A tale of two inevitabilities
Academically, I came of age around the 2008 financial crisis (yes, looking for an academic job at that time was great fun). These were, of course, the years of austerity. From governments, media (certain corners) and economics departments (not all) we were bombarded with the same message over and over again: Austerity. Inevitable. Harsh measures. We need to do this. Harsh harsh harsh harsh. There’s no other way. Did I mention that austerity is inevitable?
Most A&H academics didn’t buy any of this, of course. Not everyone went full-on “Occupy Wall Street”, but at least the consensus was that the claim that austerity was inevitable was a blatant lie, concocted to hide the fact that austerity measures were in fact a political decision. Some academics even began a political/celebrity career on the basis of such claim, such as the handsome (to some) Varoufakis.
10+ years later. Lockdown. Inevitable. Harsh measures. We need to do this. Harsh harsh harsh harsh. There’s no other way. Did I mention that lockdown is inevitable? Same discourse: the difference being that A&H academics, with very few exceptions, swallow it 100%.
This is patent, for example, in how the imminent lockdown relaxation in the UK is spoken about. Apparently, we need to ease restrictions slowly “to make sure that this lockdown will be the last”.
Hey: here’s a revolutionary idea to make sure that this lockdown will be the last. When the current lockdown ends, do not reimpose a lockdown again, even if the Black Death comes back with a vengeance while at the same time an alien invasion starts. Revolutionary, I know.
(Another inconsistency, which to me is a more blatant, callous one: after 2008 we spent a lot of time wringing our collective hands at the claim that economists treated human beings “merely like numbers in a mathematical model”. Epidemiologists, it turns out, have a royal patent to do so. I’ve long said that, for most A&H in 2020–2021, “being human” means one of two things, or both: a) being an infectious vector to other humans; b) being a number in an epidemiological model.)
The same critical minds that were able to look through the discourse around the “inevitability” of austerity are completely blind when it comes to the “inevitability” of lockdowns. Why is that? Someone suggested to me that, while academia (and the public sector) was impacted by austerity under the form of pay freezes and, in extreme cases, redundancies, this has not been the case with lockdowns, where academics with permanent positions have been able to keep them on the same pay. There might be an element of this but I don’t think it’s the only explanation.
As I’ve said before, A&H academics are typically ignorant of economic theory, and proudly so. However, it is not as if they are much more well-versed in epidemiology or public health. And with the latter particularly there’s this great tradition of critical analysis, pioneered by Foucault. Any A&H academic worth her salt will know that mental health issues, homosexuality, infectious diseases (I repeat: infectious diseases; maybe this should have been a clue), etc. have been variously criminalized, unnecessarily medicalized, filtered through prisms of gender, class and race, etc. All of this has gone out of the window. As I’ve said about Agamben (one of the few A&H academics to have spoken out about the hysteria): it’s as if all these critical perspectives on medicine and science (which, let’s admit it, in some cases, but not all, can border on conspiracy theorism) were just something we did to entertain ourselves, a sort of intellectual game with zero applicability in the real world.
So what happened, then? Apart from the various reasons I am discussing in the A&H series, I would like to venture a more specific one here. Part of the animosity that A&H academics feel for economists has to do with the perception that the latter skew right. Generally speaking, this is probably true: economics and business departments tend to be the ones with the highest numbers of right-of-centre staff, although there are plenty of left-of-centre economists, of course. Whereas, the health sciences are thought (probably accurately) to lean left. Epidemiologists are therefore seen to be on our side; they are not some ideological zealots trying to obfuscate reality with their models; if they say lockdown is inevitable, then it’s probably true.
