I recently re-read, as many of us have recently, Albert Camus’ wonderful novel The Plague. There are two things that stay with me above all, and that I would like to use to reflect upon our current situation. The first is the relation between the individual and the community. The second is the tone of Camus’ narrator, of acceptance and non-judgment. Along these lines I want to venture a thesis about our current crisis, which is this: our coming together depends upon our acknowledging, without judgment, the decidedly different ways that each of us is experiencing these times.
There is a sort of loving gentleness with which the narrator in The Plague paints the portraits of a number of people living in this fictional town that is afflicted with the plague. They are so different in their reactions and in their preoccupations and styles of being, that you might imagine they belong to different novels rather than being the cast of characters who find themselves locked down together in a small city that is facing a formidable enemy. When I look around me and speak with my friends and visitors, I also see such a variety of experiences. There are the frontline workers: health-care professionals, grocery store workers, delivery people, and so many others who are facing the threat of this health crisis every day in their work. Then there are people who are stuck at home and experiencing even that in a broad variety of ways: we have seen videos of arias being sung on balconies, and we know there are also people staring at the wall in deep depression. There are people with nothing to do and people with not enough time in the day to work and care for their families. There are people baking and growing vegetables either because they finally have the time or because it makes them feel more in control, or comforted. There are people who are profoundly stressed by the notion of homeschooling their kids, and others who again are happy that they finally have the time to do something they had always fantasized about. There are people paralyzed with fear and anxiety and people being so productive you’d think they’d been given a few weeks to live. There are people living alone and people in large families, and each of those situations can incite various responses. There are people who have never been happier and people who are desperately missing their former lives, their routines and their friends and loved ones. There are people glad of the solitude and others withering away without the social interaction that is a vital part of their existence. I could go on. There are so many different experiences and so many different responses to each situation that I think it is fair to say that each and every one of us is fighting a different battle.
We are always in our own worlds because even when we face a common cause we each confront what is common from our own unique perspective. While we are all humans whose bodies are vulnerable to viruses, and while all of us depend in some way on the world economy, we bring such different histories to this moment that we discover our vulnerabilities to be unlike those of the others around us, even while there is much in common. And it is this that we have to share, because there is no conversation when everyone is the same and has experienced the same. There can only be solidarity where we come together as unique and singular beings, facing an enemy that would reduce us. Camus’ enemy was ostensibly the plague, but his novel was also meant to be read as an account of the Resistance during the Second World War, and that enemy was one that wanted to annihilate or assimilate all that was unlike some proposed ideal. Dictators all over the world right now are using this opportunity to push ahead with their own projects of annihilation and assimilation. To resist in solidarity is to acknowledge diversity and to see the strength in that.
There is no doubt that it is unfortunate to live in a bubble. We need to be aware of the inequities in our current situations, but using these inequities as a way to blame and shame one another for being in the wrong place in this system does two things: it further deepens the suffering of each of us and it gives in to the powers that would exploit our turning against one another. To address the first issue, I would say that many of us are being made to feel that having the experience we are having is something to either be ashamed of or to hide. It might be a sign that you are privileged if right now you are stuck in your home, but that doesn’t mean you are not suffering. You might be happy about what your life looks like right now, but that doesn’t mean you don’t care that others are suffering. Each of us needs to acknowledge where we are, and pay attention to what that experience is and to what it calls for. I would say that even the people protesting in Michigan are the victims of a system that is stacked against them and might be understood as coming from a place of suffering and deficit. I myself have struggled with this one in recent days, have found myself judging in very harsh ways anyone who would go out into the streets right now with a gun to protest being denied what they see as their right to freedom of movement and enterprise. But they are suffering, of that there is no doubt. And that they haven’t been made to understand what a social contract is, or that they might not have gotten out of that social contract the necessary elements of a good life such as a solid education, health care and robust civic participation, among other things, is certainly not their fault as individuals. Blaming even these protestors for getting this wrong is missing the bigger picture, I think.
Camus’ narrator is unblinking in his description of the various characters that populate the plague-ridden town, but never does he judge or criticize their actions (and he himself is a central character in the town). One character who learns to profit from the suffering of the rest, and who seems to clearly represent a collaborator on the other level on which this story can be read, seems to be portrayed simply as more unfortunate than the rest. When he meets his downfall, it’s not because he’s been singled out and judged by anyone else, but because his own well-being is not aligned with the good of the community, with his fellow humans. It’s this that undoes him.
