What will things be like after COVID-19?   At least in rich countries, there will be a time after this pandemic.  I do not think it will be soon.  And, for reasons not here pertinent, I am unlikely to see it. But I think I see, perhaps darkly, some features of your future.  We now know that parts of many jobs—and all of some jobs—will be done remotely. ‘Working from home,’ we now say.

Some predictions about how that could change our lives will prove as comically wrong as travel by jetpack.  It will not stop the climate crisis, eliminate cars, or move all shopping online.  It will not reverse—it may exacerbate—the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power that scar capitalist societies.  ‘Essential workers’ will need to show up, and they will still be paid—if they are lucky—no more than their marginal product. In the medium term, the ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ will grow, so their wages may even go down.

But for people whose access to work is limited mainly by disability, especially by mobility impairments, things may improve.  At least, they will if equality and employment law remain roughly as they are in the more decent societies.  Many countries have something like the following regime:  employers may not discriminate against people on grounds of disability, and they have a positive duty to make ‘reasonable accommodations’ or ‘adjustments’ in employment so that people with disabilities can participate with dignity and on fair terms.  What is ‘reasonable’ is contested.  An employee has to be able to do the job, but need not do it in the time, manner, or with the efficiency of one with no disability.  The point of equality law is to put a thumb on the scale in favour of disabled employees.  For nearly all employers that means a cost, and often a nuisance as well.  Compliance is therefore patchy.

As my own mobility declined (I use a wheelchair), I discovered that even attentive employers struggle to understand, never mind accommodate, disability.  I have never encountered ill-will or indifference, but plenty of incomprehension and dithering. And, incredibly, I have seen institutions that draw on the public purse build or renovate in ways that introduce new barriers to access.  (The distinguished Canadian lawyer, David Lepofsky, rightly says that this should be a red line.)  But here is the good news.  Everyone now knows that significant aspects of some jobs can be done off-site.  We know this is possible because it is actual.  (Legal philosophers: take note.)  Classes, seminars, lectures, and meetings are being offered in new ways because, well, for now we have no choice.

Some of these are imperfect substitutes for ‘the real thing’.  They will be dropped, as general practices, just as soon as it is safe to do so.  But—and here is my point—for some employees they will become not only feasible but required forms of accommodation.  An academic ‘manager’ once told me, ‘We already have the most flexible work conditions there could be!’  They did not mean to suggest a flexibility including the right to work at a time or place that accommodates a disability.  (Nor did they have in mind casualized teachers: they meant tenured law professors.)   But COVID-19 has taught us that there are, after all, flexibilities we never noticed.

Not everyone who could ‘work from home’ should have a right to work from home. And, really, how many would want to?  But some should have that right, including some people with disabilities.  I would rather we had learned this some other way, but at least we have learned it.  I hope you remember it when this disaster passes.

In the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, a philosophy professor posted in the social media a cry of despair: he was having trouble ‘working from home,’ knowing that almost any work he might do would be less important than anything he could do that would help others.  A friend quipped, ‘It took the pandemic to make you see that?’

I have no doubt that the philosopher had at hand all the familiar replies: (a) we have a contractual obligation to do our work, but not to help a frail neighbour get groceries; (b) we have our own lives to lead and are already set on them; we are not resources for the use of others;  (c) we refuse to be taken for suckers, and our colleagues are getting on with their work; (d) our work may not be helping others, but at least it isn’t hurting anyone.

Those are, in ordinary circumstances, good reasons for not conscripting us to help those to whom we owe no special obligations.  But in our actual circumstances, they are pretty weak reasons for deciding to do nothing to help anyone outside our households.

As terrible as this pandemic is, we have not yet reached the point where general conscription is justified.   But any of us can now change the balance between getting on with our research (or scholarship, or whatever) and attending to someone else.  Most of us could do so without coming close to breach of contract, abandoning our lives, becoming doormats, or hurting more than we help.  The most senior and best paid among us can do so at no significant cost to ourselves or even our careers.  So why don’t we?

An easy answer is selfishness.  But I have come to think that explanation is too easy.  It isn’t merely that when we are dependent on reciprocity selfishness can be self-defeating.  I  think it isn’t as easy to be selfish as some assume.  It takes discipline and effort to bring yourself to care mostly about your profession, your recondite passions, trivial marks of distinction, or purely positional goods.  We were taught the necessary skills as students.  Many of us then adopted principles that reinforced those skills.  For some, keeping faith with those principles became an end in itself.  It was hard work, and did not come naturally.

To think a narrow selfishness is the academic’s default is as wrong as thinking that bias is the default disposition of a judge.  Left to themselves, many judges would be decent.  It takes a deep commitment to the rule of law to be willing to apply, consistently and without exception, any and all existing laws, no matter what they are or how they affect people.  That disposition is not impartiality: it is a willingness to give full effect to the biases encoded in the law. Without discipline, an ordinary (human) judge is liable to veer off into justice, humanity, or common sense.  Solomon’s wisdom did not lie in his skill at applying rules.

