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One of the tremendous frustrations experienced by those of us who are still cautious to avoid Covid is how little other people know about our reasons for doing so. Most people don’t know that we’re back to 1 million Covid infections per day in the United States; that Covid is a vascular disease impacting every organ system in the body; that Long Covid is reaching a public health crisis. There is an entire body of scientific literature on the effects of Covid on the body, publicly available to anyone with access to Google, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. But this is a picture that only a minority of people have decided to see.
Making matters worse, this widespread ignorance doesn’t just exist as a gap in our collective knowledge, waiting to be filled once the relevant discoveries are made. No, this gap has been filled with a substantive not-knowing, a cartoon of what kind of illness Covid is, colored in with empirically false claims that minimize its virulence, severity, and capacity for inflicting disability on us all. “Covid is just like a cold!” “Kids don’t get Covid!” This is an ignorance that has something to say. It is an ignorance that can’t stand itself, so it fills in the gaps and declares itself knowledge.
Many things interest me about this ignorance. I wrote recently about the self-deception involved in its production and the role that desire plays in people’s unwillingness to see. Today I am interested in something less psychological, more structural: that is, the role that this ignorance plays within a structure of ableist domination. Much has already been written in the philosophy of ignorance when it comes to race, especially, and its role in systems of racial domination. But I haven’t yet seen these insights carried over into the field of disability. What follows is an attempt to cast that net wider.
Our first order of business, then, is to distinguish the kind of pandemic ignorance that I’m interested in from more ordinary, inert, and harmless ones. After all, not every failure to know is a cause for alarm. I don’t know what I’m going to eat for breakfast tomorrow; how many stars are in the galaxy; who the 22nd United States president was. I don’t know the meaning of life, either, nor the meaning of every word in the English language. Some of these ignorances can be remedied with a quick online search. Others require waiting to see what happens, or a lifetime of careful study. But none of these not-knowings strikes me as either epistemically or morally problematic. Rather, they seem to be an inevitable part of the lot we’ve been dealt as less-than-omniscient creatures. Of course, my cluster of not-knowings will be different from your cluster, to some extent, insofar as its content is caused by the contingencies of my own life experiences. But there doesn’t seem to be any consistent pattern to my harmless ignorances, nor to yours.
Pandemic ignorance is not like this. It is, as I will argue in what follows, deeply intertwined with an ableist system which allocates resources, power, status, and life itself differently according to the perceived ability or disability of each individual. Pandemic ignorance serves as both a cause and an effect of this system; it both justifies and perpetuates it; and for these reasons, it is great cause for alarm. Let’s get into it.
For now, I’d like to borrow wholesale Charles Mills’ incredible epistemic framework developed in his paper, White Ignorance. Here is its basic structure: Mills begins with the fact that we live under white supremacist conditions, and notices that there is a fundamental epistemic asymmetry between white and Black people living under these conditions. “These are not cognizers linked by a reciprocal ignorance but rather groups whose respective privilege and subordination tend to produce self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation, on the one hand, and more veridical perceptions, on the other hand.” (17) In short, the different power positions of each racialized group drastically impacts the truth of their worldviews. As a result, there are at least two doxastic bodies under white supremacy: the veridical knowledge of the workings of white supremacy held by Black people who must live under it (and indeed must understand it to survive), and the self-serving cognitive distortions held by white people who neither know nor want to know how white supremacy actually works. He terms this latter doxastic body “white ignorance.”
The defining feature of white ignorance is that race has played a causal role in its formation. It is not an accident that white people, by and large, have radically distorted understandings of the operations of white supremacy, of even the existence of white supremacy. Rather, white ignorance is the ideological component of white supremacy itself — it is caused by white supremacy, and then goes on to perpetuate it in a self-reinforcing cycle. And it is constituted both by gaps in knowledge (of say Black holiday traditions) as well as the presence of false beliefs (that racism isn’t real, that Black people conform to racist stereotypes, and so on).
The fact that it is caused by white supremacy does not mean that it is only white supremacists who hold these false beliefs. Indeed its successful proliferation requires that white ignorance go beyond the bounds of the proud racists and include both the good-faith white people and even some Black people themselves. Mills writes that the most important kind of white ignorance today is the white ignorance that emerges in the “nonracist cognizer who may form mistaken beliefs…because of the social suppression of the pertinent knowledge, though without prejudice himself.” Of course this does not absolve the nonracist cognizer of responsibility for those beliefs; it is just to show that white ignorance is the product of structures of racial domination regardless of our beliefs about the justice or injustice of those structures. We’re all at risk of white ignorance creeping into our beliefs.