Camus gives us a novel of resistance. Facing a common enemy, be it microbial or political, provides us the opportunity to come together as individuals each suffering in our own private way, but stronger for knowing that our well-being depends upon that of our fellow humans. We can each use this opportunity to look within, to acknowledge that where we’re at is true and important, and that nobody has the right to tell us that our current experience or suffering is not the right kind. It also gives us the opportunity to reach out to others whose situation right now may be very different, and to meet them where they’re at without judgment. Judgment kills the openness within us, kills our willingness to look at the most difficult truths and the most sensitive parts of us. In its power to tear us apart and distract us from our vision of a better world for all, judgment is our enemy now as much as anything.
Community and the Infinite in Each of Us
One of the fault lines that this current crisis has revealed is the distinction between society and community. A society can be composed of impersonal relations, and in our highly technological world it is more than ever founded on abstract articles of law and order and the various structural systems through which we depend upon and profit off one another. I would not be the first to point out the ways in which our lives are built according to the logic of capitalism, and in deep ways our very selves are structured by what capitalism permits and dictates. I mention this here to point out that the stakes when thinking about how our communities are ordered are immense. It is not just about how we relate to others but about who we are and what we see as possible for ourselves.
The fault line showed up for me when I started to see how many goods and services whose almost immediate availability I take for granted were suddenly in danger of going away. Then it became apparent to me what my world would look like if things really do break up; I would have to rely on my own inner resources, whatever material goods I have within my reach, my family, and my neighbours. Wait, what? My neighbours? Do most of us even know who lives next door? We live in a world where we have so much mobility and so much choice that there tends to be little reason to get to know the people living right beside us. We choose as our companions people with interests and habits similar to ours, people we get something from in terms of entertainment or camaraderie that feels familiar. We tend to choose people who are like us. Our neighbours on the other hand just happen to live next door, and in some cases may be very unlike us.
There are a few reasons to rethink our relationship to our neighbours beyond the fact that we might very well need them one day soon, or may have already come to rely on them in unprecedented ways. The first is that a society that is built upon relations of expediency and similarity is not a community. What is a community? According to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a community is built upon relationships of responsibility, it is built on the foundation of ethics. In Levinas’ account, the neighbour is simply the figure that represents the ethical relationship, the person who I am faced with because he or she is right there in front of me. It is a person whose existence and proximity calls on me to be responsible for another being. The beings who I never see, the people in distant countries upon whose labour my lifestyle depends, for example, are hard to feel responsible for because I don’t see them. I might feel responsible for my family members, to be sure, but that’s more like self-interest; my family members are so much a part of me and my interests that it doesn’t even feel like giving anything up when I put their needs before my own. Often, in fact, we wrongly justify unethical behaviour in the name of family – if I believe I have to protect my family at the expense of all others, then we are right back at the war of each against all. Many of the Nazis at Nuremberg were reported to have felt justified in what they did because they felt responsibility to their own families, who would have suffered had they refused orders.
A community is made out of relations where we are responsible to these others who face us and who are not necessarily our friends and may not be similar to us. Levinas describes the pact made between Moses and the people of Israel as it is reported in the Talmud, as taking place in person with all of the tribes facing one another, so that each person can see and pledge themselves to each other person. The people do not pledge themselves to some disembodied set of laws but pledge themselves to one another, thus forming a community and not just a society. What binds them is the face of the Other looking back, asking to be treated with dignity. We already understand this in witnessing the expanded possibility of human hostility in the impersonal domain of the internet; we just don’t see faces of those we hurt. The spirit of this face to face relationship is what we should strive for in our behaviour towards all others, but we need the figure of the neighbour in order to see what it means to be responsible in the first place. It means to offer a response.
