Given that the pandemic truly onset with shutdowns almost exactly two years ago, I’ve been thinking about my biggest takeaway lessons from the past two years. Here are the first 12 that came to mind, in no particular order:
1-Group and organizational diversity is very, very important
Perhaps this emerges from receiving so many emails about what we stand for in the university. Perhaps it has emerged from a radical social decoupling via working fully online for 1.5 years. Perhaps it has emerged from reaching a saturation point of accounts of how “self care” and “mental health” is handled in the real world. Regardless of the combination of sources, it is clear to me that one needs a rich, thick set of network and organization connections for one’s identity and wellbeing. Groups and organizations that move for monopoly over one’s beliefs and value systems and life (e.g. “bring your whole self” to work, cultivating one’s full moral sensibility via higher education) are wrong and cruel and deserve rebellion.
2-Temporary policies are sticky
Hopefully, this is an obvious one. Echos of Rahm Emmanuel’s quote, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” It seems to me that any temporary policy has the ability to build energy towards permanence. Meaning, when one considers implementing some temporary rule or policy, think, “Would I be ok with this becoming permanent?” I hadn’t fully appreciated this before the pandemic.
3-Prominent twitter academics should be treated with extreme skepticism. Anyone with 5k+ followers needs to prove that they are not a wretch and a rake.
Many, many of course pass this test. But many do not. From now on, I assume there is a reason that the person took off, and that reason is bad. The burden of proof has flipped in my mental model of the world. Beforetimes, I would think, “There must be a reason so many people like X. They must be great. Wait…why do they keep saying so many wretched things?” Todaytimes, I think, “Despite their fame, I am beginning to wonder whether Y may in fact be principled.”
4-I believe in progress and the goodness of the marginal person.
This is a big one and hits from a number of weird, wild angles. I have never seen so many people from so many walks of life so radically change their behavior. The VAST majority of the elderly are at least partially vaccinated. Lots and lots and lots of people radically changed their daily routines for the sake of the pandemic. National news organizations are desperate to create groups of bad people who didn’t step up. But so many people did that it’s stupid to obsess over the marginal differences that exist.
I cried pretty hard at the Chauvin verdict. This was for a few reasons. The justice of the event was one. But I was also struck by the anonymous voices of the jurors. They were so regular. There was some fellow who was obviously nervous and had a Spanish accent. There was someone who sounded like an elderly lady with a classic northern Midwestern accent. I remembered thinking, “This was a jury of not just Chauvin’s peers, but my peers in the Twin Cities. Just regular people from around here. And they chose justice for George Floyd.”
And the vaccines. A true miracle of human triumph and innovation. And the healthcare workers who figured out so, so many methods of non-vaccine care on the fly under the hardest conditions possible. There were problems and shortcomings and excesses, of course. But was any of this less impressive than the moon landing? Than the internal combustion engine? I think those are the kinds of reasonable comparisons. I had been more pessimistic about people and the social world, but I think that people more stepped up to the plate than not. And I think those only emphasizing the shortcomings may simply be rakes looking for status, internet love, or click-based profits.
5-Chesterton’s fence is real and I didn’t fully appreciate it
I was long a stupid idiot who said things like, “Why even have football? It’s so juvenile and barbaric.” “Ugh. Bars are so tacky and gross. Why don’t more people stay in and cultivate their minds?” I now believe that many things that feel grotesque to me may serve critical social purposes, and just because I do not fully comprehend those purposes doesn’t mean they can or should be removed. Or just because they don’t serve the preferences of this idiot introverted academic doesn’t mean they’re problematic and should be unpacked. The last two years showed me that many people and young people need methods to reasonably safely expend their youthful exuberance. Let ‘em. I shouldn’t so quickly criticize those.
6-Schools, teachers, and school staff are important. So important
Teachers (and all folks who work in schools) are miracle saints and we should never again question whether they provide a net good to society. We see that children and society crumble without them. Professors like myself may or may not be important. Anyone teaching or serving children 18 or under in schools are miracle saints.
