What What does the unpredictable look like? How does it feel to be undetectable? Can you hear the unthinkable?
We are in the midst of the largest mass fish death event in American history, and our ability to understand the situation is being challenged by both the scale of the disaster and the dominance of a particular kind of rationality. body. More Americans have died from Covid-19 than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor attack, Vietnam War, Korean War, 9/11, war in Afghanistan and the Iraq War combined. As of July 13, 2022, CDC reports 1,018,035 deaths from Covid-19 in the US. We will continue to see COVID deaths for the foreseeable future: As I wrote, the number of hospitalizations and deaths in the United States is starting to gradually increase as the BA.5 strain continues to be maintained. .
However, for many of us, Covid deaths have taken place outside of our sight, often literally isolated in settings like care facilities, prisons and hospitals. What we have are official death counts, reasonable calculations and retellings of certified, recorded and aggregated deaths. It’s hard to wrap your head around the minds of over a million deaths. We have been experiencing difficulties since May 24, 2020, when New York Times first page described the deaths of 100,000 Americans as an “incalculable loss.” Two years later, as we approached the threshold of a million deaths in March 2022Journalist Ed Yong asked: “What’s ten times more unpredictable?”
In Yong’s impossibility equation, I hear echoes of the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s concept of mathematical sublime, a scale or range beyond imagination. According to Kant, the sublime in mathematics is frustrating because it is too large to be immediately understood. He goes on to argue that it is this imaginary limitation that is also the source of our joy; large-scale things require the use of rationality (I mean logical and quantitative) to measure it, to be able to understand it.
According to Kant, the purpose of such measurement and recording is to enable the mind to grasp an unimaginable scale with the aid of paper or other visual means, allowing human reason to people and some tools control something like catastrophic death charges. For Kant, the process of controlling what appears to be beyond human comprehension is both useful and intellectually gratifying.
This is a joy born of mastery and control. Joy comes from the arrogant human kind that insists that if we can count something we know it and that’s all we need. By turning our attention instead of accuracy and presentation issues (“With Covid” versus “of Covid” and New compare to old For example, the CDC dashboard), our quantification tools threaten to impede our ability to mourn the dead, repair, and grow our community. Such intellectual pleasures have their utility, but are often not spectacularly suited to the grieving and repairing processes.
The West’s use of mortality not only to manage death administratively but also emotionally has been around for a long time, at least since the 16th century. But data access can provide a way to continue tracking the number of disaster deaths while encouraging the nation’s grieving process.
