May 12

May 12 Broken Sociality: Isolation, Social Murder, & The Process Of Depoliticization / Nate Holdren

Legal historian and author Nate Holdren joins me to discuss broken sociality, political and social loneliness, and social murder and its depoliticization during the pandemic, as elucidated in his Peste Magazine essay Broken Sociality: Isolation in the Pseudo-Return to “Pre-Pandemic Normal”.

The pandemic emergency has been declared over, both here in the United States, and by the World Health Organization. That does not mean the pandemic is over, but it marks an official end to an emergency level institutional response to it. Any sort of practical and enforceable mitigatory practices to reduce the spread of the virus has been firmly relegated to the past. To add insult to injury, the trauma or discomforts incurred over the past three years are often blamed on these public health measures themselves by high-status conservative and liberal commentators and so-called experts alike. Nevermind the millions dead, the global vaccine apartheid, the tens of millions disabled and those that continue to become disabled, and what those facts mean. The virus’s plethora of variants will continue to infect and reinfect the global population into the foreseeable future—a slow burn with grim long-term consequences.

When I read Nate Holdren’s essay on broken sociality and political and social loneliness as the “urgency of normal” takes precedence in the US, it struck a chord within me. He provided a language to describe my feelings and experiences at this stage of the ongoing pandemic.

For those of us still masking and avoiding the plague, still keeping up on covid research to the best of our ability, and still admonishing our peers to be mindful of how our behaviors and decisions impact all of us, especially for the most vulnerable, oftentimes a gulf can and does emerge and deepen between our relationships with others that disregard these considerations. When an intrinsically collective health crisis is minimized, and in many cases, outrightly denied by our peers, day-to-day life becomes a lonely affair.

From Broken Sociality:

Social loneliness blurs into another facet of broken sociality, what I think of as political loneliness. This is the sense of a gulf in values or in understanding of some very important aspects of the world. Knowing that the return to normal means even more dying and life-altering suffering is terrible. Knowing that many people seem not to realize this, that people in officially respected positions seem to find this acceptable, that fellow travelers on the left don’t treat this as a priority, that all feels isolating to a degree I find hard to overstate. What’s happening, I think, is that there’s no consensus on the reality we’re living in: ideologically, the pandemic continues for some of us and is over for others, while, of course, it hasn’t *actually* ended; it feels like living in a different world from other people, but still interacting. In some cases, this means old relationships feel different, and not for the better.
What I've called political and social loneliness overlap and are related significantly. Political loneliness is less place dependent. It isn’t so much a matter where I am and who I’m around (it’s possible to feel it, as I often do, even when I’m literally alone, as I often am), but rather comes from a sense of differing from other people on the values, assessments, and explanations through which we understand the pandemic and the management of the pandemic by institutions. This comes up sometimes in casual phone calls with far-flung friends and family as we chat about our lives. I try to suppress any urge to be judgmental about individual choices and to focus my anger at those with the most institutional power, but I do notice differences on this stuff. Those differences increase the sense of isolation. This is heavily reinforced by various explicit and implicit messages from public officials and other high-status actors.

The time we’re in feels awful because it is. You may relate to our sentiments and conclusions in this discussion. You’re with it, and I thank you for that. This all sounds grim and overwhelming. It is. But, despite this, the lessons from this pandemic still apply: health and care is a collective endeavor, and cannot be achieved under capitalism; the so-called public health leaders and institutions have abandoned us to disease, debility, and death, and are the most to blame—not so much your dumbass neighbor, relative, co-worker, or friend, although their actions bear responsibility; the pandemic and the dangers it brings upon all of us now have widened the field of precarity that disabled people have known and experienced for a very long time; the pandemic is ecological, and directly tied to rapacious demands of extractive capitalism and the predicament of biospheric collapse currently underway. All of this context, while it does help, doesn’t change how personally difficult it is to bear through this time. All I can say is I’m a fellow traveler, and there are others walking this path as well.

Stay vigilant. Take care of yourself and others to the best of your abilities, and practice demanding what you need from others as best you can. That, too, is an act of care.

Bio:

Nate Holdren is a legal historian of capitalism in the United States. He is the author of the book Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era and teaches in the Program in Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University.