Our Analytic crisis: Choices in the time of COVID-19

19th-century history was caught between the mythical story of the historian and the individual "real" experience of the people and that "between the two was an unbridgeable chasm, as between truth and fiction," says Italian anti-fascist writer Nicola Chiaromonte in 1970. It's the same skepticism as today: Between the news, the government, etc. and the reality of We the witnesses and the sufferers, is a gap.

Some don't see the gap or try to reason it away, some co-opt false narratives for their own gain, and some are desperately trying to point at it. Recently it feels like more people are beginning to see it, but those who still can't are trying just as hard to ignore it (see: New York City has more-or-less normal nightlife attendance this past weekend). The COVID-19 pandemic is shutting down cities and markets everywhere, leaving people jobless, houseless, and sick without care. And the Democratic primary held an invalid election yesterday in multiple states, while others postponed their elections to a later date. Because responses to the pandemic have forced even the wealthy to halt work and travel, more people than ever in the US are attuned to the atrocious failing of the government. Maybe.

In his opinion piece this morning "Get Ready, A Bigger Disruption Is Coming: The Covid-19 pandemic reflects a systemic crisis akin to the seminal crashes of the 20th century" essayist Pankaj Mishra argues that the coronavirus is signaling a "radical transformation" that closely parallels the onset and effects of WWI and the Great Depression and the "revolution" in the arts, sciences, and philosophy that unfolded in the aftermath. The excitement of the global free market in the early 20th century and its widely-perceived infallibility are similar to the widely-perceived infallibility of the American Empire today. Similarly again, the causes of the fall -- global economic crisis and rising international tensions -- had been happening for decades, neglected by politicians and journalists. The far-left and far-right grew simultaneously, coming together against establishment elites. These parallels are so blatant, as are parallels to other historical crises and revolutions, recognizing them can only be the precursor to a further argument.

Mishra's argument is that "the crisis of our time is as much intellectual as it is political, economic, and environmental...," that we have now an "analytic deficiency" characterized by an inability to describe the conditions of this crisis in terms outside of the vocabulary of the last century. Mainstream media is using the language of reform, free market, decency, normalcy, and "reheated Cold War slogans about the superiority of 'liberal democracy'". And, in the race against the US Bernie-led democratic socialist movement, the antagonist of liberal democracy has been made out to be democratic socialism, our old enemy Communism, aka our Eternal Enemy, Authoritarianism. It's the perfect mind-fuck circular argument to convince everyone again that our normalcy is being sabotaged by the evils of radical reform; that we must return to a better time. Make American Great Again... get back the domestic safety of pre-9/11... get back the stability and abundance of Reagan... The historical memory fails us in these unending loops, the same slogans again and again. Normalcy is a dangling carrot.

Anyone with eyes can see that recycled Red Scare tactics are not just being employed by mainstream media and oppositional political figures but believed by right-wingers and liberals alike. This analytic deficiency isn't just a product of our serious lack of historically minded-thinking in the baby nation of America, it's a tactic and a weapon being used knowingly to both hearken back to past-War anxieties and to keep our cultural collective mindset locked into the mirage of the present. We are using the language of the past but we have no memory.

And, the asinine liberal tendency to latch onto people/politicians over issues/causes is another symptom of the crisis. The die-hard #YangGangForever and #WarrenDemocrat people declare proudly that they stop quite short of real analysis and belief in causes in favor of a brand they can wear. It's clear the issues are not a priority to them because they aren't actually affected.

The emptiness of establishment Dems and neoliberals might be characterized by this analytic deficiency. They love the loop and the slogans. They don't see the gap, or they're able to lightly step around it. That's why they're currently at Disney World.

At all times people have felt that they were on the edge of history, their crises the end of all humanity. It's easy to look back and see Rome as a singular event, while many generations lived and died under the empire they never knew would end, let alone time would go on 1500 and many more years. This dissonance is also why we have a natural but nonsensical lack of empathy for people in history. But I've always been curious about whether people have always truly felt this self-importance about their moment?