My guess is that academics (in my own fields, anyway) are less selfish than we are embarrassed to help. Admittedly, a few seem without shame in explaining to epidemiologists how the pandemic will progress, or to all of us how we should value human lives against the stock markets.  But they are outliers.  Many of us feel ashamed at now having so little to contribute to the public good, especially if we were educated (as I was) entirely at the public expense.

One remedy is to remember how much we can do that is non-specific.  Any of us can help someone (the housekeeper, the gig worker, the laid-off server) fill in the forms that stand between them and the benefits our ravaged welfare states still provide.  Before heading to the grocery store, any of us can ask someone what we can pick up for them—and not,  by the way, by saying  ‘Let me know if you ever need help.’  We know, or can easily find, people who always need help.  Don’t expect them to supplicate.  We also probably have phones, as well as the numbers of people who just need to talk. (And not, unless you are under 25, by texting.)

We omit these small services, not because we are selfish, because it is hard to admit that these are the only sorts of things that many of us in good jobs, ‘working from home,’ can do for others.  We feel embarrassed that we have little more to offer.  We wish for something grander, something that would display our expertise, perhaps leading to acknowledgment of how smart and important we really are.  That is not selfishness.  But it does exhibit, shall we say, an unhealthy relationship with one’s self.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the first time in ages, I did some research.  I do not mean I did whatever it is that, when added to my teaching and administrative duties, sums to 100% of my contractual obligations as a university professor.  I mean I researched something—I found out something I didn’t know, but which was there to be known. (‘What authority do Scottish courts now accord the 17^th century ‘institutional’ writers, such as Erskine and Stair?’ There is a [vague] answer to this question, and I found out what it is.)

I also often try to find out what others are saying about things I’m interested in: so I do look at periodical databases, SSRN, Westlaw, and so forth.  But that’s not really ‘doing research’.  What’s more, that once-common activity of ‘keeping up with the literature’ has become, like visiting parish churches, the pastime of a certain class only.  An influential philosopher told me he never reads the journals anymore:  he has his own work to get on with.  It takes a certain kind of person to assume that everyone else is waiting for your next, while you have nothing to gain from their last.  (A kind of person now well represented in my subjects, and I suspect in the humanities more generally.)

But if I’m not doing research in jurisprudence, what exactly, or even roughly, have I been doing all these years?  For a long time, I thought that it should be classified as scholarship.  I arrived at that conclusion by applying this rough test:

R=df:  If your failure, or delay, in writing something means someone else might do it first, then you’re doing research.

 S=df:  If your failure in writing something means that no one else will ever do it, then you’re doing scholarship.

I think you get the drift.  But the definition of scholarship proves over-inclusive. No one else is going to write your poems either, and not just because of the metaphysical necessity of origins.  It’s just that, if you don’t write them, they are not going to get written by anyone. There weren’t competing crews working on a Toy Boat, then Ocean Vuong’s crew crossed the line first.  But that doesn’t make Toy Boat a piece of scholarship.

My definition also struggles with historical studies.  In principle, someone else might be working on A History of Freemasonry in Kilbarchan, and might publish before you; but his will not be your history.  Indeed, if your history is any good, it is unlikely to be just like his.  He will approach your shared subject with different preoccupations, background, and maybe even methods.  Still, both of your histories are likely to include, or produce, research.

I’ve now come to think that, not just my definitions, but my dichotomy of research and scholarship is too crude.  I am now wondering whether we might think of some of our work in jurisprudence, or in philosophy more generally, as more like curating. (I wanted to write ‘curacy’, but OED tells me the word has been taken.)   Like research, curating can find out things; like scholarship it can communicate things in a way unique to, or bearing the indelible imprint of, the creator.  But curating also does something else.

A curator attempts to care for knowledge and culture we already have.  Not by freezing it or ensuring no others can touch it, but by conserving it while placing it in a new context, or displaying it from a new angle, or in the company of new ideas, so as to make it intelligible and perhaps useful to those who follow us.  A curator protects what we already know (and value), not only against forgetting, but also against the disintegrating forces of self-importance (including national self-importance) and against the blaring noise of the news cycle.

At the end of his play, The History Boys, Alan Bennet gives the closing words to Hector, the childlike schoolmaster whose career is ruined by his fumbling and fondling affection for the boys.  But it is Hector, not the smarmy if effective Irwin (another, even more tragic, closet-case) who actually gives the boys an education.  Irwin merely teaches them how to game the system and win places at Oxford.  Yet Hector does neither research nor scholarship: he recites, assembles, displays and, especially, places in the context of their world some truths the boys need to know.  Mostly, they are things everyone already knows, but which cannot be counted on to survive without care.  Some truths are fragile:

“Irwin He was a good man but I do not think there is time for his kind of teaching any more.

Scripps No. Love apart, it is the only education worth having.

Hector Pass the parcel.

            That’s sometimes all you can do.

            Take it, feel it and pass it on.

            Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day.

            Pass it on, boys.

            That’s the game I wanted you to learn.

            Pass it on.”

The thought is put more sentimentally than we should in jurisprudence or philosophy.  But Hector’s core idea now seems true to me—some of what we do, and some of what we should be doing—is neither research nor scholarship, but ‘passing the parcel’, in the hope that it will be of value to someone, somewhere, one day.  It’s a decent, and honest, ambition.