Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputationby Jonathan Mummolo, Princeton University (2018) https://www.pnas.org/content/115/37/9181
Police at G-20 in Toronto (2010) photo: Boston.com
Will Ford’s failure to protect Long Term Care Facility Residents and Staff during the COVID-19 pandemic be his Walkerton?
Earlier posts, as well as mainstream media, have commented on the impact of budget cuts to public health funding, the significant reduction in inspections of long term care facilities, the disproportionate impact of the virus on lower socio-economic groups including front line long term care facility workers, the prior roll-back of minimum wage increases, and the significantly higher number of deaths in long term care facilities operated by for profit organizations. The crisis faced by residents of long term care facilities during this pandemic reflect the Ford government’s policies and its willingness to allow partisan dogma to trump reality and the lessons of the past.
In Orwellian fashion the Ford government – focusing on its ideology of fiscal restraint, cutbacks and efficiencies to benefit taxpayers in lieu of citizens – ignored the key findings of the inquiry by Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor into the Walkerton water crisis of twenty years ago. In so far as the Ford government and its acolytes are concerned it is as if a “memory hole” erased Mike Harris’s Walkerton debacle and freed them from any responsibility to heed the lessons learned.
To avoid the current crisis in our long term care facilities from falling into its own “memory hole” it is essential that a public judicial inquiry with an appropriately crafted mandate is established to inquire into:
(a) the circumstances which caused thousands of long term care facility residents and staff to become ill, and over 1,200 to die as of May 12, 2020;
(b) the cause of these events including the effect, if any, of government policies, procedures and practices; and
(c) any other relevant matters that the Inquiry considers necessary to ensure the safety of Ontario’s long term care facility residents and staff,
in order to make such findings and recommendations as the Inquiry considers advisable to ensure the safety of Ontario’s long term care facility residents and staff.
The Walkerton Inquiry was designed with four principles in mind: thoroughness, expedition, openness to the public, and fairness. These considerations must govern any inquiry into the current crisis in our long term care facilities.
14.2.1 Thoroughness
Given the purpose of an inquiry, “[i]t is crucial,” as Mr. Justice Cory has said, “that an inquiry both be and appear to be independent and impartial in order to satisfy the public desire to learn the truth.” An inquiry must be thorough to realize this duty of independence and impartiality. It must examine all of the relevant issues with care and exactitude so as to leave no doubt that all questions raised by its mandate were answered and explored.
14.2.2 Expedition
To remain relevant, an inquiry should be expeditious. Some inquiries have been criticized for becoming bogged down in procedural wrangling and for taking so much time that they drift into irrelevance. Expedition in the conduct of an inquiry makes it more likely that members of the public will be engaged by the process and feel confident that their questions and concerns are being addressed. Moreover, an expeditious inquiry usually costs less. In the Walkerton Inquiry, we set timelines at the beginning, and, with few exceptions, they were met. This is a testament to the commitment and hard work of all those involved, including the parties, most of whom made a substantial contribution.
14.2.3 Openness to the Public
An inquiry should be public in the fullest sense. This means that the public must have access to the inquiry so that the story that is told can be heard. Further, to maintain public confidence, the process of an inquiry must be open to public scrutiny. On this issue, I echo the reflections of Justice S.G.M. Grange, commissioner of the Inquiry into Certain Deaths at the Hospital for Sick Children, who said:
I remember once thinking egotistically that all the evidence, all the antics, had only one aim: to convince the commissioner who, after all, eventually wrote the report. But I soon discovered my error. They are not just inquiries; they are public inquiries … I realized that there was another purpose to the inquiry just as important as one man’s solution to the mystery and that was to inform the public. Merely presenting the evidence in public, evidence which had hitherto been given only in private, served that purpose. The public has a special interest, a right to know and a right to form its opinion as it goes along.
An inquiry must also respond to the concerns of the public, especially to those individuals most affected by its raison d’être – in this case, the people of Walkerton. Mr. Justice Cory expressed this role as follows:
Open hearings function as a means of restoring the public confidence in the affected industry and in the regulations pertaining to it and their enforcement. As well, it can serve as a type of healing therapy for a community shocked and angered by a tragedy. It can channel the natural desire to assign blame and exact retribution into a constructive exercise providing recommendations for reform and improvement.
