When we look back on today, will we view it as our crazy time? Or will we see this time, and the history before the virus, through the eyes of a broadly neurotic people publicly nurtured into the obsessive cleanliness variant of the obsessive-compulsive disorder? With the new administration, I’m beginning to wonder. I’m starting to doubt whether we will be ever allowed to be fully human again.
If so, say goodbye to a free republic and hello to a nanny state on meth.
Jake Tapper and Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director, from Sunday, Feb. 14, 2021.
Hints of the omnipresent and muscular nanny state have been arising out of the Biden administration. Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s CDC Director, announced earlier this month the need to get back to some sense of normality by reopening the schools even without a complete vaccination of all teachers. She walked back the statement a week later. On “Face the Nation”, she worried about a new variant, the UK variant (B.1.1.7), and the likelihood of more. Later, Jake Tapper of CNN pressed her on reopening the schools, and that means in-person instruction. She back-peddled. She stated that over 90% of children live in “red zones” of high infection rates and thus limited classrooms to K-5 with the mandatory butchering of the classroom experience behind desk and face shields, compulsive cleansing, and the scattering of kids behind 6-foot DMZ’s. She tied any return to something resembling normal to infection rates. In other words, with the perceived threat of variants and the persistence of the outbreaks, we might be hovering in a forever state of totalitarian controls and shutdowns. Is that any way to live?
That’s not all. Clearly, totalitarianism lurks at the core of the policy. Any return to a normal human life will hinge on “universal” – meaning perfect – obedience to the state’s edicts.
If “universal” masking is ordered, it had better be followed by everyone to the letter at all times. But that’s impossible. Remember, in the case of the schools, these are kids. In the case of adults, people slip. Absolute compliance is an impossible standard. Or maybe I should amend my account by saying that it might be possible with the kind of police state that would make the Castros envious. The same would have to be true throughout the regime on everything from perfect compliance on 6-foot social distancing to stay-at-home orders to the banishment of social and economic life. Perfect, compete obedience with the long arm of the state . . . forever.
Police arrest parishioners in Moscow, Idaho, as they participated in a public psalm sing in defiance of mask and social distancing mandates, September 23, 2020.
It’ll have to be forever because the virus may not, probably will not, completely disappear. If it hangs around like the lazy, obnoxious relative after Christmas, it’s 2020 forever, there being no limiting principle. What was sanctioned in March of 2020 is the precedent for an unending contortion of existence – if not for this bug, for any pathogen of mysterious origin. After all, mother nature is infinitely creative.
And this will be true in spite of a vaccine. Any new variant and new pathogen will incite the suffocation of society. If history is any indication, and given our knowledge of nature, new threats will appear. The acts of simple living could be forcibly ended nearly at the beginning of each flu season, till another herculean effort to create a vaccine succeeds. We may spend more time in lockdown than out of it.
Imagine an entire existence of a people living in a constant state of pins and needles. This could be our future . . . until the peasants with pitchforks (the guns having been taken in prior decrees) rise up in rebellion and expel the commissars. A point of saturation will have to be reached at some point. The experience of peasant rebellions in history isn’t a pleasant one.
One question overhangs the entire episode: Why do the American people seem so docile? Have we bred citizens or sheep? There are good reasons to challenge our response to the virus, not the science about it. Why haven’t we rose up in broad acts of civil disobedience, as in MLK’s campaign against Jim Crow? At this juncture in our history, I can’t avoid the strong conjecture that the citizens of today aren’t citizens of the 19th-century settlement of the frontier. We are different, profoundly different.
Sheeple?
The change is palpable, and something to worry about. The truculent John Adams was more direct: “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
Or, how about this gem: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There [was] never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” Are we about to prove him right?
The current hysteria is anthropogenic, and could well spell doom to a free republic.
A caveat to begin with: I refuse to paint with a broad brush. I had the pleasure of working with some of the most wonderful and dedicated people on the planet in my 30 years as a public high school and community college teacher. Yet, over those many years, I also became aware of the cancerous rot that has penetrated almost every square inch of the system. It’s amazing that some teachers succeed in spite of the decay. Lately, their task has been made worse by the intensification of the putrefaction. I worry for the kids and many of my colleagues still in the system.
One of the most dreadful notions to fly under the radar is the idea that human relations can be tuned like an old-style carburetor with a turn of a screw. A carburetor is childishly simple when compared to the ultrafine mesh of a civilization. The attempt to adjust one set of connections unravels and distorts others. To the over-confident and over-credentialed “expert”, unknowingly wearing blinders, and many a government officeholder who began their rise to prominence in the same manner as the degreed master – with a college degree – the temptation for busybody interference is too great to resist. The schools are the principal purveyors of this facetiousness.
To be honest, the idea of a small and centralized group of henchmen running national affairs has been around for centuries. As a case in point, the notion was crystalized in economic terms in the 17th century by the equivalent of France’s Commerce/Treasury Secretary under King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and called mercantilism. Mercantilism is so simplistically alluring: sell more than you buy as a nation and your nation will get rich. The fact is, any benefits are concentrated on a few while the costs are many and more broadly distributed. For any politician and most others in our ill-educated media, the glorious ribbon-cutting ceremony is more glamorous than the many other people up and down the economic food chain who gradually find their lives made more difficult. It’s a fool’s errand but one perpetuated by the belief in the omniscience of the degreed or credentialed “expert” to manage things. We’d be far better off if our culture and schools did more to esteem humility than mass-produce framed paper affixed to office or home walls.
Trump swallowed the idea of societal manipulator hook, line, and sinker in his affection for tariffs, but don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are off the hook. The foolishness is the heart of their progressivism. They believe in “industrial policy”, an idea that is akin to a people’s life being best managed by a class of social and economic technicians. Of course, the technocrats will be churned out by our degree mills, the colleges, and not surprisingly it has led to wisdom dilution, inflated tuitions, and soaring college debt. Amazingly, our grasping for societal betterment became a disaster to be “solved” by more national debt.
The Democrats want to manipulate the system for the benefit of anyone not white and male, no matter how you define the sexual divide. Genitalia and melanin matter much to them. If truth be told, though, a history of lefty activism would have to be added to their list of preferred traits. So, clearly, it’s lefty women and men in dark pigments who are the objects of their sympathies and cares.
The intersectionality of the superficial, and having little to do with character.
In contrast, Trump’s darlings are blue collar workers. If I had to choose, my sympathies lie with the working stiffs who keep things humming along. Regardless, though, such targeted sympathies do not ensure good policy for a nation.
