COVID-19/Sociology

The mixture as before

Early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic a cultural studies scholar published an article, which became famous, with the subtitle ‘An Epidemic of Signification’ (Treichler, 1987). The COVID-19 epidemic hasn’t yet achieved that semiotic distinction, despite Donald Trump’s heroic efforts on Twitter. But there’s certainly a great wave of COVID commentary. As well as the mass media stuff, there are also disciplinary literatures, for instance providing psychologists with resources for dealing with COVID-related mental health problems, or thinking about challenges and responses for social workers in the crisis (e.g. Truell, 2020). It’s not surprising that similar discussions are occurring for sociology.

The discussion is mainly among academics, because sociology has not yet been much noticed in the public policy debates about COVID-19 – compared, say, with economic modelling, which is front and centre in the debates about lockdowns, income support, and recovery.

Nevertheless some familiar sociological ideas do circulate in the public discussions. A good deal of commentary has suggested the epidemic is revealing, or widening, the gaps between rich and poor, white and black, or men and women. When UN Women (2020) put out a ‘policy brief’ discussing the global epidemic’s impact on women, one of its leading ideas was the gender division of labour – a basic idea in the sociology of gender. The UN document spoke of this division in households, where lockdowns intensified women’s domestic labour obligations, and in the workplace, where feminized occupations such as nursing and hospital cleaning were ‘on the front line’.

So it is worth thinking about how the disciplinary discussion is being done. It may be harsh to say this, but what I have seen is impressive in its conventionality. There are pieces that urge sociologists to understand the COVID-19 epidemic by going back to the Great Classics, for heaven’s sake (I’ll not cite them, out of kindness). When a symposium on COVID-19 was offered by the largest sociological association in the world (ASA, 2020), it seems to have been assembled by running down the list of sections in the association and asking each to make a statement on the relevance of its sub-discipline. That is almost guaranteed to re-run conventional ideas about the discipline and the shape of its problems.

Virus at work

Let’s start on a different tack by taking the point of view of the Other – in this case, the virus. SARS-CoV-2, which already seems to be (like HIV and the flu) a family of strains rather than a single version, is a bit of a go-getter. It was presented with a chance for prosperity and seized it with both protuberances. Human bodies, like the bodies of some other vertebrates, provided a happy home and source of nutrients, so a colonizing population of the virus could grow in this fertile swamp. But social interaction provided it with remarkable opportunities for a second-order and much more splendid population growth, by colonizing multiple bodies and reproducing – dare I say it? – virally.

Humans created an opportunity by crowding together in settlements where the coronavirus could easily ride from the upper respiratory tract of one body-swamp to the respiratory tract of another on our coughs and sneezes. Our busy hands helped the virus get to the entrance by making familiar gestures such as scratching our nose, clutching our brow or stroking our chin. Even better, we gave this virus a means of travelling farther and faster than the dreams of earlier viruses. We created a globally integrated economy that positively required body-swamps to move around in large numbers over long distances at great speeds, and then brought them within coughing and sneezing range of other body-swamps while working, going on pilgrimage, holidaying, shopping or having good old sex. We call the result a pandemic. The virus could call it entrepreneurship, achievement, and glorious prosperity.

From the coronavirus’s point of view there is one catch: a body-swamp can die. This is definitely a side-effect: the virus does not eat the human. Its presence triggers immune responses both at cellular and systemic level; and it seems that the systemic anti-viral response to SARS-CoV-2 colonization has effects that include inflammation in the lungs which can kill (for some virological detail see Blanco-Melo et al., 2020). Happily for the virus, a large proportion of those killed are past the human reproductive age, so the virus is assured of a continuing supply of nutrients and housing for a while to come.

A very social disaster

The growth of the virus’s population and effects soon had humans talking about a crisis. Perhaps the horror first became clear to a global audience in February–March when the news from northern Italy, a prosperous region that was an early centre of the epidemic, included stories of hospitals jammed with COVID-19 cases. On the heels of this came stories of nurses and doctors engaged in triage, choosing who would get treatment, and turning away very sick people, especially old people, who were left to go home and die. (There’s an excellent description in Rosenbaum, 2020.) Shortages of testing kits, masks, respirators, hospital-grade personal protective equipment, and other supplies soon became a staple of COVID-19 reporting. In Australia the panic buying of toilet paper will be an enduring memory.

