What A&H academics have written about lockdowns
Sinéad Murphy, a lecturer in Philosophy, published last week an article called “Preliminary materials for a theory of Devi Sridhar”. It’s so ridiculously good that I read it twice on Friday before I went to sleep, then woke up on Saturday and read it again. Let me just reproduce one paragraph, one that elegantly delivers the silver bullet to the lockdownistas’ constant pretence that “we need to consider all options”, “everything is on the table”, “nothing is off-limits” and so on:
“For a way of life to exist — whatever it consists of — many, many things must be impossible. For, a way of life is a closed system, a defined whole. It may alter itself somewhat around its margins. It may change some of its ways — often very slowly and after much debate. But its horizons of possibility, from which those who live it derive the meaning of their existence, rely essentially upon its closedness, upon the many principles and practices that it simply cannot entertain.”
Although Murphy does not seem to have a social media presence, she was no stranger to me, having co-authored with her colleague Michael Lewis We cannot teach in masks last September.
Philosophers seem to have been the most active (in a generally very inactive field) in authoring lockdown-critical commentary from a Humanities perspective. This isn’t really a surprise, since philosophers have tended to be the most maverick, the most out there, the least Humanities of the Humanities. As someone who probably lacks the tendency to abstraction that makes a good philosopher, I have sometimes been exasperated by their arguing-for-arguing’s sake, their sometimes schoolboyish arrogance, but you have to admit that, in the shitshow that we’re in, these qualities are exactly what is needed.
Giorgio Agamben is of course the most preminent name in the Humanities to have written from a lockdown-critical perspective. There’s a very beautiful multilingual site here containing links to all texts by Agamben on the subject, as well as translations into various languages. Beautiful.
Simon Elmer at Architects for Social Housing has been publishing blog entries since last spring, combining theory-heavy exegeses of Agamben with more journalistic-type writings, which perhaps do not belong so much in this post. Elmer also details the attacks that Agamben was object of from other philosophers and academics because of his critical attitude, which are a great laugh - it’s as if all these youngish, wokeish, “in” academics turned to Agamben and said: “hey Giorgio, see all that biopolitics and Foucauld stuff? We didn’t really mean it, we mean, it filled time in our seminars and it gave us opportunities galore to write articles and books and gain tenure, but you did get that we didn’t really mean it, right? There’s a virus, right? There’s a global pandemic.”
Ian James Kidd and Matthew Ratcliffe also have Welcome to the Covid World; in this Medium I try to do something similar to what they do here, which is try to describe what is this outlandish state of mind that most of the population seem to have been plunged into (what they call the “Covid World” and I call “lockdownia”). Kidd and Ratcliffe also have a follow-up piece, written as a response to a response to their original article by another philosopher, Ben Bramble; in due course we’ll learn more about Bramble’s piece, which I plan to include in a list of the least distinguished A&H writing about lockdowns.
David Cayley has written some very illuminating contributions about biopolitics and medicalization — from a perspective more indebted to Ivan Illich (whom I am ashamed to say I was not terribly aware of) than Foucault. See here and here. When I read people like Cayley I tell myself that perhaps it isn’t so bad that there are so few humanists writing critically about lockdowns, if quality clearly makes up for quantity as is the case with this author.
Cheating a bit here, because Anthropology is a social science and not one of the Humanities, but I am going to include Carlo Caduff’s What went wrong because that one too is ridiculously good. Although the date of publication is given in the link as July 2020, I must have read an earlier, pre-peer-review version back in March or April: the first scholarly reflection I ever encountered on the pandemic response from a critical, broadly left-wing perspective. This was at a time when I looked around and I saw that all my peers (intellectual, lefty, artsy types) were undoubtedly pro-lockdown, some of them even lockdown stakhanovists, and the only lockdown-critical voices I could find were: a) free market libertarians; b) Catholic fundamentalists; c) Brexiteers.
Also from a medical anthropology point of view, Anthony Stavrianakis and Laurence Anne Tessier have Go suppress yourself, which very early on (May) identified what to me is still the most important question in this mess: as the authors put it, “How did broad blanket closures and the cessation of movement of people and things, “social distancing” and “lockdown” measures, become the necessary solution to this pandemic?”. The authors admittedly do not have an answer, and the article ends up becoming a sort of critique of Neil Ferguson, but kudoz to them for articulating what we all need to get to grips with.
A bit niche perhaps (and also Social Science-y), but Edward Hadas’ Catholic social teaching looks at the policy of lockdowns also contains some great insights, among which my favourite is:
“Good doctors always order chemotherapy with a certain reluctance, and always try to minimise the dose. The caution should be even greater for lockdowns. The damage they cause to human flourishing and dignity is so severe that they should only be ordered with a heavy heart, indeed with fear and trembling, and only after long and painful deliberation. That seriousness is always appropriate, no matter how many premature deaths the lockdowns are expected to prevent. (…) I have seen only brief flickers of seriousness, diligence, sadness, or reluctance in our public officials’ approach to lockdowns. Most of the time, they seem to neglect almost entirely their responsibility for the flourishing of humanity. Rather, they appear to be driven solely by a desperate and fearful desire to save lives at any cost.”
Paul Frijters’ comparison between lockdown scepticism and the Dreyfusards also has a number of interesting perspectives, although the caveat here is that Frijters is not a professional historian but rather a specialist in Wellbeing Economics. Like any good Humanities academic, I am a bit uneasy about the assumption — that Frijters seems to assume without much critique — that history is there for us to learn from it, but as I said, interesting perspectives here, and a very welcome article because — unlike their more theoretically oriented colleagues — academics broadly dedicated to the study of history have not been prolific in using their perspectives to articulate critiques of lockdowns. Historians of religion — as I said in a previous entry — could have explored the extent to which the lockdown-mania indeed resembles a religious fad. Medievalists could have studied parallels between responses to medieval plagues and our own (I suspect, without being a medievalist, that we are not that far away from them). Literary scholars studying dystopias could have analyzed how the utopian and the dystopian powerfully shape our ideas about lockdowns and what kind of world they are supposed to deliver us. Historians of music could have discussed how the long-standing claim that certain types of music are dangerous (they corrupt the youth, they incite hedonism) has morphed into the idea that all live music-making is dangerous (those choirs! superspreader events! stop the murderers!), and how we’ve all accepted without blinking an eye. They haven’t, and so they have deprived us of the historical, context-specific, detail-rich gaze that sometimes complements so well the more abstract, idealized reasonings. Well, what can I say. They surely have better things to do with their time.