No better example can be found than Trump’s tariff escapades on aluminum (see here). The on-again, off-again exactions wreaked havoc for aluminum users such as beer and soft drink producers. Given the peculiarities of the beer and soft drink markets – the industry’s consumers are highly sensitive to price changes – the tariffs made precarious the livelihoods of thousands beyond the few hundred who have an increased lock on job security among the few remaining domestic producers of aluminum sheet metal. Trump had more zeal for ribbon-cutting while others were left seething at Budweiser, Coca-Cola, etc. Many in the bigger economy might be able to connect the dots. The possibility may have been missed, or simply ignored, by Trump and his advisers.
Where were the schools in teaching basic economics to the millions who pass through their doors? Where were the “experts” in educating your sons and daughters? Either the lessons didn’t stick or were never taught. Maybe people were never held accountable for either learning the lessons or teaching them. Either way, there’s a vacant spot in many minds to be filled with socialist nonsense or the belief that a puppet master or grand vizier will manipulate our lives to paradise. Actually, both possibilities are mirror images of each other.
We’ve seen this picture before. The vacuous thinking was resplendent in the streets of ancient Athens to those of Weimar Germany to the avenues of today’s Seattle, Portland, LA, Chicago, New York City, and any place in America beyond a threshold of population density. The “science” and “experts” haven’t freed us from the turmoil and ignorance. In fact, they may be contributing to it.
Take for instance, our “experts” in epidemiology – especially those that fill government posts – a field of understandable media attention during a pandemic. They have set us on the road to lockdowns, mandatory and universal mask wearing, abolition of Christian fellowship, the end of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the destruction of much of our economy, and putting the kibosh to real education for our kids. Has our educational system given us the same breed of “expert” who foisted on us the 1960’s-and-beyond War on Poverty?
They came right out of college knowing a lot about microscopic organisms and very little about the Laffer Curve, creative destruction, supply and demand curves, or crowd-induced hysteria. It’s easy for them to say, “If it saves one life, it’s worth it.” In their isolated world of labs and microscopes, it might make sense. As a governing philosophy, it’s a disaster. Just think of all the salutary advances from the rule of law to artificial power (steam, natural gas, nuclear, et al) that came from someone somewhere gambling. We’d still be in tribes in constant war with each other or huddled in caves next to open fires if we decided all matters by “If it saves one life …”.
And we are slowly reverting back to that prehistory with the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, mandates for donning semi-burkas at all times in all places, and everyone treating everyone else as an alien species with the unceasing entreaties for social distancing. The crazy orders are depriving people of producing sustenance – i.e., boundless business closings and zooming (no pun intended) unemployment.
You know, sustenance, the kind of thing that’s been around since hunting and gathering. Many in our ruling class have made a conscious decision to replicate primordial existence, or at least the Great Depression. Once you take a meat axe to capital – thank you, Gavin Newsom and the other would-be Napoleons – it’s hard to bring it back. According to the National Restaurant Association, 40 to 50 percent of eateries won’t, if ever.
An empty downtown street amid the Covid-19 lockdown in Chicago, March 21. (photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
Guess who’ll suffer the most? To find the susceptible, you’ll have to move down the social status and income pyramid: small businesses and the social rungs below those in exclusive zip codes. Without a doubt, the not-so-privileged, in the lingo of the day, will be the most vulnerable, not just to get the virus but also to lose their livelihoods (see here). Guess what happens to the woke crowd’s much-esteemed goal of “equity” as Newsom and company smother their economies? Guess who’ll cry the loudest for a “bailout” for their draconian measures? Mensa membership isn’t necessary for an answer.
The service industry is decimated, and much of the 15 million middle-income jobs with it. What do you think happens to your average barista? Hello, AOC. The president of a leftist activist group, Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, proclaimed, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.” The lockdowns are an assault on the much-ballyhooed “equity”.
Taking a page from the Weimar Germany book of 1923, the response is to shower the country with paper money, with the same result, and non-expulsion edicts. Paper money being shoveled into the economy while euthanizing much production isn’t an expression of sanity in public policy.
It’s all due to “If it saves one life …”. Thank you, our schools, for giving us a powerful cadre of small-minded but powerful people.
Arising out of our colleges is much more than blinkered, busybody “experts”. Insanity dressed up in arcane academic rhetoric emanates out of these gilded hot houses. For example, take equality and turn it into equality of outcome, mash it into ruminations about our electoral system, and out comes “vote reparations”, and out goes “one man, one vote”. You’ve got that right: a black vote should count twice, or some similar formulation. Really? Brandon Hasbrouck, law professor at Washington and Lee University, hatched the idea to address the fact that there aren’t enough blacks in Wyoming and Nebraska, and too many in Chicago, Detroit, and the urban dots on the mid-Atlantic coast (see here). Yeah, African-Americans aren’t evenly distributed enough, he says, or in large enough numbers to protect their interests in a constitutional republic. So, he demands to jerry rig the system to the advantage of 13% of the population and end the constitutional republic that we’ve come to know.
Brandon Hasbrouck
The possibilities would be endless for advocates. For instance, divide LA’s Watts, Compton, and Southcentral neighborhoods into 20 congressional districts. Let’s put Eldridge Gerry’s salamander, the Gerrymander, on fertility drugs.
Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like “monster”, and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander.
Crazy? You bet, but something that gets a serious hearing among those in padded cells and faculty lounges.
Our schools, now at all levels, are quickly becoming breeding grounds for the sort of deadly mental pathogens that spell doom to any healthy society. At the entrance to every school – grade school to college – the following caution should be required under the school’s name in an official font size: “Warning: The activity in this place is hazardous to your cognitive development and the health of your country”.
Barack and Michelle Obama superimposed over their plush Martha’s Vineyard estate.
First ladies normally leave office with high approvals because they aren’t sullied by the messiness of politics and are normally remembered for their high-minded crusades. Think of Nancy Reagan (just say no), Laura Bush (literacy), the pre-activist Michelle Obama (child nutrition), and Melania Trump (child well-being). When they choose to get into the muck, however, you realize that they were willing participants in a four-year choreographed charade – or 8 years in Michelle’s case. Michelle Obama, very rich and secure, residing in her $11.75 million Martha’s Vineyard 7,000 square foot estate, lectures us on our incipient racism and her opponents’ vileness. It’s beyond despicable; it’s ignominious and disgusting. She’s proof that elections can bring out the worst in us. It is doing it do her.
The discreditable side of Michelle Obama has been volubly evident this election. Her latest podcast monologue (see below) is chock full of partisan rhetoric, the kind of bombast that can be easily dismissed by anyone with a brain.
She blithely blasts Trump for no COVID plan. No one has a “plan” till they know the nature of the problem. By her measure, neither did her beloved husband during the Ebola, SARS, swine flu (H1N1) and Zika outbreaks. Biden advisor at the time, Ron Klain, recalled about H1N1,
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.”
Not surprisingly, Michelle didn’t say a word about her husband’s neglect of the mandated stockpiles of PPE and medical supplies such as ventilators.