14.2.4 Fairness
The principles reviewed above all stem from the public’s interest in an inquiry. It is important to remember, however, that inquiries can have a serious impact on those implicated in the process. Thus, an inquiry must balance the interests of the public in finding out what happened with the rights of those involved to be treated fairly. As the Ontario Law Reform Commission has commented, the public benefits of an inquiry must be weighed against the costs of “interfering with the privacy, reputation, and legal interests of individuals.”
Mr. Justice O’Connor ultimately rejected the Harris government’s arguments that it bore no responsibility and made wide ranging recommendations to enhance the safety of drinking water by strengthening regulatory oversight, applying sound quality management and operating systems, protecting water sources, and adopting a cautious approach to making decisions that affect drinking water safety. He considered the impact of and made recommendations regarding, inter alia, expeditiously filling local medical officer of health positions with full time appointees, budget reductions and the failure of cabinet to conduct a proper risk assessment of such reductions, the failure to have an effective inspections regime which included both unannounced and announced inspections, and the creation of a regulatory culture in which the Harris government “discouraged any proposal to make the notification protocol for adverse water results legally binding”.
We can only speculate at to what the current situation in long term care facilities would be if the Ford government had but heeded the general conclusions of the Walkerton Inquiry and applied them to protect long term care facility residents and staff as illustrated by the following adaptation of Mr. Justice O’Connor’s report:
The risks of unsafe drinking waterlong term care facilities can be reduced to a negligible level by simultaneously introducing a number of measures: by placing multiple barriers aimed at preventing contaminants disease from reaching consumers residents and staff, by adopting a cautious approach to making decisions that affect drinking water safety long term care facilities, by ensuring that water providerslong term care facility operators apply sound quality management and operating systems, and by providing for effective provincial government regulation and oversight.
Notwithstanding the benefits that such an inquiry would provide, and the established precedent of calling inquiries even where the number of fatalities were far less, the Ford government has refused to commit to a through, expeditious, public inquiry. Long term care facility residents, staff, and their families, as well as the media and the public deserve more.
Dr. Troy Michael Bordun, Concordia University and Trent University
Streaming platforms released Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe (2019, UK/Austria/Germany) in March. Despite Little Joe’s success at Cannes (Emily Beecham won Best Actress and the film received a Palme d’Or nomination), Hoopla, where I viewed it, didn’t showcase the film on the “Popular Movies” page nor advertise it with a banner. Perhaps a film about a virus that threatens the UK, then the world, was a little too timely.
Since the Festival, Little Joe has received scant attention. The film’s message about our overreliance upon pharmaceuticals to promote wellbeing is an engaging one, but its VOD release during a pandemic encourages an alternative reading (note 1). Or, for me, every film I watch these days is a coronavirus allegory. Spoilers ahead.
Plant-breeder Alice Woodard (Beecham), with the help of an unregulated virus, created a genetically-modified flower capable of activating the release of oxytocin in a person’s brain (note 2) Or that was her intention. Instead, after a human takes a whiff of its pollen, this sterile flower – dubbed “Little Joe” after the protagonist’s pre-teen son – uses its new mobile hosts to facilitate its propagation. In the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, once humans become infected with the pollen, they do whatever it takes to bring new hosts to Little Joe’s greenhouse, whether through direct means such as traps and physical violence, or more indirect means such as a persuasive argument.
With a sickly brown stem and bright red tendrils that open up to release its toxins, the flower appears poisonous or alien. Karl (David Wilmot), Alice’s boss at Planthouse Biotechnologies, questions the initial proliferation of Little Joe in the greenhouse setting and reminds Alice that certain viral strains are illegal in genetically-modified plants. Alice ensures her co-worker that she followed the regulations. Later, as mass infections seem more likely, she confesses to the use of a virus to make the plant sterile. Unfortunately, this is too late for humanity – Karl is already infected and assures Alice that Little Joe will sell at the upcoming Flower Fair (and later, across the U.K., and then the globe).
The film’s mood is one of paranoia. It becomes increasingly unclear who is infected, if an infection exists at all, or whether Alice is the one who is different than others. Indeed, the infected hosts resemble their former selves. They carry no visible symptoms and even present themselves as happier than before. These hosts, however, check-in and out of consciousness, and their family members can only say with certainty that this person is “not my wife,” as one test couple observes.
