The gods! The gods!
So cries the novelist Celeste Ng, a Harvard grad who lives in Cambridge, married to a Harvard administrator.
The problem, you see, is that Harvard is attacking collectivism. We’re trapped in a miasma of individual responsibility!
I think we can all agree that the one big problem during the last three years has been the complete unwillingness of institutions to “enact any kind of very basic safety regulations.” Our unrelenting libertarianism has doomed us all! Damn the Faucis and Ferrers, with their constant insistence on showing restraint. Look at all the nothing these people insist on doing:
What you won’t find in Ng’s thread is a discussion of how anything works. Harvard is “cancelling all COVID tracing,” for example. What does that mean, in practice, and how — at the end of 2022 — do people with real expertise in respiratory illness view contact tracing as a protective measure against an infection that something like 90% of the population has already experienced? Harvard, by the way, requires all students to be vaxxed to the gills, “including the bivalent Omicron-specific COVID-19 booster.” If you’re a Harvard-educated novelist, this fact proves that NO ONE IS TAKING ANY COLLECTIVE ACTION, and institutions “refuse to enact any kind of very basic safety regulations.” How much collective action is enough to make this kind of mind feel that the threshold level of necessary collectivist action has been met? (The correct answer is “LOL.”)
If we behave collectively, we’ll be safe! Why? The virus knows?
Even to the bishops of the Church of Vaccination, the declared goal of Covid mitigation was to return to pre-pandemic existence. Get vaxxed so you can get back to normal, was the laugh-out-loud funny promise. The supposed point of protective measures has always been to end protective measures: “Two weeks to flatten the curve.”
The loss the faithful are experiencing is the loss of ritual, the loss of shared performance that frees people from the anxiety of consciousness and personal deliberation. When you walk through town, some people are wearing masks and some people aren’t wearing masks; the reassurance of uniformity is lost, and everyone just becomes a person, making their own choices. Remarkably, the harshly enforced collectivization of behavior led to an obvious increase in social atomization, so the return to individual responsibility signals a return to social engagement and togetherness in ways that send a bunch of confusing signals to people who yearn for collectivist performance. It’ll be a hard year of adjustment for them.
What a shame.
Our "thinking class" is one Atlantic article away from throwing virgins into a volcano to eradicate scabies and athlete's foot. They're snake-handling Appalachian hicks, but communist.
Please, nobody, show Celeste the notifiable disease tables that the CDC puts out every week. None of those diseases is going away, yet Harvard does contact tracing for zero of them. We're at the point of this situation where guys like Paul Offit start sounding like the voice of reason (“A pandemic, by definition, changes the way you live, work, or play; an endemic disease doesn’t.” Noting that there were more than 60,000 deaths attributed to influenza in the winter of 2017–2018, he points out, “We chose to accept it [...] SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever. The question becomes, How do we decide to live with it?”) But the cynic in me says Celeste doesn't actually have any real feelings on the subject, and just wants to crank the outrage machine to get her name trending. Does that still work?