Plans don’t take shape till you know the disposition of the enemy. The liberation of Europe in 1944 couldn’t begin until we had some idea of where the Germans were and their capabilities. COVID-19 was special, very special. It’s identification, transmissibility, spread, symptoms, and lethality were unknown in January to … everybody! Once we began to know the enemy, travel bans, quarantines, lockdowns, expansion of medical facilities, therapeutics, and a Manhattan Project for a vaccine were pushed into place. Her podcast harangue was an empty rant without benefit of any suggestions for how she, or Biden, would do it differently. If you buy her balderdash, then, please, for your own sake, stay away from real estate offices. Michelle, you should know better.
Then she goes into a rant about Trump’s mask-wearing tendencies. Apparently, she wants universal mask-wearing at all times, even during moments when the science shows it to be ridiculous. Transmissibility of the virus outdoors has not been established even at this late date. The fear-mongering about the loss of “countless lives” is pure political hot air from science illiterates who are eager to employ generalities to pursue a naked partisan aim.
A real scientific mind, which Michelle shows no indication of having, would recognize the uneven impact on the population. Mitigations need to be targeted on the vulnerable, and, as it turns out, few of us are. Anyone healthy who is infected will have a case of the flu. We know that now; understandably we didn’t in the beginning. Michelle is stuck in January. She shows no sign of recognition of the destroyed lives in emotional depression, delayed medical procedures, job loss, bankrupted fortunes, retarding a child’s mental development, etc., from her favorite mitigations.
A mature adult acknowledges every day that life is a balancing of risk, even down to the decision to get up in the morning. Michelle’s authoritarianism is a recipe for civilizational collapse in a destructive crusade for zero-risk. Michelle, you should know better.
The rant continues in her attack on Trump for “sowing division and hatred” against black and brown people. Her entire line of attack is shattered by the reality on the ground. Residents and shop owners in our urban centers know who’s torching and assaulting people in their neighborhoods. Hint: it isn’t solely “people of color”. Michelle is right if her purpose is to deflect blame for the destruction from black and brown people. As it turns out, it’s white people from her socioeconomic strata who are instigating the mayhem. And, Michelle, mayhem it is. You are gaslighting, not Trump, by asking people to ignore their lyin’ eyes as they watch the Antifa and BLM-inspired pandemonium. Au contraire, you, Michelle, and your Democratic Party allies are complicit in “sowing division and hatred” by manufacturing hypothetical grievances under an unprovable abstraction, systemic racism. It’s a disgraceful attempt to invent racism when you can’t prove it, but you need it as a foil in furtherance of a power grab. Michelle, you should know better.
Michelle, no one, Trump included, has called for the arrest of protesters. That’s straw man demagoguery. The demand for law and order concerns the looting, vandalism, assaults, killings, and the setting of businesses ablaze.
Riot-damaged Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.
The many protests around the country are irrelevant to the shooting of cops, the spittle-laced fulminations in their face, the wanton infliction of injury, the homicidal acts of arson at federal buildings, etc., etc. It matters not if the ratio of protest to violence is 10 to 1. Simple protests don’t draw the attention of federal authorities. The 10 riots among the 100 protests is an immediate concern for the victims caught up in the havoc. And when you and your political allies quietly sanction the violence through misdirection, you’re an accomplice. As a mother, Michelle, you should understand this. Michelle, you should know better.
Michelle Obama’s behavior during this election season is a primer on how to destroy a first lady’s reputation.
“Until I know this sure uncertainty, I’ll entertain the offered fallacy.” (William Shakespeare, “The Comedy of Errors”)
Electron microscope at the University of Bath, UK.
I can’t leave the subject of the coronavirus alone; riots and “defunding” the police be damned. Everything about the virus says so much about ourselves and our current state of affairs.
An image of the new coronavirus taken with an electron microscope. (photo: U.S. National Institutes of Health/AP)
“COVID-19 Is Not the Flu”, so stipulates the title of John McCormack’s piece in the May 18 edition of National Review. It’s the primary assumption that drives most everything that has been written and said on the subject of our current contagion, the coronavirus. Hugh Hewitt, another of the center/right commentariat, is fond of prefacing some of his remarks on his radio show with “in the year of plague”. Is the sickness a “plague” and is it “not the flu”? Honestly, I don’t know, and neither do they, and neither does much of the army of others who have contributed to the widely publicized tale about the virus. They claim a confidence that is unwarranted.
The storyline on the contagion is its proclaimed near-apocalyptic threat to civilization, so much so that we have come close to ending society. Thus, we are required to live a life of imitation and strangeness: an ersatz sociability through a mask, distance, digitization, and no touching; a dangerous fiddling with people’s livelihoods through arbitrary edicts of “essential” and “nonessential”; and the unwitting deputization of a horde of unthinking scolds.
I stand corrected. The unthinking scolds are thinking, but they could be reasoning from a host of unexamined assumptions.
One unexamined assumption occurred to me as I was reading McCormack’s essay. His comments were composed at a time of what could be referred to, in hindsight, as high hysteria. While in this public state-of-mind, nothing, as far as I am aware, has been written or said on the possibility of the distorting effects of focusing so many resources on this virus that comparisons with other pestilences are impossible. The distorting effects contribute to an emotional and socio-political environment that then corrupts the raw data. The rationale becomes the equivalent of a house of cards but is sold as rock solid.
The field of physics presents an excellent illustration. Scientists have long been aware of the possible impact of their detection methods on the object of their interest. The mere act of observation can alter the nature of it and distort their findings. As a result, they must be constantly conscious of this “observer effect”. Are our public policy experts, political leaders, and punditry class mindful of it in areas beyond science? Given what I’ve seen, heard, and read, I kinda doubt it.
I’ll use McCormack’s piece to lay out the conventional explanation for the gravity of this virus. His argument that it isn’t the flu, and shouldn’t be treated like it is, relies on an analysis that probably suffers from the observer effect. The observer in this case would be the public and private entities with a singular laser focus on this thing. No sickness has ever drawn this much attention in recent times. The final public and private bill for our reaction to this contagion hasn’t been finalized. As of today, the federal government has pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into relief and treatments. The Federal Reserve will inject $1.5 trillion to finance the response. How quaint for Sen. Everett Dirksen to opine in 1933, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” We have to add a zero to keep up with the numbers rolling out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
A few trillion dollars of observer makes for one mammoth potential for distortion.
In addition, the states have thrown another billions, if not trillions, into the kitty. California’s governor Gavin Newson estimated in April that the initial drain on the state’s treasury will amount to $7 billion (We’re still in Dirksen land), with more billions by the end of the year. Many states have seen their fiscal ledgers tip into the red, maybe way into the red. The word “bankruptcy” now applies to more than the businesses that they have driven into insolvency with their loose labeling of “nonessential”.