Aside from the pharmacological issues raised by the film, Alice navigates a busy career and motherhood, thus Hausner tries to reflect on these sometimes-conflicting activities. Rather than the trite narrative of an absent father who restores his family or relationship with his children, here, through conversations with her therapist, Alice reflects on the dual aspiration of success at work and competent motherhood, resulting in an understanding by the end of the film (after she’s infected) that her mothering of Little Joe is more important than caring for real Joe.
But Little Joe is somewhat unsatisfying for its inability to provide nuanced and sophisticated claims about any of these themes. This doesn’t foreclose an allegorical reading for the present times.
First, Alice’s workplace is a microcosm for governments’ slow responses to the pandemic. If capitalist economies function as complex global networks of trade and investment, Alice’s initial disbelieve that Little Joe could be harmful echoes our reluctance to put a halt on the circulation of capital. Is it surprising that China, the US, or the EU may have waited too long to acknowledge the spread of coronavirus? Acknowledging the harm would have required closing borders and halting trade, investments, labor, and finance as we know it. The hope, I assume, was simply that this would all go away and we could carry on with capitalism’s imperatives. The infected plant-breeders in Little Joe exhibit a drive to accumulate and possess, but this drive is no different than Alice’s pre-infected state of mind as she dismissed her co-worker Bella’s (Kerry Fox) warning about the plant’s propensity for procreation.
Second, Little Joe is affectively poignant in the present moment with its depiction of asymptomatic hosts. I watch pedestrians from my fourth-floor window enact social distancing as the parties walking in opposite directions move closer to the edge of the sidewalk or building facades as they near one another. Everyone is a possible carrier of the virus. Recent studies suggesting that the asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 is hindering our attempts to create safe environments ensures that Little Joe touches a nerve (note 3). Alice’s paranoia is our own – we never know for sure who has Covid-19.
Little Joe’s pessimistic ending resonates as the infected Alice accepts things for how they are. Of course, she accepts the global diffusion of Little Joe because her mind has been altered by the invasive plant; however, our circumstances are similar because a return to normalcy is, at this juncture, unforeseeable. A new normal includes ongoing paranoia, face masks, and pretentions that everything is okay. The ingenuine smirks on Little Joe’s hosts make a mockery of our forced smiles in Zoom meetings as well as the gratitude we show to our frontline workers while we secretly hope they don’t infect us.
Note 1: Paul B. Preciado provides a theory of the pharmacopornographic era. He writes, “We are no longer regulated solely by [the management and production of the body’s] passage through disciplinary institutions (school, factory, barracks, hospital, etc.) but by a set of biomolecular technologies that enter into the body by way of microprostheses and technologies of digital surveillance subtler and more insidious than anything Gilles Deleuze envisioned in his famous prognostications about the society of control. In the domain of sexuality, the pharmacological modification of consciousness and behavior, the mass consumption of antidepressants and anxiolytics, and the globalization of the contraceptive pill, as well as antiretroviral therapies, preventative AIDS therapies, and Viagra, are some of the indicators of biotechnological management, which in turn synergizes with new modes of semio-technical management that have arisen with the surveillance state and the global expansion of the network into every facet of life. I use the term pornographic because these management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.” Preciado, “Learning from the Virus,” Art Forum, May/June 2020: https://www.artforum.com/print/202005/paul-b-preciado-82823?fbclid=IwAR0p1PvNArS1y_nr3jswiSR756oNkdVgu0erj0bvbGGJGkvLrXuT01xCSfY
Note 2: Perhaps Alice’s name is a play on DC Comics’ plant-based villain Jason Woodrue, a.k.a. Floronic Man.
Note 3: Monica Gandhi, Deborah S. Yokoe, Diane V. Havlir, “Asymptomatic Transmission, the Achilles’ Heel of Current Strategies to Control Covid-19,” The New England Journal of Medicine, Apr. 24, 2020, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2009758
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has a concept called hysteresis. Basically it means living in the past. An example, is the boss of a factory who doesn’t want to install additional washrooms because… well, it’s just too much trouble. Having to hire an architect, and get a building permit, and all the disruption. Hell, its easier to just buy some bottles of hand sanitizer. Hysteresis means living in a pre-Pandemic world. And this attitude is all around us. Because there is some new evidence that better toilet facilities reduce the spread of Covid-19.
