Sorry, but very little is gonna change (post-COVID)

 

Whew, really long time with no news of ol’ Vintage Rocker! But fear not, dear readers, I have not fallen, one more victim of the hideous disease that is still ravaging the world, so many more months after it was first identified. I just have been busy with other endeavors, and just plain didn’t feel like blogging in all this time, confined and out of confinement alike. Not that I have been less amused than usual with the foibles and the follies of the human race, or that I have been less engaged with the deep thoughts about the ultimate reason of our species-wide malaise (which predates the pandemic, and was having its insidious and deleterious effect many decades before we had heard any inkling of a sanitary crisis stirring in Wuhan). Not even that I have been less fond of writing, as I have written tons and tons of my usual stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge, only for a new book and to be used as class materials, instead of posting it here…

But time to compensate this long time of idleness (blogging-wise) and share some opinions with the rest of the world (or, at least, with the tiny fraction of it that reads this blog). And I wanted to start debunking a trope that has been repeated ad nauseam in these trying times: the idea that the collective suffering, and the time we’ve passed forced to stay at home (either strictly confined or with greatly reduced possibilities to go out and spend) somehow have “changed everything”, making everybody (or enough people to really change the direction of society) suddenly realize that we were spending too much money in useless baubles, and too much time working only to acquire the means to purchase those baubles, when what we really should be doing is spending more time with our loved ones (while they are alive, a condition we cannot take as much for granted as we would like to think), investing less time and effort in our professional careers (with all the rat race and keeping up with the Joneses and office-politicking and bullshit-jobbing -gee, David Graeber recently left us, now that was one original and profound and seriously influential tinker!-) and more in nurturing deep relationships with those dear to us and growing as persons (supposedly by meditating and doing some physical activity to stay fit and healthy just for the sake of it, instead of to post silly pics on Instagram of our gym exploits).

Well, if you believe any of that pabulum, all I can say is… keep on dreaming (and, by the way, I’ve already mentioned in other posts I have a wonderful, wonderful bridge in Brooklyn I would be willing to sell for a pittance, a real opportunity, and I cannot avoid bringing it back to your attention given your display of poor analytical skills). I’m afraid the number of people willing to espouse a true de-growth philosophy, or to drop out of the famed rat race because of the coronavirus pandemic is exactly zero. Well, let’s not be too drastic and dogmatic and proffer such extreme generalizations and say instead that the number is likely to be so tiny that it won’t make any kind of noticeable difference in the way the world works and feels in a couple years. The economic activity has not yet recovered, in most major cities all the world over there is a very significant number of people out of work, or working from home, but the pollution levels are back where they were before the pandemic hit, and the level of traffic congestion is about the same. And the people that still have a job are probably busting their asses as much as they used to, if not more, because the unemployment figures are really frightening, and you don’t know what those devious bastards in the executive suite are up to, but they very well may use the COVID-induced downturn to trim a bit more the workforce and ram through some extra gains in productivity, and I better show how more productive I am than everybody else, so it is not me the first one they fire (without realizing how such show of extra effort and commitment is self-defeating, as if every worker produces more, in a scenario of depressed demand, they add to the unsold inventory and accelerate their own redundancy). And after so much saving by not going to restaurants or on vacation (again, the lucky few who still have a job), the Joneses and all their neighbors, all the world over, are really and desperately itching to indulge in some truly bank-busting conspicuous consumption, and splurge in some instagrammable, facebookable, or whatever social media platform is popular these days, activity, to show the rest of the world how much they are back living the high life ‘til al their contacts turn green with envy, aptly rekindling the never ending arms race of ever-increasing strutting their stuff (in the well-known metaphor of the “hedonic mill”, engaged ever more forcefully in the similarly self-defeating activity of running faster and faster to stay in exactly the same place).