But why would we answer this call to be ethical? Why are neighbours checking in on one another right now, bringing groceries to the more vulnerable among us, offering their time and services for free to those in need, sharing goods and resources that we might be better off keeping to ourselves in these uncertain times? Levinas was a religious philosopher and believed that we worship the infinite in our duty to the Other. With or without God, we do this because it fulfills something that is deeply liberating to us, something that can’t be captured in the transactional and self-interested nature of most of our relationships. The responsibility for the other is something we often enact at the expense of our own immediate and individual well-being, and yet we are loathe to refuse it. As ethical beings we could not enjoy what we keep to ourselves knowing that the other suffers and that we have turned away. It is so easy in our disconnected lives to avoid being called upon like this, to avoid the kinds of relationships that would obligate us, and so we don’t tend to get to know this part of ourselves. In this crisis, we are discovering our ethical natures.
I am not naïve. I know that, more than just avoiding the call, some of us turn away, and there are those out there who are profiting off the suffering of others more than ever. The human drive for security is powerful, and those who live by greed and exploitation seem to me more insecure than the rest, more fearful and unsure of their own inner resources, less confident that there are others who have their backs, and thus never satisfied with the external securities they amass. If it is true what most of the ancient philosophers believed, that a crucial element of human happiness is virtue, then these exploiters are the unhappiest of us all. They may never have experienced the illuminating joy of being there for or depending upon another human, the way that in that coming-together with the Other we overflow the bounds of our individual selves and for a moment participate in the infinite. The need for security is what drives us apart and convinces us to look out for ourselves or our families at the expense of others, but within the fault lines of individualism lies the revelation of how much more of ourselves the ethical relationship offers us.
Here we are, many of us, surrounded by our neighbours in a time when we might think we have very little we can depend upon. In these community networks we are capable of Herculean strength, I would contend. The creativity and pooling of resources and trading of skills and local organization and emotional support that I have witnessed has been amazing. My view is that this could significantly further a movement that we have been seeing already for decades, a movement that would help us begin to undo the global relations of exploitation within which capitalism imprisons us. You might think this is hopelessly utopian and unrealistic, and a few weeks ago I might have agreed. But the way our lives are structured by capitalism is designed to give the impression that humans aren’t capable of living outside it. In times when the cracks appear in our habitual ways of doing things we learn what else is possible, and my greatest hope is that we let the communities we’ve awakened here lead us far beyond this crisis, to a better version of each of us.
The World We Want
I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves – we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.
-Mary Oliver
These beautiful words of the poet Mary Oliver have been on my mind as I try, like everyone else, to wrap my head around what is happening to the world. They remind me that while I am confined within my home, the links remain unbreakable. These links become, in this crisis, more apparent than ever.
I am a bore in the ways that I drone on about those few things that I find absolutely fundamental and one of those things, as the people who visit me regularly will know, is that we are what we are only in relationship. There is no such thing as an individual without ties, and those ties are not secondary to some integral and isolated self but constitute the most basic fabric of the self. To develop and grow as an individual is to develop and grow in ones relationships, with others both human and extra-human, with the natural world, within our communities.
Mary Oliver’s words remind me that this crisis is a time to remember that and to feel it more concretely in every moment of my day, and it is also a reminder to not rush too quickly into establishing a new normal, but to take the time to recognize that everything now is transforming, and that this transformation of each of us and of all of our systems of interconnection provides an astonishing kind of opening within which we might springboard the hoped-for changes that have remained mute in the daily habits that keep us dull and preoccupied. Hegel describes habit as “tensionless activity”; it’s going through the motions of being alive while having nothing against which to struggle and nothing towards which we might aspire, aspiration itself implying struggle. Now that the veil of habit has been pierced, now that quotidian preoccupations have been cleared away, we have a better view of the whole. By the whole I don’t mean any unified vision or any one truth in some mystical sense, but simply an orientation for things that are farther away, a concern for bigger things like the shape of a whole life, what we are adding up to with our daily activities, or the structure of our communities, the future of our planet.
I am a little hesitant to talk about these things because of the very real and very present struggle that many are and many more will face in terms of confronting this disease. It is often seen as a luxury to think philosophically, but the fact is that many of us do have more time right now since what we are doing to contribute to collective well-being is staying at home and not working. And I think that if we fail to take advantage of the current shift in the collective consciousness, a shift that is still just a swirl where things have kicked up but not yet resettled, then when this is over things will settle with much the same framework as before and without our having had a say in how they might be different. And the opportunity, to my mind, is absolutely fundamental because we want a different world.