But Bourdieu also has some ideas that might help in this Pandemic. Bourdieu was always opposed to network analysis because he said it does not capture the social foundations of everyday life. Contact tracing apps are a kind of network analysis. They seems to imagine individuals floating above the world. An analysis of their contacts (their networks) is all that we need.
But Public Health research has demonstrated again and again that people have social lives, and live in built environments, and have jobs. It is significant that in Ontario there are no statistics kept about the occupations of people who contact Covid-19, and those who die from it. We are aware of healthcare workers, to some extent about workers in Amazon warehouses (though we don’t want to think about that when we order stuff — hysteresis again) and meat processing plants. These are not just networks: they are work environments that involve occupational safety.
If you look at John Snow’s famous map of cholera cases in Soho, it is quite possible that many of these people shared the same space (and today would turn up on a mobile phone contact-tracing app) but this network was not what caused the disease. What these people had in common is that they got their drinking water from the same contaminated pump. It took intelligence and a sociological imagination to discover this crucial fact.
In a similar way, it takes ordinary statistical work to discover that in England and Wales deaths from Covid-19 are twice as high in poor areas than in wealthier neighbourhoods. Researchers find similar patterns in New York.
Of the 20,283 Covid-19 registered deaths in England and Wales to 17 April, an overwhelming proportion were of people from the poorest areas.
Caelainn Barr, Covid-19 deaths twice as high in poorest areas in England and Wales, The Guardian, May 1, 2020.
The substantial variation in the rates for COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths across the New York City boroughs is concerning. The Bronx, which has the highest proportion of racial/ethnic minorities, the most persons living in poverty, and the lowest levels of educational attainment had higher rates of hospitalization and death related to COVID-19 than the other 4 boroughs. In contrast, the rates for hospitalizations and deaths were lowest among residents of the most affluent borough…
Wadhera and Smith, Variation in COVID-19 Hospitalizations and Deaths Across New York City Boroughs, Research Letter, JAMA, April 20,2020.
And this is not something that network analysis can capture. Network analysis just looks at who talks to who. It doesn’t capture the realities of how people live, social inequalities, and the long-understood relationship between social class and health outcomes. The Apple / Google App doesn’t capture that because it’s model of people is that of a computer engineer, examining nodes in networks. But that is not how we live our lives. We live in a class structure and a human geography. To understand this we need to think forward, not backward.
Career Suicide, a Toronto hardcore band with Martin Farkas, Jonah Falco, Noah Gadke and Chris Colohan recorded this 7″ vinyl in December 2002. It was issued on Deranged Records in 2003. You can listen to the band on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YJXk8sjeAk
QUARANTINED
It started with a cough and now your Skin is turning green. The windows have been boarded on you and there’s no vaccine. At first just a little fever, but now it’s attacked your spleen. The doctors won’t come near you! You’re under quarantine!!
You walked around with a mask and made sure your hands were clean. But now you’re only alive because of a machine. Downtown to the Lakeshore and stretching all across Queen. They’re going to round you up and confine you to Quarantine.
This slightly puzzling graffiti is from Bangkok in March 2020 (from IM)Graffiti shows Gollum from “Lord of the Rings” holding a roll of toilet paper and saying “My precious” in Berlin, Germany. Graffiti of Brazilian president Bolsonaro with face mask in Rio de Janeiro. The mask says Coward-17–the number 17 is a reference to the number Bolsonaro used in his 2018 election campaign.
In a pithy commentary published on The Nation website, Mike Davis points out that in previous wars wealthy individuals and corporations were expected to play their part. Income tax was increased on rich citizens to pay for the war. And essential corporations such as railways were nationalized.
In 2014, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times: “Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America.”
Amazon reported that it had $75.5 billion in sales in the latest quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier, surpassing analysts’ expectations. Profit fell about 29 percent, to $2.5 billion, because it cost more to meet the increased customer demand.
New York Times, May 1, 2020.
In the current “war” on the Covid-19 virus, Mike Davis argues that we need to nationalize “the infrastructure of the digital age—including Amazon and private delivery services—and operate it as a series of democratically administered public utilities.”
As well as a retail operation, Amazon also operates web services used by much of the internet. Perhaps its the modern equivalent of the railway in the 1910’s.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that investors are betting that corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook will increasingly dominate the economy in the post-Pandemic world. Smaller corporations will not be able to compete with the resources of these Behemoths, or will be swallowed up by them.
For many people, Amazon is an efficient delivery service for items that they need while staying at home during the Pandemic.
