I’m writing a second journal of the plague year, seeing as we now have a second year of plague to go with it. The Covid-19 Delta variant has taken off this September, and deaths have reached record frequencies in Idaho and in other relatively unvaccinated states. Idaho hospitals have begun triaging patients, and Idaho school boards are implementing mask requirements for students in districts where the potential for violence from the parent body is acceptably low.
As usual, medical authorities are urging social distancing, masks, and vaccination as a way out of the crisis. But misinformation from anti-vax forces has resulted in off-label prescriptions, shortages of horse worming paste in farm-supply stores, deathbed claims that the virus is a hoax, and, in our local public spaces, belligerent refusals to wear masks or socially distance. Fatalities are following a rising curve.
Early in my writing career I worked for a Ketchum, Idaho startup publisher whose mission was to deliver solid medical advice, in layman’s language, to people who had specific medical conditions. My first assignment was to learn as much as I could about cardiology and write what amounted to an owner’s manual for anyone with a damaged heart. I was handed a file box full of peer-reviewed studies on people who had had heart attacks and told to read the two thousand or so pages of dry scientific prose it contained.
I learned that chaos theory applies to scientific studies. Specifically, tiny variations in study parameters, the hopes of grant writers, the composition of peer-reviewing groups, and the human tendency to ignore unintended consequences produce enormous variations and outright contradictions in study results.
Solid medical advice is not easy to distill from hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. When you’re only dealing with two or three, it’s impossible.
In my book A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, I noted that the Framingham Heart Study, which tracked forty thousand people over three generations, is still identifying major risk factors for heart disease. Some risk factors have been deemed less risky than they were once thought to be. New interpretations of hard data have reversed conclusions about diet, drugs, and procedures.
Scientific data, no matter how carefully collected, is always subject to new analysis. The Framingham Study will again and again be mined by ambitious graduate students applying revolutionary new hypotheses to heart disease.
The relatively few studies done on Covid-19 and its variants have not resulted in a consensus about the virus or its human future. The way we’ll find out about the virus is by waiting, preferably by waiting while vaccinated. The desperate measures that put vaccines in billions of test subjects seem to have paid off, at least so far.
It may be fifteen or twenty years before human certainty and Covid-19 can exist in the same universe. In the meantime, there are other redoubts of the uncertain. The debt bubble that has sustained industrial civilization for the last twenty years looks to collapse sooner rather than later, with results projected to vary from uncontrollable inflation to Great Depression-style deflation. The weather anomaly that occurred when Portland, Oregon experienced a temperature of 116 F created whole labfuls of shocked climate scientists, each with a deep urge to revise existing climate models. A chip shortage caused automakers to shut down assembly lines and cover giant parking lots with unfinished vehicles. The U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan after twenty years of nation-building and the Taliban, this time with better public relations personnel, undid most of that construction within a month. Texas, with passive-aggressive help from the U.S. Supreme Court, outlawed abortion after the first six weeks of pregnancy, creating a black market (alongside those for fentanyl, bathtub meth, and heroin) for mifepristone and misoprostol. A giant statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from its pedestal in Richmond, Virginia, prompting Donald Trump to state that if only Lee had been leading our troops in Afghanistan, we’d still be there, and that if only Lee hadn’t lost at Gettysburg, the South would have won the Civil War.
In its mourning for lost certainty, America has become the land of If Only. Its past hasn’t become any kinder or its future any more predictable.
Last year’s journal of the plague year was called End Notes, a title borrowed from a newspaper column I began writing when I first realized that Julie and I were likely to outlive industrial civilization and its institutions, at least until we ran out of pork and beans in the crawl space.
The journal lived up to its title. Even if industrial civilization is still twitching, lots of formerly solid parts of our lives melted away in the period from March 2020 to March 2021.
Our lack of certainty has made us grateful when the sun comes up in the morning. Often enough, in these days of California on fire, it doesn’t. One awaits the stock market crash, the new and more lethal variant, the insurrection better organized than the last one.
This year’s journal—and I’ll again write a couple of thousand words each week, and I’ll again post them on Monday mornings—is titled Ghost Dance, after the Native American ceremonies that aimed to unite the living tribes with their dead, who would then help the the tribes put the world to rights.
Once the ancestors were called into our world, they would effect a physical transformation of it. Lame Deer, in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, is quoted as saying, “The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man’s ugly things—the stinking new animals, sheep and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came. The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent.”