The beauty of this epistemic framework is that it clearly shows how some forms of ignorance are a political problem. False beliefs about race are very different from false beliefs about, say, the lyrics of a song; one is caused by white supremacy, the other is caused by hearing it wrong. Mills shows us that when beliefs are caused by and then reinforce a system of unjust domination, it is a mistake to regard those beliefs as innocuous “internal” states. They are caused by external, structural forces, and they cause external harm; for these reasons, they are the proper object of moral scrutiny.
Let me now extend this framework to the question of pandemic ignorance, and argue that people’s not-knowing about, say, Long Covid is both an epistemic and a moral failure of great proportions. We can start with a parallel observation to Mills’: we live under widespread ableism, and where one falls along the spectrum of ability will determine, to a great deal, one’s access to resources, respect, opportunity, power, and life itself (through the operation of necropolitics). Under late-stage capitalism, this now also determines the extent to which one’s disability is itself commodified, transforming non-working populations into yet another source from which capitalists can extract profit (for more on this, see Adler-Bolton and Vierkant’s exceptional book, Health Communism).
The result of this is the existence of two groups, those who are abled and those who are disabled, with radically different understandings of how disability operates in contemporary political and social life. Recall what Mills wrote about this kind of epistemic asymmetry: “These are not cognizers linked by a reciprocal ignorance but rather groups whose respective privilege and subordination tend to produce self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation, on the one hand, and more veridical perceptions, on the other hand.” (17) This analysis applies in the case of disability just as well as it does in the case of race: it is disabled people who have the keenest understanding of just how wedded to the illusion of the “normal” body most of society actually is; the lengths to which people will go to avoid having to witness the harsh realities of the disabled body; the impact that the crushing weight of this ableism has on disabled people themselves. This is a veridical perception of ableism today, and it has been entirely produced by disabled people themselves. It had to be seen if disabled people were to survive.
On the other hand, we have the ideology of ability; the myth of the “normal” body; the entire juridical apparatus that ensures that this myth can be preserved (see, for example, the “ugly laws” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries). Abled people, by and large, actively produce and reproduce this kind of self-deception, carefully reinforcing a worldview in which disability is always something that happens to “other” people, and hey, even when it does, it will be temporary and well-supported by everyone around them. The naivete of the worldview would be funny if it weren’t so deadly. Let’s call it “abled ignorance.”
As in Mills’ framework, abled ignorance is caused by ableism itself. It is not a coincidence that these are the realities of which abled people are ignorant: that disabled people mostly live in poverty, are mistreated and experimented on by doctors, are warehoused in carceral institutions, are incapable of marrying, have their autonomy undermined daily, are banned from public, are imprisoned, are dead. The very things that abled people don’t know are what comprise the system of ableist domination itself. It is an acrid and self-righteous not-knowing, filled with endless cartoons about the supercrip and the functioning welfare state and the power of the body to heal with the right amount of effort.
These ableist myths are not just confined to avowed eugenicists, either — they constitute the understandings and self-understandings of well-meaning abled people and disabled people, alike. Again using Mills’ words, the ignorance proliferates “because of the social suppression of the pertinent knowledge.” The entire apparatus that maintains this system of ableist domination is supported by an ableist ideology, and this ideology constantly renders veridical disabled perspectives as unreliable, aggrieved, and (therefore) wrong. The pertinent knowledge is suppressed. The result is a loathing of disability that we all share in (and which becomes self-loathing once the specter of disability makes its home in you).
For these reasons, abled ignorance is a political problem. Like white ignorance, it has claws. And like any form of ignorance that is caused by and perpetuates unjust forms of domination, those who uncritically accept this ignorance, who espouse its illusions, are the proper objects of moral scrutiny.
