Covid Era Thoughts — mid-June 2020

June 16, 2021

It has been several weeks since I have recorded my thoughts and I wish that I had earlier. I reread the diary and had to shake my head when I wrote about “hundreds dead in Italy.” We now have over 112,000 dead in the United States with new expectations of around 200,000 dead by September. Coronavirus continues to ravage the globe. Foolishly, Penn State has decided to try regular classes this fall.

I do think it is important to record my feelings on the police brutality, social unrest, and authoritarian movements that have dominated the last few weeks. Less than a month ago, George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, was killed by a police officer while others looked on. The tragic episode was filmed and was added to a recent list of unjustified killings of black men. Minneapolis and then America erupted in protest. Given Covid19, I was first worried about the role large protests would play in spreading it. However, it quickly became clear that without protests our society would worsen. The protests against police brutality were met with more police brutality. Accelerationists, anarchists, and other opportunists took advantage of the situation to cause mayhem.

At least 96 police department used various forms of teargas against protests. Peaceful marchers were mercilessly beaten by amped up police officers. They drove into crowds, rode their horses over people, shot people with rubber bullets, tasered people, among many other instances of extreme police brutality. I can’t begin to describe all of the atrocities committed by American public servants. My fear: rubber bullets today, real bullets tomorrow.

I have experienced many emotions over the last few weeks — ranging from extreme numbness from the traumatizing videos of police shooting and blinding people, knocking them over and leaving them in pools of blood, to red-seeing rage. Although righteously indignant, aside from righteous FB posting, there is little that I have done. I certainly feel that as a white male, there is more I should be doing. I will need to completely revise my courses and materials to adapt to this world of disease and authoritarianism. I hope to contact some of my top students and try to work closely with them. It’s through my students that I can have the greatest impact.

I do worry about my emotional state in the months ahead. I fear the pressures that my job will exert, the ongoing anxiety over coronavirus, and what will be a chaotic and potentially bloody election. I know life will be hard in September and October — classes will resume, and the election season will be ending. I think there is a worryingly high potential for political violence.

I have become alarmed by the rise of the “boogaloo” or as I call it the whatever-the-fuck (WTF) movement. These are primarily young men who are alt-right or libertarian. They first started showing up at anti-lockdown protests and more recently have been attending BLM protests. However, they sometimes support BLM but mostly hope that a violent conflict will ensue and they will be able to use their weapons. Why they are not labelled as a terrorist group while Antifa is, is pretty obvious. They are mostly white, middle-class rightwingers and libertarians. Now they have shot someone at a protest in New Mexico. I believe that they have caused other mayhem at other protests. It should be the goal of the next administration to clamp down on these increasingly emboldened terrorist groups. These people are not oppressed — they only care about gun control or their interpretation of accelerationism. They want society to crash so that they can commit murder.

***

The initial threat of covid19 seemed respiratory with death limited to the elderly. However, we are learning that it begins as a respiratory illness than turns into a vascular disease. It can lead to strokes or heart attacks in younger patients. Many are patients with underlying health conditions. This is a diabolical virus and I am now more worried about it than I was in March or April. The failure of the federal government has been compounded by a crushed economy, heightened racial and social tensions, and general social unrest. How does one psychologically cope with these present conditions? How does one prepare for the darkness that may come?

Some of the books that I am reading/listening to for my mental fortitude during this period include White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. At a time when I feel the need to explore my own racial assumptions, I must also prepare students, especially white students, to examine their privileges and biases. DiAngelo is a sociologist so I am glad to see whiteness discussed from the perspective of my field. She is white — which is helpful, although there are many things that I am already familiar with as a white sociologist myself. Still, I feel a duty to re-examine my sense of a racial or ethnic identity and how my course material, references, cadence and so on, may more easily advantage some than others.