The upshot: all this activity has generated more data on this contagion than any other. To make the case that this candidate for mayhem is worse than prior ones, McCormack trots out the numbers for H1N1 of 61 million infections and 12,500 deaths over 12 months. The death toll for the flu season of 2018-19 runs about 34,200, he says. How do we know that these numbers were a product of a run-of-the-mill “good enough” as opposed to the frantic hyperactivity for corona? The difference in response between the culprits colors the numbers to such an extent that they could become incomparable.
In the earlier instances, the beginning and end dates for the infection might be more casually agreed upon. In quite another, contact tracing is conducted with all the intensity of Nazis ferreting out those with the “poisoned” blood of the Jews. The start/finish is pushed further and further out as more and more attention is devoted to it. The difference in the intensity of scrutiny creates a classic apples and oranges fallacy. Like isn’t compared with like.
Then, overreaction feeds more overreaction. Borrowing from science once again, we have now created a system feedback loop of frenzy feeding into more frenzy. Our collection and analysis of feverishly acquired data doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an atmosphere of fear and doom.
It’s likely that the overhanging sense of dread will stampede governments into monumental actions that will culminate in subsidizing moral hazard in the realm of data collection. The money for defraying the costs of the epidemic will reward the promiscuous assignment of cases to the coronavirus category. The numbers are corrupted. The situation produces grossly uneven numbers depending on an official’s susceptibility to the corruption.
Macomb County, Mich., Chief Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz in April was quoted as saying, “I think a lot of clinicians are putting that condition (COVID-19) on death certificates when it might not be accurate because they died with coronavirus and not of coronavirus.” In addition, “Are they [the coronavirus death numbers] entirely accurate? No. Are people dying of it? Absolutely. Are people dying of other things and coronavirus is maybe getting credit? Yeah, probably.” Numbers get inflated in a surrounding climate of subsidized frenzy.
The shear volume and intensity of observation warps our perception of reality. It makes more difficult the useful the sort of comparisons which are critical for ascertaining the magnitude of the threat. The more we peer into a contagion, the more we make those numbers incomparably unique.
All of us are observers who have been made more obsessive about this disease by a world of extraordinary connectivity. We know in an instant what is happening anywhere. If our government is drawn to a particular happenstance, it’s ferocity of activity will combine with our own to disfigure our judgment. I can only wish that our chattering classes were as aware of this humbling aspect of our nature.
Patients wearing face masks and personal protective equipment wait on line for COVID-19 testing outside Elmhurst Hospital Center, Friday, March 27, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
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The Basic Limiting Principle: “There are certain limiting principles which we unhesitatingly take for granted as the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined. Some of these seem to be self-evident. Others are so overwhelmingly supported by all the empirical facts which fall within the range of ordinary experience and the scientific elaborations of it (including under this heading orthodox psychology) that it hardly enters our heads to question them. Let us call these Basic Limiting Principles.” *C.D. Broad in his scholarly piece, “The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy”, 1949, in the journal Philosophy.
C.D. Broad
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While listening to a recent National Review podcast of “The Editors”, the discussion among the editors turned to the issue of masks, as a prophylactic in government guidance or commands regarding the epidemic. I recall that the general consensus of the 3 editors was supportive. The more their view settled in my head, the more disturbed I became. Broad’s limiting principle came to mind, as did the possibility of severe social and psychological disfigurement from this “new normal”. My conclusion: this has to end sooner rather than later.
One editor, Charles C.W. Cooke, true to his libertarian bias, equated the mask to the right to bear arms. The comparison is foolish, but I get it. The Second Amendment is integral to our understanding of ourselves as a self-governing people in a citizen republic. How does mask-wearing fit into that constitutional construct? It doesn’t, unless disguising one’s appearance in public is the “new normal”. Conceal-carry doesn’t undermine fundamental social interaction like conducting public life from behind a mask.
Charles C.W. Cooke
For the podcast participants, a great emphasis was placed on its usefulness in an epidemic, citing Asians in 1 million+ urban centers who are accustomed to wearing them in their pollution-addled air. Granted, but the excuse of an epidemic had better be carefully defined with much more than boundaries of geography and longevity. However, the treatment of this contagion is morphing into a never-ending crusade. We are about to confront the limits adumbrated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in his law of unintended consequences as we continue to treat the issue as the 14th-century’s Black Death. A simple plank (masks) in the program to fight the disease may result in something more than “flattening the curve”. It will flatten our psyche and our social connectivity. The emotional, social, and economic negative spinoffs will be profound.
The practice of hiding much of our face in public, and a good portion of everything else, is indicative of near-totalitarian social and political regimes. Does Sharia and the burka remind you of anything? Do the Guidance Squads of the Islamic Republic of Iran remind you of anything? No need to worry about the niqab’s impracticality for ID photos. Women are not supposed to drive … and vote, be educated, be business leaders, or stray too much outside the home in many of these places. The rule applies to only women, but it conveys an alarming assumption about the person. Hiding the face – or a good portion of it – is incompatible in a free society of free individuals.
How do we freely interact if the person is a stranger and if the contact isn’t carefully staged beforehand? Identification from the bridge of the nose up is nearly impossible; the voice is muffled as in the electronic distortion to protect a Mafioso turncoat; the initial attraction of people to each other is marred by the absence of two-thirds of the face. Identifying criminal suspects becomes impossible since the photo on the ID is difficult to match with the hidden face, unless the thing is removed thereby defeating its purpose. Plus, how do you distinguish the bank robbers from the crowd of seeming bank robbers on the street? The whole thing is ludicrous for finding a mate and protecting people’s savings accounts.
It’s beyond ludicrous. It’s creepy. Have you noticed the mangling of the social space under a regime of masks and social distancing? Yes, I’ll add social distancing since it is the policy cousin to the masks; its purpose being the same: reducing the risk of picking up and transmitting the bug. A restaurant resembles Madam Tussauds wax museum with mannequins seated at tables to give the patrons a phony sense of bustle in an atmosphere of lockdown. I’m reminded of the makeshift suburbia in nuclear tests. Others have invented ghoulish alterations to eat and drink through the things. Does the “new normal” look like this? Huxley or Orwell couldn’t have surpassed what we are proposing to do to ourselves.
Mannequins in The Inn at Little Washington, a Michelin three-star restaurant, reopening shortly in Washington, Va., May 20, 2020A “typical American family” of mannequins who were subject to an atomic bomb test at “Doom Town” in Yucca Flat, Nevada. (Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images)
And then there’s the plastic experience of simulating a touch, handshake, or hug through a broadband image on a monitor. Now we are one step closer to the digitized world of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” (acted by Tom Cruise in the movie). Masks, mannequins, and Thanksgiving dinners limited to the immediate household and TV images of grandma and grandpa promises to be our “new normal” if some of our overlords get their way. What happens to a society with much less personal contact? We become a people awfully resembling solipsistic automatons, a shadow of our former selves.