Let me now tie this concept of abled ignorance back to our opening concern: namely, pandemic ignorance. What is the relationship between the two? I regard pandemic ignorance as a species of abled ignorance — not the only one, to be sure, but profound in the extent to which its status as ignorance is so transparent, its reach so pervasive. The onset of the pandemic was a radical breach in the daily operations of our lives, a kind of perforation through the ideology of ableism that forced us to confront the ideology for what it was. Might I die from an illness? Might I lose access to the places I love, on account of my having a body and a respiratory system and a desire to live? We were all, all at once, confronted with our own mortality and the fragile systems ordinarily keeping us from seeing it.
It is no wonder, then, that people wanted to reinstate the illusion as quickly as possible: “Vax and relax!”; “Back to normal”; “Return to work.” These were the epigraphs of our brief encounter with reality, when refrigerated trucks held bodies and our funerals were conducted on screens. “We have the tools” turned into mask bans; “we’re in this together” turned into “vulnerable people should stay home.” Indeed the very invocation of the idea of “vulnerable people” marked a resurgence of the old ableist ideology, which separates the “normal” from the “vulnerable” as if vulnerability were not the essence of the human condition.
Our governments aided in this effort, steadily removing effective testing, treatments, wastewater surveillance, and masking from our arsenal. If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist! To justify these returns to “normal,” an entire mythology about Covid’s mildness was manufactured: this is where we encounter the false framing that “Covid is just a cold” or that “kids don’t get Covid.” Lies about the duration of infectiousness were introduced to justify, ex post facto, shortening the mandatory quarantine period at the behest of an airline CEO (whose profits were plummeting). The “back to normal life” that so many people heralded was in fact a return to the ableist ideology of the normal body. We filled in the gaps with an ableist myth.
Insofar as pandemic ignorance as I’ve described it above is a species of abled ignorance, it is the proper object of moral scrutiny. That the government aided in the creation and perpetuation of this ignorance does not absolve us of responsibility, either. If anything, it heightens it — where institutions fail, we must fulfill our ethical obligations nonetheless, and the difficulty of doing so is one of the tragedies of political injustice (tragedy in the ancient Greek sense). But tragedy is not absolution. We are responsible for our beliefs and our not-knowings when they harm others. That this harm occurs in a realm hidden from the ableist gaze is part of the problem.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I witnessed the convergence of pandemic ignorance and abled ignorance at a funeral I recently attended. The deceased had died of Covid, but the family was covering up this fact (which I only later learned in a surprising moment of spontaneous confession). Family photos were displayed on various tables, most of them depicting the deceased before he began using a wheelchair. And written on the sheetcake, in cursive baby-blue frosting usually reserved for baby showers, were the words, “No Wheelchairs in Heaven.”
The grieving family was adamant that the deceased was finally “free” from the “shackles” of his wheelchair, walking once again presumably from cloud to cloud in heaven. His widow even recited this mantra to me while seated in her wheelchair (maskless and probably Covid positive, given her proximity to the deceased). The myth of ableism was alive and well at that funeral. Not once did they consider that, perhaps, heaven’s built environment is accessible in ways that ours refuses to be — it was disability, not inaccessibility, that got abolished in their paradise. The eugenicist undertones of this religious fantasy are chilling.
What has stayed with me since is astonishment at the amount of labor that went into preserving their pandemic ignorance, too — the cover-up of the real cause of death, the refusal of masks so as not to tip anyone off, the hushed conversations ensuring that this fact stays within the family. I wonder when the cover-up decision was made, where it was made (was it in the hospital room?). My suspicion is that the decision protected them from having to confront their own tacit complicity in the entire regime that ultimately killed their loved one. They chose an illusion over reality because it is only in the illusion of ableism that others’ vulnerability is not our responsibility.
The pandemic is the most vivid recent example of the falsity of this ableist view. Despite our best efforts, Covid continues to insist on the interconnection of all beings. Covid waves continue, infections mount, and this tiny virus reminds us every day that each of us exists as what philosopher Arne Naess terms, “knots in the biospherical net.” If you pull on this net anywhere, ripples extend everywhere, each knot the intersection of tendrils that go on forever. This vulnerability is both our greatest weakness and our greatest strength; it is what ableist domination tries, with all of its force and violence, to deny; and it is one of the sparkling truths that disabled people have tried to get the world to see, if only it had the courage to look.
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Writings on the moral psychology of the pandemic, ethics in the midst of collapse, and collective memory, from the founder of Clean Air Club.