We spent years needlessly frowning behind masks and protocols. We didn’t smile. I frowned at my unreasonable cello playing. I didn’t smile, but I should have. I learned my lesson after that first recital. Now — I smile no matter how badly I play. It is the most important thing an aspiring cellist can do after a performance. Smiles will always be an infection we should Start to Spread.
What no one told us, however, is that this reformist method of engendering peaceful change was highly dependent on the existence of a broadly-subscribed ethos of honesty, goodwill and, perhaps most of all, healthy shame in the class of people possessing an outsized ability to promote new ways of approaching social problems.
I struggle to find words to describe how weird the last four years have been. I’m now starting to think that Covid represents a social pole switch worldwide. Perhaps it has happened before, perhaps it is the first social pole switch in history.
Jump ahead a couple decades from the present and it seems almost certain that there will be no shortage of people reluctant to accept that organizations like the CDC behaved in a disreputable and dishonest manner. Moreover, it does not seem difficult to imagine mothers reprimanding sons for vowing disobedience in future pandemics, while older relatives shake their heads in disbelief at how young contrarians somehow don’t understand the reason we locked down and masked up was to do our part and help flatten the curve.
I want to take the thesis of the last essay a step further and explore what might be causing our collapse. Is it a coincidence that we are suffering in so many different areas of life right now? Is it a little misstep on an otherwise progressive path? If we are on the verge of collapse, is it part of the arc of all great civilizations? Or, like Oedipus, do we suffer from some tragic flaw — a collective destructive character trait that we all share — that is responsible for bringing us to this place at this moment in history?
This is the year of elections, with 50 (World Economic Forum), 64 (Time), or 80 (Guardian) countries and the EU going to the polls, accounting for almost half the world’s total population. The list includes the US and India, the world’s most powerful and populous democracies, respectively. The US presidential election is the most internationally consequential of all while, by sheer weight of numbers, India’s is the most awe-inspiring.
Is it time to disassemble sides and camps, to intermingle tribes, so we may think more critically and independently, build alliances to grapple with real and substantial challenges we share, challenges that get ignored while governments harm our health, waste our resources, order violence, and overreach their power and authority? Rulers and cartels, who have gotten paid all along, want us down in the street fighting each other. That way, they retain their power and keep getting paid…while nothing changes all that much.
What could we count on after lockdowns descended? Mainstream churches shuttered doors while the local AA meeting near my house met at a park in the winter. Another 12-step meeting met under a tree in the yard of the church in warm months and under a porch awning when it rained. Church bureaucracies ordered doors closed. What had happened to us? Yet, Amazon never stopped.
The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.
We recoil because we know that the appeal to self is corrosive to unit cohesion. We also know that promoting individual identity and self-actualization—focusing on what is different among us—fosters division. And yet we are repeatedly told that it’s precisely such “diversity”—not of thought, but of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation—that makes our nation prosperous and our military strong.
We’ve become, through a series of coercions and inducements forced on us by the government since 2001, and made banal through cult-like invocations and rituals, a nation of first-class “skimmers” there for the taking by anyone who feels like tossing us out into the encroaching waves of the deep blue sea.
For many years now, Ireland has been subject to a particularly intense cultural offensive. Why this should be so is an open question. It may be that Ireland is – or was, at least – more than usually culturally robust, an opportunity for the technocrats to really cut their teeth.