Yet there have been repeated reports in the new media of unsafe working conditions at Amazon warehouses and shipping facilities.
At least 50 Amazon warehouses in the US have confirmed one or more employees have tested positive for coronavirus, as its network of facilities, which are operated by about 400,000 workers, remain open as online orders surge. Workers at Amazon warehouses in New York City, Chicago and Detroit have held walkouts in protest of working conditions during the pandemic.
(The Guardian, April 7, 2020)
Ms. Jayapal … outlined her concerns about worker safety and other issues, including a report from an undercover journalist in Britain that employees had been urinating in water bottles because the warehouses had limited bathrooms.
New York Times, May 3, 2020
An employee at a Toronto-area warehouse also tested positive for Covid-19.
Amazon then fired another three employees who made public statements questioning Amazon’s pandemic safety measures, or for demanding increased cleaning at Amazon facilities.
In France, a court ruling forced Amazon to close down its warehouses because they are unsafe for workers. Amazon appealed that decision and lost.
COVID-19 outbreak at Amazon warehouse in Alberta — Alberta is reporting an outbreak of COVID-19 at an Amazon warehouse north of Calgary. Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province’s chief medical health officer, says there are five cases at the site at Balzac.
Globe and Mail / Canadian Press, May 1, 2020
Commentators have noticed that Amazon is starting to behave as if it were a sovereign state rather than a business that must follow national laws and safety regulations.
Reuters reported that Amazon, Target and Instacart workers in the United States staged protests on May Day, 2020.
Amazon’s increased visibility means that people are taking notice. Read a report: Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip on the Economy Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communitieshttps://ilsr.org/amazon-stranglehold/
UPDATE: “A Canadian software developer says he has resigned his position as a vice president with Amazon over the firing of employees who he says fought for better COVID-19 protection in the company’s warehouses. Tim Bray, who says he worked with Amazon Web Services, wrote in a blog post that he “quit in dismay at Amazon firing of two whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19.” Bray says some workers, who had been active with a group of Amazon employees pushing the company for leadership on the global climate emergency, were contacted by Amazon warehouse staff concerned about what they considered lack of coronavirus protection. He says the employees with the climate group responded by internally promoting a petition and an April 16 video call with guest activist Naomi Klein, and made an announcement using an internal mailing list. Bray says two workers who were leaders with the climate group were immediately fired.” – Toronto Star May 5, 2020 12:48 a.m.
Dr. Troy Bordun, Trent University and Concordia University
In a previous post, I wondered about the sublime and pandemic data visualizations. I wasn’t able to touch upon the role of the imagination in the theory of the sublime, nor how mathematics plays a part (or doesn’t) in that theory. Here, I’ll turn to a novel to help us better understand the sublime and humanity’s ongoing crisis.
As we read in my previous post, the first sustained investigation of the sublime was Edmund Burke’s APhilosophical Enquiryinto the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). A reminder of his succinct definition: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (1993, p. 67). The sublime is a subjective experience whereby one feels either mental or physical pain at the sight or sound of some object that could be greater than themselves, cognitively incomprehensible, or effectively Other.
In Burke’s account, the sublime is either an object or a subjective experience, and the degree in which we parse out these two is somewhat unclear from his treatise. Burke’s unrefined theory thus took Immanuel Kant on a journey a few years later. For Kant, the sublime is a disposition of mind: “an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think of the unattainability of nature as a presentation of ideas” (in Clewis 2019, p. 139). In short, your cognitive faculties experience the sublime “occasioned by the senses” (Forsey in Clewis 2019, p. 322). When the senses perceive something with magnitude, the mind is incapable of processing the size or scale; we then experience the failure of our rational faculties while simultaneously feeling a negative pleasure upon discovering that I am a subject with an unlimited capacity for imagination. I cannot rationally comprehend the stars yet I perceive then experience them through my imagination. For Kant, the senses are significant. The imagination requires both a vantage point and a new unit of measurement when cognition cannot transform its sight into simple mathematics. On the first point (perception), Kant notes that in viewing the Egyptian pyramids, one must not stand too close (you would only see block) nor too far (you would only see a far-off small triangle). Regarding the second point (cognition), since my sight could not accurately account for the depth of the Grand Canyon, I may deploy my imagination and hazard some comprehension through the lengths of football fields or some other unscientific method.