7-Loneliness is very bad, and the internet is a worse substitute
Personal connections are very good. The downsides of localized and geographically contained provincialism are worth the costs of the human connections they enable. As Saint Benedict said, “Too much solitude leads to melancholy or madness.” It should be unsurprising to see why the internet is fueled by such emotional energies. Being alone and online is really, really bad. A full life of connection that is then complemented by internet use is ok.
8-Sadness is full-bodied
A personal one. I had to look in the mirror and decide whether I’d spend the rest of my life emotionally and physically unhealthy or not. Escaping one meant escaping both. Mental and physical wellbeing is all or nothing. Not one or the other.
9-Academic research is conducted by way more hucksters than I appreciated.
I experienced significant moral injury by observing the sheer quantity of ambulance chasing among academic researchers. I experienced moral injury by observing how much cheerleading and enabling of the ambulance chaser exists. I experienced moral injury seeing the ambulance chasing-to-national journalistic institutions pipeline. I experienced moral injury seeing very good scholars who don’t study airborne illnesses have 10-25 citations on their very good papers and 45,000 citations on their bullshit throwaway “does covid go to dogs via carpets? A network simulation study from scraped tiktok data” paper.
Now, in my niche of inequality research, there has never been better work produced than right now (by others in the field, not me). It’s a true golden age. But I now consider good research by serious scholars on broadly important topics to be a small subsystem within a broader ecosystem defined by hacks running after ambulance after ambulance. Do we need ambulance chasers to keep the system moving? I’m not sure. Maybe. But the covid paper land grab was nevertheless revealing.
10-Broader social relevance as a goal and legitimator for research might be as bad as it is good
I think that the fundamental justification of “broader social impact” for much of research and research funding is maybe more negative than positive. Over the last two years we have seen wave after wave of massive trend hit our social world. They’ve been super weird and not totally predictable from previous social conditions. And thank God that there were weirdos toiling in obscurity on such topics. I think “Social benefit” may be a narrowing device that limits the acceptability of research topics to those which currently are viewed as socially impactful, which undercuts research development on future weird historical turns. At minimum, I’m more skeptical of this justification mechanisms than I was prior to the pandemic.
11-Technology is way more important for the most important forms of social change than I’d appreciated.
Vaccines are unequivocal goods. The ability to rally full social consensus to shift social behaviors is unlikely to occur. Social movements, public opinion change, etc., are all still very important. But technological innovation probably is our best bet to solve the massive impending social problems we face. I didn’t believe this before the pandemic. Now I do.
12-People from all kinds of groups are right and wrong at all different times and I shouldn’t shun people because they’re not part of my group
This one’s really weird and I don’t quite know how to articulate it. But I kept thinking again and again about these Meridian Idaho moms who were arrested for breaking down the police tape surrounding the playground. Mountain state right wing (perhaps) evangelicals…that sounds like my place growing up, and the group I often defined myself against. I remember seeing this viral video and being aghast “how could these people be so terrible and selfish?!” I of course discounted their views because they are generally part of my outgroup. But I just kept thinking these last years, “My God…those Idaho moms were RIGHT!!! THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO GO ON THAT PLAYGROUND!!!”
Maybe this is a very dumb lesson, but I’m much more sensitive to the point that many people may be right or justified about things, even if they’re social or intellectual outsiders (I have also been a bit aghast at what has flown among my social and intellectual insiders). Things that make people right or wrong about specifics or particular eras don’t ensure that their corectness will be perpetuated into future situations. Finding people with good insights and good ideas for broad social issues is a much more extensive and fluid process than I had appreciated. Now, am I tempted to jettison my core values of significant public investment in the marginalized, in lowering inequality and maximizing flourishing, in environmental protection and stewardship, in race/class/gender equality? Of course not. This is such a basic point that I’m a bit embarrassed to mention it, but: polarization is bad. Discounting people different than yourself is bad. There is a lot to learn from difference. Unfortunately, it feels like academia and the political parties are increasingly demanding values and experience and intellectual similarity. But that’s a negative trend that should be pushed against.
These are the 12 lessons that come immediately to mind. I’ll list more if I think of them.