How can I be so sure? Why should I be the one right, and not the uncountable journalists and TV personalities and seemingly everybody with a pulpit or a microphone that are announcing that the opposite will happen, and we will, indeed, get out of this species-wide crisis better people than we entered in? Well, because I seem to understand, at a deeper level, what makes society work and how it ticks, and apparently they do not. Let us recap something I’ve said a gazillion times (running the risk of boring my readers to death, whom I can very well imagine at this point sighing and saying “oh, no! here we go again with the dominant reason argument!”): When people decide how they act, pandemic or not, they do so in the context of how they want their lives to look like (something they find more and more difficult to articulate verbally, we’ll deal with that in a moment). They align their intended actions (without necessarily being conscious of it) with an “ultimate end” or a more or less well-defined image of what a “life well lived” consists of, even if they are not fully aware of such image, or even being dimly aware, they perceive it only imprecisely, as having somewhat fuzzy contours. But at least they are quite certain about the overall shape, or they wouldn’t be able to act at all. And that “life well lived”, that image (fuzzy and imprecise and even unacknowledged as it may be) of what a successful conduct of their own affairs looks like, is not something they have arrived at by applying their reason individually, by judiciously weighing the different alternatives on offer and dispassionately settling in the one they found more rationally appealing.

That image of the good life, the successful life, the life worthy of being pursued, strived for, is something they are nurtured into since they first set foot in this planet. By their parents, by their extended family, by their friends and peers as soon as they master language, by the TV shows they watch, the lyrics of the songs the listen to, the films they see, the plots of the videogames they play etc. (there was a time when such essential element of acculturation would have been also heavily influenced by the novels they read, but who still reads novels these days?) What I’m getting at is that the fact that for a few months there has been a lung disease epidemic ravaging the world has very little influence in what people judge the good life to be, set against years and years and years of patient but relentless accretion of what I’ve called the “dominant reason” of the age. And how does that dominant reason look like? for starters, it teaches people that the only understandable, “reasonable” definition of a successful life is the maximization of desire-satisfaction. The more desires you are able to satisfy, the more admirable, more worthy, more successful, more enviable, your life has been.

But of course, that only moves the object of our enquiry one level deeper, as desires themselves are not something we decide to pursue after conscientious deliberation (aiming at the attainment of what Rawls called “reflective equilibrium”). Desires, as the image of the “good life” itself on which they are built, are made intelligible by being taught, by being socially transmitted, and that’s why I consider them inseparable part and parcel of the same construct (dominant reason) as the former. Have your doubts? one of the most brilliant parts of the excellent Intention by G.E.M. Anscombe is her consideration of the desire for a “saucer full of mud”, a desire that, unless it is presented with some (probably pretty odd) context to extensively explain how it came about, is wholly impossible to understand. We can understand the meaning of the words, of course, and we have a general sense of what “desiring a saucer full of mud” points at. But we find insurmountable barriers to really put ourselves in the shoes of someone in the grips of such desire, to phenomenically experience what desiring such object feels like. In a sense, then, we cannot fully grasp, identify with, condone, approve, extol, favor or facilitate the satisfaction of such desire. If someone expressed it to us as a justification of some of his actions, for all practical purposes we would still consider such action irrational, in need of more information to be understood (let alone approved). The point Gertrude Elizabeth was trying to make is that just desiring something cannot be a complete justification towards others (although that is definitely true, “because I strongly desired it” would indeed be a piss-poor justification for having killed somebody, for example), but what her discussion also highlights is that desiring is (in a popular, albeit suspicious, modern expression) “socially constructed”. Which simply means that for desire to play the expected role in the justification chain we may want it to play, it has to be socially sanctioned, it has to be part and parcel of what the majority of the people that constitutes the social group considers “sensible” and “proper” to desire.

Of course, some desires are most definitely sanctioned by society (even if they are considered in some circles as disreputable or reproachable, and apparently are presented to its members more to be avoided or repressed than to be acted upon, they are at least understood and considered as something that somehow resonates with human nature) and some are not. Some, of course, have a most ambiguous status, as they are at the same time presented as strong and overwhelming but at the same time capable of being mastered and thus to be rejected, or at least not to be acted upon. The prohibition to act on the most conspicuous among them is typically highlighted in the society’s laws. As one old master of mine used to remark, “there is no need to forbid that which nobody wants”. Thus, filling saucers with mud is usually not included in the penal code, whilst slandering, raping, having sex with minors and manslaughter universally are. With this I want to highlight that all desires, to be “interiorized” by the individual, have to be previously shaped and “accepted” as such by the group in which said individual is acculturated. Some of them will be approved, and some will be frowned upon, or actively prohibited. But for them to exert their motivating force they have in the first place to be acknowledged (and, to a certain extent, shaped, given a precise form and content) by society, even if it is only to better label them as deviant, perverse, shameful and whatnot.

