…Or anything except the Rona, masks, the economy, the Constitution, police, governors, etc.
I don’t want to add my thoughts to the CO-risis because I don’t have much of substance to add and it would probably just devolve into an unpleasant libertarian-leaning Murica rant that comes of differently than I intend.
BUT for some reason I can’t think of anything else, so I’ll try to share some thoughts while steering clear of non-philosophical politics [sidenote: Politics are supposed to be informed by legit, thoughtful philosophical understanding; it’s supposed to be the ideal that guides the practical, but, alas.]
I think a big part of what’s going on here is 1) information overload and 2) no coherent, consistent understanding of life to even begin to process the meaning of the information.
For months and months, we’ve gotten all kinds of statistics and studies and reports from all sides. WEAR MASKS! DON’T WEAR MASKS! NEW YORK IS A WARZONE! NEW YORK IS NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT! ASYMPTOMATICS SPREAD IT WAIT THEY DON’T WAIT MAYBE THEY DO BUT DEFINITELY SURFACES DO WAIT THEY DON’T
It’s overwhelming. And we’ve never been able to follow a virus as closely as we’ve been able to follow this one- we are constantly updated on cases in each state and country. Graphs galore. BUT we don’t know what to DO with all that shtuff.
People, in general, are chronically woefully incapable of interpreting stats and graphs; we can decipher what they’re stating but not what they really mean. We see that cases skyrocket in a place but forget to ask if they suddenly cranked up their testing, which would make that relatively meaningless.
Also, traditionally, for thousands of years, you just had to go on the common sense and the collective wisdom of your family/village to react more or less prudently in crises. Whatever pops up in your tiny corner of the world, you deal with. But this has been a slow motion crisis, we have all kinds of info before anything tangible even happens to us personally. We had to constantly guess at what might be going on, and I don’t think humans are built for that. They seem to be breaking under the weight of it in this situation anyway.
So you have the unprecedented information overload. (I won’t mention the colossal disaster that is the media on top of that)
At the same time, you also have, in this largely post-Christian secular western world, no coherent philosophy of life to contextualize all that data that you also don’t really know how to interpret.
In the Christian understanding, death is not the worst thing. It’s power has been stamped out by Christ’s victory over the grave. So, sure, it’s still scary and still inevitable and still generally to be avoided, but you prepare yourself for it hopefully it turns out not all that bad. Even if it’s a terrible death, you get through it and hopefully you are ready for judgment. That’s the Christian story that guided Western civilization for centuries, and resulted in all the greatness of that greatest civilization.
As a whole, society doesn’t buy into that so much anymore. We prefer to pretend that we’re somehow going to progress our way past death, and when we can’t keep up that farce anymore, we either say “Whatever, it’s all meaningless, we just go out of existence when we die” or confidently predict some vaguely Christian-flavored fairytale of peace and clouds (based on very little actual Christian Tradition). BUT since we know we, as a society, have mostly rejected the Christian explanation of things, part of us that remains sane and intellectually honest, tiny as it may be, knows the Cloud Hammock of Eternal Peace is not a thing. So we panic in the face of death. [Tell me again why this is called “progress”?]
We panic because death has seemed to regain its power over us.
On the other hand, the oh-so-enlightened Nihilist side of things, which holds that when you die you just disappear from existence, doesn’t panic, exactly. It gets rather wigged out, but they respond by doing something. Stay Safe Stay Home. Call 911. Post a video of a heartwarming neighborhood singalong from a safe distance. It makes me think of the saying about arranging deck chairs on the Titanic– usually that image is used to illustrate utter futility, but in this circumstance I think of it as an exercise of nihilistic boredom. Ah this ship will probably sink anyway, in the meantime why not arrange the deck chairs into a cute and clever meme-able?
So… yeah. I mean, most things in life these days comes down to the sad emptiness and confusion of the horrific and devastating failure of an experiment that is the post-Christian, progressive, Sexually Revolutionized modern dying West. The COVID hysteria, as bad as the virus actually is, is just the latest and greatest glaring example of how messed up we’ve let ourselves become.
I will write one more thing related to the Rona, only because it explicates a Flannery quote that I felt was on to something but didn’t quite understand til now. That quote:
If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from teh source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
More on that in a later post…
Samwise the Gρεεκ. 