My friend Andrew T. Walker tweets:

Caring about the economy does not make someone an Ayn Rand acolyte. A proper understanding of economic health understands its intrinsic connection to public health. The “economy versus life” argument is contrived.

“The economy” is your neighbor’s ability to feed his family.

— Andrew T. Walker (@andrewtwalk) March 27, 2020

On that front, here are a couple of e-mails from readers:

I’m a pilot. Lost my job in 2008, spent most of the next four years unemployed. I had relatives to stay with but I still went through all my savings, getting dental work, going to futile job interviews, and other unavoidable expenses.

I’m unemployed again. I may get back to work after months, years, possibly never, probably at a much reduced income. I now have a wife and a small child with special needs. I have replenished my savings and have a small inheritance so I won’t be homeless or starve, but any kind of security or retirement may well be gone.

Likely solution is we all move to my wife’s home country after some months and live with the in-laws. People are murdered there for their cell phones every day. Or maybe they will go and I’ll live here in my car and try to get work.

And the really funny thing is, I’m better off than many, many people. Many millions who don’t have savings, don’t have relatives to go to, and will not be making rent next month. (April 1 is less than a week away, we will see things start to get real then.)

All the good people seem to agree it’s rough, but yes will will need to stay in quarantine for six months or so. Absolutely necessary to save lives! Only a monster would disagree! Well maybe April will be containable, but May? The small amount of relief will barely pay rent, and many people won’t get it.

Other countries seem to be able to manage without the shutdowns. We have been told ridiculous, bald-faced lies, that masks don’t work, that travel bans don’t work, it’s just the flu, don’t give in to fear, go out and enjoy life. Most of this did not come from Trump, but as long as they can blame Trump, they have emotional comfort. Trump wants a quick resolution, but so do Cuomo and other liberals, because I think they too realize this can’t go on too long.

Telling people after three months in their cramped apartments (if they haven’t been evicted and are homeless) that they want to murder your grandmother because they want to go back to work and not be destitute isn’t going to work.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

Another e-mail:

Regarding the growing debate on when to “move on” (for lack of a better phrase) with the economy, it is certainly possible that we may survive the pandemic only to succumb to the poverty of another Great Recession (the second in a generation).

If we learned anything from the opioid crisis and the oft-reported “deaths of despair”, we might have learned that poverty of the sort created and exacerbated by the Great Recession kills.

If we look at overdose deaths alone over the past couple of decades, we see that we lost many, many more of our fellow human beings to deaths induced by economic despair than we stand to lose from coronavirus; even by the most dire projections.

We also know poverty’s impact on the birthrate, which further reduces the headcount. The entire political system of modern western social democracies depends on a birthrate that is at least at replacement level. The Great Recession demonstrably lowered the birthrates of many western nations as adults deferred (or outright declined) having children.

Lastly, we know that poor countries and poor areas of wealthier countries are among the worst polluters. Poverty induces the cutting of corners in order to cut prices and keep expenses as low as possible. Polluted areas also frequently result in medical maladies and shortened lifespans of people living there.

So yes, coronavirus kills. Poverty kills, too. And unlike naturally occurring viruses, poverty is the result of human decision-making. We have much more control over the latter than the former. One can recognize this and still refrain from putting money above all else.

It is neither improper nor unseemly to make decisions concerning mitigation of coronavirus with an eye towards the fallout from the poverty being created by same. Such an analysis could arguably determine that flattening the coronavirus curve creates a poverty curve with its own mortality rate. It’s not unlike a half-filled water balloon. Clamping down on one part causes the other part to rise.

I don’t see this as an issue where one is obliged to defend their pro-life bona fides. “You only care about the unborn and not the elderly!” is a non starter. I refuse to be baited into appearing insufficiently pro-life.

There is absolutely no apples to apples comparison to be made between deliberately terminating a pregnancy by human intervention and someone succumbing to a naturally occurring virus despite all reasonable efforts made to save them.

As with so many other issues in our hyper-partisan age, the answer likely lies somewhere between “Not one more life lost” and “Not one more dollar lost.”

That’s true. It is hard to know what the cumulative effect of lives lost from economic depression will be. Nobody can predict that. What we have to be clear about is how much our concern for lives lost to poverty is really a cover for fear of poverty for ourselves. After all, there were a lot of poor and desperate people in this country prior to the arrival of coronavirus. Were we all that concerned about them then?

I’m not trying to troll people; I’m just trying to make sure we’re honest with ourselves. I’m talking to myself too. I’m watching the retirement security that my wife and I have carefully built over the past 16 years of careful investing blown to bits. None of us can count on our jobs being here through this. I don’t have any marketable skills that don’t involve writing. I have a mortgage, and kids. Poverty, and all the insecurity that comes with it, frightens me too. I’m old enough to remember my father’s stories about his rural Depression childhood. I’m not that far removed from poverty, historically.