The fact I wanted to underline at this point is that what desires are understood, regardless of their moral valence, is transmitted from parents (plus the already mentioned coterie of extended family, MTV, rock songs, newspapers, TV shows, public opinion, Twitter and media in general) to sons and daughters alike not piecemeal and one by one, but as as the next level of a coherent cultural package I designate “dominant reason”. And what kind of desires are nowadays in that package? about just one desire that encompasses all the rest (“all the rest”, i.e. the desire for sex, fancy clothes, good food, staying fit, travelling to exotic locations, having kids, not having kids, drinking intoxicating liquors, smoking pot, listening to classical music, etc. being but instances of it, just one single, all-including ur-desire): that of showing one’s status is higher that the status of those around him (or her, status, in a rare show of equality, is strictly non-gendered, there are no glass ceilings here, women as much as men are conditioned to show everybody around they have more of it, and are thus more socially valued than them). Think about it. What is the advice we routinely give youngsters pondering what to do with their life? “to do what they love”, “follow their passion”, “be true to themselves” and all that pabulum? bollocks. Or rather, what we are actually not-so-subtly telling them is that it is OK to do all of those things… as long as they can monetize them and end up becoming millionaires by practicing them, because if they don’t, then all that passion following and doing beloved things will be considered a huge waste of time.

Now it becomes evident why we shouldn’t expect a gigantic Kumbaya moment for all of humanity. The pandemic has not changed the two first elements of our epoch’s Dominant Reason: what that Dominant Reason teaches is the only valid ultimate end (maximize desire satisfaction) and the kind of desires it makes it intelligible to have and to act upon (signal to everybody around you that your status is higher than theirs). What about the third element, which is precisely the criteria for such status assignment? Every dominant reason requires a widely accepted rule for defining who is given precedence, who is listened to, who is widely admired, who is automatically believed and who has the burden of proof. In the absence of such a rule every social interaction would escalate into violence, and coordination would be almost impossible, with each party vying for the naked application of brute force to overcome the resistance of all the other affected parties. In our particular age, that rule is to yield to whoever has more money, in an ever more naked way. The instances in which we see that rule being applied are almost limitless: the one who can afford to pay more can cut lines in amusement parks, buy limitless ads in electoral processes (specially in the post-Citizen United USA), choose the best seats in theaters or planes or concerts,  get the best lawyers to prevail in court against any consideration of fairness or justice, access the best healthcare (or , really, any kind of scarce collective resource, that is now apportioned strictly according to ability to pay, disregarding any other criteria like desert, equality or redress of blatant previous injustice).

So, back to our initial question, is any of those three elements (ultimate end of the good life, types of desires fostered in people and criterion for assigning social rank) likely to change because of this little coronavirus thing? No, it is clear that the dominant reason of the age, not having changed due to far more serious reasons (like being toxic, accelerating and justifying the destruction of a livable natural environment, creating untold amounts of unhappiness and, most important of all, not being able to reproduce itself and driving the whole species slowly but surefootedly to extinction) is not going to change because of a lowly virus that, so far, has proven itself unable to kill more than 0,01% of the world’s population (actually, far, far less than that). I hope I’m not puncturing anybody’s bubble of “we will get out of this better and more resilient”. I’m afraid that, as usual after any great or small catastrophe, we will get out of it (whatever that means, and whenever that happens) being the same greedy little bastards we have evolved to be so far, following the dictates of a collectively formed reason without being fully aware of it that forces us into maximizing our own perceived well-being whilst minimizing that of everybody else, and screwing ourselves up mightily in the process.