The “new normal” verbiage, and what it advocates, with its masks and ersatz social life, should be dispensed with immediately, except in targeted locations with flare-ups and serious rates of infection. Charles C.W. Cooke, this isn’t the same as a coal mine. Masks are limited to miners, not as a public ethos for everyone. Apples and oranges, buddy.
Once breached, the standard of masks imposition comes easier the next time. If it was good for the coronavirus, why wouldn’t they be good every flu season … or permanently? After all, human beings are walking founts of pathogens, at all times. Forget about that passionate French kiss. Forget about foreplay. Expect an intensification of the birth dearth. I wonder what romance looks like behind masks and a restaurant of mannequins. My guess: it’ll be as rare as the births.
Too bad the Wampanoags in the 17th century didn’t have their own blue-state governors. They wouldn’t need the warrior face paint to appear fearsome since they’d be frightening enough in a N95 mask. They’d also be around today in greater numbers given their complete lack of herd immunity to the Europeans’ influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhus. But then again, knowing the probable negative effect of masks on romance, they’d still experience empty maternity wards. They’d still end up with the same declining numbers.
Herd immunity (the possession of the antibody in enough people to dampen a contagion’s spread) is the key. Here’s how it worked in Harris County, Tx., regarding a measles outbreak.
Being as isolated as they were – and as we are trying to be with sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and masks – the Wampanoags were virologically innocent children waiting for death. Since Wampanoag medicine didn’t include vaccines, they either faced death or salvation from a European retreat from the continent. Given the acquisitive nature of human beings, the latter didn’t happen. For us, we can simulate herd immunity with vaccines, but the things are partially successful and difficult to create. Holding out for one in the meantime could result in some of us ending up like many of the Wampanoags or experiencing a Kafkaesque mangling of life and society, or both.
Depiction of 17th-century Native American smallpox victims.
My choice is to aggressively clamp down in hotspots at the onset to limit the devastation, then loosen ASAP. We must be mindful that after a while the social and economic costs come to be insurmountable. Lockdowns should be narrowly construed and then dropped like a hot potato. 2 months is too long in the absence of flare-ups, and even then only applied locally.
Herd immunity or no, vaccine or no, we must recognize that the risk of contagion is always present. Paraphrasing Matthew 26:11: you will always have pathogens among you. It’s a truism that should restrain us from doing the same thing again. No nation can endure the constant and ugly prospect of an on/off life overhanging us every fall and winter. The lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, shelter-in-place, and masks came with no real sunset provisions. If you live in the disease’s epicenter in the Northeast, you might look upon the smothering and mauling of social and economy life differently. Anywhere else, it’s grotesque in the extreme.
Down with masks and the rest of it. As per C.D. Broad, we have to acknowledge the explicit and inherent limits.
Lately I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlog of National Review issues, like the ones of April 6 and April 20. There’s much for me to agree with in the magazine … and some points of disagreement. I’ve noticed something else, however, during this pandemic. The magazine is headquartered in New York City. Its contributors may be scattered all over the country – with many residing in the City or its environs – but they come to focus on the city, which requires many trips to reacquaint and remind them of the City’s circumstances. I can’t help but think that they have an East Coast or Northeast orientation. Does the pandemic experience in the City overwhelm their perspective on everything relating to COVID-19?
What do they see when they tune in their devices or look outside the window? New York City and neighboring New Jersey are the epicenter of disease in the US. Accordingly, the overall tenor of the magazine in the April issues is dark, one of doom. My perception of the publication’s treatment – yes, I admit to being overly subjective – centers on the dire condition of death and crippling illness in the region where they live, work, and may have been raised. Understandable.
Heaven knows, the virus is highly contagious and deadly to certain groups, regardless of national geography. Yet, a quarter of deaths to the virus comes from one state: New York, and the overwhelmingly majority of those concentrate in New York City. The Overton Window (the range of “acceptable” discourse and views) for the magazine’s staff and all media centered in the city must have been influenced by the experience.
A body wrapped in plastic that was unloaded from a refrigerated truck is handled by medical workers wearing personal protective equipment due to COVID-19 concerns, Tuesday, March 31, 2020, at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn borough of New York. The body was moved to a hearse to be removed to a mortuary. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
You might say that my Overton Window is similarly constricted by my residence in sparsely populated northwest Montana. There’s no registered cases or deaths of COVID-19 in Sanders County (a county without a traffic light), with Montana being lightly touched by the disease. Geographical bias is a problem. One advantage, though, of living outside the urban infection and death centers is to better appreciate the bad consequences of instilling an induced coma to the social and economic parts of an entire nation.
Similarly, a mother will refuse to see her lovely little darling as a juvenile delinquent in spite of the evidence. Our experiences and emotional attachments color our view of the matters before our eyes. Welcome to National Review headquarters, most of big media, and Sanders County, Mt.
Some of the magazine’s editors and contributors are strong supporters of federalism, to their credit. Some writers have taken a slightly different tack in supporting the shutdown, or are at least defensive of it. Some states never fully shut down; others went all in, and continue to do so. Federalism at work … to a point – to the applause of many of the magazine’s contributors.
Overhanging it all is an overlay of federal policies – also generally supported by the magazine’s staff – that induced that national coma. As in a coma, many bodily systems atrophy after prolonged hibernation. Are we truly prepared for Great Depression, Part II? Is there a full appreciation of what it will entail? I doubt it, especially after much personal exposure to MSNBC (much in New York City), the networks (much in New York City), and even CNN which is headquartered in Atlanta. Most of CNN’s programming emanates from New York City and Washington, DC. The publishing industry also crowds into the city. What happens in New York City seldom stays in New York City.
And a dangerous virus crowds into the city as well. The crowding of people presents an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of dangerous microbes, always has. Public sanitation campaigns and systems can only take you so far. People are still piled on top of one another and spend much time cheek-by-jowl in subways and hives of the hospitality industry. Add to this the fact that the range of personal hygiene in any population extends from obsessive/compulsive to bachelor/couch potato. As the virus parties through a densely packed population, a lockdown seems appropriate to the denizens of the City – many of them in the media – but maybe not so in places where an existence in “flats” is much less a fact of life.
New York City subway pre-corona.
Charles Murray writing for the American Enterprise Institute makes a similar point. The gravity of the disease has a population density dimension. The observation makes an excellent case for the salutary effects of sprawl, and the therapeutic benefits of many and expansive suburban parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and bike paths that exist in exurbia. A spread-out population might be a healthier one.
American urban sprawl, or just a healthier low-horizon city?