I think yes, but I also think we are at a peak of this analytic crisis, aided and afforded by American culture. The empire is young. Built on imperialism and slavery much closer in time to now than other major countries.' Part of our lack of historical education is an active effort to obfuscate this fact. That's a whole other issue too much to discuss here, but the indoctrination of American children with this national superiority (with all its elements, chiefly racial) lends itself perfectly to lack of historical memory. The golden vision of the past is always an illusion, but here it is an illusion cast on a history that doesn't even exist, a view of America's upbringing that's always been fabricated. Maybe that's why culturally we are so focused on the future.

There's no part of a responsible post-structuralist historical theory that deals in projection, IMHO. Many people writing on this topic were historians first anyway. When I started writing about theories of history it was 2017, the fall after Trump had been inaugurated. The earliest tagline for my thesis project was: "We are currently in a third turn/reactionary era/postmodern 'crisis' in which our conception of history is a confused fusion of positivist and rhetorical philosophies, allowing strategically posed narratives of history such as Holocaust denial to be adopted for ideological purposes in the current political discourse."

"Every new philosophy is a reaction to events in history" (Nice one). I argued that we were at a crossroads, a predicament, between a clearer historical thinking and old abstract philosophies that, fueled by popular discourse that aimed to obscure analysis at all, was polarizing people between extreme political ideologies and eroding the value of truth. This obscuring of truth was being produced by and co-opted by politicians and the media to sabotage any attempt to curb the crisis, aka real analysis. And somehow, all of this led to Trump, the rise of the alt-right, and the offensively massive amount of people who actually believe the Holocaust is a propaganda hoax. The central ideas are the same as what Mishra has succinctly posited about the coronavirus, the market crash, and the "intellectual" crisis.

We are at war with our own ability to conceptualize and talk about what's happening in the 21st-century outside of the rhetorical environment of 20th-century events. This has never been more clear. Mike Bloomberg calling Bernie Sanders a communist on the Democratic debate stage, or Trump calling COVID-19 "Chinese Flu" yesterday are just two of many ludicrously transparent examples.

And we keep doing it. I agree with Mishra on all of his apt paralleling between the 20th-century crises and today, and clearly, I agree with him emphatically about our inability to analyze being at heart a rhetorical problem. But still, we reinforce it by going over these parallels again and again.

I've seen people wondering if this is the brink of the fall, as the start of the Depression in 1928 or the Russian Revolution in 1917, and how they should act accordingly. There are and will be more mass strikes, demands for expansion of welfare, demands to stop bailing out companies and start directing aid to the people, et. al. Again as in the 20s, from the left and the right on both sides comes the wrath of workers on the (literally) dying elite class. We could list parallels to no end, but remember how incredibly different the material conditions of life are in our time.

I'm not sure how #Unpopularopinion this is, but I think it's a mistake to believe a workers' revolution, or an intellectual revolution, will occur "no matter what." At every critical turn in Dual Power Russia, even some of the most radical revolutionaries (except Lenin, maybe) balked when presented the moment for striking, time and time again, hundreds of times over. People have always been scared, self-interested, had families, had jobs, had a hierarchy of priorities in which the revolutionary agenda couldn’t be first. Change is a guarantee, but all other factors are truly unknown and though this time seems like a critical opportunity for massive political shifts it also seems like another possibility for a capitalistic double-down, acceleration, onto the next loop.

Notice how you're saying already you "miss" the 2016 election because it felt so much easier. Who do we help when we romanticize?

If we learn anything new now, and I mean we the left not we the people (as many people are taking this week to just now realize they can't trust the government to look out for their wellbeing, etc.) it's that everything is made and made to change by individual people and their individual choices. Don't let yourself be convinced there's no controlling anything, or that there is a story that's playing out or a fate we're hurtling towards inevitably. Rules of history like rules of anything are a narrative we construct, and we can psychologically resist it. There are no rules. It can seem silly and ridiculous to believe that, but this is exactly the time to.