A Modest Proposal: Stay in the Classroom
Warning: This article contains mentions/descriptions of death
[Jan 19, 2021 2:59 PM] The world is not well. At the time of writing, 25,286,512 human beings carry a deadly virus in their bodies, little half-dead things [1] that are hijacking their body cells, reproducing alien existences within the warm life blood and tissue of the human being. A whopping total of 96,121,673 cases have been recorded, and 2,052,267 among them are of the dead. None of this is news to my fatigued reader, wandering mindlessly on the abundant but flat world of the internet, tired of virtual meets, tired of bad news, tired of their laptop screens, their smell of indoors, the new normal. 25286512, 96121673, 2052267, like phone numbers, really. What do they mean? Bad news, surely, but is 25286512 a different piece of bad news from 96121673? Social media, our only reality now apparently, has been getting all excited about this old quote from old Stalin: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Unlike most (mis)quotes, he did actually say something like this. It was 1947, Ukrainians were dying by the handful in a famine. [2] When, during a meeting, an official began to enumerate death figures, Stalin interrupted him with this now deathless insight. It's heartless, but it's true. We don't understand mass deaths. A little exercise I tried when the numbers were still rising was to imagine myself back in my secondary school classroom: 36 writing desks and chairs. School girls, hairs braided, sitting in each one and half listening to class, some knitting below their desks. Now imagine they were all dead. That makes 36 dead bodies. 360 deaths would be ten of these classrooms of dead bodies. That's two floors of my school building. Now that, times ten, 3600... I lost track.
Are you uncomfortable? But 2,052,267 have died. If the afterlife sat each of them in my high school classrooms, and we spent 5 minutes in each classroom, just sitting among them, really contextualising our aliveness with their deaths - that would take us a total of 190 days. And yet more are dying. I think sometimes we leap too quickly to conclusions: the question 'what does it mean?' is immediately interpreted as 'what should we do then?' which is a socio-political question, a very important one, but it skipped the human part of it. People are dying. They are dying like a big hand is wiping bread crumbs off the table, and we are, you and I, we are bread crumbs. Forget Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. If reality was an agent (read 'God', if you are a theist), a point is being made here and being missed: we are powerless products of nature.
We know that, of course. We know it like a mathematical axiom, something to remember by heart, or be reminded of at catastrophes like the Holocaust, the 9/11, the Rwandan Genocide, the COVID-19 pandemic. Why do we keep forgetting? A fact about the nature of our existence, for crying out loud. Shouldn't it be more obvious? We don't forget our genders, what we're allergic to, whether we still hate our moms. Why does it take footage of fires, news of piling carnage, viral videos of dying people - to remind us of the contingency of our being? The truth is that we do not understand death. We understand what we mean when we say 'I am a woman', so much that transwomen are able to stand up and say it even when society disagrees; we know what it means to be allergic to nuts (swollen tongue, hospital stays), what it means to be angry at mom.
But we don't understand death. Consider just one death, and we cannot wrap our heads around it. It is the ultimate Other, the token alterity, to borrow Levinas' concept. He wrote of alterity in Totality and Infinity: 'The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is only possible if the other is other with respect to a term whose essence is to remain at the point of departure, to serve as entry into the relation, to be the same not relatively but absolutely.' Death is not just a complicated concept, it's one where we absolutely do not have access to. Yet it is immanent to us, it is only in contrast to death that we are alive. Its enigma motivates us intrinsically (as my more Freudian readers have already begun muttering under their breaths), we are unconsciously tended towards death as though seeking to unite with ourselves, or at least according to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud introduced the death drive as our unconscious but intrinsic desire for ‘ultimate pain’, symbolised by death.
The key notion here is that our intense concern about death, ours or others', is linked directly to how much the self evades us. It doesn't take as huge a leap as the negation of ourselves (i.e. our own deaths, or the deaths of loved ones whom were part of who we are) to understand this. Sitting at the television on 9/11, we need not know any victim personally to experience the sudden trauma, we need not even have been North Americans. The simple, unavoidable fact of being a human was that our staying intact was at the mercy of complete strangers. How many of the innocent lives taken at the attack had any personal relationship with the suicide bomber? And yet he killed them; he can. We don't have to look to climate change or a pandemic to conclude that our lives are at the mercy of something we can't control - nature; in fact our survival is also dependent on people we are completely unaware of, and had no intention of controlling. This was a key thesis developed in Precarious Life, a collection of intriguing essays by the fascinating thinker Judith Butler. Not to mention our livelihoods, our mere survival already rejects a clear boundary between you and me, us and them. When we lose someone, especially somebody intimate who was part of 'who we are', we have lost a part of ourselves which we never knew and was always in the process of understanding. With their deaths, this part of ourselves is taken away forever, a bridge cut off; and this is one way to rationalise the unspeakable trauma and grief of losing someone dear.
A single death is therefore a tragedy, an insurmountable loss. But what about the millions of deaths? I think we do not inherently have a psychological pathway to that concept. We are able to understand a little of it, watching videos of family members saying their final goodbyes through an iPad. We can try to empathise with a mournful, heartbroken tweet. Our direct, emotional comprehension of a million deaths can only be done manually, one by one, via the individual. But that is an infinity, temporally speaking - we will run out of time before we can finish this task. This brings us back to Levinas, to the totality of infinity. The infinity that is itself a totality, a radical other, the little bits of death that is in itself the alterity of Death.
I have presented this conceptual abstraction as a counterpart to the emotional numbness that each of us are feeling at the start of this new year. I'm afraid it does not explain much, doesn't distinguish 96121673 from 2052267 human lives, doesn't tell us how to feel. But in the mix of factors: Zoom fatigue, missing friends, bored at home, bad news syndrome... The inextinguishable tiredness and confusion that some of us find ourselves naturally retiring into - is underpinned by the lack of conceptual handle over death unfolding everywhere around us. If we had wanted to understand what it means that 'people are dying', we would first have to understand what it means for ourselves to die - the totality of our own Deaths colliding with the Leibnizian infinity (in contrast to Cantor's). Perhaps we are better off pondering in the (Teams) classroom.
Footnotes
My editor asked if viruses are indeed half-dead things. They are in a specific way: viruses do not show any standard sign of life until they have entered their host bodies. Check out this article for more.
I mention this story specifically to pave the way for Levinas, the main guide to my thesis here. Levinas was born in Russia, lived in Ukraine, was a Jew and an exceptional Jewish scholar who lived in the times of the Holocaust; he was caught by the Nazis, avoided death/torture because he was found in France and put into the Black Forest. Read more about his reality here.
