There is a striking overlap between the guiding slogans of those twin madnesses of 2020 from which the world is still reeling. On the one hand, Covid meant we were all to “stay home, stay safe, save lives”, and in due course to get vaccinated with that same aim of “saving lives”. On the other, after the killing of George Floyd, the 2013 activist hashtag “Black Lives Matter” became a global obsession.
So in both cases a panoply of both top-down and bottom-up disruptions of society were carried out under the banner of “lives”. Much of the world was turned into an open-air prison in honour of “lives”. The naked human face, even that of a little child, became an object of fear, for the sake of “lives”. Then the vaccination program—like many before it—sought to crush all resistance and reluctance, because there were still “lives” to be saved. At the same time, “black lives” became the motivator for demonstrations, riots, simpering pageantry, and a still lingering institutional and managerial crusade whose chief weapons were gleeful ostracisms and brain-dead training regimes.
A panoply of both top-down and bottom-up disruptions of society were carried out under the banner of “lives”.
Intersections between the two movements for “lives” were particularly absurd. Bans on public assemblies were lifted in honour of BLM, because “racism is also a pandemic”. When Covid restrictions returned, they gained further justification from the argument that the disease was particularly dangerous to “BIPOC” populations. The vaccine sacrament and the Black Lives sacrament were then fused in decisions to prioritize “racialized minorities” for vaccinations. Sometimes it seemed the two programs of life-saving were a single disciplinary regime: getting the shot and posting the black square were parallel acts of submission, prices that had to be paid if we were ever to be allowed to resume ordinary life.
Was the specific focus on “lives” part of why public health and anti-racism became such society-choking forces? One could after all argue that “saving lives” and “lives matter” are just convenient, everyday shorthands for the imperative to protect persons—men, women and children—at risk of death. Yet this evocation of “lives”, rather than persons, was reminiscent of Ivan Ilich’s deep suspicion of “life” as an abstraction, and of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life”. Illich was long dead by 2020, but his biographer, David Cayley, and others believed his writings offered a powerful antidote to the Covid program, while Agamben was almost the only major intellectual in the West to forthrightly oppose the horrors of lockdown-till-vaccine. “Lives” may be more than a convenient shorthand—or rather, we ought to ask what is passed over when a shorthand is used.
“Lives” may be more than a convenient shorthand.
The opposite of life is death, and the immediate effect of couching the 2020 programs as “saving lives” and “black lives matter” was to frame opposition to those programs as support for death. To push against lockdowns was to accept Covid deaths. To step away from BLM was to accept black deaths. From there, it was easy and frequent to claim that opponents were more than passively indifferent to those deaths: that they were active participants in forms of social murder. So, if nothing else, the obsession with “lives” enabled the Covid and BLM enthusiasts to transform political contention into feverish, vicious moral persecutions of the purported allies of death.
But the elevation of “lives” was not just hard on its opponents: the ostensible objects of its beneficence were at least as brutalized. It was after all the “vulnerable” and “black people” who were being fused into single lumps of population, and then imagined as “lives” rather than persons. Then no group was more thoroughly tortured by Covid restrictions than our elders, particularly those in care homes—terrified, isolated, forced to die and even to be buried alone. Similarly no one was more demeaned and manipulated by BLM than so-called black people: invited to think of themselves once and for all as a homogeneous mass, and one whose role was forever to suffer and lash out, so as to gain the patronage without which it was doomed.
Lives, it turns out, are not here a shorthand for persons at all—they are an imagined essence, abstracted from men, women and children. Lives are the property of those who claim the power and authority to be their saviours. Lives must be saved, lives matters: too bad if, in the process, those living them are to be lost and to discover that they don’t matter at all.
