No Man is an Island
Nate Holdren on pandemic nihilism, social murder, and the banality of evil.
Today’s interview is one I’ve been excited to publish. This essay, Pandemic Nihilism, Social Murder, and the Banality of Evil made it’s way to me (on Twitter) a few weeks ago, and I kept going back to it.
“Our suffering is inconsequential to the machinery of power and to those who compose and operate that machinery. This has been the case all along, but in this phase of the pandemic, our suffering has been nihilistically recast as not just inconsequential, but inevitable by the administration and the voices it has cultivated as its proxies.”
The author, Nate Holdren, writes about suffering at the hand of a banal and pervasive sort of nihilism. He writes of the perverted ability of elites to quite easily, time and time again, chose profit over people. And how it surprises him, even though it shouldn’t.
I kept reading it because I felt similarly. Surprised — even though I’d say otherwise. I think the surprise comes from hope. I think the surprise comes from fear. I think the surprise comes from denial.
“It is the same nihilism that led to inaction on AIDS, the workplace accidents that regularly occur in the economy, and the government’s response to the COVID pandemic.”
It is a nihilism that seems to flower in an antisocial world.
We are encouraged to live for ourselves, to practice self-care, to maximize personal utility, and, increasingly, in our built world, to exist alone. But we’re not alone. And we should work to remember that. Real freedom considers other people. Sorry.
“To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison. - The Ethics of Ambiguity
When I got to speak with Nate about his writing I wanted to get into his thinking —he was generous enough to let me poke around.
This interview with Nate Holdren was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
Would you introduce yourself?
I'm Nate Holdren. I teach at Drake University in Des Moines, in the Law, Politics, & Society program. I am trained as a US legal historian, and I describe myself as a legal historian of US Capitalism. I wrote a book about the law of employee injury called Injury Impoverished. Broadly, I describe it as being about how in regards to injuries in the workplace and the legal handling of injuries, things used to be really bad, worse than you think. And then, later, it was differently bad, and worse than you think.
I'm the first person in my family to go to college and get a four year degree – that's a big part of my life. It makes me a little bit at odds with myself. I'm kind of uncomfortable with being fancy. So, I should brag – the book won some awards, it's a good book – but it's a weird thing to say. I feel it kind of pulls me apart from people I care about.
I finished the book at the end of 2019 and I was planning to go on to other stuff, but then the pandemic broke out. I had spent a very long time thinking about kind of broad patterns of injury and harm, and inadequate or malicious response to injury and harm, and suddenly these topics were everywhere in the pandemic.
My work basically comes from trying to understand the world, especially at a time when the world is pretty intense and understanding it feels pretty high stakes. It's that thing when you're a kid and there's a monster under your bed, and you don't know what it looks like, that is one kind of terror. If you can give it a shape and a name, it’s a little bit more predictable. I strongly felt that if I can make this all a little less amorphous, it could feel a little bit more livable.
Look at your fear. I think people spend a lot of time avoiding understanding their own fear.
I couldn't agree more.
Do you feel like these newer essays stem from the work of your book? Or are they completely new for you?
I feel like I wrote my way to a set of ideas about harm, the social production of harm, and the failings of political institutions to respond to harm. There was a ton of resonance in the core concerns and the big picture analytical categories. As the pandemic was unfolding, I felt like I was better equipped by virtue of having written the book, but not a place I would stop at, if that makes any sense.
It does. I wanted to talk about a particular essay you wrote, about nihilism, the banality of evil, and the horror that those things are. What were you trying to work through in that piece?
I was trying to get at how horrifying all of this is. It's like watching an accident happen as you're driving down the road. Why do I keep feeling surprised?
I've written a lot of stuff about the social production of harm and the takeaway point is always, “expect harm.” Yet, I still greet the news on a regular basis with a sense of surprise. I'm still so surprised. To a degree I just wanted to say that. I also wanted to try to speculate where the surprise comes from, and if I can, to a degree, write my way out of it. I would prefer to be less surprised and shocked that the world remains exactly as it was when I went to bed the night before. So, I would say those are the core themes that I was writing my way toward.
I guess there is one other theme, which is that I am appalled by people who appear able to go to bed with a clean conscience despite their making genuine contributions to harm in other people's lives. Like, they should at least have to feel bad, you know?
Do you think feeling badly about being a bad actor is enough? And by the end of this, did you feel like you had written yourself into understanding why surprise lingers?
To some degree. I mean, we'll find out if it's sufficient, and if I continue to be shocked. In the essay I talk about this Steve Earl song where he’s like, “I’ll show you,” imagining a confrontation with someone responsible for a disaster. This is a common trope, this sense of “I’ll show you a thing or two.”
But the real, deeper fantasy, is you want someone to admit they are wrong – to be like, “Oh my god, you are right. I see what I have done.”
That is a deeply appealing idea, but one that really wrong foots us, I think. The folks responsible for all this stuff…if they were capable of moral transformation, they would've already transformed. There's no meaningful context where we show up and we're like, “President Biden, let me just explain this to you.”
