Imagine the following. There’s a terrible war going on, and you’re fighting on the side of rightness and justice. You’re in the army and everyone in the army is in favor of winning the war, winning it quickly, winning it completely, and winning it while minimizing the amount of death and devastation that wars naturally bring. Think of the following scenarios:
The general surveys a map. There’s a high risk, high reward attack to be made in a dangerous area. “If we can win this battle, the path into the enemy’s capitol is all but assured. It’s heavily fortified and our prospects for victory are slim. But if we succeed, the war will end quickly and countless lives will be saved.” The general decides the risk is worth it and orders the attack.
The lieutenant colonel reviews the plans for this foolhardy attack. “Has the general lost his mind? This attack is hopeless. We’re lambs going into the slaughter. He’s completely ignorant of the reality on the ground. How can I justify sending my best men into certain death? This will make us all the weaker after this attack assuredly fails. We’ll lose the line, try to fall back, and we’ll all die.” The lieutenant colonel sends in the troops, but reserves his best platoons to the back to prepare for the inevitable retreat.
On the front line the soldiers are bombarded with bombs and bullets. The lieutenant leading the front line platoons yells to his soldiers to hold the line. “Why the hell are we here?” he thinks to himself. “This is hopeless!”
Deserters from both sides watch bombs explode in the distance. “What fools they all are,” one says. “If every man decided to stop fighting, the war would end.”
Here’s a rough sketch of what each person might be thinking:
The general thinks, “The brave soldiers on the front line must make a sacrifice for the common good to end the war quickly.”
The lieutenant colonel thinks: “The lousy general needs to sacrifice his lust for individual accolades and not make such foolhardy swings for glory. I will fortify the retreat so we can fight another day and win this just war.”
The lieutenant thinks: “The greedy lieutenant colonel musn’t hoard our strongest fighters for his personal protection on a retreat. If we’re going to fight we must be all in.” The lieutenant also yells: “Hold the line! Don’t let the enemy break ranks to kill your brothers behind you!”
The deserters think: “Those fools with their lust for glory, their fear of maintaining good standing among their peers. If only they’d risk for the common good, war would be a thing of the past.”
Hokey. Do you see why I’m not a famous novelist? But this line of decision-making isn’t the most out there, right? Which of these folks are operating with a logic of individualism? Which are operating with a logic of collectivism? I’d say all are doing both and neither and both. I’d say the general has a reasonable viewpoint towards collectivism. I’d say the deserters do too. I’d say the deserters are unrealistic if they think all soldiers can drop their rifles at the same moment for the common good. I’d say anyone thinking that leaders aren’t motivated by personal incentives and glories are full of it. I’d say people caught in the middle of a chain of command and authority face criticisms of faulty collectivism and faulty individualism from all angles, accurately. I’d also say a war with an obvious good and bad side presents one of the simplest and most straightforward social contexts to differentiate individualism versus collectivism.
The point is that there is not a single expression of individualism, nor a single expression or form of collectivism, communalism, pitching in for the common good. A world with multiple institutions, priorities, identities, networks, and values is not a world with clean lines between individualism and collectivism. But you wouldn’t know that if you only read prominent media pieces on the coronavirus.
Covid Talkers and Simple Ideas
Being a public facing talker / thought leader about the pandemic must be really hard, especially if you are a journalist, academic, or scientist. You need to make a convincing case while doing your best to remain (or appear to remain) as unbiased as one reasonably can be expected to remain. My hot take: I think everyone has actually done a really good job, considering the circumstances, including public facing talkers / thought leaders. But every now and then I see people talk about “doing one’s part"/pitching in/common good versus individualism/selfishness/you’re-on-your-own, and it feels so deeply nonsensical and superficial. It feels like someone is trying to cram real life complications into Disney character tropes of simple and cleanly divisible good and bad.