The thought will be heartily condemned by your run-of-the-mill central-planning greenie trying to replicate Hong Kong everywhere in the country. To them, sprawl is of the devil. If their design leaves the country open to pandemics, well, so what?! As per AOC and her Squad fan club, they’d love a planet with far fewer people anyway. AOC has already announced her support for infertility. Speaking metaphorically, it’s no skin off her back … or ovaries.
For those of us in the empire of sprawl, our incidences of infection and death are much below de Blasio’s mecca. Thus, why the national shutdown, or more accurately, the broad imposition of the creepy-mask look, the shuttered businesses, and enforced unemployment due to China’s city-loving incubus? The empty streets of Missoula, Mt., weren’t much different from the thoroughfares of New York City.
North Higgins Ave. in Missoula was mostly empty on the morning of April 3, 2020. (photo: WILLIAM MARCUS / MONTANA PUBLIC RADIO)
Again, why? Don’t answer by saying that it could be the same in the Helena. “Could” is a nasty word for the rational governance of one’s life. We “could” be invaded by a superpower like the Grand Duchy of Fenwick as in the “The Mouse That Roared” (It’s a hoot so take a look.).
The “science” – the thing that lefties ubiquitously proclaim but seldom understand – of the virus is mostly well known, not so with cures or therapies, or the accuracy of the stats to brutalize the population into cultural and economic suicide. A country as vast and diverse as ours should not be cowed into broadly shutting down or coming close to it by ending much of our social and economic life.
Target, target, target is the sensible response. Target with quarantines the ravaged areas. Target public and private moneys on cures and therapies. For the rest of us, leave us alone. A hurt economy is far better than a wrecked one.
The principle of holes is very relevant to our current situation. A v-shaped recovery is impossible if our hole has become a miles-deep shaft. The bounce will come up short if the lighted hole of the surface is a small dot as we look up. The window that dominates our media empires might makes us less cognizant of this reality. NYC-centrism may unnecessarily end up crippling us for quite some time.
Hugh Hewitt, normally one of the sane people in the media storm in the age of Trump, has joined the ranks of militant busybodies that were unleashed by the current sickness hysteria. A couple of days ago he was agreeing with a caller (a medical doctor, so someone with medical street cred) on the need to continue the mitigations: social distancing, masks, business closures, etc. The day after, he was ranting from his WaPo op-ed about running into groups of joggers and bicyclists on paths who were not practicing his meddlesome measures. He crafted his complaint as one of selfishness and foolishness of the non-compliant. I was incensed … not at the bicyclists but at him.
He would say, and has said, that the numbers and science are on his side. What drivel. Yes, policy making during a pandemic demands the use of statistics and science. But these are some of the ingredients in the recipe for making good policy, not the only ones. Think about it: science has produced many ways to safely abort a baby, but is abortion even acceptable? On such matters, science and numbers can only take you so far in the determination of what ought to be done.
The limitations on science and numbers go beyond the moral issues. They extend to all decision making, and especially to ones that have great impact on the country. It should begin with a presumption on the boundaries for action. In other words, what is acceptable? In combating terrorism in Baghdad, is it appropriate to nuke the city? (Oh, by the way, don’t think that it didn’t come up in many a ribald beerhall conversation around the time of The Surge.) For me, the thought was beyond the pale. The same consideration should be at work in response to a communicable disease. Options like the mass execution of the infected are too horrible to contemplate … and so should the euthanization of the social and economic life of a continental country of 330 million people. Going back to Dirty Harry: “Man must know his limits.”
Who would have thought it was possible? LA freeway without traffic jams during the current California lockdown.
And that’s what we have done with the American lockdown. We’ve decided to nuke Baghdad, so to speak.
There are so many holes in Hewitt’s logic – and others like him – that if it was a ship, it’d sink. Forcing a population of 330 million to take on the appearance of bank robbers is foolishness in the extreme. An argument in support of the nonsense relies on the highly contagious nature of the virus. Wait a minute. All viruses, as well as bacteria, are contagious and dangerous to certain classes of persons. Yes, Hugh, no surprise, the things are small enough to swim in aerosols (suspended fine droplets of moisture). Always have.
But there’s a fallback position for the would-be authoritarians. Wait for it: they proclaim that this one is particularly deadly. Well, to be honest, it’s lethal only to vulnerable groups, but these people are vulnerable to any malevolent bug, and there are many, many of those without the coronavirus in the mix. Hewitt’s stance is actually a demand that many of us will come to know only a third of a person’s face from here on out. Apparently, for him, it’s the new normal.
I guess that the discovery of masks on a couple of dimwits who just held up the local Wells Fargo can no longer satisfy the new post-pandemic standard for “probable cause” when so many of us have a few in the glove box, thanks to Hewitt, others like him, and that band of “experts” straying way outside their lane.
Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist at a bank in Odessa, Tx., January 2020.Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist in a bank in Lower Gwynedd, Penn., September 2019.
Furthermore, why bother putting anyone in a police lineup with half the face gone? Criminal investigations will be farcical in Hewitt’s brave new world. The only parallel that comes to mind is the demand by some Muslims for their women to be photographed in the burqa for government-issued ID’s. A crowded DMV under the current protocols would logically require a photo of everyone in a full burka or at a minimum in Jesse James mode. Of course, what good are the pics with two-thirds of the face veiled?
Voter ID laws are similarly made useless since the picture is undecipherable. The electorate instantly becomes whoever happens to be breathing – or not breathing in the case of Chicago – on US soil at the time of the election, a fervently sought end state of the Pelosi Democratic Party. It’s an interesting way to repeal protections of the ballot from fraud.
Exceptions? Come on, what Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and every other power-hungry politico in high office isn’t salivating at the opportunity to embrace full burka getups and the N95 bank-robber look in state-issued id’s and driver’s licenses if need be? But how will cops identify a pulled-over driver with everyone disguised in their mask? It certainly will be easier for under-aged teens to buy beer as they approach the counter with the same mask that appears on their older brother’s driver’s license. Clerks will have to learn the science of forensic facial recognition absent two-thirds of the face … or, more likely, the booze age limits will become passé.
See, the scheme is so unworkable in the long term. It’s a short-term response that some meatheads want to make the “new normal”. Amazing!
There is no limiting principle in the logic of the shutdowns, every-man-is-an-island mode of social interaction, ending gatherings and the First Amendment’s right of association, the mask-wearing nonsense, and government squashing the livelihoods of millions as businesses are forcibly shuttered. You simply can’t take a meat axe to the social and economic parts of life and still have anything resembling a life.
Some have proposed that the epidemic should be treated as a war, like Trump and ironically his “progressive” foes who are constantly on the lookout for the next “moral equivalent of war”. What they’re after, more accurately, is total war. Total war is the complete involvement of the community from kids collecting scrap metal in the neighborhood, to bond drives, the militarization of the work force, to all kinds of conservation and rationing schemes. But here’s the kicker: all war plans presume the existence of an economy. No economy, no war material, and no war. They want total war without the “total”.
