Covid-19 And The Common Good
I was just on a long Zoom session with some TAC folks, in which Claes Ryn discussed the personality required to live successfully under the US Constitution. There was talk about the “common good,” and it made me wonder what that even means anymore. I’m still sore about the whole mask issue. It’s not that I am opposed to people objecting to the mandate to wear masks. It’s that I’m not hearing these people talk about the issue in terms of the ineffectiveness of masks (some people are! but not the angry people); I’m hearing them frame the issue wholly in terms of personal liberty. I’m so used to hearing this kind of thing from the left — that any restriction or limit on what they want to do is intolerable oppression. I am super-sensitive to hearing it from the right.
Then I received this e-mail from a Pennsylvania reader named Kevin, who has given me permission to post it:
I wanted to reach out to raise something with you to see if you have been seeing this as well. Among my friends who attend more charismatic and Pentecostal denominations, there is this widespread sense that the death numbers are fake, the polling that shows lockdowns are generally favored is fake, and that polling showing Trump’s approval on the crisis is in the toilet is fake. These are also the folks who generally ascribe to the Trump as Cyrus (or King David) view. I understand we are to live by faith, not by sight – but we are also called to seek wisdom, knowledge and understanding.
And, Rod, what tears my heart up so much is what we are seeing from the data is this virus disproportionately harms the elderly, the poor and black people. It just isn’t fair. Haven’t we been called by Scripture to lay our lives down – particularly for the marginalized, the widow and the orphan, the foreigner and the oppressed? I have my objections to the social justice movement just as you do, but here just as when we have been asked to engage in a country-wide project of compassion, I weep that I see so many in the church – in my church – that want to dismiss it. Perhaps for the reasons you have laid out, based on the Heterodox Academy’s research.
I wanted to highlight a recent Twitter thread from Southeastern University theology professor Chris Green, that begins with this thunderclap of truth: Conspiracy theories are needed when you’re socialized to question every authority but your own. https://twitter.com/cewgreen/status/1258489625842274306
I recognize we have to make some tradeoffs. I am not advocating for perpetual lockdowns. I work for a chamber of commerce, and every we get calls from companies who want to re-open, because they are on the brink of collapse. And do you know what Rod? The employees don’t want to come back. They are scared for their lives. And I don’t blame them.
What also frustrates me is we did these lockdowns not just as an act of compassion, but so that we could increase medical supplies, testing and treatments – and to come up with an actual plan. Ari Schulman at the New Atlantis made this point well the other day. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/whats-the-plan. And now we read that ventilators aren’t effective, we can’t seem to get testing off the ground, and any promising treatment – hydrochloroquine and remdesivir come to mind – are either harmful or only mildly effective. Where is our plan? Does anyone actually have a plan? Or have we wasted two months?
Yesterday I read Isaiah 2 and 3 as part of my morning devotions. While I think we need to be very careful about taking OT verses and applying them directly to contemporary events (see above, re Trump and David/Cyrus comparisons) it should tell us something that God, through Isaiah, tells Israel there will come a day when He will frustrate the wise, strip the nation of its wealth and its command over nature and technology, and leave the people in hiding. When I look at the nation by nation data, it is apparent to me that, even adjusting for population and China’s downplaying of the magnitude there, we are being uniquely humbled and humiliated.
And rather than look this squarely in the eye – that this is harming the poor and the elderly, that our leadership is failing us, that we are too prideful to accept authority from politicians of another party (why is Trump God’s anointed but not a Democratic governor?), that we are being asked to lay down our idols of comfort and power and security – we must retreat to an ideological lens. Because Trump might appoint some more pro-life judges in 2022? Hannah Arendt was right.
I presume Kevin is talking about Arendt’s claim that one sign that a country is in a pre-totalitarian state is when people within the country prefer ideological claims to the truth. That is, when they would rather hear things that confirm what they already believe than to deal with truth that makes them angry or anxious. People like that — and we have them on both the left and the right — are sitting ducks for a leader who knows how to manipulate them.
You have probably heard the news about the unemployment rate:
The nation’s economic distress came into greater focus on Friday, offering a snapshot unseen since the Great Depression.
The Labor Department said the economy shed more than 20.5 million jobs in April, sending the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent as the coronavirus pandemic took a devastating toll.
The monthly data underscores the speed and depth of the labor market’s collapse. In February, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, a half-century low.
And the damage has only grown since then: Millions more people have filed claims for unemployment benefits since the monthly data was collected in mid-April.
“It’s literally off the charts,” said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America. “What would typically take months or quarters to play out in a recession happened in a matter of weeks this time.”
Scientists say that barring a vaccine, we are going to have to get used to living with waves of Covid-19 for possible two years:
What is clear overall is that a one-time social distancing effort will not be sufficient to control the epidemic in the long term, and that it will take a long time to reach herd immunity.
“This is because when we are successful in doing social distancing — so that we don’t overwhelm the health care system — fewer people get the infection, which is exactly the goal,” said Ms. Tedijanto. “But if infection leads to immunity, successful social distancing also means that more people remain susceptible to the disease. As a result, once we lift the social distancing measures, the virus will quite possibly spread again as easily as it did before the lockdowns.”
We are going to have to get ourselves in order, or we are not going to make it through this next year or two. We cannot carry on like this. We need credible leadership. I’m not sure what that looks like, because we’ve not seen a lot of it. We also need credible followership. I’m not exactly sure what that looks like either, other than at the very least refusing to accept conspiracy theories and theories that “feel right.”
There’s a lot we don’t know about this virus. We can’t expect scientists and government officials to get this 100 percent right every time. The information we have had from the experts regarding mask-wearing has been contradictory. A reader points out that Michael Osterholm, one of our top experts, says that there’s no evidence that cloth masks at all impede the spread of coronavirus.
But the CDC still recommends their use. The Mayo Clinic says that they may provide some protection, and recommends their use. I think we just don’t know for sure. I don’t think people should get so angry and political about masks! It is a legitimate debate over whether or not we should wear them. Personally, I think it’s a minor inconvenience, and if my governor says he wants me to wear them when I go out in public, I don’t mind doing it until it is definitively shown that it’s pointless. Remember, these cloth masks are not to keep you from getting sick (they don’t really work that way), but to make it less likely that you will pass on the virus to others if you are infected but asymptomatic. As I see it, this is a tiny sacrifice to make for the health of others — in particular store clerks, who are serving people like me, even though they risk exposure to the virus.
As I write this, I’m hearing that Donald Trump’s valet — the man who served him dinner — has tested positive for Covid-19 — and did not wear a mask. I bet the president wishes now that the valet had.
We are not the resilient country that we once would have been. What is being revealed by this thing is a country that has ceased to believe in the common good, and in which many individuals think that they should not have to give up anything at all for the sake of others.
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