***

Some basic reviews of books I have read or partly read recently:

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig was written in 1939, three years before he and his wife committed suicide. Zweig describes living through the end of the Austrian empire, the first world war, the depression, and the welcomed invasion of Austria by the Nazis. I am at the point in the book where he is still discussing the imagined security of the literary world he was entering in the early years of the twentieth century. Vienna was an amalgamation of various cultural innovations. The empire seemed stable. Trade throughout Europe was flourishing. Everything seemed stable. It reminds me of the 1990s in the West. Even the 00s and early 10s seemed more stable and forward looking. Zweig did not live to see the Nazis defeated, committing suicide with his wife after they had fled to Brazil.

I have just begun The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary Carter. It is supposed to be a good general biography as well as an exposition of his ideas and how they were implemented by American economists after the Second World War. Keynes lived roughly the same period as Zweig but worked himself into an early grave trying to develop a plan to maintain peace. Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group — bohemian artists, intellectuals, playwrights, poets, among others. They were liberal socially and sexually. It may seem like an odd place for one of the greatest and most consequential economic minds in history to be found. But that’s what made him great. He was able to experiment with his sexuality and develop an appreciation for the aesthetics of life — and beyond basic survival there is little else to life besides sex and aesthetics. I think this understanding underpinned his belief that the role of government in economic crises was to help, not sit idly by while the market did its so-called magic. Keynes knew that markets were just systems of human speculation driven by emotion and instinct; what he famously called “animal spirits.” I plan to read this sporadically when I need a source of inspiration. Though primarily known for his macro-economic theories that underpinned postwar industrial America and the European welfare state, he also battled authoritarianism. He saw that economic pain and communal humiliation of the kind Germany experienced after the First World War might embitter a country so much that they eagerly accepted totalitarian rule.

I am sporadically listening to Kingdom Come, the last fictional book by JG Ballard. Written in 2006, it seems very prescient. It describes the suburbs of London becoming havens for British nationalists who combine fascism with a deep love of consumerism — they are willing to adopt a fascist ethos as long as their rights to shop at the mall are allowed. They wear St. George gear and are partly comprised of various football leagues. The book features the narrator describing how his father — who was one of these St. George shirt-wearing fascists — was killed by someone and the murder seems to be getting covered up. I still have several hours to listen to. Once again, life mimics art. A few days ago, several football league nationalists in Britain tried to protect several statues in London from BLM protests. They got drunk and yelled racial slurs and jeers — just like in Ballard’s book.

Another book that I am still making my way through is House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. I have reached the early Stalin years, the early 1930s. It truly is a monumental work. Very few books have combined so many of my interests: religion and eschatology, revolution and its aftermath, Russia, gender relations, ethnic relations, architectural design, building and housing data, aesthetic descriptions, music, organizational structures, utopianism, among many other things. I am taking detailed notes as I see how I could link my interests in seemingly unconnected things like how the economics of parking affects urban form, violent millenarianism, and human psychology. In many ways, it is similar to John Gray’s book Black Mass, but unique because it focuses on one building complex where many Russian officials lived. I like it because it treats Bolshevism as a religion more than a traditional political ideology — which makes sense, as political ideology often takes on a religious fervor.

All of these books are being read both for pleasure, but also for my professional and intellectual life. I have tried to read about times of great change, when the mirages of life were revealed for what they were. Because my view tends to be gloomy, I can assume the worst when that is not always the case. Nevertheless, I believe the precautionary principle is important at the personal and policy levels.

***

It’s still unclear where the country is going . There are many thoughts that I want to express that hope to preserve for posterity. Like Stefan Zweig, but without the critical acclaim, I hope these journals can help me make sense of myself and the world at the beginning of the 2020s. Or at least my perception of it. I am also recording and reflecting on my emotional states. The overwhelming feeling today has just been on of restlessness. I want to write and teach and organize and relax, but I can really only do one of those things. I hope that I can sleep longer or better. I fear the days, weeks, and months ahead will be very challenging, physically and emotionally.

