Mark Kingwell, On Risk

Five years on, how do YOU think we're doing with COVID?

When it came out in 2020, Mark Kingwell's book On Risk was seriously timely. Although the first of Biblioasis' series of novella-length nonfiction pamphlets Field Notes, it was also deliberately targeted at how to think about COVID. Kingwell offers all kinds of ways to think about how we think about risk, hazard, danger, and other related but non-synonymous terms, including some prescriptions for how we might best most ahead, both in relation to COVID and in terms of larger social issues (hint: tax the rich!).

Reader, we didn't listen, but you knew that already. The rich are still largely untaxed, COVID is being ignored rather than confronted, and of course there's the small matter of broligarchy Trump AI billionaires Nazis climate change Poilivere neoliberalism racism misogyny social media bullshit.

Fundamentally, we didn't heed advice like this: "Justice in a risky world does not mean a return to normal, whatever normal might seem to mean. It starts, at least, with a recognition that the normal was deeply and inherently unjust" (p28). Collectively, we simply didn't do that. We wanted to get on with things. We wanted our profiteering, our yoga classes, our burgers, our investment returns.

And so among other things, we sacrificed those with "pre-existing conditions," many of whom died—grandparents and great-grandparents, particularly, but so many more people—but many of whom continue to suffer now through long COVID or the potential impact of a crushing respiratory illness on whatever inflections are already in place in their lives.

"We" isn't all of us. It never has been, and it never will be, but justice demands that we try to look after all of us. Kingwell's final chapter here concludes with a list of ideas, many of them very much in line with my own thinking about this: "Begin real conversations about reparations and structural corrections for identifiable groups who have suffered from systematic overexposure to risk" (p152), for example. 

If you want an actual review of the book, you should check out the thoughtful piece by Lucas Ratigan, then a student at the University of Toronto, where Kingwell is a professor, at the U of T student paper The Varsity. (I wanted to follow up Ratigan, because I'm always wanting to know more about everyone I read or link to, but inexplicably I can't find a single online hit for that name since 2020. One wonders, and hopes one isn't deadnaming, or naming the dead for that matter.) There are longer, more detailed, more philosophic pieces, but Ratigan's is a good place to start.

My thumbnail comment is simply that this is a readable but still somewhat dense work of philosophy. If you've spent any time around the fringes of this kind of thing before, though, it'll be easily accessible to you, even if there are terms, names, and concepts you'll want to look up. Kingwell does take pains, too—most of the time—to keep it accessible: "I will endeavour to limit the use of 'scare quotes' from this point on in the text," he remarks partway through the first chapter; "you could imagine every single declarative sentence about the nature of the world and our place in it as so enclosed" (p48).

It feels a little like a time capsule, to be honest, from a time when some of us thought our collective response to COVID might lead to a better world, rather than the broligarchy Trump AI billionaires Nazis climate change Poilivere neoliberalism racism misogyny social media bullshit we're currently dealing with.

Fight on, friends.