A convenient fear?

We need a discussion about the future of work and education that is not subjugated to COVID.

In the discourse of COVID culture, skepticism about COVID measures and narratives has been often linked to selfishness—to the presumably egocentric, ill-informed desire to go back to normal and live life to the fullest.  One of the insinuations directed at people who speak about going back to normal is that they are thinking only about themselves and about their own liberty and pleasure.   

In that context, as someone who is critical of COVID culture, I find myself in a strange situation: if I judged COVID measures opportunistically through the effect that they have been having on my life, I would have a reason to be grateful.  As a contract university instructor with significant childcare and child-education responsibilities, I found that COVID measures have simplified my logistics by enabling me to do 100% of my work from home.  The amount of work did not change, but the conditions of work under COVID are highly compatible with logistical efficiency and ongoing parental responsibilities (no time is spent commuting, getting ready to commute, packing food, standing in food-outlet lines because I forgot to bring food, etc.). 

It is often assumed that COVID culture is driven primarily by fear and by empathy for vulnerable people.  But could convenience for people who can work from home be another significant factor?  In other words, do you believe that what we have been doing since March 2020 is primarily about the empathy-driven, fear-driven effort to save lives?  In asking this question, I am not in any way suggesting that COVID is not real or that vulnerable people should not be protected.  However, when a sacrifice for the common good also happens to be closely aligned with one’s convenience, I have to ask questions about whether I accidentally found myself on the “winning” side of a phenomenon that is somewhat less selfless than what it presents itself to be.

People sometimes ask how I like teaching online.  This is not a question that I can answer ethically because how I like it is not the point that our society should concern itself with.  I love teaching online simply because I always love teaching. Teaching large classes on Zoom is intellectually satisfying because, despite the sterility of the blank black boxes, there are features (such as the chat box) that make the experience stimulating.  Not having to walk on icy pavement and take public transportation to get to a lecture hall where electronic multitasking is sometimes happening in plain sight (as opposed to behind those blank boxes on Zoom) is a convenience—no matter how much I do honestly love and value being in those lecture halls.

And yet, the only question that ultimately needs to be answered when it comes to the future of university education is what the right thing for society is:  Should the future of education be determined by what is convenient for professors?  Should it be determined by what is convenient for students?  Should it be determined by overarching values that transcend convenience or the pragmatic need to balance conflicting demands? These are truly complex questions to answer because while some forms of convenience are dominated primarily by inertia or aversion to effort (I don’t feel like changing out of comfortable clothes, packing a dinner and taking a bus to teach a night class on a January evening), other forms of convenience are motivated by the genuine challenges of conflicting demands, for example the need to balance work and study with family responsibilities, challenges that technologies such as Zoom can help to alleviate.  This authentic complexity makes it especially important that COVID is not used as a smokescreen to make decisions, without sufficient in-depth discussion, about the future of work and education that may later be hard to reverse. 

Many of us who have been experiencing the unofficial “convenience benefit” of COVID measures have been told that our “sacrifice” was necessary to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.  We have therefore “selflessly” accepted the cost-benefit and risk analysis presented to us as scientific truth.  We have modified the way we do work overnight ostensibly for health reasons. But what if health might be functioning partly as a smokescreen for a much deeper transformation that will be perpetuating sharp divisions among people based on whether or not they can make a living working from home?  Could it be that there is an element of fantasy fulfilment, not simply sacrifice, in our submission to COVID measures?

The gap between those who do skilled trade work and those who work in the knowledge economy has never been larger in terms of the conditions of their work.  There is nothing wrong with different people doing different types of work based on their aptitudes, training and the requirements of the task at hand.  However, the desirability to some knowledge workers (myself included) of the possibility to get paid to work from home heightens the responsibility of these workers to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of true knowledge.  In universities, the tenure system is often justified in terms of giving critical thinkers academic freedom from government and corporate control.  However, the relatively little critical thinking about COVID narratives that has so far come out of the academia might be partly due to the possibility that considerations of lifestyle/convenience and conformity may be much more dominant in the quasi-aristocratic academia than passion for truth seeking.

Reflecting on the foundations of COVID culture and its possible future variants is like going to the dentist for an Xray.  If you have cavities, you do want to know—but do you really need to know today?  Why not put it off as long as you feel no pain?

If you bought a house that had a foundation problem, would you not like to know? 

The Covid regime has enabled many Canadians who can earn money from home to simplify their logistics—even if many of us are working very hard from home.  But this lifestyle is build upon the foundation of

·       Silencing scientific and medical debate.

·       Erosion of freedom of speech and other civil rights.

·       Questionable data analysis and cost-benefit analysis.

·       Hierarchical ways of thinking, with health professionals overly glorified as quasi-religious “priests,” “saints” or “heroes,” knowledge workers sometimes given quasi-aristocratic privileges and many others unfairly labelled as non-essential.

·       Non vaccinated people demonized as a threat to public health who are abusing their right to make choices for their own bodies.

·       Making decisions without sufficient regard to the wellbeing, education and future of our children.  Will they be able to reproduce the convenience that we enjoy, or will they be increasingly ruled by a narrow elite that would facilitate downward socioeconomic mobility for many?

·       Turning ourselves into “pharma-humans” who inject into our bodies whatever we are ordered to.    

These are only some of the costs that the apparent “winning class” is currently incentivized to not sufficiently notice or question. 

Canada (like similar countries) under COVID has been exhibiting utopian tendencies.  As the rhetoric about flattening the curve to not overwhelm the hospitals efficiently metamorphosed into talk about “cases,” it seemed that we had been recruited to achieve something that may be historically unprecedented—stop the spread of a virus that, to the vast majority of people, is not deadly.  The same system that chronically underfunds and understaffs long-term care facilities has asked us to believe that is it at the same time exceptionally devoted to saving the life of each person there.  Focused protection for vulnerable people (starting with improving the conditions of their care) while minimizing the harm to the rest of the population did not seem to be regarded as a viable option.