Yet in our present pandemic, the virus becomes visible through its numbers: infections, hospitalizations, deaths, unemployment, financial reports, projections, etc. It amounts to a lot of numbers – some stick out as immediately terrifying while others are too vast to comprehend, especially given the global reach of the virus. For Kant, apprehending the sublime is possible as the imagination can advance to infinity; however, comprehension cannot stretch its faculties that far. I may apprehend the spread of the virus, as I suggested in my prior post about time-based maps and the pandemic, but I am strained to comprehend a million cases dispersed throughout the continents or the economic toll on multinational capitalist enterprises. Numbers do not necessarily call upon the imagination and immediate sense perception, thus they cannot be sublime.
Concerning an epidemic, a mid-20th century work of fiction best captures this split between apprehending and comprehending. In The Plague (1947), Albert Camus tackles the epidemic with Kantian insight. In two remarkable passages, the narrator considers the plague, death, and imagination. The first:
Figures floated across his memory, and [Dr. Rieux] recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast throughout history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day. Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You could collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. […] Seventy years ago, at Canton, forty thousand rats died of plague before the disease spread to the inhabitants. But again, in the Canton epidemic there was no reliable way of counting the rats. A very rough estimate was all that could be made, with, obviously, a wide margin for error. “Let’s see,” the doctor murmured to himself, “supposing the length of a rat to be ten inches, forty thousand rats placed end to end would make a line of…” (Camus 1948, pp. 35-36)
We can unpack this passage with our theory of the sublime. First, the narrator has Rieux consider the role of habit and familiarity when it comes to corpses and death. Conversely to this kind of habit formation, the sublime requires novelty. A farmer working at the foot of the Alps would soon arrest his feeling of the sublime after repeated workdays as the mountains fell into the backdrop. In the above passage, Rieux also attempts to apprehend the forthcoming plague and its toll on the residents of Oran, Algeria. He notes that a hundred million stretched across history is but a number, a number which sparks the imagination then recedes into obscurity. Rieux then tries to comprehend the number of 10,000 dead a day, but cannot fathom such a pile of corpses (I cannot bring myself to look at the images of corpse pits or rooms in various countries affected by coronavirus), so he uses his imagination to apprehend the death toll and turns to a favored institution: the cinema. The mental image of five audiences helps our doctor imagine a square full of corpses as well as an approximate length of rats. From there, he apprehends the plague.
The second passage recounts a theory of mass psychology and the inability of numbers to sway mental dispositions and behaviours:
In spite of […] unusual sights [in the early days of the quarantined city,] our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them. […] Nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself [sic] what the disease connoted. […] They were worried and irritated – but these are not feelings with which to confront plague.
[…]
[…] [T]he reaction of the public was slower than might have been expected. Thus the bare statement that three hundred and two deaths had taken place in the third week of plague failed to strike their imagination. For one thing, all the three hundred and two deaths might not have been due to plague. Also, no one in the town had any idea of the average weekly death death-rate in ordinary times. The population of the town was about two hundred thousand. There was no knowing if the present death-rate were really so abnormal. This is, in fact, the kind of statistics that nobody ever troubles much about […]. The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth. For in the fifth week there were three hundred and twenty-one deaths, and three hundred and forty-five in the sixth. These figures, anyhow, spoke for themselves. Yet they were still not sensational enough to prevent our townsfolk, perturbed though they were, from persisting in the idea that what was happening was a sort of accident, disagreeable enough, but certainly of a temporary order.
So they went on strolling about the town as usual and sitting at the tables on café terraces. (Camus 1948, pp. 71-72)
This passage illustrates that comprehension does not lead to a sublime feeling. As Kant notes of the essential quality of the sublime object, its magnitude, once we try to compare it to something similar, negative pleasure is foreclosed. For Kant, magnitude suggests an apprehended view that is comparable only to itself, which does not mean that we cannot try to imagine it, as Rieux does of the cinema audiences as a heap of corpses; rather, a thing or landscape with magnitude can only be apprehended by what I’ll call irrational imaginative calculations. As the passage describes above, comparing the plague deaths to normal death-rates, or coronavirus deaths to the Spanish flu turns an otherwise negative feeling into a process of rationalizing (Terry 2020). Moreover, in our present pandemic, we turn from a moral crisis into feelings of worry and irritation that result in people championing the economy and “freedom” over life (Taushe & Breuninger 2020; Wilson 2020). According to these protestors, freedom from death by COVID-19 does not trump the freedom to go to church or the beach and to carry guns (Smith 2020).