We want a different world. I commit to this thought, which might seem a reckless over-generalization. But I commit to it both because I have heard it from so many people and because I am convinced that objectively we are living in a very unhealthy way, all of us. Many people who come to see me seem to think that there is something wrong with them, that they are doing something wrong, when in fact – in my view - it is the larger systems in which they participate that leave them no way to thrive. Again the links; we cannot thrive, no matter how much we work on personal development, in an unhealthy environment. And the first thing that is unhealthy in our world is the rampant individualism that is baked into Western thought. The revelation of the unbreakable links could jump-start a genuine revolution against the individualism that has led to a world of injustice, alienation and degradation.
I am going to continue to think and write about this period of transformation and the ways in which we might take advantage of the opportunity to rethink. But for now, I want to leave you with some advice if you are feeling directionless. To begin with, I am personally against this idea that I am seeing everywhere on social media that we ought to use this time to be productive. Not just because I have seen the anxiety that it has produced in many people who are just trying to survive this. Productivity is exactly what many of us have been mercifully released from, and trying to reclaim it as quickly as possible puts us right back into the daily grind that for so long has blinded us to the big picture. Having some kind of structure to a day can be good for mental health, and we should each of us do what we need to do to feel healthy and active. But if you can manage right now to take the time to practice not being productive, this is where things can come alive. Stay away from social media where everyone is posting all their amazing little at-home projects or fabulous crafting ideas or writing a novel or learning a language. I think it’s good to be doing something, but it is true that many of us are experiencing trauma and should not be expected to produce anything.
And if there is mental energy leftover, use it to contemplate. Heidegger points out the difference between calculative thinking, which accepts the world as it is (a fundamentally technological world, in Heidegger’s analysis) and weighs things, in order to figure out how to get somewhere, and meditative or contemplative thinking, which releases us beyond the framework in which we normally remain trapped, allowing us to consider meaning and Being in a more open, intuitive and creative manner. It is this latter that we now have an opportunity to engage in. We have been forced out of our comfortable ways of relying on systems that we take for granted. The gift of that is to see them from the outside for the first time and really consider if the ways our communities and systems are structured are good and healthy ways. The gift is to notice that how these are structured is deeply important to each of us, and is fundamental to any development we might make as individuals. The gift is a chance to think how these structures might be otherwise so that we might be otherwise.
It is in this contemplative mode that we have the opportunity to notice those links of which Mary Oliver speaks. We can feel these links in the way that our hearts break over the deaths of people we have never met, as far away as Italy and China. We can feel them in the way that our neighbours, people we may never even have noticed before, now depend upon us to check in with them, to get food to them or to just spend the time letting them know they’re not alone. We can feel them in the way our economic systems are crumbling all over the world and revealing the ways that we have depended upon people far away without even being aware of it. We can feel them in the way that practicing this strange new thing call social distancing demonstrates faith in our fellow citizens and an awareness of the impact each of us can have upon the collective. We can feel them in the way that our children feel our anxieties wordlessly. We can feel them in the way that we are looking to nature for wisdom more and more, and taking stock of what our business as usual mode has done to nature. We can feel the links between ourselves and others more deeply now that we are forced to be physically distanced from them. Notice those links in your own life, if you can. Meditate on them. Be unproductive and notice that the links do not weaken if you produce less. We are each other’s destiny, says Oliver. With this in mind, I would ask you - what would a better world look like to you?
Philosophy in the time of Covid-19
Dear friends,
I have not been keeping up with posting in the past few years, as life and work have been busy. But in this crisis I wanted to post some notes here to help those of you who are looking for philosophical guidance through these strange and uncertain times. As always, the philosophical way is about finding and harnessing your intelligence, your creativity and your emotional depths and asking the questions that will help you to live with more wisdom, conviction and courage. To live philosophically is to wonder about the world we live in and our human ways of making meaning in order to increase our power to live fully. We have no choice about what happens to us, and sometimes what happens to us is terrible and frightening. What we can choose are our responses to what happens to us. We can choose to reflect, consider and respond in the healthiest and most affirmative ways available to us, rather than being reactive or just going along with the conventional discourses or the latest fads in thinking, or sinking into despair. What I offer here are my own thoughts and reflections as I try to tune out the noise and tune into deeper revelations and opportunities.