Take Katherine Wu’s recent article in the Atlantic, “The Biden Administration Killed America’s Collective Pandemic Approach.” Here are a few representative quotes:
“The onus of public-health measures has really shifted away from public and toward vulnerable individuals,” Ramnath Subbaraman, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist at Tufts University, told me
Here’s another:
“It is public health’s job to protect everybody, not just those people who are vaccinated, not just those people who are healthy,” says Theresa Chapple-McGruder, the director of the Department of Public Health in Oak Park, Illinois…Throughout the pandemic, American leaders have given individuals more responsibility for keeping themselves safe than might be ideal; these revised guidelines codify that approach more openly than ever before. Each of us has yet again been tasked with controlling our own version of the pandemic, on our own terms.
(I actually like Chapple-McGruder’s point!). Wu later describes the public health model of behavior:
A medical framework—almost resembling a prescription model—is not public-health guidance, which centers community-level benefits achieved through community-level action. People act in the collective interest, a tactic that benefits everyone, not just themselves.
As I’ve sat on this draft, Wu has written another article about fall boosters. Again, the downsides of individualism are centered:
The reality that most Americans are living in simply doesn’t square with an urgent call for boosts—which speaks to the “increasing incoherence in our response,” Sosin told me. The nation’s leaders have vanished mask mandates and quarantine recommendations, and shortened isolation stints; they’ve given up on telling schools, universities, and offices to test regularly. People have been repeatedly told not to fear the virus or its potentially lethal threat. And yet the biggest sell for vaccines has somehow become an individualistic, hyper-medicalized call to action—another opportunity to slash one’s chances at severe disease and death. The U.S. needs people to take this vaccine because it has nothing else. But its residents are unlikely to take it, because they’re not doing anything else.
Here’s Gregg Gonsalves, one of the most online public health people, writing in The Nation:
There is a decadence to the Democratic embrace of rugged American individualism, where we owe each other nothing, that’s almost, well, Republican in spirit. Personal risk. Personal choices. Personal responsibility. Paul Ryan—remember him?—would be proud. The Gridiron Dinner was just American Covid-19 policy personified: no precautions beyond vaccination and Paxlovid for the unfortunate few who catch SARS-CoV-2.
Except that this is policy for the privileged, who are boosted (probably twice by now—and, full admission, I am doubly boosted myself) and know just whom to call to ensure they get the best medical care should they get sick. But, as Harvard emergency physician Jeremy Faust just wrote, this notion that we can calculate our own personal risk is a chimera: “Nobody has a good handle on what their individual risks truly are. How could they?… the math is remarkably complicated. We can’t expect people, even experts, to do this on the daily. That makes the ‘leave it all up to individuals’ approach pretty unworkable at the moment.”
Furthermore, as Aparna Nair, a historian of public health, told Ed Yong at The Atlantic last year, “Framing one’s health as a matter of personal choice ‘is fundamentally against the very notion of public health.’”
If I don’t think about it too much, these kinds of arguments make total sense. Yes, let’s all pitch in for the common good! How could anyone be reasonably against that!? But if I think about it for more than a hot second, the complexity becomes much more understandable.
The simplest response is that we haven’t all been in this together. At least not after the first few weeks. Here are a few very basic points to back up this claim.
Earlier, I hashed out an at-most 30% true theory of red state turmoil of professors returning to the classroom. There’s a big socioeconomic gradient of who could work from home during the pandemic.
My students at UMN are very aware of the disparities of in-person work versus laptop work. Many of my students were on the front lines in the pandemic. I’d describe their view of the “laptop class” as, at best, mixed. They haven’t exactly seen the “Stay Home, Stay Safe” crowd as working towards the common good.
In the Twin Cities during the vast majority of the pandemic, private schools were open, in person, and thriving. Public schools were shut down with the thin facade of google hangouts substituting for education.
I will just note: I have yet to meet a parent in the Public Health crowd that has not supplemented their own “Stay Home, Stay Safe” with some optional network node to advance their child’s well-being, whether this be private school, tutoring, or supplemental childcare. So the lived reality proved to be more complex with wider bars of acceptable risk tolerance than official messaging.
