what is Community? 10
spans of time. In the short term, wealthy dummies have a better chance of survival than even the most intelligent members of vulnerable subpopulations. The essential question of all human societies has ever been this: Who will live and who will die? This is what the philosopher Achille Mbembé expressed in the following stark language in a 2003 essay called “Necropolitics”: “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes.”8 That is what sovereignty really means, friends – and it is not Malthusian in the negative sense to acknowledge it. And yet, the existential baseline drawn beneath those calculations remains of course John Maynard Keynes’s ultimate socio-economic conclusion: “In the long run, we are all dead.” True enough (and, for Keynes, more about monetary policy than life philosophy); but in the present, we need to be thinking hard about when, why, and how many are dead, not just lurching from reaction to reaction. The virus is neither brutal nor just; it simply is. What it portends and achieves is up to us. Justice does not mean a return to the dark dream of prepandemic normal. That is not in the interests of community. Justice starts, at least, with a recognition that the normal was deeply and inherently unjust. There were already population firebreaks before the pandemic, brutal mechanisms of immunity constructed of barbed wire fencing and birthright exclusion. New firebreaks of the reckless and stupid are not defensible in current discourse, which is a victory for decency but maybe a defeat for global equity. Meanwhile, we lurch on into our near future, caught between the dilemmatic horns of mass death and economic collapse. Is there any resolution here? We must hope so, but whatever it is will not, and should not, mean a return to what went before. The risks there are only too obvious. And so now, let us move on to the next staging-ground of contingency. Or, as a solider would say, we now have to advance in defilade and watch for flanking fire – otherwise known as emergent unforeseen risks, the kind that cut us down in enfilade. These military metaphors usually strike me as unseemly, if not actively harmful; but right now it feels as if the world is on a kind of war footing and we need to think in tactical and strategic terms. Community So what is community as we head into the third decade of the 21st century? It is a morass of confusion and contradiction, to be sure, but also still a beacon of hope for a world in which we accommodate not just the robust trees but also the most vulnerable and at-risk ones. This last idea is, after all, the governing norm of the past centuries of nation-building, global connection, and international law.
We have grown, by difficult stages, more and more inclusive. And, while pockets and even systems of exclusion obviously remain—wealth inequality, racial and gender intolerance, colonial and environmental depredation—there is always room left over for hope: what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida memorably defined as “the unresolved remainder” when all daily dialectic had done its sublating work.9 That remainder, the undigested bit of human reason that somehow lies beyond reason, is our best chance for future community. It is distinct from optimism, which many experts warned us, in the first months of pandemic lockdown, could be a recipe for anxiety, depression, or bad predictions. Optimism is keyed to the idea of a return to normal, without questioning the darkness of the dreams that dominate that state of affairs from a time before – what a Latin-trained writer would call the status quo ante. Optimism is also dangerous if it impairs more existentially inflected forms of coping, because it becomes easy prey to disappointment, and hence a dangerous fatalism.10 But then optimism and pessimism become almost indistinguishable judgments on the glass containing half its volume: Half-full? Half-empty? Same thing. Returning to Leibnizian theodicy for a moment, the philosophical old joke has it that the optimist believes he is living in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that this is true. And, finally, to continue with yet another military analogy, surviving prisoners of war sometimes describe how those without optimism had a better chance of retaining sanity amidst insanity. They did not expect any kind of return; and that made them especially resilient to the daily insults and terrors of imprisonment. As I was pondering various responses to risks and consequences during the pandemic-dominated weeks of this writing, I came across an article that felt unlike all the other things I had been reading, both contemporary and historical. It was by the writer Julian Brave NoiseCat, of the Secwepemc/St’at’imc First Nations, called in English the Interior Squalish people and based in the Central and Southern Interior regions of British Columbia, near towns like Kamloops, Chase, D’Arcy, and Lillooet. The essay related how he heard the Blackfoot filmmaker Cowboy Smithx, from Southern Alberta, describe Native culture as one of “postapocalyptic people.” What he meant, NoiseCat suggested, was something like this: “As Indians, I think we’ve been told that we’re supposed to be dead and gone so many times that we’ve internalized it. Some of us don’t want to be anymore. In a society built atop our graves, survival has become an act of resistance.” And further, it meant this: “We’ve inherited a vision so audacious, it terrified our oppressors. It’s a worldview that celebrates beauty, defiance, and a playful wagging of the finger at the people who tried to kill us. After the pandemic but as the climate crisis unfolds, maybe more people will understand what it means to survive and still dream, like us.”11