Kari Nixon > Quotes

“If I've learned one thing in my years of studying the social impacts of disease, it's that we live in a world where we're connected, for better or worse, to the people in our human community by the microbes that we share between us. And in times of contagious disease crisis, if we fail to recognize our shared connection, we are most certainly doomed, because our fates hang together, yoked by tiny particles that threaten us all. Scores of historical figures-both famous and infamous-have taught me as much. By learning the stories of those who lived before us, by educating ourselves about the worlds they inhabited and the viruses and bacteria that lived in, with, and through them, we can learn how to emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever before and well prepared for the next new disease we will inevitably face. If we don't learn from their examples, however, I foresee a world adrift, damned by alienation from its own history, a victim of self-annihilation cued, rather than caused, by the novel coronavirus.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“When society felt adrift in the wake of its loss of religious belief, people turned to science as the anchor that could stabilize them. Again, this is not an argument about the importance or lack thereof of religion. It's rather a statement that humans seek frameworks by which to guide their understanding of the world, and whether they turn to religion or science or something in between, they'll find something to grasp hold of and use to make sense of an often senseless and chaotic world. In my view. we've done that with science over the last 150 years, resulting in many problematic outcomes.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“it’s always a matter of when, not if.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“Perhaps it does come back to valuing community, after all. Recent studies in science communication have suggested what I've sketched out in this chapter: that scientific literacy is not the variable that determines whether or not a group will accept the reality of a public health issue like vaccination or global warning: social groups are. While those individuals tested demonstrated a surprising ability to factually interpret scientific findings, they tended to eventually revert to in-group thinking about the issue, siding with whatever their main social group already believed. We humans are social, after all. Our social nature is why solitary confinement is potentially a human rights violation, why just about all of us wish we weren't having to stay home during the COVID crisis, why we all cling to Zoom meetings-why children yell at one another across balconies, starved for the sound of another child's voice. We all do the same dance of retreating to our social safety spaces. And if our 'safe' social group told us that our experience during the pandemic was a lie? Well, it seems we'd be more likely to believe our friends than science, because, as I've argued elsewhere...in times of desperate calamity, all we humans really have is one another. I have no answer to this twisted dilemma that the healthy carrier narrative, via the vehicle of COVID-19, has presented to us in the United States, but understanding the dilemma rightly is surely important.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“In my discipline, we affectionately refer to this sort of box (culture) as a zeitgeist, which literally translates to 'time ghost.' Unfortunately for any of you expecting spooky surprises, a zeitgeist doesn't refer to a literal ghost but is better understood as the 'spirit of the age,' although even this doesn't quite pin down its meaning. Think of any stereotype of any decade in the last century-from the Roaring Twenties, Flower Power of the sixties-any of these could certainly be said to illustrate the zeitgeist of that era. But zeitgeists can also be more specific than this, and its the SSDC that ends up developing a decent portion our zeitgeists, the sorts of zeitgeists that can be doubly hard to see outside of because they define more than just lifestyle practices. They define everything we think we know about our collective identities and our collective realities.

Of relevance here is the zeitgeist of 'I know best about my body.' It's a lesson we teach people from almost before they can talk: 'You know your body,' 'Listen to your body,' and so forth. And while these are great truisms to teach our children about consent and empowerment as they grow older, they do come with blinders as they become our culture's zeitgeist. How can we really expect people to do a 180 on this logic all of a sudden in 2021?...It would be more productive of us to ask the broad cultural reasons that people resist such mandates, rather than scolding individuals for not conforming. Only then, I think, can we slowly begin to change our collective zeitgeists to those that encourage ownership and empowerment of our own bodies and also add in a healthy dose of 'Sometimes the body is silent' or 'Trust one's own body in collaboration with trusted experts' or something of the like. Ironically enough, the very denial of any shared realities that I mentioned in Lesson 20 is its own zeitgeist that has been gaining momentum for the last five years or so. I worry that this only allows the virus-or any other pathogen in our future-a foothold. Our divisions are their smorgasbord. How can we plan and strategize if we can't agree that we need to plan or strategize to begin with? This is one of the biggest hurdles we'll need to overcome to ensure humanity's long-term survival. It's possibly one of the most terrifying threats to humanity that I've seen in my lifetime-for if our only shared belief is that there is not shared beliefs, where do we go from there?”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“I'm not making any claims here about whether secularization was good or bad-I'm simply saying that in my experience studying cultural history, people never simply let go of religion, they rather find new things to guide their behaviors and actions: essentially, they create new religions our of secular things. In the late 1800's, this new guiding force was science, and faith in science as a means of solving all the world's most complex problems (even today we call the study of government political science, so you can see that this mindset still pervades our society) allowed people to indulge in the fantasy of germ whack-a-mole.

And, of course, handwashing and antiseptic techniques do reduce contagious disease transmission, so fortunately and unfortunately (yes, I mean both at once), the fallacy of playing whack-a-mole with germs reaped positive rewards to some extent, but also allowed society to take the delusion of a germ-free life too far. This sort of thinking is a logical fallacy called an 'appeal to ignorance.' An appeal to ignorance occurs when we have been doing something to ward off a negative effect, and when said negative events never happens, we are all too easily able to assume (possibly incorrectly) that our actions prevented the negative event from occurring.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“It is simply hard to break free from our belief in the experiences of our own bodies, but this is an even greater difficulty to overcome when we're talking about changing our shared cultural attitudes (like the American belief in bootstrapping individualism, for instance). A shared cultural belief is like being trapped in an invisible box. It's hard to break free, of course, but first you have to realize that you're trapped, and this is even harder because you can't see the box to begin with.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

“America is the land of boot-strapping individualism, and that mindset has extended to expectations that good American citizens look out for their own health (think about the media campaigns you see to go get mammograms or to know the signs of a stroke). Ironically, this grassroots method of trying to keep a large population healthy through self-management and self-monitoring leads to a predicament in which we suddenly need everyone to do the same thing for public health reasons. First, we're asking a population steeped in individualistic culture to concern itself with the public good-for public rights to supersede individual rights, that is. But second and just as important, we're asking individuals to believe in a publicly defined reality and not in a personally informed one. In short, we're asking Americans to suddenly stop doing everything that we generally ask them to do in regard to public health (look after your own body, monitor your own symptoms) and instead urging an about-face (do things to protect other people's bodies, and stop assuming you know what your own body is 'telling you.) That's a tall order, to say the least.”
― Kari Nixon, Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today