A silly anecdote I just keep thinking about. On a run in mid-day mid-fall 2021 semester. I live near mansions in St. Paul. I ran by one that had a well established sign on lawn, “Stay Home, Stay Safe.” I ran by this house frequently and saw the same car parked out front. This time I saw the Hispanic couple bringing their cleaning supplies inside. Their tween daughter in the back of the car on an ipad (this was during the school day during the school year, but public schools were shuttered and online.).
Say what you want about pandemic decisions of social distancing, masking, etc. (I distanced, masked, vacc’d, boosted, etc., by the way. Don’t mistake me for someone who’s going to try and convince you that Melinda Gates put an ancient Soviet uranium chip in the Moderna vaccine). The big point: has the US population ever undergone such a mass change of personal behavior for the greater good? I’d say we’re at least on par with victory gardens. That shouldn’t be hand waved away. But the communal effort championed by Wu and her sources, Gonsalves, etc., were not fully communal. I’d argue that the benefits and costs of our collective no pharmaceutical interventions were widely distributed across social strata in, dare I say, very unsurprising ways.
Which is to say: these ideas of individualism and communalism must coexist with existing systems, existing power relationships, existing norms, existing practicalities, and existing incentives. Society isn’t one thing. It’s complex. Individualism for the general means something different than individualism for the deserter. And the tradeoffs for the greater good as ascertained by the general may or may not make sense to the lieutenant. Such must be the case when making a general claim about a third of a billion people living across a vast system of social environments.
Before I go further on why I think the individualism discussion has been superficial, let me lift out two other pseudo-related examples.
Schools
Look at the last quoted Wu article. She bemoans the lack of testing at schools. But testing at school was highly consequential, resulting in a lot of chaos, uncertainty, and routine-disruption. Different countries made different decisions (Denmark made very different decisions regarding schools compared to the US, for example). I don’t want to go too far into the deep end of the pool, but a few things are obvious now. 1. There has been a massive amount of learning loss among children. 2. It has been highly, highly unequally distributed in the most unsurprising of ways. 3. Private schools reopened and got onto the normal track much more quickly and aggressively than public schools. And there’s an ever-so-slight correlation between socioeconomic status and private school attendance.
I’m not going to link. But there’s a prominent academic who’s very much in the education / kids / covid world. I’d guess they’re in the top 95th percentile of fear-of-covid. They recently (as of the first drafting of this post, six months ago) were very angry that their school dropped its mask requirement. This person bemoaned that their child wore a kn95 mask, but that these weren’t universally required to wear. That masking is a collective endeavor, not an individual one, that it works when we all do our part. Their kid got covid (the kid’s fine, btw) and had to miss some in person recreational activities. Side bar: this person has been located in some of the most extremely prestigious institutions for over two decades. They’re probably in the top 5% of the household income distribution. Their kid survived without incident. Their school is very high quality and comprised mostly of high SES children of academics.
I’d ask: who should absorb the brunt of collectivism? Because what I’ve seen is that primarily poor and minority students have suffered extraordinarily because of school shutdowns and disruptions. Open up any recent study and you’ll see American-style school closure and disruption has been a nightmare for poor and Black students, while more privileged and White students have largely recovered. This method of collectivism didn’t happen in many affluent countries. Is maintaining normal school “individualism,” “selfish,” “harmful,” etc., or would catering to elite preferences of zero covid in fact be the “individualized,” “selfish,” and “harmful” decision, insofar as the resourced have an easier time compensating for low functioning school systems? There’s not one individualism. There’s not one collectivism. Your communitarism is my getting trampled on. Your greater good may in fact be a claim about whose good is greater. It’s not easy. It’s multileveled and complex. That’s so obvious to me and should be for anyone who’s ever taken a halfway decent social science course.