This is a social disaster at the deepest level. Human social contacts are precisely the coronavirus’s means of population growth. This was immediately realized by the public health folk, and – while virologists rushed to research COVID-19 treatments and a possible vaccine – social contacts became the focus of prevention efforts. Curiously a sociological term, ‘social distance’, was re-purposed for the practice of maintaining enough physical distance between human body-swamps to make viral transmission difficult. Online controversies broke out about what distance was enough – 1 metre? 2 metres? Staying rigorously at home? Wearing a mask as a substitute for physical distance?

Once state elites became alarmed, a term from the world of prisons became more prevalent: ‘lockdown’. The authoritarian regime in China first used police methods to control local movement, soon followed by Australia, India and more. Other governments resisted this strategy, in defence of ‘freedom’ or ‘the economy’, or because their media strategy was to pretend the epidemic was insignificant. This response contributed to huge infection surges in the UK, the USA and Brazil.

Contradictions or troubling side-effects of the official responses rapidly became apparent. Feminists concerned with domestic violence warned that household lockdowns would trap many women and children indoors with their abusers. As workplaces closed, governments that had formerly been hot and strong for free markets and balanced budgets saw employment and market demand collapsing. They suddenly launched huge state subsidies for their preferred industries and preferred groups of the newly unemployed. Migrant workers were rarely among the preferred. In India a roadside disaster immediately followed the sudden national lockdown of 24 March, as millions of internal-migrant workers, a key to India’s economic growth, were left without wages, food or transport home (Santoshini, 2020).

Switches of state strategy weren’t a matter of well-oiled machinery smoothly changing course. The shifts exposed incompetence and callousness on a breath-taking scale. The Australian federal government’s $60 billion accounting blunder in its JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme is only one example. The lockdown disaster showed the Indian regime’s indifference to the safety of migrant workers, most of whom are its own citizens, but lower caste. (An apology was issued, later.) Shortfalls in medical equipment supply and procurement have been widespread around the world.

The moment

It is not hard to see how contemporary social patterns have worked in favour of SARS-CoV-2 and its replication strategy. More humans are crowded into cities than ever before: the demographers tell us that the world total of urban populations passed the total of rural populations in 2008. Cities include huge informal settlements (Kibera, Khayelitsha, Dharavi, Nezahualcoyotl, Orangi, and many more) where ‘social distancing’ is impossible, let alone the frequent hand-washing recommended by the doctors. Air travel has massified: the global airline industry’s annual total of flights, already at 23.8 million in 2004, rose to 38.9 million in 2019 (Mazareanu, 2020). (That is just the number of flights: in 2017 the industry carried 4.1 billion passengers on scheduled flights.) The speed of the COVID-19 epidemic has been one of its most disconcerting features. There has been little time for reflection and democratic decision-making.

Not that democratic or even consultative processes were likely. Another striking feature of this historical moment is that most of the world’s largest countries, and a good many of the smaller ones, are currently controlled by narrow-minded neo-conservative governments, closely aligned with corporate elites, trading on nationalism, racist fearmongering and religious antagonisms to sustain their popular support.

Since the 1970s global trade has expanded massively in a deregulated environment, enabled by a hypertrophied finance sector, and in a variety of countries (Australia and South Africa among them) wiping out local manufacturing industries including the capacity to manufacture medical equipment. In most of the world, public sectors have been squeezed and many public assets and agencies sold off, allowing tax cuts for propertied classes while weakening public services such as health care. All this is familiar to sociologists, though we don’t always realize the extent of institutional corruption – sometimes euphemized as ‘corporate welfare’ – that is basic to contemporary neo-conservatism.

Even less thematized are the changes in organizational life that have concentrated more and more power in the hands of an unaccountable elite of managers and owners. Since the 1980s managerial prerogative has grown almost unchecked, along with managerial incomes - part of the growth of social and economic inequalities in this generation. The strikingly arbitrary policy-making of the Trump, Johnson and Morrison governments reflect the rise of a corporate model of managerial prerogative within state decision-making, together with the irresponsibility and impunity to which managers are now accustomed.

But even that doesn’t fully capture the spirit of state and corporate decision-making on the eve of the epidemic. One must factor in, too, the sheer malevolence of the incitement of racism, from Austin to Naypyidaw to Canberra; the elite-funded culture wars against inconvenient sciences, humanities and arts; the re-masculinization and militarization of the public sphere, including the growing violence of police forces; the political success of ‘border protection’. It was not a good moment to be confronting climate change; it was not a good moment to be confronting a highly infectious, deadly, and previously unknown virus.

And sociology?