The apparently idealistic and categorical nature of the attempt to stop a mostly non-deadly virus from doing what it was designed by nature to do and what viruses have been doing from time immemorial—spread—is a reminder of what writers of fiction have long depicted in their works: the slippery slope between utopia and dystopia.  In The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin depicts a city in which the perpetual happiness of the citizens depends on the constant misery of a single child who remains locked away in a filthy, dark room.  Most citizens consent to this injustice—but a few walk away from Omelas into an uncertain future.

Wherever one finds oneself in a Utopia, then, one should look for what is locked away.  In the COVID utopia, the most obvious victims, in addition to patients in long-term care facilities and children whose lives are disrupted, are those whose ability to make a living has been harmed or those suffering extreme loneliness.  Meanwhile, the apparent “winners” have been those who can make a living from home and who, like me, have a personality that is compatible with spending a great deal of time at home and who have a strong family support system.  Dutiful citizens, who often label themselves as responsible and anybody skeptical of COVID culture as morally inferior, are fortunate to be living at a time in which our relative convenience and status can be sustained by technology.  In the engineering classic Flying Buttresses, Entropy and O-Rings: The World of an Engineer (1993), James L. Adams discusses the belief of some philosophers of technology that

. . . technology determines the desire for goods and services.  [Proponents of this philosophy] see technology and the knowledge that underpins it as the major driving force within a culture.  People subscribing to this theory will sometimes say that technological “progress” is “autonomous” and speak of “the technological imperative.”  A perspective that often follows, sometimes called “technological determinism,” assumes that technology determines social directions and that people will follow its lead.  (p. 66-67)

According to the logic of such theories, if applied today, it is the development of technologies such as Zoom that may have led us to accept COVID measures—just as the invention of the stirrup, as Lynn White argues in Medieval Technology and Social Change, played a major role in the rise of feudalism by making it easier to mount a horse and fight a war, which in turn stimulated the creation of a feudal society that would support the new kind of warfare (cited in Adams, 67).

Adams, however, acknowledges that “the notion that technological breakthroughs are the dominant force in altering the fabric of society may be overly simplistic” and that “historical counterexamples to the philosophy of technological determinism abound.”  “Could it be,” he asks, “that societies determine the direction of technology, rather than the other way around?  That the emotions of individuals and moods of a culture are the key?” (68-69).

If that is the case, then it is our desire to stay at home, obey health authorities and think of ourselves as virtuous—that make us accept COVID measures and drive the development of technologies such as Zoom—not a health crisis and the availability of Zoom that keep us at home:

The business world is fond of the theory that technology responds to the market by providing what people want.  This is often referred to as “market pull,” as opposed to “technology push.”  Certainly evidence can be found for this view.  The supersonic transport has been a commercial failure simply because people don’t want to cross the ocean that fast badly enough to pay the price. . . . People subscribing to this theory would assume that the stirrup was invented because warriors figured out that they needed some way to handle heavier weapons while mounted and were willing to pay for it.  (69)

Why are we so willing, as a society, to pay for COVID and for the technologies that help to keep us at home?  Adams’s focus on emotion—his reminder that “the direction of technology involves desires, dislikes, hatreds and passion”—is productive for understanding COVID culture:

Since technology is an activity of people, emotions play a critical role in determining the problems on which engineers work.  Technology is often considered to be a completely rational enterprise, producing products for rational consumers.  Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . Most personal computer owners I know are quite aware of the amount of memory in their computer, but they are not aware of how much of it they are using.  If they found out, they would undoubtedly realize that their computer has large amount of capability they do not use.  Does it mean that the excess capability is not valuable?  Not at all.  It has value because they love it. . . . I was firmly convinced, during my more cynical periods at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that as far as the public was concerned, the entire U.S. space effort was entertainment.  I still believe that the public supports large projects partly because of pageantry. (272)

Does the public support COVID culture and its sustaining technologies because they feel good within that culture?  Healthcare, it should be remembered, is much about the ability to engineer, produce and deliver diagnostic procedures and treatments.  We have been seeing in recent decades a growing willingness to view the healthcare system as the lens through which we might understand and manage many aspects of our lives. COVID culture represents a culmination in our willingness to submit ourselves to the direction of the healthcare system—and there seem to be some power-oriented personalities who know how to take advantage of that willingness.

Adams notes that “the role of government makes it even more difficult to create simple theories as to why technology proceeds in the direction that it does” (75-76).  For countries in which governments have enormous power to influence daily life, Adams emphasizes the moral responsibility to ask ourselves, “Are the forces presently causing technology to take the directions it does the right ones for the long-term good of humanity” (76)?

The current narratives that are encouraging long-distance work and learning technology might have harmful consequences for the long-term good of humanity (see H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine).  For the sake of all that might be in the process of being locked away—individual liberty, the right to think freely and speak freely based on evidence, the future of education and of the economy—our society should consider peacefully walking away from the COVID utopia/dystopia and focusing instead on protecting people at risk while living our ordinary lives in the real world.  And if this life involves working from home, we should be honest about the reasons that we want to work from home and encourage a mature, nuanced and open discussion about working from home instead of building a paradise of fools on a foundation of fear and virtue signaling.

It is time to have a discussion about convenience as a possible motivator of COVID culture—and about how we can use technology to optimize convenience while minimizing the hazards and erosion in values that may be caused by an excessive focus on convenience.