We see this in interviews. I love watching US officials go on British news because it’s such a different journalism culture — it’s people having an honest exchange of thoughts. In the US, it's always someone with an agenda encountering someone else with an agenda.
For people unfamiliar with the British journalistic tone – you mean that it’s more direct, more critical, harsher, etc.
Absolutely. But even then, nobody has an “aha” moment where they admit they were wrong and come out of an interview contrite. People come out of an interview thinking, “Oh no, this'll hurt me in the polls.”
A genuine moral dialogue with the powerful, where then they change their minds, is a fantasy. There is this idea that if we could just have this kind of exchange, people would change. But, I just don't think that that happens. That’s part of where the surprise comes from. The continued astonishment that people can do the things that they've been doing for a very long time without guilt, is tied to that fantasy that we have that if we could talk it out, things would change.
It's not an individual moral character thing. These people are in contexts. And people take on the traits of their contexts.
You are who your friends are.
Exactly. And these are folks who are in institutions and around people who want to keep them the same.
Do you feel like the alternative to surprise is cynicism?
No. I mean that's a worse alternative.
Surprise is probably more painful than complete cynicism, but cynicism would be a huge loss in lots of ways. I think the alternative would be a qualified optimism, or maybe an angry optimism. The reason this is outrageous is because it didn't have to happen, and it doesn't have to continue happening. The moving out of the surprise into a kind of principled outrage is important.
It's hard not to linger on the beginning of the pandemic and think, had we only done “x”... The absolute failure of leadership landed us in this nihilistic place. Can you explain your feelings of nihilism?
A really simple layperson's explanation – there's that bit in The Big Lebowski where there's a group of people where they pretend they are going to do a hostage thing, and they keep saying, “We're nihilists. We believe in nothing.” Despite that, they still want to make money. They’re kind of shallow, selfishly appetitive. There's also a TV trope about this – the villain for hire. The hired goon, who is just like, “Hey man, I'm just punching a clock like everybody else. Nothing personal about torturing you, but we all gotta make ends meet.”
It's really impersonal, and I think that is what I am so angry about. It’s very like, “Hey man, it's not me. I am just following orders.” It’s top to bottom. I don't know if it comes through in the piece, but I'm not only angry at Biden, there's an ensemble of actors. Lots of employers have made decisions, enabled by lots of people in HR departments.
Can you give me some examples?
Absolutely. I work in higher education. Something like 900 universities had a vaccine mandate. There's like 3,500 universities in the United States. It was similar with mask mandates. There's now some decent studies that show counties that had university sessions in person and counties that had university sessions with less mitigation efforts, had more Covid, not only on campus, but more broadly.
Those are choices of various institutionally powerful actors. Big fish in small ponds made choices that promoted harm. To be fair, these decisions were made with flawed information as the result of decisions made at the top, from the White House, but I'm not convinced that the decisions were all made innocently. It's their job to think about society and to understand patterns and to think about disparate impact on different populations.
How do you negotiate personal responsibility when thinking about these things on an individual level?
I'm inclined to say that we should be most angry with people at the top of the pyramid. We are in a pyramid-shaped society made up of small pyramids, so we should be mad at the president. And those of us who work in organizations with presidents should also be mad at our organizational presidents.
I mean, there's a significant amount of continuity between the Trump and the Biden administration. In September of last year there were around 500 recorded pediatric Covid deaths. There are now around 1,800. If that level of increase in pediatric covid deaths had happened under the Trump administration, I think we would've seen a tremendous response from a whole lot of folks. There are absolutely no sympathies with the Trump administration on my part, just to be clear, but there’s a different set of standards for the Biden administration. There is a serious level of trust in Biden and the Biden administration and the CDC under Biden, that is not warranted.
I'm not super interested in the personal responsibility end of it, because everybody's just trying to do their best. But the more someone's choices affect a large number of people, there is more responsibility there is, and I think there is a willful ignorance on the part of a lot of these folks. I talk about this a little bit in the essay – this kind of cultivated thoughtlessness. I think it actually must take a fair amount of work to be so self-blindering.
I think about personal responsibility because the weight of decision-making over the last few years has been constant stress, at different levels. It’s years of this now, way more intense for some than others.
It is also about the values informing those choices. I don't want Covid. I don't want my kids to get Covid. But, I also don't want to give Covid to anybody. There's been a lot of messaging toward encouraging the frame of reference to be, am I individually going to get Covid? Which is not as prosocial as, my mask protects you, your mask protects me.
I wear a seatbelt because I don't want to get hurt, but I don't drink and drive, mostly, because I don't want to hurt someone else. Early on we treated the pandemic like driving sober, then over time we began to treat it like wearing a seatbelt. And now, more recently, there's been a, “Hey, accidents are rare, so you do you” kind of push. And at the same time as this push, there is a lack of clear, reliable information. A lot of people are not running the calculations of do I want to go to a bar? Is it worth covid?
