Monthly Muse: 9/2023
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the September 2023 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
Like many other writers on Substack, I began my publication in the midst of the pandemic. Naturally, I wanted to help make sense of the global situation we found ourselves in, and that entailed writing about covid. When American colleges and universities became a key battleground in the national debate about vaccine mandates, my petition and organizing efforts against the mandates irrevocably attached my name to the political maelstrom surrounding pandemic policies in the United States.
Since the covid storm has calmed in the past year, I have focused on other topics at Handful of Earth, such as music, artificial intelligence, 1960s counterculture, and free speech. Indeed, my philosophical intuitions and personal political history have always inclined me toward a holistic understanding of phenomena in their totality as opposed to the social media-driven obsession with single issues. I’ve also noticed that people who gained an audience through writing on covid often have great difficulty moving beyond the confines of the now indelibly drawn “culture war” battle lines of the pandemic moment.
For these and other reasons, when a science journalist at a mainstream publication asked to interview me for a long-form piece on covid vaccine mandates, I was somewhat hesitant to wade back into these murky waters. In the end, I agreed because I believe that covid in general and the vaccine mandates in particular are matters of great importance that cannot (or at least should not) be swept under the rug now that we are living in a “post-pandemic” world.
In the article that emerged from these interviews, “Did College Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates Go Too Far?,” I am portrayed as a reluctant activist with appropriately moderate views on pandemic policy. This seems to be the image necessary to win over those who read publications like Undark and, in that sense, I am grateful for the sympathetic portrayal. Unfortunately, the article did not capture the depth of my philosophical convictions surrounding covid mandates. But, fortunately, it did link to my essay, “The Truth of the Anecdote,” here at Handful of Earth, in which I expound on some of these convictions. The article also conspicuously ignored other diverse voices in the anti-mandate movement, which would have provided helpful counterpoint to the narrative constructed around my own involvement.
I mention all of this to reflect on the position of the covid debates in my work here at Handful of Earth. My style has never been to obsess over covid as if it is the only thing that matters. At the same time, I find myself coming back to pandemic topics—especially the vaccine mandates—because I believe that they raise incredibly important political and ethical issues which impact the trajectory of our lives and societies far beyond the purview of “the pandemic.”
So, for those who have found me through covid dissident circles, know that these issues have been and continue to be close to my heart. Though most of the content on Handful of Earth is not overtly about the pandemic, I hope you will still find it relevant to your concerns. What we need most right now, I believe, is a rigorous analysis of the political, cultural, and technological roots of the covid regime, roots which underlay much more than just pandemic policies. Only then can we chart an alternative path forward.
For those who have found me through other avenues, know that some content on Handful of Earth will address covid-related topics, but the bulk of it will continue to explore other issues. If you find the covid content exhausting, I hope you’ll continue to see value in my writing on other topics, which forms the vast majority of the content on this Substack. In the process of engaging with this work, perhaps you will get a better sense of why the pandemic continues to crop up in my writing despite the much larger scope of my interests.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. How do you view the relationship between covid and the broader issues of the present moment?
Provocation
“Objective science would seem, in its own terms, to be completely unqualified to make any scientific statements about those qualities of human experience which have the impertinence to persist in existing, even though science cannot study them. A personal bond cannot be seen by being looked at by a look that cuts off the personal connection between look and looked at. The scientific look is no act of communion. The very idea of a sacrament of the present moment is, scientifically, worthless nonsense. It has no objective existence, therefore it has no epistemological value. Whatever shadowy existence it may guardedly be granted has no real existence in objective time space. That is as much as to say: we have been abolished, and can only wait to be demolished.”
—R.D. Laing, The Voice of Experience