My COVID cocoon is ending soon. Soon I will be rising earlier than usual (some of the time) and bathing with more regularity and heading to the subway station for the first time in nearly 20 months (I hope my card still works) to commute to my office. It's not like I want to, and not that I need to, but rather that I am obliged to. Capitalism impels me. The prospect of this momentous transition has not only made me sick to my stomach, it's somehow put me in a pensive frame of mind. I'm not seeking them but I keep coming across opportunities to cogitate.
For instance, I recently had a philosophical discussion during a phone visit with an older relative, a nonagenarian, about what the new normal will mean for her. She's a social person by nature still living independently (with assistance from neighbors and nearby family) but she has forgone in-person visitation willingly since the start of the epidemic in the interest of safety. She's fully vaccinated and even boostered as are her friends, one of whom is encouraging her to consider an in-person indoor visit while both are still healthy enough for it. Her instinct was to demur. I share a bit of her skepticism about the objectivity with respect to risk factors exhibited by those who are desperate to forge ahead with the return to normality. But as I listened to her, I wondered if she had considered the impact of a future without human contact, even at her stage of life.
After having myself lived through several months with the risk of covid reduced thanks to widespread adherence to proper public preventions and precautions, it seemed to me that with a long winter coming, there might come a day when she would crave the company of one of her many friends, and that given the brevity of life, and the reduced risk of infection with full vaccination, especially in conjunction with the wearing of masks indoors, she might find herself wondering why an indoor socially distanced visit with the right masked person on a cold winter day wouldn't be worth the risk, and I wanted her to know that if she decided it was, I wouldn't protest. She thought for a minute. She hadn't considered it. The most insistent friend she thought was maybe too reckless to be trusted even fully vaccinated, but she imagined she could entertain the possibility of relaxing her standards enough to give it a try if she thought the situation was worth it someday.
I'm not sure why I took that tack with her. I don't think I'd have any trouble swearing off the company of other humans* if circumstances warranted it (or gave me plausible deniability for it). But I have an aversion to commitment, and an aversion to standing on principle, so the thought of someone committing to a behavioral stance, such as abstention from having guests, on the basis of a principle, such as a notion that nothing is worth the risk of contracting COVID, is probably bound to be viewed by me with a jaded eye. Is it really true that nothing is worth the risk of COVID? Probably not.
I've had other excuses to wax philosophical occasioned by this new phase of the COVID era. Recently, a call-in podcast I listen to had a series of callers who wanted to debate the host on the premise that it is immoral to have children, not just because of COVID but also in response to the unprecedented uncertainties of the future due to global warming and to the hostility, particularly toward the young, of stubbornly persistent neoliberalism especially as it is coupled with frantic end-times capitalism. The solution to the problems we are facing they say is for humanity to actively give up and for the righteous among us to work toward a future that is voluntarily emptier of humans. Many of these callers would like to see some sort of tax disincentive if not outright legislation to prevent at least the most poorly reasoned births, something that many of these folks feel is something of an epidemic given the world that children are born into. How could planning to bring a child into this world ever be a good thing, they wonder. No one is talking out loud about culling babies, but why go public with this proclivity if you're not willing to get serious about it?
To me it seems a paradox: if you're clever enough to realize that when having a child is a choice it could well be an increasingly immoral one, we need more of you, not fewer. What we don't need is a world more full of people who think the purpose of life is to populate the earth with their kind-- though with clever people abstaining from procreation, that is exactly the kind of world you get; and in light of that it may not be a coincidence that it's a hellish place in which to bring forth a child. But my view is that the choice to have children should be just that-- in a sense it can be nothing other than that-- a choice, made possible with fullest advantage of tools for realizing the desire. In my view it's better to focus on the tools for responsible choice -- birth control for those who choose not to reproduce; health care and child care, an amplitude of resources and a healthy, well-tended environment for those who choose (or merely happen) to have children.
Unfortunately, the climate in this country, political as well as geological, is just not hospitable in these times to either choice.
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* Don't act like you'd care if I did!
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