Reading Crisis: Introducing What Matters Now, Spring 2020
How is it possible to review books during the interlocking health and economic crises of spring 2020? Billions of people are in and out of lockdown. Hundreds of thousands are sick and dying. Unemployment is spreading faster than it did during the worst of the Great Depression. Every word, every deed of the past two months enters a world overwhelmed by grief, fear, and punishing uncertainty. Literary criticism has never felt so fanciful.
Certainly I’ve seen examples of people’s resilience, creativity, and collective care, their commitment to life-making over profit-making. Think of: Hamilton’s CUPE 5167 waste collection workers putting down their tools until receiving necessary protective equipment from their employer; nurses in Arizona staring down far-right protestors who value market freedom above human life and dignity; the massive banner hanging from an apartment near my home that reads: FRONT LINE WORKERS WE ♥ YOU STAY SAFE. Inspiring, but these bold acts of worker power and solidarity only make me more skeptical about the immediate need for literary work.
It can feel as though anyone as privileged as I am, that is, who is not personally devastated by income loss, illness, or death at this moment ought to be devoting all their time and resources to meeting the urgent material needs of countless community members experiencing just such devastation. Ask the 1,380 City of Hamilton workers laid off on April 17 if they’d prefer a hot meal left on their doorstep, or a hot take on the new Hilary Mantel novel.
On March 17, bestselling author Alicia Elliot tweeted: “It’s so surreal to be working right now on anything that isn’t essential to helping people during this pandemic. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s pointless. Which maybe it is, but also what the hell else can I do.” An Italian friend of mine who lives in New York City, a brilliant philosopher specializing in Plato, says that when she looks to her place of birth, and looks outside her window, she thinks: The world doesn’t need philosophers right now. It needs health care professionals, scientists of medicine, grocery store clerks, food truck drivers.
While this isn’t the first time artists and philosophers have questioned their own utility, COVID-19 has profoundly shaken our sense of what matters now. I don’t think it’s as simple as artists and writers feeling guilty about creating in a time of destruction and death. It’s more a matter of being unsure whether we need artistic labour in this precise moment, even if we’re ardently convinced of the need for art during “normal” times.
If you’re like me these days, you read news constantly. In the rare moments I’m able to read anything else (when I’m not sanitizing groceries or emailing students or failing yet again to convince my toddler why we can’t go to the playground), I’m reading political theory. Tithi Bhattacharya’s writing on the tensions between care-giving and profit-making under capitalism. Lenin’s writing on the role of political organization in social transformation. Debates on the role of the state in struggles for social justice.
Because just as the crisis today is overwhelming, it is also, by definition, temporary. Crises are transitional periods. This one, too, shall pass.
I don’t mean that in a stoic or meditative sense, nor am I grasping at silver linings. Things may get better; they may get worse. It’s too soon to tell.
What we know for certain is that there are forces pressing to resolve the crisis in ways that will benefit existing elites, and there are forces (with far greater potential, despite being, at this moment, less organized) pressing to resolve the crisis in ways that will benefit social and environmental justice.
One of the odd things about this period is that, no matter how overwhelmingly the pandemic reshapes or overtakes aspects of our day-to-day lives, the world continues to go on. The late French activist and philosopher Daniel Bensaid writes about the “discordance of timescales” shaping existence, reminding us that we live simultaneously in this condensed moment of urgency, and longer timescales which include, for example, our individual lives, neoliberalism, the modern era, human history.
This isn’t a cheery call to chin up because, Hey, life goes on and isn’t that grand? It’s to recognize that life is going on, whether we like it or not; and inasmuch as the world is consumed by crisis at this moment, it is also virtually everything it was before the crisis, cast into a new context, and the ground on which a post-crisis world will be shaped.
As we navigate the unique pressures of today, we can also ask what this period will mean for struggles that existed long before and that will go on long after this particular virus is no longer a threat. What will the crises of spring 2020 mean for struggles against racism and sexism? What about struggles over public transit in Hamilton, or over public schooling across Ontario?
This edition of What Matters Now reviews four books focusing on these very issues. Shazlin Rahman reviews Eternity Martis’s They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up. Irene Tencinger reviews Lauren McKeon’s No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules. Shawn Selway reviews James Wilt’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. And I review Paul Bocking’s Public Education, Neoliberalism, and Teachers: New York, Mexico City, Toronto.
Because they were written before the pandemic drove an epoch-defining stake through the first months of 2020, the books can seem like letters written by versions of our past selves. Rather than read their ignorance of “social distancing” and the latest trillion-dollar bailout package as anachronistic, think about the power these books have to ground us, to keep us in touch with the politics of history that have built the world now in crisis, and will shape struggles to build a post-crisis world. Our job is to refuse to read these books as being “apart” from the current moment, and read them instead not only in their own right, but in order to read questions of crisis into them.
James Cairns is associate professor of Social and Environmental Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Senior Editor at Hamilton Review of Books. He is the co-author (with Alan Sears) of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2017).