The advocates of William James’s “moral equivalent of war” in response to the virus have killed off much of the economy. And given their rationale, they would inflict the prescription on us anytime the same, mutated, or cousin of the bug makes an encore. Can you imagine our economy and social life sitting on pins and needles every flu season? Stress on the people goes through the roof, uncertainty for all investment is the “new normal”, business and commerce becomes unsteady as they constantly look over their shoulders at the latest moves by some commissar, and workers and everybody else can’t plan ahead. Get used to that word “depression”. That will be our new normal.
We can’t do this, this shutting down of life. We can’t continue with social distancing, universal sheltering-in-place, the masks, and an end to work life – or its constriction. And what’s with this planned obsolescence of the neighborhood school, with its lifetime memories of friendships, teachers, band, cheerleaders, games? We can’t do this, and never should have done it. Instead, we need to do something more sensible: limit restrictions to the infected and vulnerable, pump private and public moneys into therapies and cures, and leave the rest of us to conduct our lives in accordance with our conscience and our God.
We should be admonished to proclaim “never again”. “Never again” applies to genocides, and it could also refer to the horror wreaked on our social, religious, and work lives. Never again. Please, never again.
New York mayor Bill De Blasio at one of his press conference.
Hugh Hewitt on his morning radio news show recently recounted from his Washington Post column his anger at bicyclists on a bike path in unapproved groups not wearing masks. He reacted as if they were morally irresponsible. I was floored by his over-the-top reaction, disturbingly aware that many others probably share his troubling opinion. I most emphatically don’t.
Family biking on Long Island, NY, April 28, 2020.
Our responses to this virus should ignite a debate about what is permissible for government to do. Events frequently expose deeper issues at stake. Here, during this epidemic, are we to have a government that can end the very and most basic act of living, suspending the behaviors that make up a life, any life? Do we realize that we have quietly condoned a Leviathan suffering from an obesity of power? The lockdown, both national and by the states, raises these overarching questions.
While in Costco last week, the store mandated masks to be worn and passed them out at the entrance. I overheard a conversation among two customers in the store with one person extolling the virtues of the mask. The other was in general agreement and not disposed to push back. They answered the question in one way. But the view cries out for pushback. Have sovereign citizens all of a sudden become field hands under the control of political overseers, no one being allowed to dispute their overseers’ dictats?
The masks are a signifier of this deeper problem. There is official and peer pressure to wear them. We are told that they prevent us from spreading the virus to other people. Do they? Maybe in some instances but not in others. The virus like other viruses will spread from touching products on the shelves in the same Costco that requires us to wear masks. Masks reduce the flight of the bug but it will still land on something touched by someone reaching under the thing to scratch or remove bodily fluid, and from there to the hands, eyes, and every place under the mask of another patron.
Plus, can you imagine a cardio-vascular exercise routine as we partially reintroduce carbon dioxide back into our lungs while sweat pours underneath the things? The experience makes for one more excuse for a couch potato to not shed the spare tire. Gyms – corporate or personal – might go the way of Sears or JC Penneys.
And how long must we put up with it? Hewitt says through the summer. But that’s the problem: these measures are so open-ended. There’s a never-ending array of reasons to continue to corset our noses and mouths with the things: a second surge (or a third, fourth, ….), the bug is still lurking somewhere, etc. And, let’s not forget, that greatest of all fear trump cards: kids will die if we don’t get them used to noticing people from the eyes up.
To make the encumbrances more attractive, businesses have even popped up to sell us more stylish versions, like a Riyadh bizarre selling burkas with bling. Pardon me, the thought is appalling.
In the end, should all facets of a person’s existence be surrendered to the fear of catching a virus? At a certain point we must accept the risks of a traffic accident as we drive to work, getting salmonella from our dinner salad, a slip and fall as we shuffle between our work desk and the boss’s office, carpal tunnel syndrome from pounding on our computer keyboard, and catching a germ from a friend in a prayer circle. Risks must be accepted to live the life that God gave us.
Mandates for masks, sheltering-in-place, social distancing, massive business closures, and an end to all gatherings in “large” groups is more than an expression of prudent health measures. It’s an expression of totalitarian control. Freedom carries with it dangers, always has. And so does ensconcing near-omnipotent power in the hands of a select group of “experts”.
Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist, of Imperial College in London, and the author of the projection of 2.2 million deaths in the U.S from the coronavirus.
Lenin was surrounded by “experts” in revolution. If experience is an indicator, they were good at it … bringing about revolution, that is. They just weren’t much good at anything else, as the assorted misery, shortages, and bloodshed in the ensuing decades would attest. I’m not wiling to turn over my life to the dictates of narrow-minded “experts”.
“Experts”, as I’ve said before, are specialists. By definition, they only know one thing well. The decisions of a community will always require much more than that, such as impacts on livelihoods, our religious life, and that thing called the Constitution. A broad-reaching decision should never be the sole province of a compressed group of “experts”.
Please watch this 54-minute session of the Hillsdale College symposium, “The Coronavirus and the Constitution”.
President Xi Jinping of Red China and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. What do they have in common? Answer: authoritarian power. Xi’s power naturally comes to him because he’s a communist. Whitmer’s comes from her habit – the same one belonging to all progressives – of never letting a crisis go to waste.
Progressives are always on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war”. It’s in their philosophical DNA. They can’t help themselves. The reason is simple. They need to invent or manipulate a crisis to shock the public into accepting a transfer of immense power to them to remake society according to their lights. It’s not Constitutional; it’s dangerously extra-constitutional.
The coronavirus presents the perfect opportunity for them to seize the golden apple of power. I suspect that the belief is at the root of the early and grossly misleading casualty prognostications and Pelosi and Schumer’s obstructionism. The Great American Shutdown is really another example of the Great American Hijack of a crisis — or a recurring primer on how to expand the power of the state to control and direct the population.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi during the impeachment-palooza.
At nearly every opportunity, the progressives’ drive to expand state power shows in their budget proposals, their choice of interest group allies – totalitarian environmentalists, public sector unions, college faculties, the plaintiff’s bar, the misnamed civil rights lobby, etc. – and in their nonstop endeavors to obstruct Trump and Republicans. The progressives’ earlier grand design for our life, before they had the coronavirus, was the Green New Deal. Now they have a pandemic to play with.
William James in 1906 coined the phrase “moral equivalent of war” as a rallying cry for progressives to use to gain power. Ocasio-Cortez is the latest progressive/socialist political barker to embrace the tactic.Ocasio-Cortez drumming up support for her Green New Deal version of the “moral equivalent of war”.