(Sidebar: I realize masking is not the same as shutting down schools. But I’d argue that, at minimum, masking children should be thought of as a highly disruptive decision without an overwhelmingly obvious set of communal benefits.)
Masks on planes en route to fun
I’ve flown twice in the past three years. Each time masked the whole time (update: I didn’t mask the whole time on an August flight, four months after first drafting this). Whatever. I’m the laptop class so this wasn’t too inconvenient for me. I monitor the substack “Your Local Epidemiologist,” because it represents in my mind the maximum combination of intelligence/thoughtfulness and covid fear/pro-restriction viewpoints, both by the very intelligent author and her very intelligent commenting community (not to be too obvious, but I have a very high level of respect for this blog). Following the dropping of masking requirements on planes, YLE discussed the various issues of plane transmission. Before moving forward, I thought she was intelligent, thoughtful, and reasonable in her discussion. But one highly ranked comment kept rattling in my head:
Here’s one way to interpret this comment in terms of individualism versus communalism (I’m also loosely using this as a stand in for the comment section of the substack): we did our part to stay safe on the plane, protecting ourselves and others with our N95s. Yay! If only a policy were maintained so that everyone pitched in to do their fair share. That’s a frame of these medical students contributing to the collective good, and non mask wearers focusing on individualism.
Here’s another: privileged medical students want to fly to an optional footrace, the entire chain necessitating low paid and low authority workers to be in risky in person situations for the entire day. There’s no way in hell they correctly wore their N95 masks in every space between leaving their house and re-entering their house. I’ve been on planes. Everyone has Coca-Cola time. Or maybe they moved it down every so quickly to take a sip of water. But the point: isn’t the choice to fly to an optional recreational event in a pandemic, necessitating a whole slew of workers to remain in person for long stretches of time to cater to these whims, not a profoundly selfish, even individualistic, choice? Wouldn’t pitching in to the collective good mean not flying to the Boston marathon? That is as reasonable a story as the first, in my opinion. Now, don’t get me wrong: great job running the Boston marathon! Get it! just don’t delude yourself with a narrow definition of collective effort and individualism.
Here’s a third way to interpret it. According to this Pew poll, most Americans don’t fly in a year. 75% of Americans fly less than twice a year. Airline masking received a lot of oxygen, not only in major news sources and academic twitter, but among public health folks as well. How is this focus not another example of public health / academic chatter getting distracted by palace intrigue among the well to do?
My Point
Individualism is way more complex of a concept than the public health oriented commentators suggest. Individualism is a web of related concepts that exist within a broader society with many intersecting social positions and institutions, and which pushes in directions of both solidarity and atomization. Individualism and communalism coexist with organizations, which themselves have incentives and values, and which are connected and/or atomized. Individualism and communalism themselves are situated within power relationships that enable social closure, opportunity hoarding, and claims over material or symbolic resources. There never has been, and never will be, simple and universally applicable definitions of individualism and communalism outside of Disney movies.
And contra Wu, Gonsalves, Yong, etc., the disparities of communal activity were not due to libertarian boogeymen, but because individualism and collectivism are complex topics that likely made sense in local contexts. I think a lot of folks just didn’t think too seriously about diverse and broad systems, identities, tradeoffs, and incentives that existed during the pandemic.
I’m reminded of a good critique of libertarianism: a libertarian policy fails and the libertarian says, “It failed because people kept interfering with the market with their pesky society and norms and communities. If only we got a purer market, my ideas would have been shown to be true.” But, of course, markets are social things and cannot be fully isolated from broader society. I now see the same foolhardy logic among the most online public health folks: “If only we communal’d harder without that wretched individualism. Then we wouldn’t have ever had covid.”
It’s complex. I’ve started discounting the value of arguments made by folks who lean too much on simplistic ideas of individualism and/or collectivism. It’s a shame that public-facing public health folks use such arguments, as they cover up much of the very real and important complexity and series of tradeoffs we faced during the pandemic.