Sibylla Bostoniensis

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The internet is full of people enraged by the US CDC's reduction – and all but elimination – of isolation guidelines for COVID, pointing out that the CDC's new guidelines seem to be more about what is good for "the economy" – which is to say, good for business interests – than what is good for the health of the people.

I don't think anyone's wrong to be enraged. Nothing that I am about to say is meant to make anyone feel better about the CDC's decision. I do not explain this as any kind of excuse.

There is a sense in which the CDC's decision is right. Not good, mind you, but correct: it brings their guidance back into alignment with our larger society's beliefs about the value of human life and health.

Ours has never been a society that has particularly highly valued the health and well-being of the people of it.

I find myself often thinking of a man I knew who had done time in prison for a crime of profit. He was struggling with the need to reintegrate into society in some non-criminal way. He told me something that loomed large in his mind was the situation of an older relative of his who had had his own business in a construction trade, by which he had done quite well for himself, economically – but which had wrecked his back by the age of 50, such that he was in constant pain. Was this, then, the price of legitimate economic security? The health of one's body? Was submitting to "straight" life an agreement to be broken on the wheel?

I'm thinking of someone else I know, whose adult son committed suicide, almost certainly in some way connected to his chronic pain which even the strongest opioids no longer managed, which was caused by on-the-job injury, from a very physical job he could not quit and still make his mortgage payments.

I'm thinking of somebody else I know, who went to work everyday in pain, as a hospital employee whose job it was to lift patients, because he couldn't afford to take the time off work to have the surgery and its recovery necessary to repair his injured knee.

I'm thinking of someone else I know whose two uncles died a week apart, of the same lung cancer, who had decades before started the same job a week apart, in an asbestos products factory.

Ours is a society that sent men and even children down into mines, to come back up with black lung. Ours is a society in which women painting watch dials licked the tips of paint brushes with radium on them. Ours is a society in which once the number one cause of childhood blindness was industrial accidents. Ours is a society in which the expression "mad as a hatter" is an idiom.

Ours is a society that sent doctors and nurses and technicians into emergency departments wearing nothing but bandanas and trash bags for PPE, March, 2020. And even forbade them to wear the respirators they brought from home.

The fact of the matter is that one of the most monstrous of the externalities of work in our society has always been the toll taken on the bodies of the people who do it, and the years harvested from their lifespans.

It would be wrong to lay the whole of this on capitalism, though capitalism certainly throws gasoline on the fire. The deeper problem is that we as a society allow capitalism to do this because we fundamentally believe that it's just the order of the universe that the work we must do to provide for ourselves must perforce be deadly or disabling. It was deadly and disabling when we were hunter-gatherers, it was deadly and disabling in pre-capitalist agrarian days, and now it can be deadly and disabling for some rich person's profit.

Fundamentally, our society sees humans as expendable – that is, we exist to be expended, which is to say spent. Even if somebody else doesn't spend us, we're supposed to spend ourselves.

This rather challenges the basic premise of public health as a field. In a society such as ours that does not value human well-being for its own sake, but rather values humans solely as laborers, human health is not an intrinsic good, but an exploitable resource. In such a society, the job of public health winds up being not to preserve the health of the public, but to make it maximally available for exploitation, and to not frustrate that exploitation.

I feel the need to point out we could do this differently. It's entirely possible to have a fully exploitative society that measures the worth of a human exclusively in terms of that human's capacity to labor, and still not be so short-sighted as to work people to death and maim their bodies to the point they are useless as laborers. At least hypothetically. We could, hypothetically, have a society that values humans' capacity to labor sufficiently to cherish it and preserve it. But we don't have that society. We have this one, in which human well-being is shortsightedly devoured until it is gone.

We send workers into the fields soaked with pesticides to harvest; we send workers into deadly meatpacking plants to slaughter and butcher. We send workers up towers and down tunnels, to their mortal peril; we send them out to sea to sometimes never come back at all. We have them stand stations at x-ray machines inadequately shielded, we task them to work with toxins without sufficient, or even any, PPE. We task them, in factory, in office, at the register, and at the keyboard, with doing the same action 100,000 times until it wrecks their fingers, their wrists, their shoulders, their necks, their backs.

Why, then, should it be any different with Covid? The only limit we have ever observed – and that only sometimes – in what risk to human life work should be allowed to pose, has been that it maybe shouldn't be an immediate threat of ending it. Which is where we are with Covid: if you're vaccinated, it probably won't kill you. At least not immediately. So why shouldn't you be exposed to it in the workplace? Sure, it might kill you long-term, it might cripple you with Long Covid such that you're not much use to anyone as a worker anymore, but that's always been the deal with work in our society: might shorten your life eventually, might cripple you at any time.

That's always been the deal. That's been our social compact all along. The only thing that's new here is Covid itself. And there's never been some sort of exception in our social compact either for infectious disease or for new threats to human health. Covid is just a new version of the same old thing.

What we're witnessing is our society adjusting itself to this new reality, and incorporating the new fact of Covid's existence into its prior paradigm, working out where it fits into our value system. And where it fits is this: Covid makes going to work (or going to school, which is effectively just employment for children) more dangerous, but not immediately fatal, and we've always accepted work being almost any level of dangerous, so long as it's not immediately fatal, and sometimes even then.

