The Habit Can Supercharge Moral Cowardice

I want them to know that we still need other people

We have, by my count, just two more Wednesdays left in the year after this one, meaning just two more newsletters in 2020 after this one. Sort of staggering, really—how different things look now compared to then. It was in this calendar year that I was writing about Bernie Sanders, presidential front-runner. In late March I was writing about solidarity, and what this new and frightening pandemic would demand of each of us.

Now I can’t imagine wanting to write about anything pandemic-related ever again. (Nor can I imagine writing hopefully about a presidential candidate ever again, if I’m honest.) This heavy, shapeless black mass of a year deserves better than the chipper, can-do genre of Prestige Quarantine Essays we’ve gotten: What Baking Sourdough Bread Taught Me About Love and How I Learned to Forgive Myself for Downloading Uber Eats Again and whatever other twee first-person narratives we were exposed to in glossy publications, which painted all the world as Going Through It Together. We were all working from home, these essays presumed, even the Uber Eats drivers delivering the food and the grocery store cashiers selling the yeast and flour, somehow. I am exhausted by the cutesy normalization of it all—online, in commercials, wherever.

This kind of memeification of our shared (or seemingly shared) experiences under coronavirus maddens me. But I have to remind myself—as I do about so many things—that this is less an individual failure of imagination or behavior and more a manifestation of the conditions of capitalism under which we all labor. In “Outlaw Country,” which explores the segmentation of the working class and the difficulties it presents to burgeoning mass movements, author and organizer Ramsin Canon describes the group of people I’m talking about thusly:

Everything from the appropriate tempo of email correspondence, the argot of office communication, and the appropriate methods of both workplace and personal conflict resolution have in practice become commodified skills critical to capitalism’s continued operation. There is a reason these workers can move fairly easily between [types of companies]. The details of the firm’s operations are less important than a familiarity with the mechanics of bureaucratic coordination, the language of emails and conference calls and progress reports.

…In the time of pandemic, the Coordinator Class are the ones who are able to most easily quarantine, because their jobs can mostly be performed without having to be in a physical space…Already segmented from other parts of the working class, they are now even more atomized from one another, and capital is rapidly building the infrastructure to allow them to never have to be in the same physical space ever again. As firms knit themselves together coming out of the pandemic, they will do so permanently scarred by the outbreak—and that disfigurement will look like millions of workers who rarely see their coworkers as living people but as names attached to emails who mostly complicate their day.

I have to remind myself that a few things can be true at once: that through our shared experience of “work” we all experience the indignities, deprivations, and alienation of capitalism; and that there are nevertheless differences in the degree to which we experience those things based on our income or credentials or other categories; and that these tensions between the experiences of the Uber Eats drivers and the Uber Eats orderers can and must be resolved if anyone is to fully escape these indignities and deprivations and alienation. Which is to say that no one will fully escape them unless everyone does.

This is why, ultimately, our politics cannot be a purely moral exercise, even as our morality undergirds our desire for everyone to have good and fulfilling lives. Moral boundaries are not only fluid, they can be weaponized, in both directions: the comfortable can absolve themselves of the hard work of participating in struggle (“I don’t deserve to have a say in this, since it doesn’t affect me, and it might make others suspicious if I show up”), and the uncomfortable can absolve themselves of the hard work of building solidarity (“Anyone who makes more money than me can’t possibly understand my pain”).

Canon continues:

These approaches, with their emphasis on centering and uplifting, seem better suited to HR departments and tenure committees making hiring decisions than to a mass organization of volunteers moving into struggle on their own behalf. Again, if we want to overcome segmentation of the working class, we have to experiment with how to yoke differential struggles together, to democratize power.

The philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò refers to this phenomenon as “standpoint epistemology,” the creation of twin poles: either giving deference or demanding deference based solely on categories of real or perceived experience. Anyone who has spent time in Left political spaces, or spent time flicking through Instagram stories, has seen one version of this or another. Well-intentioned calls to “center” or “uplift” the voices that we don’t usually hear spiral into an outright fetishization of trauma and the conclusion that those who don’t look like us are fundamentally Unknowable to us. That we have nothing to offer each other except a hasty shoving into or out of the spotlight; that we owe nothing to each other except a neverending recalibration of the Oppression Scale so that all time, attention, and space is allocated appropriately.

Táíwò deftly describes the flaws in this method of political engagement (emphasis mine).

…while [trauma and felt superiority] often come about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or representing others’ independence as a hostile threat (such as failures to “centre” the right topics or people).

These behaviours, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community’s norms magnify or multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or metabolizing them.

For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people – and, more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them.

There are political implications to all of this, but there are also personal ones.

The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the struggles of other people – prerequisites of coalitional politics. As identities become more and more fine-grained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional politics” (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.

If you believe, as I do, that connection and transformation across the lines that capitalism has drawn between us is not only desirable, but necessary as a condition of building a world that’s fit for all of us, then it becomes clear that we have some work to do in how we engage with one another.

We have so many responsibilities: to challenge and fight against the existing status quo, certainly, but also to stop ourselves from valorizing, caricaturizing, and thereby dehumanizing entire other groups of people. We need to be clear-eyed enough about our past and our present to reckon with the real enemy and set our targets accordingly. We need to understand that real power being won on behalf of the many has always required the many to understand what they hold in common. Marxists focus on the working class—the entire working class—not because it is the most moral or valorous group of people but because it is definitionally the only group capable of actualizing its own liberation. We therefore must organize and strategize accordingly. That means abandoning some of our preconceived notions. It also means abandoning bullshit like this.

I began this issue by mentioning the pandemic, and though I said I was sick of writing and thinking about it, I am going to close with it, too. My friend Scott over at the Action Cookbook newsletter wrote a great piece this week about how he’s learned to talk to his kids about what’s happening, given that they might learn all the wrong lessons at a time when the existence of other people seems so fraught with peril.

For them, this isn’t just the new normal, it’s starting to become the only normal they have ever known. 

I want them to know that this is not normal. I want them to know that an end is coming, even though it may take the better part of the coming year for that end to be practically felt. I want them to know that a genuine medical miracle is happening, that a vaccine that could have taken many years to be developed is being loaded on trucks and planes just down the road at this very moment, a visual that unexpectedly brought me to tears yesterday as the emotional weight of this awful, uncertain year manifested in joy at the sight of UPS trucks leaving a distribution facility.

I want them to know that help is coming. 

More than that, though, I want them to know that we still need other people.

We still need other people. Then, now, forever. Let’s never forget it.

I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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