What The Plague helps us understand is the role of imagination in appending the moral crisis of our pandemic. Indeed, a few (hundred) deaths in the lesser affected American states seem comprehensible and thus US citizens haven’t acknowledged the gravity of the situation. If the numbers do not change hearts and minds, nor the images of suffering through which our capacity for moral feeling should be evoked, can art and literature quash discourses of “the economy” and “freedom”? Can there be an aesthetic experience of a literary sublime such that it sparks moral reflection? Regarding terrifying images (we may add words too) viewed from safety, Friedrich Schiller notes that the “pathetically sublime” is possible so long as we are conscious of the moral freedom within us (in Clewis 2019, pp. 159-160). An image of suffering is sublime when we have personal security and when our mind is elevated by morality and pathos.
In short, from a safe distance in our homes, with our novels and daily news articles about frontline workers in hand, we contemplate the present pandemic and apprehend that safety is not guaranteed for all. As Tarrou states, here speaking in earnest about plague as a metaphor for the unceasing harm humans do to one another: “[W]e all have plague…. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken…. So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, brings death to anyone or justifies others’ putting them to death” (Camus 1948, pp. 228-229). Whether in the US or Queen’s Park in Toronto (Herhalt 2020), freedom to consume cannot justify putting others to death.
References
Burke, E. 1993. A Philosophical Inquiry (A. Phillips, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1757).
Camus, A. 1948. The Plague (S. Gilbert, Trans.). New York: The Modern Library.
Clewis, R. C. (ed.) 2019. The Sublime Reader. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Alan O’Connor, Professor of Media Studies, Trent University
Six weeks into the Pandemic, how are news media doing?
One thing that is clear is that many of us still depend on daily newspapers, even if we mostly read them online. Clay Shirky’s prophecy that citizen reporters would take over from professional journalists has not come to pass. Citizen journalists are important in some parts of the world, but the internet is also full of clickbait and misinformation. Monthly magazines such as Jacobin and Monthly Review (in the USA), Tribune and New Left Review (in the UK) often publish thoughtful essays and reportage, but most of us still want local news and daily updates. See the array of articles in NLR (March-April 2020), free to read at: https://newleftreview.org
Although people are turning to news media for information about the Pandemic, advertising income has plummeted because economic activity has been drastically curtailed. Marc Tracy, News Media Outlets Have Been Ravaged by the Pandemic (New York Times, April 10, 2020) estimates that 28,000 workers at news companies have been affected in the United States. These range from 13 employees (4 journalists) laid off at the Denver Post, 31 lay-offs at Sports Illustrated, and a four-day workweek at VICE, with pay cuts of 10% or 20%. Jane Martinson reports in The Guardian (May 15, 2020) that BuzzFeed has closed its UK and Australian news operations.
In an interesting development, journalists’ unions in the United States are taking a more activist role, even exploring the possibility of public support for news organizations.
The Pandemic has put huge demands on news media. There is little doubt that news organizations with deep resources have performed better than local newspapers. New media such as VICE news do not have these kinds of resources, though VICE did release documents about poor behaviour by Amazon executives. The outstanding mainstream news organization is The Guardian. The New York Times is a more conservative newspaper, but has expanded its range in an interesting way. In his study of media coverage of the Vietnam War, Dan Hallin describes what he calls the “sphere of legitimate controversy” in mainstream media.
As the Pandemic unfolds in Europe and North America, the sphere of legitimate controversy has expanded. It is astonishing to see the New York Times on a single day publish four or five major news articles about social inequality, and to start questioning the American prison system. The Times has also initiated a series of Opinion pieces imagining a better America after the Pandemic.
A study of the field of news media during the Pandemic shows that it operates much in the same way as before the emergency. Much reporting is “spot news” of statistics, shortages of medical equipment, economic bailouts (data show that these are the most read stories). There is also a considerable amount of “news you can use” about surviving at home, cooking, coping with kids. Media organizations with deep resources (New York Times, The Guardian) perform better than many local news sources and new digital media such as VICE. Media in the isolated rightwing ecosystem in the USA (Fox News, Breitbart) continue as before relentlessly supporting President Trump (blaming China, attacking the WHO). As the emergency continues, this rightwing media operates as “flack” distracting attention from serious reporting.