Calling my blog Ghost Dance is an act of cultural appropriation, of course, but I do see contemporary American politics and economics as a kind of a ghost dance, an attempt to roll up and dispose of the world as it is and uncover that older, renewable world that we remember as being safer, saner, and full of beauty. Whatever magical thinking it takes to undo the pandemic, the ugly split between formerly mutually supportive Americans, the chip shortage, late-stage capitalism, unpayable student loans, extinct salmon, bad cops, no-interest savings accounts—we’ll magically think it. Whatever rituals we can invent to make that transformation happen, we’ll perform. We’ll let our actions reflect our beliefs even if they’re empty ritual in a world that looks emphatically non-renewable.
People eating horse dewormer might look like bad craziness to you, but it’s probably not as crazy as the Federal Reserve Board of Governors injecting incomprehensibly large tranches of money into a non-producing economy. It certainly isn’t as crazy as the folks who insist that a perfectly executed conspiracy involving tens of thousands of corrupt election workers cheated Donald Trump out of a second term.
All these people are just trying to roll up the ugly world they live in and replace it with one in which they can imagine feeling safe and in control and in possession of a future.
Our contemporary ghost dances could end the way the 1890s dances did, with a massacre of magical thinkers by people determined to enforce their version of reality. What happened at Wounded Knee is what always happens when people invoke spiritual power against military force.
Military action is a kind of lowest-common denominator thinking. You don’t bring a beautifully-constructed philosophical position on the meaning of existence to a dispute with people who hate philosophy and are packing .45s. The argument will proceed on their terms.
All this sounds as if I’m appropriating Russian nihilism from Dostoyevsky. In The Possessed, Dostoyevsky introduces a character, Shatov, who so despises the world he lives in that he decides to obliterate it by committing suicide. It works for him.
Self-murder loses no argument, doesn’t respond to any appeal to ethics, brooks no reference to a greater world, and admits no reappearance of ancestors, no matter how much spiritual power they offer.
The same goes for regular old murder. If current trends continue and nine of ten Americans end up packing guns to picnics and high school football games, nobody who’s willing to die for an idea is going to live very long.
I’m not a nihilist. I’m not. I’m not. Really, I’m not.
Refusing to believe in the efficacy of ghost dances doesn’t mean I don’t believe in anything.
I do believe that spiritual power can reanimate a culture’s damaged heart, which is one of the things the ghost dances were trying to accomplish. I believe that ritual can connect us to that spiritual power. I’m completely certain that no living human being has yet figured out the ritual that will do it.
It may be a problem of scale. When theoretical physicists insist that the quantum levels of reality respond to consciousness much more than they do to physical action, I tend to see the hand of God. But I’m disappointed that quantum effects at human scale are hard to detect, and if they are detected, it’s hard to say they mean anything. If quantum effects demonstrate the hand of God, God has very small hands.
I would love to see the hands of God magnified considerably. I’d love to watch them sweep away the world we have. I’d love to see it replaced with a world where people are decent to each other, where poverty isn’t built into economic systems, where lives are not stunted by fear of climate disaster or economic collapse, where people aren’t continually finding out that their lives have way less meaning than they thought.
This last point provides at least the hope that ghost dances provide an extensible metaphor, even for white people, even for white people who are writers. During my last stint of journal-writing, I found that writing could dance older, kinder meaning into existence, even if it was only meaning at the quantum level.
Some time ago I joked that I had lived long enough to become one eight-billionth of humanity, and I always thought I’d amount to more than that. But my existence as one eight-billionth of all the humans on earth makes me think I might be small enough to touch the hands of the divine. I might be small enough that the divine might touch back.
Smallness might be an escape from the larger, lethal trends of politics and economics (though not of climate). As one whose writing remains at the quantum level in the literary universe, it’s my only hope.
Julie and I (one four-billionth of humanity—still small enough for quantum effects) are subject to spooky-action-at-a-distance, where changes light years away result in checks in the mail, sudden voluntary quarantines, Amazon and Costco packages on our doorstep, cancelled get-togethers with friends, and a fascination with obituary columns. These constitute the personal effects of our lives, and we seldom see their causes, if indeed they have causes.
The good news is that they seem to have created a space where Julie and I can live for a while, however divorced we are from larger-scaled reality.
Making meaning in the absence of cause-and-effect is a challenge, but not making meaning, even in the most challenging circumstances, is a kind of cognitive suicide. I’ve seen that happen to too many friends and acquaintances. Dostoyevsky’s Shatov seems to be a common enough type, at least as far as a life of the mind is concerned. Large numbers of people have murdered their own cognition, even if they’re still walking around. Their minds have succumbed to the lies that are pretending to be reality these days. They accept those lies rather than looking at the world and thinking about it critically, investigating further, and staying open to rational inquiry.
So what I’m doing this year is trying to make meaning in a world that has seen meaning destroyed by an assault on truth. If that scenario seems too abstract for you, I promise I’ll get more down to earth and specific in the coming weeks and months.