Disclaimer: If you haven’t read my last post, this one may not make much sense. I’d recommend starting here.
If you read my last post you’ll know that I left you hanging. I said I’d circle back to a couple things and I never did. The two points that went unaddressed were steel-man objections to a sub-thesis of my last post, which was that the recruitment poster was manipulative, deceptive, and thus should be looked upon critically. The steel-man objections were these:
Now you might say “if nobody enlisted, the British would have lost the war, putting the security of all individuals in jeopardy.” And you’d be right. In order to fight the war, and to keep everyone safe, the British government needed to recruit soldiers.
You may also say that in a time of war, when the country is under imminent physical threat, young and healthy people have an obligation to their elderly neighbors to enlist and to fight.
I didn’t tie these points in at the end for a couple of reasons. First, dissonance should be our constant companion when discussing things as fundamental as the individual’s relationship to the state. We must be able to hold two (or three or ten) competing and contradictory notions in mind at the same time. We need to sit in that dissonant space in order to have any hope of grasping the complexities of these issues. So, I didn’t tie everything up in a nice bow. I let the discordant note ring out.
Second, I didn’t return to these points specifically, but the conclusion I drew subsumes them: our humanity will be used by those in power to stay in power at the expense of the people AND it will be used to protect the people. It’s both. So the obligation of an individual to serve in time of war is valid, but should not be followed blindly. In the example of the recruitment poster from part one, the state chose to manipulate and deceive for the greater good, rather than using truth to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
You might dismiss those actions on the basis that it worked out in the end. The war was won and peace was restored. But that leaves many uncomfortable questions unanswered, such as Is there a cost to ends/means decision making? What happens when the state gets it wrong; when it manipulates and deceives for the greater good, but something bad happens instead? Do we have to put up with it?
These questions get at something more fundamental about the systems we’ve used to organize our world and they demand attention. Unfortunately, most people subscribe to something I call the Bridges and Roads (BR) model of the state. The BR model is of a state that operates reliably in the background, taking care of the fundamentals, so that we can go on about our happy, busy lives. It’s a functional but incomplete (and inaccurate) narrative that enables us to travel from one destination to the next without interruption. It enables a willful ignorance of the greater forces at play.
Unfortunately for the BR crowd, the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing response have effectively broken the model. The bridges have failed. The car is broken. Biology has forced us into a social and political inflection point. We can either cling to the BR model of the state and believe that we can return to a pre-pandemic world and live happily ever after, OR we can put the BR model to one side and start exploring the space between worlds. The space between the bullet-point, load-bearing fictions (to borrow Eric Weinstein’s coinage) and the ever-present, if distant, threat of societal decay.
One huge reason to choose the latter option is that, while the pandemic has brought foundational issues of individual and collective survival to the fore, the systems we’ve been conditioned to trust unquestioningly have been showing cracks for quite some time. Systems like 4-year-degrees, home-buying, and retirement pensions are not the beacons of stability and class climbing that they once were. To return to a pre-pandemic world is to return to the precipice of instability. The speed wobble before you’re thrown from the skateboard. In my opinion this is no option at all, the only responsible choice is to drive at the hard questions that the pandemic has busted wide open.
That’s what I intend to do and I hope you’ll join me.
MW 