Something like two or three months ago, I promised a post on the following Flannery 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 the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
But then riots broke out and the world got- somehow- even more overwhelmingly crazy and I couldn’t hope to write anything that wouldn’t turn into a half-crazed rant.
But I’ve calmed down somewhat and Flannery’s insight should be addressed, as it is about as relevant as ever (so relevant, like, even more relevant than Handmaid’s Tale. (Gross.))
To illustrate, let’s talk about something everyone is sick and tired of talking about: masks. Yay!
This whole dumb pandemic (not to minimize the serious reality that it is a terrible disease that you don’t want to get. Unlike those other diseases you love getting) what have we been hearing everywhere we go? “Stay safe!” “We’re in this together” “Love your neighbor, wear a mask.” That last one is usually a lot more condescending and critical, it’s usually something more like, “stop being a baby and wear your mask to protect me.” Pillars of virtue and honor like Andrew Cuomo and Bill Nye have a couple moving speeches on the subject (blegh).
I don’t think masks are a vast left-wing conspiracy… pretty sure, anyway… however, I still have a major issue with how we’ve been treating the issue. First of all, there’s the fact that all the evidence that’s given to us is inconclusive and doesn’t quite add up. We are told that masks reduce risk of transmission, but by how much? because those same calls to masks also say that hand washing/sanitizing and distancing is still the most effective defense. Soooo, am I wearing a mask for an extra 3% safety? That…doesn’t seem worth it.
Also, maybe I just haven’t found the golden explanation out there that makes it click for me, but I’m looking at the Mayo flipping Clinic right now, and it says:
“At this time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved any type of surgical mask specifically for protection against the coronavirus, but these masks may provide some protection when N95 masks are not available. … Health care providers must be trained and pass a fit test to confirm a proper seal before using an N95 respirator in the workplace…” [emphases mine]
How many have passed a fit test out there? And did you note the “may provide protection,” as in, it may, may not, who knows? Don’t tell me I’m a science denier because I am not convinced by maybe-statements.
But wait! says the Mayo Clinic, “countries that required face masks, testing, isolation and social distancing early in the pandemic have successfully slowed the spread of the virus.”
What about countries that required all of those things except face masks? Oh, you don’t know? Cool. Thanks for your help, O Infallible Science. I thought I learned in middle school something about too many variables at once and controls and stuff, but I don’t know, I’m not a science person.
And lastly, if masks are so great, which, I don’t know, maybe they are, then why does the Mayo specifically warn that they are not a substitute for distancing..? Okay, they prevent droplets expelled by breathing, coughing, sneezing from getting all out in the open. Makes sense. But then, what’s wrong with filling my church with masked parishioners? Oh, they aren’t that effective and you can’t trust everyone to wear them properly? So then why are we talking about mandating them again? What good are they doing, what are they adding to social distancing?
Going back to Flannery; we have all kinds of appeals to our selfless kindness, something our society has been working hard to cultivate in its people for a long ti– oh wait, no, this is the “treat yoself”, “my body my choice”, “whateva- I do what I want!” culture. I almost forgot. And yet, we have sappy emotional appeals to “just wear the damn mask” and save lives (the value of human life: another thing unironically championed today as the decades-long tradition of literally throwing away thousands of babies daily continues).
This barrage of sentimentality is very troublesome. Consider the people freaking out that you not wearing a mask in a giant hardware store is for sure going to “cut your family tree at the root” as one particularly brilliant videographer of WalMart put it, and kill grandma and all of us. Do you think those people who just care so much for their neighbor and the elderly and the poor and the immuno-compromised, do you think they would hesitate for one second before ratting you out when the Health and Safety Police come to load the Dangerous Unmasked into boxcars? I really, really doubt it.
Christ teaches us that love of neighbor is a requirement for salvation. So is love of enemies. So is the willingness to lay down your life for your friends, first of whom is Him. As Flannery points out, if you take this radical self-sacrifice and love away from its source, it quickly becomes corrupt. Christ makes love make sense, Christ makes love’s eminent worth known. Apart from Him, pseudo-charity becomes a utilitarian trick of how to get the most out of “loving” people-in-general, humanitarianism quickly turns into sacrificing some humans for your lofty ideas about “humanity” and what it should be. (Chesterton has a great passage on this that I can’t find at the moment. All I can find is “Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved men.”
If you take Him out of the equation and just squawk about whatever the government is telling you is the best thing for all (for the good of the colony! for the good of Germany!) isn’t it obvious, regardless of how effective masks actually are, isn’t it obvious how very easy it would be for people in power to abuse that? Does the people-approved rise of Nazi Germany not seem a little more believable these days?
When you get sappy emotions worked up, when you don’t have the Sacred Heart as your model and guide for virtuous emotions and love, any evil is possible. Sure, maybe in this particular case masks really would help our situation, I still don’t know, BUT no one has convincingly proven that. [Health professionals, in my mind, lost all credibility in the matter when they refused to condemn giant, smooshed together protests. Some of them even went out of their way to say that systemic racism (not really a thing) was a bigger threat to public health than coronavirus. Thanks for your input guys, I’ll file that away.]
More importantly, people generally don’t seem sufficiently worried about what we’re supposed to do when, God forbid, a radical leftist takes the White House and declares climate change and racism national emergencies, and requires all kinds of immoral and insane things…
A final comment: I understand and accept that there are situations where you should just where the mask anyway, so as to avoid scandalizing people. Like St. Paul advises the Romans to do. There were old school Jewish converts to Christianity who still held to the Jews-exiled-in-Gentile-lands meatless diet. Paul said, basically, “Whatever, if that’s what they feel they need to do, you won’t die eating vegetables. Don’t let something so dumb ruin the Faith.”
So there. That’s it. I don’t want to write on this issue anymore. I want to go back to more interesting, less stupid things, like maybe my recent re-discovery of St. Bonaventure’s Mind’s Road to God, or some more Maritain on Art and Beauty, or maybe some straight up Catholic stuff, as I’ve been on quasi-retreat the last week or so [a month ago now. There was a little publishing delay] and have a lot of straight up Catholicism on the brain.
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Samwise the Gρεεκ. 