As I write this, the global total of known COVID-19 deaths has passed half a million. It is likely the real number is a lot higher; and the rate of known new infections is still going up, as the virus spreads in South America, Russia and South Asia. Second waves are being reported from some countries and regions that did well in flattening the first wave. The governments of countries that did badly in the first wave sabotaged the person-to-person interaction practices that are the effective ways to stop an infectious disease agent (as we discovered with ‘safe sex’ for HIV). Instead they produced a torrent of lies and hostile fantasies designed to divert blame, create confusion and disempower their citizens.

In the face of mismanagement and malevolence on this scale, what kind of sociology would be valuable in crafting a response? It’s hard to see our familiar schools of theory, or our familiar tools of research, as giving much help in the face of this irruption of biological threat and this sudden metastasis of arbitrary power. There exists a sociology of disasters, but it mainly examines disasters after the fact to improve emergency management – and here we are in the midst of it and the management is a large part of the disaster. Sociology as we know it is not very good in handling a historical moment, unpacking a conjuncture, let alone grasping a radically new situation like this.

And we may not have much time to do better. Sociology as it exists in Australia is now under threat. Like other university-based disciplines our workforce has been pushed into precarity, by the massive casualization of university teaching and the power of university managements to re-structure and chop. Current neo-conservatism has little use for the humanities and social sciences; the current Coalition agenda to re-shape universities as job-training centres is the most recent demonstration of that (Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2020). Neo-conservative strategists now intend obliterating, not just criticizing, disciplines and institutions they dislike. Legislation has recently been passed in Romania forbidding the teaching of gender studies in universities; this is part of an international campaign against this field of knowledge. In Australia the wish-list of the IPA, the corporate think-tank that bills itself as the voice for freedom, includes complete elimination of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) as a public agency, though the Coalition is only half-way to that goal. As the Roman poet Horace put it, de te fabula narratur. In crude English, you are under the gun too.

Directions and practices

What would be a sociology adequate to the time of COVID-19? I think it would not be satisfied with the mixture as before. It would have to recognize the distinctive moment we are in, and be able to theorize the dynamics of a conjuncture. It would have to provide ways of thinking about the stony cruelty of global power centres and their regional avatars; about the toxic cascade of consequences from huge concentrations of wealth; about the ghastly failure of human solidarity involved in the deliberate incitement of racism, nationalism, sexism and religious hatred in our time. It would need to reckon with Gaia and her ways.

This would be neither a contemplative nor a conventionally useful social science – though it would be relevant to current practical and intellectual concerns. It might be hard to reconcile with the managerial university and the neo-conservative state. If asked for an example, I would say that Achille Mbembe’s account of contemporary colonial occupations and war machines in his essay ‘Necropolitics’ (2003) is as close as anything I know.

There is no quick fix. I don’t have a clear picture of the path sociologists should follow and I don’t know anyone who does. For those working within the managerial university, perhaps it will be important to publish less and so free up more time for sustained thought. Heaven knows that was scarce before everything went online and seems to be scarcer since. This will need collective action. The universities still play the ranking and league-table game, though I’d guess that by now even university managers know how futile it is and how damaging. Collective action will also be needed to reverse the casualization and outsourcing strategies that are devastating the university workforce.

In the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the most effective answer to the virus, in the period before antiretroviral drugs were widely available, was community self-help. It was urban gay communities that devised the ‘safe sex’ strategy (Kippax et al., 1993). Strikingly, the same logic appeared in the Ebola virus epidemic. West African communities worked out the epidemiology of the outbreak and created prevention strategies that sustained, rather than disrupted, local ways of life (Richards, 2016). In the current epidemic there has been little recognition of local initiative. Prevention campaigns have been overwhelmingly top-down in organization and quite authoritarian in tone. Given that the world now faces long-term problems on a very large scale, sociological reasoning will be important in shifting towards a different logic.

If we can develop sociologies adequate to the moment of COVID-19, they are likely to involve scary leaps beyond our current rules of sociological method. They are likely to be connected with, perhaps embedded in, forms of social action beyond those familiar today. Thinking about possible futures in The Good University I went in for a little science fiction, for the first time in my writing life. I think we need lots more, and I’m pleased to see initiatives like SoFiZine ¹ as forums for sociological work in unconventional genres.

Quite simply, we need more imaginative social thinking, especially about the new structures of power, and new means of change and ways of organizing. Not least, we need thinking about forms of social living that are practicable, humane, and capable of meeting future COVID-scale crises. Because we will certainly have more of them.