I’m thinking right now about my sister Ruthie, who died of cancer in 2011. You longtime readers know the story, which I told on this blog first, and then in my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. For those who don’t know the story, Ruthie was two years younger than I, and did all the right things, according to the code of my family. She married her high school sweetheart, she lived in our hometown (as opposed to her brother, who went out into the world), she built a house in the country across the gravel road from our folks, and raised her three daughters there. She was a schoolteacher who was active in the community, and physically healthy. Never smoked. One day, she started coughing. By the time they discovered the lung cancer, it was too late to save her.

From the book:

Sitting on my front porch on Fidelity Street one warm winter’s day, I asked Tim Lindsey, Ruthie’s physician, what the biggest lesson of her life was.

“That the American dream is a lie,” Tim said. “The pursuit of happiness doesn’t create happiness. You can’t work hard enough to defeat cancer. You can’t make enough money to save your own life. When you understand that life is really about understanding what our true condition is – how much we need other people, and need a Savior — then you’ll be wise.”

When you’re young, nobody tells you about limits. If you live long enough, you see suffering. It comes close to you. It shatters the illusion, so dear to us modern Americans, of self-sufficiency, of autonomy, of control. Look, a 42-year-old woman, a wife and mother and schoolteacher in good health and in the prime of her life, dying from cancer. It doesn’t just happen to other people. It happens to your family. What do you do then?

The book came out in 2013. I’ve done a lot of thinking about Ruthie and my family since then. One thing that’s in the book, but which didn’t stand out so clearly to me at the time I wrote it, is the death-grip that denial had on my sister and my family. On the night before she died, Ruthie, by then reduced to skin and bones, conceded to her best friend that maybe it was time for her and her husband to have a talk about how she might not survive. This, after 19 months of chemotherapy. The next morning, she had some kind of embolism, and died on the floor of her living room. None of her family was prepared for it. They — including most of all Ruthie — had all been living in a kind of spell, thinking that what was happening to her, right in front of her eyes — that she was wasting away with incurable cancer — wasn’t really happening. So they didn’t prepare themselves, psychologically or otherwise. I don’t say this as a judgment on them at all. It was a testimony, though, to the all-too-human capacity for denial.

Every one of us is subject to this. It’s in our nature. As the years have gone by, I’ve been able to appreciate better how the myth that my Louisiana family lived by — that nothing really bad would happen to us if we stayed there on the ridge in Starhill and lived by the code — was shattered by my sister’s untimely cancer death. It was the kind of thing that Auden talked about in his great poem “As I Walked Out One Evening”, in this verse, which speaks to how death upends all our plans of perfect harmony:

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

Auden counsels the newly enlightened:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

I’m thinking about my dead sister, and my Louisiana family, because in what happened to us I see the danger in fear of poverty, which is really a fear of death. My family was not rich by any stretch, but the deeper poverty of having my sister, in the prime of her life, taken from them was unthinkable. The people of the town offered resilience, but in the end, my sister’s death shattered a myth. Our inability as a family to find resilience after the shattering of that myth doomed us. We did not love our crooked neighbor, with our crooked heart. But that’s a story for another day.

My point is this: there is a greater poverty than being materially poor, and that poverty is death. If we Americans believe that living in middle-class comfort is the same thing as life itself, then a lot of things we love are not going to survive our impoverishment. Today Peter Leithart writes about this current apocalypse:

When God comes near, he strips away the fig leaves, our defenses and delusions, and brings hidden things to light. In the United States and Europe, the pandemic may reveal many things: The fragility of our sense of invincible security; the frivolity of our entertainments; the risks of globalization and the risks of insurmountable national boundaries; the frayed condition of our social relations. Our confidence in science may be shaken—whether because the experts’ modeling drastically overshoots or because science can’t save us. Coronavirus may put a nail in the coffin of libertarianism, convincing everyone that only massive collective action can protect us in times of mortal danger. It may, on the other hand, be a blow to statism, if the massive collective action backfires.

The main thing exposed by any apocalypse is the state of the heart. God tested Israel with manna to “know what was on your hearts” (Deut. 6), and his word cuts through to expose the thoughts and intents of the heart (Heb. 4:12–13). We will come through this, and that reprieve will be as critical a test as the crisis has been.

We have to learn to love our crooked neighbors, with our crooked hearts. What else is there? If we don’t, we are going to miss the opportunities to defend and renew life in the ruins of the temples of our idols. Every single one of us will be put to the test — indeed, are now being put to the test. Me, I’m a weak person, a hobbit to the fingertips, and that means someone who loves comfort. I’m a middle-aged version of the child Flannery O’Connor talked about in her short story “Temple Of The Holy Ghost”:

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

She could stand to be shot but not to be burned in oil.