The scheme is becoming clearer now that we have more information about the disease and its spread. Gloom and doom were leveraged for a power grab. The seizure of power to kill an economy was publicly justified because of predictions of 2 million deaths in the US. Others in the field of epidemiology blew the whistle. Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford brought to light the key flaw in the Cassandras’ cries (Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Washington Examiner). The exaggerated estimates were a product of good algebra and BAD numbers. Known deaths were compared to the number of known cases. But we don’t know the ACTUAL number of cases. We can’t know because we don’t even know when the virus entered the US and haven’t performed enough antibody tests to give us a clue.
The first known case of COVID-19 in the US has been pushed back to Feb. 6 as based on recent antibody tests in Santa Clara County, which probably means that the virus was circulating in California as early as January given the virus’s 2-week gestation rate (LA Times). That is the state of play now. Who knows how much earlier as more antibody tests are conducted? The trajectory is earlier, not later.
Point: Known cases of infection is an ever-expanding number as we uncover more subjects with the antibody, which profoundly alters the morbidity rate downward. So, 4% becomes .5% and then becomes ..?.. The progressives’ dream of a shock-and-awe campaign to drive the public into their utopia is disintegrating as the morbidity rate plummets.
So, what of the validity of the Great American Shutdown? I can’t blame any public official for acting on the information at hand. Still, more caution should have been evident till a better picture takes shape, especially if rendering unconscious a nation’s economy is contemplated. Many of us will come out of the Shutdown only to face foreclosure, bankruptcy, and unemployment. Broad despair at Great Depression levels is hardly justified to curb a health threat that nobody could honestly describe … except those who are eager to be dishonest in order to socially engineer their vision of the better world.
Chinese experts fighting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at the front line meet the press via a video press conference, introducing treatment of the COVID-19, in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, March 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
Not long ago, I learned of a person who was recently berated by an older acquaintance for his parents not practicing the dictats of shelter-in-place and the wearing of masks. The story is believable in the context of citations and/or arrests of a dad teaching his daughter to throw a baseball in a “closed” park or a surfer trying to catch a wave off a “closed” public beach. The pundit Kevin D. Williamson says that this is “ratfink” America at work. Today, America seems to be experiencing a major rat infestation. Why so many rats? The problem can be laid at the feet of the cult of the “expert”. Let me explain.
I’ve written of this before. America has acceded to the rule of “experts”, and the defenestration of popular sovereignty. Cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are united in the person of a civil service employee or political appointee wrapped in protection from popular accountability. We as citizens are increasingly out of the picture. We are left to the election of the participants in an increasingly meaningless debating society called Congress. We are habituated to the situation by the unceasing pounding of all things progressive in public schools’ curriculums and teacher training. The same weltanschauung permeates the popular culture.
A flow chart of the Progressive administrative state.
The “expert” is at the root of the scheme. The “expert” is degreed, preferably with a PhD. How did the master climb the mountain of high status? First, he or she jumped through the hoops of college general ed courses heavily burdened with victimology. Speaking of a pathogen, the matriculant was inculcated with the ideology by exposure to entire academic departments that are infected with it. Some owe their existence to the ideology: the Rainbow Coalition departments (Women’s Studies, etc.). They aren’t “studies” as much as they are ideology platforms. The Humanities and Social Sciences are particularly fetid. Remember this the next time you are treated by a doctor (MD that is) younger than you.
For instance, History – a subject I am most familiar – is often treated as a Progressivism apology tour. Nothing good happened till Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the beatification of environmentalism in the sixties.
There you have it for the typical college student before they devote the rest of their university sojourn – the majority of it – to their area of expertise, now that the corrupted general ed stuff is out of the way. That other stuff (general ed) is in the rear view mirror as they motor to their graduation and post-graduate destinations. The degree will certify their place in the pantheon of “experts”.
The word “expert” is an interesting one in today’s world. Really, in essence, an “expert” is a specialist. They have to be; the human mind is capable of absorbing only so much. For example, the explosion of knowledge in Biology has led to sub-categories, with sub-sub-categories, broken into sub-sub-sub-categories. Ditto for Computer Science and every other department in the college catalogue. The longer one stays in college to get that souped-up graduate degree, the more specialized the subject gets.
The intelligent design folks – much despised by died-in-the-wool Darwinists – have popularized the concept of irreducible complexity: a cell retains its complexity as we go deeper into its structure, thus drawing into question the necessary small adaptions for traditional Darwinian evolution to function. But the subject’s complexity also leads to a profusion of specialties. More true today than ever, experts are specialists!
Dr. Michael Behe of intelligent design and irreducible complexity fame vs. Darwin.
Soon we get the denizen of the administrative state whose forte is commonly limited to a very narrow slice of life. Yet, they have exaggerated importance in policy making that effects all aspects of a people’s existence. During this period of pandemic, naturally, experts whose bias is oriented toward epidemiology and medicine – and some things ideological as well – dictate policy that can destroy the economic and social parts of life. That’s the danger posed by specialists.
Ergo, the Great American Shutdown. For the expert, it’s an essential response. For everyone else facing their dictats, it’s a ravaged existence. A degreed, salaried, high-income person with substantial financial assets can afford to ride out the storm. It isn’t true for anyone whose kids, mortgage, and car payment requires a regular paycheck. These folks are ruined.
The specialized expert defines the parameters of risk when a situation falls within their wheelhouse. As one would expect, their explication of risk conforms to the sole regard of medical health. Their definition is much less considerate of different levels of risk due to circumstance. People who ride bikes run a higher risk of getting mauled by a 2-ton car than an aged pedestrian on his evening constitutional. An independent plumber comes into contact with more pathogens than a Google coder. Some are more willing to accept risk because their livelihoods require it. But the plumber doesn’t have the ear of Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, or Schumer as much as Anthony Fouci and the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Understandable? Yes, but the stew of policy demands other ingredients. Without the other additives, you might get poison.
What does the exalted role of expert get us? We all too often get a dose of scientific fact with a large smattering of personal bias. The hyper-charged politics of crafting policy brings out the worst in everybody, including our “experts”. Confirmation bias runs wild among media mavens who are on the lookout for experts to help them wield their ideological axes. So, if you are a writer with homeschoolers in his or her crosshairs, there’s no shortage of ed and psyche types with PhD’s attached to their names who are nothing but activists masquerading as experts.
If you are looking for an egregious example of same, look no further than Harvard Magazine, May-June 2020, “The Risks of Homeschooling”, by Erin O’Donnell (thanks Kevin D. Williamson for the heads up). The whole thing is a tome for ripping children from their parents and home and placing their upbringing in the hands of the government’s employees and schools. Stalin, Mao, and the rest of the 20th-century’s walk of shame would be proud.
Fact: Human beings with PhD’s after their names are still human beings. Plus, their specialties come with blinders. An epidemic should place public health experts at the head of the table. Just make sure that the other seats are filled with people of more well-rounded perspectives. If done right, we might come to conclude that the Great American Shutdown was a huge mistake.