Public radio broadcasting such as the BBC and the CBC have a significant role. Medical experts who are not normally heard are given a forum to speak, phone-in programs often reveal horrifying details, for example about work conditions. However, the quality of magazine programs often depends on the choice of experts invited to participate (an issue discussed by Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, 1998).
Update: By early May 2020 news organizations seem to have moved beyond the initial shock of the Pandemic. After six to eight weeks of emergency measures, news organizations are starting to publish critical reports on issues such as privatization of nursing homes and chronic staff shortages, and the government delays in issuing travel advisories in early March. The New Yorker and the New York Times have published lengthy articles about coronaviruses in general, environmental destruction that opens conduits from animal to human infection, and attempts by experts to warn about the possibility of a future pandemic. An article by David Quammen, Why Weren’t We Ready for the Coronavirus? New Yorker, May 4, 2020, asks tough questions about the poor response of the United States. A documentary on Netflix makes background information on coronaviruses available to a wider audience. However, these investigative articles and “long reads” will mainly reach middle-class audiences with higher levels of education.
The study is based on qualitative content analysis of print / online news sources: Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, New York Times, Irish Times, The Guardian, Pensacola News Journal (local news site), New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Fox News (website), and Breitbart. The period covered is from March 16, 2020 to April 19, 2020. The study does not include television news.
Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent (1988) propose an institutional theory of media institutions. Five factors explain why mainstream media are indexed to the worldview of economic and political elites. For example, a for-profit media organization that relies heavily on advertising support is not likely to be open to radical ideas about worker control and about curbing consumerism for environmental reasons.
Because of institutional pressures, the media tends to focus on spot news. What is announced as breaking news turns out to be a report on something immediate, dramatic, deviant or involving violence. An airplane crash is breaking news and it will get a lot of attention. But longterm problems in the industry, especially issues put forward by workers, are normally not considered to be news.
In the sample of news media included in this study there has been good work by local newspapers such as the Toronto Star and the Irish Times. But the most outstanding mainstream news organization (continuing a pattern from before the crisis) is undoubtedly The Guardian. With offices in London, New York and elsewhere, and several different online editions, the Guardian has provided good reporting, thoughtful “long reads” and a wide range of Opinion pieces, often written by experts in different fields.
It should be noted that these investigative and Opinion pieces are not usually the most read pieces online. This is now the distinguishing feature of quality mainstream journalism: to commission in-depth and thoughtful writing and to publish it even though it is not what most people are reading. Screenshot for The Guardian, April 9, 2020.
The documentary Coronavirus, Explained debuted on Netflix on April 26, 2020. It clearly shows that the Coronavirus Pandemic was foreseen as a possibility by medical researchers and social scientists. Political leaders who claim that nobody could have seen this coming need to explain why they made budget cuts to Public Health (which has the job of monitoring dangerous viruses) and why they didn’t take the danger seriously.
Political leaders use misleading language about an “unprecedented crisis” and claim that they have “moved as fast as possible.” Conservative politicians favour military language: “We have come so far with this fight; we are not giving up.” This language hides the fact that political and business leaders paid no attention to medical experts and social scientists who warned about an outbreak for years.
The documents are there to be read:
The SARS Commission, Interim Report: SARS and Public Health in Ontario (2004)
Learning from SARS: Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak: Workshop Summary (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2004)
Ontario Health Plan for an Influenza Pandemic (in several updated editions, published by Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Emergency Management Branch)
Reading List about Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic
Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005). Available as an e-book. The best explanation of the Coronavirus threat, how they work, where they originate, and how large-scale agriculture and ecological change make it easier for these viruses to jump from animals to humans. There is a recent interview with Mike Davis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOp9G5hoQnM
Jennifer Kahn, How Scientists Could Stop the Next Pandemic Before It Starts, New York Times, April 21, 2020. A recent investigative report in the New York Times Magazine that covers some of the same ground. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/magazine/pandemic-vaccine.html
Public Health. PBS has a four-part documentary looking at issues of Public Health in the United States. The trailer introduces the main ideas: https://youtu.be/bXBkOYMCAro. If you have access to a university library check out many articles by Dennis Raphael. On health care in the United States during the Pandemic see Anne Case and Angus Deaton in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/sunday/covid-inequality-health-care.html
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 