I think I could live bravely and with stability through the death of my wife from cancer. But the catastrophic reduction of my family into poverty, and the radical instability that comes with it, because of this virus? I don’t know. I hope I can do my duty, but the impoverishment of the American middle class is something I’ve never had to think about. Look, I rail at so many fellow middle-class Christians who remain defiantly self-blinded in the face of evidence that the faith is disappearing in America, criticizing them because their rejection of the Benedict Option thesis is not based on logical argument, but on a desperate conviction that this catastrophe cannot happen to people like us. But I have a bad feeling that I’m the same way about the prospect of being poor.

This post has gone into a place I didn’t foresee when I started writing it. I feel the need to say that I’m not at all making light of poverty, and the deaths of despair that will surely come if the virus pushes large numbers of Americans into poverty. Intellectuals, especially Christian intellectuals, have to guard against thinking of poverty as an aesthetic mode. (Me, at 23: “Maybe I should go to Prague and be poor and bohemian and have an interesting life!” Thank God I didn’t do it.) There is nothing romantic about it. And, as Andrew T. Walker rightly says, people who are feeling morally high and mighty about those who fear poverty ought to understand that for most people, we’re not talking about not being able to pay for lacrosse lessons for the kids, and a junior year abroad. We’re talking about being able to pay rent and put food on the table.

But notice something important. In the sociological analysis of deaths of despair, we have seen that this phenomenon falls disproportionately on white people. Blacks and Hispanics are much more psychologically resilient in the face of poverty and limitation. Why? No doubt because they have had to build their lives around the reality of limits, and to learn to find joy in things that cannot be purchased. I would love to know if black and Hispanic people are freaking out right now as bad as white people are, by the prospect of being poor. I bet they aren’t.

There is a reason why Jesus speaks of the poor as blessed. It cannot be because he was sentimental about poverty. Growing up in the rural South, I saw a fair amount of poverty, and can tell you that poverty can make people bad and crazy. One blessing of poverty, though, at least from a spiritual point of view, is that you are under no illusion about your ability to control your world. It is all too easy for that to degenerate into a self-destructive fatalism (that is, the belief that you can do nothing to improve your prospects), but it can also be an opportunity for Christian virtue — recognizing that there are more important things in life than material gain and comfort, and that the right way to live is to trust in God and to do your best to love your neighbor and to relieve their suffering — and when you can’t take their suffering away, then to suffer with (com + passio) them.

Wednesday we observed the Feast of the Annunciation. Do you remember what the Virgin Mary said to the Archangel Gabriel when he told her that she was going to bear the Messiah?

My soul magnifies the Lord
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid;
For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed;
Because He who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is His name;
And His mercy is from generation to generation
on those who fear Him.
He has shown might with His arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.
He has given help to Israel, his servant, mindful of His mercy
Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.

Can we be sure that the virus is not God scattering us, the proud, in the conceit of our hearts? That it is not God’s way of putting down the might from our thrones? I’m not talking about the Donald Trumps and the Bill de Blasios; I’m talking about you and me, middle-class Americans who, because of that fact, are among the wealthiest people who ever lived.

There is a certain kind of conservative Christian who likes to quip that maybe persecution would be good for us, because it would make us stronger Christians. Nobody who has read accounts of modern persecution, or spent any time (as I have done this past year) with those once viciously persecuted for their faith, could say such a thing. We shouldn’t welcome persecution, but if it’s coming, we should be prepared to meet it as Christian men and women. Similarly with poverty and disease. Now is a time to repent of the comfortable Christianity that made sense as a helpmeet of middle-class stability. It will not tell us what to do when we are sick and poor. It is a myth that will not survive the shattering. Instead, we need a Christianity of solidarity, one that will help us to love our crooked neighbors, with our crooked hearts. Don’t doubt for a second that it could go the other way. We know what mass poverty and instability did to the people of Germany in the period between the wars. It could happen here too, if we aren’t careful.

How do we get to where we need to be? How do we get to the point where we can see the suffering of the unemployed pilot with a special-needs child, and reach out to help him through this crisis, as the people of my town reached out to help my late sister and her family through her cancer? I’m not sure. I’m cloistered in my hobbit hole, groping my way along the same path with the rest of you. Part of our repentance is, and must be, a deep self-interrogation of our fear of poverty, and the limits it imposes. This is how most of the world must live today. This is how most of our ancestors lived. It is we who live within the illusion of control, given to us by our wealth and technological prowess. That is being taken away from us now. We can’t control that, but we can control how we react to it. If you are looking for something to read right now, in this strangely cloistered Lent, read Chris Arnade’s book Dignity, which is about being poor in America.

It’s a confusing time of apocalypse. I’m looking into my own heart in light of the unveiling, and I don’t like a lot of what I see. I am trying to repent as well, trying to use the Gospel to light the way through the enveloping darkness, so I don’t lose the straight path, and so that I can build the strength to keep going on it, come what may. Forgive me, a foolish, lazy sinner who thinks he might be able to be poor, as long as they don’t turn off the air conditioning.