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In March, there was a certain popular nihilism expressed in the rolling wave of cancellations. Presented with the option not to continue on, people chose not to continue on. I feel like this, as much as real concern for health, explained the sudden shutdown.
It reminded me at the time of Yurchak’s observations on the fall of the Soviet Union in “Everything was forever, Until it was no more”. The pro-forma activity of living on as normal became so empty, so “hypernormalized”, that at the slightest opportunity people chose not to
But if this sort of popular nihilism of cancellation in the spring was one form of bartleby-Ism, there is a much more insidious form of popular nihilism I’ve been reading about — a certain amor fati that seems popular in places where the virus is surging
Some people think that the virus is some sort of hoax, but many others seem to feel indifferent towards it — insisting that accepting the possibility of collective endangerment is the price to pay for continuing on.
“I’m not going out and looking to catch it,” he said, sitting at a cluttered desk in his auto repair shop in the tiny eastern Nebraska community of Elmwood. “I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.” https://apnews.com/article/iowa-south-dakota-coronavirus-pandemic-nebraska-north-dakota-bf7197b284401dea8b779cfa764dfab2
This sort of suicidal resignation strikes me as another and more worrying nihilistic response. It’s cynicism acknowledges the inevitable dangers, but is unable to imagine another way of life or a form of reparative activity to get us there.
If the spring was a collective cancellation of the activities of life due to — in some large sense — a general antipathy towards simply living on, this second sort of suicidal resignation is a failure to imagine anything beyond this life, and rather than seek joy, embrace death
I suspect that this cynical lack of life style change, a resignation to the fact that one is participating in a form of life linked to our own collective endangerment and unwillingness to change, will also emerge as an evermore popular response to the ecological catastrophe
I think that positive visions of other ways of living, non-utopian affirmations that it doesn’t have to be this way, is the only way to escape this impasse. It is not a public health issue, but an issue of imagining other ways of life that would be appealing enough to live for
What we need is something like what Jonathon Lear describes in his book Radical Hope. The Crow — facing the destruction of their way of life due to colonization — insisted on the possibility of life, an insistence that allowed them to endure the end of their world