June 17, 2020

Sometimes you need to plumb the depths of your own ideological extremities to better comprehend the extremism marring the world. As I read the House of Government, the tome on the Russian Revolution, I am reminded of my childhood fascination with Nikolai Bukharin. He was a Marxist philosopher and Bolshevik revolutionary who spent several years in exile working out the ideas of Soviet Communism with Lenin and Trotsky. Bukharin’s name is not as recognizable as Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, though he was a pillar of the Bolshevik revolution. Maybe the “rule of threes?” Remembering four Russians may be too much. I digress…

Though my parents raised me as a pacifist, and I have mostly stuck to those values, I do not consider myself a fully committed pacifist. I recognize that there are times when action is demanded. But this should be a very last resort situation. As Sun Tzu emphasizes in the Art of War, the best way to win a war is to avoid it. This is not always possible, so other methods ought to be used, such as deception. I do not advocate deception and find it to be a dishonorable way to engage with the world. However, I recognize its power. I also know that authoritarian, millenarian and nihilistic troll divisions excel and deceit and subterfuge.

Troll division: rather than using “alt-right” “manosphere” “red pillers” or other terms that are partially correct but in some ways are too precise. I like the idea of troll divisions for the following reasons:

1. trolls are ugly, cave-dwelling monsters; trolls are people who go online to harass people, act absurdist, “shitpost” and so on.

What is kind of fascinating is that the more politically, intellectual troll divisions hate social justice and postmodern academic terminology. Here I may agree with some of their gripes, mostly about the turgid volumes of social constructionism and the avoidance of psychology. But one can’t help but notice a similarity in the way that cloistered academics in an ivory echo chamber of verbiage are mirrored by troll divisions who also use their own terminology and insider rituals. But at least the academics are mostly striving to seek truths and fight for justice, which don’t always easily combine. Trolls are just really annoying most reasonable people. In most fantasy novels, warriors defeat trolls.

2. divisions: this can be interpreted in different ways. They are like divisions in the military — they are militant, if their organization is more algorithmic than logic-based. But it also represents the divisions within the alt-right, Aruguloo (my term for the boogaloo militants), troll-o-sphere. Like the left, there are many divisions about the proper role of race, gender, class, nationalism, globalism, religion, and the environment. They are not simply angry white nationalists. The far right in 1900s Germany also had many divisions that coalesced into Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s. Right now, we have troll divisions. But they could similarly coalesce into something like an army — literally and metaphorically.

My dive into the murky waters of the troll divisions has been aided by the book, Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, by the New Yorker writer, Andrew Marantz. More on that later.

July 2, 2020

Today I recorded a lecture on libertarianism, utilitarianism, John Rawls and communitarianism. I reviewed the Trolley Experiment. I look forward to the online discussions. Students love these topics. It was strange giving this lecture to a screen. Usually this is one of the more engaging lectures, because I am trying to hook them into the class. I want to review best-practices for Zoom discussions. Tomorrow I lecture on population growth, the tragedy of the commons (Hardin), and the work by Elinor Ostrom, a personal hero of mine. Ostrom went and empirically tested various ways of managing resources. She and her colleagues did statistical analyses, ethnographic fieldwork, as well as lab experiments. After several years of inquiry and theory development, she used the concept of “Common Pool Resources” to describe ways that commons could be managed — not by government or corporate bureaucrats (though they might work sometimes) but usually by people on the ground.

I have spent most of today watching the show Sabrina the teenage witch. It’s fun but serious/dark enough to keep me interested. After plunging into the neo-pagan, bizzaro-world of the far right, my interest in paganism has been piqued. Not for spiritual reasons! From a scholar and activist perspective; I want to know why so many people are suddenly turning to rightwing pagans. White people looking for ancestral culture, is one reason given. I suspect is a combination of that and the prevalence of fantasy in pop culture, LARPing, and video games. People have been raised playing heroes on a screen. Of course, the real modern world that makes video games possible, seems effeminate or materialistic to them. So a generation or two who have been raised in this media environment now can go from playing Final Fantasy and Fornite to reading Guillame Faye’s archeofuturism and Nietzsche’s many venerations of the warrior-hero. Not surprisingly, prominent Youtuber, PewDiePie listed Yukio Mishima as his favorite writer.