Covid, The Mask, and the Grand Conjunction
For a long period of my adult life, I thought abortion was morally permissible…largely because of slavery. Now, to be clear, my reasoning was never made in these explicit terms of course, but, existentially, in a weird kind of way, that was how it all shaked out in the end nonetheless. The reasoning went something like this;
I believe that slavery in America is a grave moral evil. I believe we have a strong moral duty as persons and as American citizens to off-set the ills of slavery. The political left is committed to off-setting such ills. I should therefore be on the political left. Pro-choice people are also on the political left. I am therefore, by default, also a pro-choice person.
Such networked reasoning seems to frequently occur with many other political issues as well. If you already know that you are strongly and personally opposed to factory farming, for instance, and therefore on the political left as it is often assumed, then you now seem to put yourself on a fast track to inheriting an entire suite of not just other political commitments but also other moral, metaphysical, and epistemological commitments that come part and parcel with that one, singular commitment to that one singular issue.
Indeed, your singular moral commitment to ending factory farming, in the present cultural moment, seems to function as a fast on-ramp now committing you to a whole host of other tenuously related commitments; ones having to do with sexual ethics, environmental ethics, drug legalization, geo-political and foreign policy decisions, gun control, national sovereignty, Constitutional law, and International law. This one commitment also seems to commit you to a host of other commitments having to do with economics, race, class, aesthetics, technology, historical events of the past, predictive claims about the future, rights, duties, human nature, language, meaning, truth, life, death, personal identity, and even God. All of these commitments seem oddly bundled together and oddly downstream from one’s original commitment to one or maybe two close, personal issues. A friend of mine jokingly calls this bundling of beliefs ‘the grand conjunction.’
Indeed, with the increased politicization of the social, cultural, and economic world, we see instances of the grand conjunction bubbling up in more and more domains of regular day-to-day life in cartoonish expressions on both the political left and political right.
“And what will you be having for dinner tonight, Sir?”
“I will be having the steak.”
“Oh, a white supremacist dining with us tonight I see.”
“And you, Ma’am, what will you be having?”
“I will be having the vegetarian meal.”
“Ah, so I guess you believe in infinite genders and a world without borders then?”
And so on.
This weird state of affairs, whereby a commitment to the truth of one proposition necessarily entails wholesale commitment to an entire constellation of other propositions demonstrates itself no more clearly in this day and age than in the current debate over Covid, instantiated specifically in the wearing or non-wearing of the Covid protective mask.
Indeed, political debate over the wearing of the mask seems to have now transcended not just concerns regarding science, biology, and matters of public health policy, but has begun to transcend more foundational issues of metaphysics, epistemology, morality, and even logic. That being the case, ‘the mask’ has now become much less so about reducing the spread of Covid infection and has instead transformed into a kind of metaphysical proxy and de facto flag of sorts social signaling one’s commitment to one side of the grand conjunction or the other, by means of any number of specific commitments having little or even nothing to do with COVID.
The consequence of this phenomenon is that one bundled set of ‘all-things-considered’ moral and epistemological reasons and trade-offs now presently stands against another entire bundled set of ‘all-things-considered’ moral and epistemological reasons and trade-offs, with the issue of Covid generally, and the mask more specifically, functioning as the primary pivot point upon which the moral scales ultimately balance.
Persons attempting to occupy some nuanced middle-ground, on either the center-left or center-right, frequently end up getting herded towards accepting one dogmatic interpretation of the Covid data or the other primarily on account of other related or indirect moral and metaphysical commitments having to do with sex or violence, equality or liberty, race or gender, free speech or God. Indeed, the ‘Covid science’ and the wearing of the mask, have now largely become handmaiden to other more foundational philosophical presuppositions, while ‘the well’ has largely been poisoned for those on either side of the present discourse.
What is fundamentally at stake, therefore, in the present Covid debate, and in the physical wearing of the mask, is not just issues and concerns contained to questions of virology, or biomedicine, or collective health policy, or just political questions between democrats and republicans, or progressives and conservatives, or capitalists and socialists, or even nationalists and cosmopolitans. Indeed, what is ultimately at stake in the Covid debate and in the wearing of the mask, is the social endorsement or repudiation of an entire paradigm or worldview; and thereby an entire networked set of propositions and truth-claims having to do with metaphysics, epistemology, and morality, logic, language, and culture, past, present, and future.
As to how these two grand conjunctions will ultimately sort out, and as to what nuanced positions in the center can be salvaged and for how long is uncertain. That being said, the only two thing we can know for certain in the present political moment are 1.) that both paradigms cannot both be true, and 2.) that truth cannot be masked forever.
Photo from Mark König @markkoenig