Do you think there's a current rational response?
I mean, there has to be. But I think we're in a context that works to prevent the conditions for that mature conversation from happening. There's a lot of motivated reasoning around winning elections. I saw a chart on masking behavior by race and income – it's totally crazy.
Moneyed white dudes generally are making the worst choices. And the further you are from being a moneyed white dude, generally speaking, the better your choices are, from a moral perspective. This is not so surprising. We live in a world that caters to white dudes and money, the white dudes get to make the choices. Something like 68% of the Covid deaths in 2020 were among low wage workers. That seems to suggest that very few of those people probably caught Covid doing a thing where they're like, “Oh, you know what? This is worth it to be here.” Most of it happened in the workplace.
My mom got Covid at work at a retail job – she makes like $15 and change. And she quit another job because of the Covid risk. She was able to ride that out for a while because they were sending checks to folks and then that ran out and the administration was very, very clear that they were going to cut them because they were afraid of this “Great Resignation.”
I mean wanting people to want to risk their health to bag your groceries is demented.
Totally. Under what circumstances is it reasonable to endure Covid and for what purposes? And, who gets to decide that? That would be one criteria for having a reasonably mature conversation. Another would be, what are the best practices? We should be trying to achieve some level of consensus or at least genuinely trying to inform people about the facts. What does it mean to get Covid? What are the potential harms? What do those harms actually look like?
There's this kind of specter of, we don't want to be China, look at all those lockdowns. Well immunocompromised folks are locked down, they're just not acknowledged. Those are populations that are quietly disqualified and told that they're not important.
There's just such a colossal failure of imagination. There could have been a lot of money spent on giving tents to every public library in the country and hosting lots of outdoor events. You could give people their free masks, but instead they're moving toward marketizing rather than subsidizing vaccines. These are sometimes conscious choices, and sometimes these are just emergent properties of letting the market choose.
This is from another essay of yours, but you wrote about the way we view freedom. How do you perceive our attitude toward freedom?
Being genuinely free in the world is not a purely individual thing. It is not about getting to do whatever you want. I have a very dear old friend who died of Covid early in the pandemic, and that's a huge loss for me and his family. Any worthwhile notion of freedom would include the consideration of us as relational beings.
Our individuation is a collective product. A sense of respect for individual human dignity implies attending to those social processes that produce our individuality. I think instead, what we're getting are these really narrow attenuated versions of freedom. There's a selective application of a consideration of the greater good logic of freedom, and then a “you do you” bracket.
We probably do need both notions of freedom. Classically, philosophers talk about this in terms of positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is your freedom to say no to things, and it tends to be individualizing. Positive freedom is your freedom to have things, and it tends to be a collective direction.
So, I'm free from the state reading my book beforehand to decide whether or not it can be published – that is a negative freedom. I'm free to vote – that’s a positive freedom. In the US we don't tend to have a lot of positive freedoms actively provided to us. We're going to come out of the pandemic with even fewer, especially in regards to public health.
An even more robust notion of freedom would be when we maximize how much everybody can flourish. And we're really far from that unfortunately.
The idea of freedom as complete selfishness is really crazy to me. We focus on domestic politics – and this does feel very American. But I guess I don't know if that's true.
I think that probably is more the case in the US than in a lot of other places. I think with the rise of neoliberalism in the 70s, this became more true.
But even then, I think most people have a mix of a group to whom they are responsible, and then they have another group in relation to whom they feel more freedom to act selfishly. The worst kind of libertarians still probably feel one set of ways toward their kids or toward their parents. What is seen as relevant collectivity and what is seen as irrelevant is probably a pretty important set of variables here.
I don’t know if I have read enough to argue this point, but I suspect this has a lot to do with gender as well. I don't think it's an accident that most of the most strident libertarians are dudes. I think it's probably connected to having the family be the primary referent.
I read Leslie Stahl’s autobiography a few years ago and one part really stuck out to me. She basically said the difference between her and her female peers was her husband. He was willing to sacrifice time to be with their daughter, when other husbands were not. There’s a few essays I found since that talk about this.
As you said, it is not so much that there's not an immediate antagonist, the sexist boss, as much as there's a widespread diffused pattern that weighs down everything. I think that is also a lot of what's going on in the pandemic. I think I say this in the essay, but, shit rolls downhill, and we live on a hill. It’s a hill that is getting steeper in terms of income inequality and racial inequality and inequality for disabled folks – like I said, 68% of the Covid deaths were among low wage workers.
This isn’t really a “plan” by those at the top, but there are these structural vulnerabilities that make it so that when horrible things happen its poor people, its people of color, its women, its disabled folks, and immigrants that are the most hurt. Folks further up the food chain have a hard time seeing this – and they have the most to lose.
To my mind, this is where those of us who live lower down the hill need to figure out how to do some things differently because we can't rely on the good consciences of the people further up the hill, unfortunately.