I'm not suggesting you shouldn't be outraged. I'm suggesting you understand your outrage in this larger context. I want you to understand what it is you are outraged at, and that it's something much bigger than how our society is handling Covid.

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This is what I mean when I say ours is a morally disordered society. One of the things I mean, at least.

It's not just that bad people do bad things. It's that a great mass of people, maybe even the majority, consider such things they account bad as just the human condition, lacking any sense that these things are wrongs. They know they don't like them, but they exceptualize it only as a mere personal preference. Most people do not look at this through the frame of morality at all.

This is not how it's always been. The history of reform movements in the US up to the beginning of the 20th century were deeply predicated on moral conceptions of the issues they addressed. Issues like the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, child labor, universal public education, and the criminalization of the abuse of animals and of children were understood through a moral lens by those who fought for them. And, particularly apropos here, large amounts of labor law were fought for not because of a vague sense that it would be nice if workers had some protections, but from a fierce sense that workers deserve to be treated better. Morally deserve. Not because they had done something morally righteous to deserve it as a reward for their virtue, but they had a right to it out of their basic human dignity – itself a moral notion.

If you were wondering why it was that people a hundred years ago in this country were willing to strike for better working conditions and better pay, and today they largely are not, well, there are a lot of reasons for that including the relentless crushing of the labor movement by industry, and a government made the puppet of industry. But one of those reasons is that the first thing a nascent workers' rights movement has to do is convince the workers they have a right to better treatment.

People today, they're all confused. To the extent they think in moral terms, they think those arguments are for the purpose of trying to convince the bosses to give the workers what the workers want, out of the goodness of their hearts at the prodding of their consciences. No, the role of moral argument here is to convince the workers that they would be in the right if they stood up for their rights. Because nobody is going to fight as hard as the struggle against the exploiter class requires for something they just think of as a nice thing to get. Principle is what puts steel in people's spines. People who are fighting for bread are easily cowed. People who are fighting for what is right are indomitable. Should it be otherwise? People who fight for personal gain know they have alternatives to get it: they could try to cozy up to their boss, get a raise, get a promotion, maybe become management themselves, or maybe get a job somewhere better, or maybe just win the lottery. They could desist from organized struggle to try to pursue their well-being independently. People who fight for a moral principle are fighting for not just themselves, but the workers laboring shoulder to shoulder, on either side of them, for their children and grandchildren, for their whole community, for their society, for all workers everywhere, for humanity. They have no individual alternative to get what they are fighting for, because they are not fighting for it just for their individual selves. They have to stick with the collective struggle because they are struggling for the collective good. The one who fights for another dollar more might fight only for themselves; the one who fights for the right of workers to be able to earn a living that is adequate to provide for them and their dependents, free of the twins scourges of poverty and precarity, in working conditions that are safe, or at least safer, fights for everyone.

But to even say these things, I know I risk sounding perilously alien, maybe even quaint. We moderns are much too hip and sophisticated and cynical and cool and jaded to allow our hearts to be moved by such sentimental, woolly-headed notions. Idealism is a bad word. Morality, as previously discussed, is a bad word. And thus any native inclination to fight to better our society for the sake of one's fellows is strangled in the cradle.

But the proposition that people shouldn't have to trade their long-term health, or accept the risk immediate death or dismemberment, for their short-term survival – and that therefore, even if we are not able to make all work perfectly safe, we should strive to make work as safe as possible – is a fundamentally moral sentiment. That's what that "should" is doing in each of those clauses: turning what would otherwise be a counterfactual observation into an assertion of a moral position.

It clashes with another moral position: the position that it is perfectly fair and just that workers are endangered by their jobs, that that is what they are paid for, and they accepted that deal, and therefore have no right to complain. This is not a moral position that you'll hear a lot of people actually espouse, though I think it a fair representation of what many people feel in their gut. But a moral position does not have to be consciously adopted from contemplation of moral principles. In the way that making no choice is a choice, in the absence of a moral ideal is still a moral position: the position that however things are is morally unobjectionable.

Like I said above, there are many reasons for why things are the way they are in our society. Obviously, this moral position that being physically endangered by one's job is just not morally objectionable serves the interests, as they understand them, of the moneyed class that is strip-mining the health of workers to line their own pockets. And I am quite certain they have done all they can to promulgate this moral sentiment. But however we got here, the problem is not just in the faction that benefits by it: now the vast majority of working people don't really believe they have a right not to be physically harmed by their job. They do not subscribe to the principle that there's something wrong with subjecting workers to mitigable physical risk, even as they don't much like it. It is not merely that they do not have what I consider the right moral position, it is that having moral positions – reasoned, principled, consciously adopted moral positions, instead of defaulting to the assumption that whatever is, is right – at all on such things as the conditions under which workers labor, or on whole great swaths of human experience, is something to which they are wholly unaccustomed. Indeed it seems that for much of American secular society, knowingly regarding the world through the lens of morality is close to being an alien worldview.

So long as that is true, change is impossible. When I wrote previously that the problem of the problem of morality is a life or death problem, I meant that very literally. And, well, here is your first example.

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