). Better to be in the endgame where a growing number of people make an effort to make things better than the endgame where people give up.
I comment on this because The Covid Underground isn’t the only place I’ve seen this sentiment.
At least in the United States, it’s becoming harder for covid-cautious people to integrate with society while maintaining their precautions. Fewer people test, fewer people wear masks, even fewer options for online participation (that last one surprises me, but it’s true, even Creating Change, an LGBTQ+ organization which should be aware of the legacy of AIDS, didn’t even offer a hybird/online option for people who considered in-person attendance too risky). This limits job options, such as when someone has to choose between attending a conference which is important for advancing their career or avoiding covid exposure. (People wouldn’t need to make such choices if conference organizers made conferences safe, at the minimum offering options for virtual attendance). Or when people avoid certain jobs altogether because they don’t consider the workplaces to be safe.
And that’s just work. There’s also social life, and medical care, and grocery shopping, and more.
Staying covid-cautious requires sacrifices which would be unnecessary if society as a whole were committed to stopping covid transmission through, say, mandating improvements in indoor air quality.
On top of that, we’re trained to see decent jobs (the jobs which pay enough to cover basic living expenses without being miserable) as a scare resource to fight over, thus we have reason to delight in the demise of our ‘competition.’
This makes it easy to fall into the mindset where we look forward to seeing all the covid-minimizers succumb to the long-term illness they’d insisted wasn’t a big deal while we take their jobs and tell them ‘I told you so.’
Even if that scenario comes to pass, I’d consider it tragic. An economy in which we get decent jobs only when others become bedbound isn’t an economy I want to live in. After we say ‘told you so’ and they weep openly about how they regretted spreading covid, what then? That doesn’t feel like a basis for healthy communal relations going forward.
As John Michael Greer explains in “The Politics of Time’s Shape,” social movements which are losing politically tend to adopt apocalyptic visions in which they get to gloat over their opponents’ demise. He describes this as an ‘Augustinian’ shape of time, after St. Augustine, in that it features a righteous remnant who remain true to the movement’s vision as society sinks into depravity. The Covid Underground is presenting itself as a representative of that righteous remnant.
The Augustinian shape of time, of the emotional payoff of watching the apocalypse make the covid-reckless repent for their sins, is a sign of a social movement which has lost its political power.
If the only two ways of thinking about historical change your culture offers you are the Joachimist and the Augustinian shapes of time, in turn—and this is decidedly true of contemporary industrial society—the winners in any given social conflict are likely to embrace a Joachimist view in which their triumph marks the arrival of a grand positive transformation and a great leap forward along the inevitable track of progress, while the losers are just as likely to embrace an Augustinian view in which their defeat will inevitably be paid back with interest by some apocalyptic transformation in the near future. Those beliefs are comforting, they allow the cascading randomness of history to be forced into an emotionally satisfying shape, and they encourage each side to continue to enact their assigned social roles as winners and losers.
– John Michael Greer, “The Politics of Time’s SHape”
That doesn’t mean the covid-cautious movement is wrong in its factual claims, just as the political failures of the environmental movement doesn’t mean its factual claims about environmental destruction are wrong, or the political failures of Christian fundamentalism means it’s wrong about it’s factual claims. (Note: I’ve never been a Christian, but my lack of faith has nothing to do with Christian fundamentalists adopting an Augustinian shape of time).
I agree with many other covid-cautious people about the usefulness of respirators, that two-way masking with respirators is much more effective than one-way respirator use (hence the need for mask mandates), that we need to improve indoor air quality to reduce the transmission of airborne pathogens (not to mention the other health benefits, such as improved concentration when carbon dioxide levels are lower), that we need good surveillance of covid-19 and other pathogens, and most of all, that we need to drive down transmission of the virus so that it has fewer opportunities to mutate into something worse. As I edit this post, Arcturus has already dominated covid-19 cases in India and is spreading fast in the United States. How bad will Arcturus turn out to be over the next two months? I don’t know, but even if it turns out to be no worse than previous variants it’s reckless to keep rolling the dice.
However, I refuse to rub my hands with glee at the notion of covid-reckless people suffering righteous punishment from a covid apocalypse. I care more about stopping covid than being proved right, or punishing people for their harmful choices.
Though, I understand where this ‘darker edge’ of covid-cautious communities comes from. I resist this darkness. I’ll do what I can to better my own life and the lives of the people closest to me. If it comes to a dystopian scenario where billions are bedbound, even if I’m one of the ‘survivors’ in relatively good health, I won’t celebrate. I’ll mourn.
The Notes Which Do Not Fit 