Signs of the fever breaking?

I’ve linked below to a few things I’ve been reading in the last couple of weeks, about our continuing madnesses—health, cultural and otherwise. Strangely, these pieces have had the effect of keeping me sane, perhaps because more of this nonsense is being pointed out, even if the mainstream venues ignore them.

Bit by bit, these upstart ventures are becoming a refuge for the non-woke against a vicious illiberal tide. And do check out the final link on this post for more about that.

From UnHerd, Why the atheists turned on Richard Dawkins, the secular humanist who triggered the transgender lobby:

“The bigger problem Dawkins faces is that our religious instincts are not reducible to the question of whether God exists. We hunger for community. We thirst for meaning. We celebrate idealised concepts and lash out when people question them. Even problems which are not explicitly religious—those of borders, and families, and resource allocation et cetera—cannot be solved by pure scientific reasoning. You can take God and the church out of the equation but people will imbue other concepts and communities with the hope of transcendence.

“Well, people certainly found their tribes, and their hopes for transcendence, and many of them have none of the tolerant and curious spirit of the clerics and theologians who engaged Professor Dawkins in debate 15 years ago. Heresy must not stand. It demands public denunciation and disavowal— removal from the public space and from the bounds of civilised inquiry. The likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could sell millions of copies but the likes of Ryan Anderson and Abigail Shrier cannot have their books sold. Richard Dawkins cannot even hold onto an award that he won 25 years go.”

From Lockdown Sceptics, The War on Pubs is Being Waged by Puritans Against Joy:

“Pubs matter for reasons that go further than the economics of the hospitality sector, important though those are. They matter because they are playgrounds for adults. They are important because they remind us that not everything has to be geared to the puritanical assumption that we work only to get up and repeat the same day.”

From City Journal, Masking Children is Unnecessary and Harmful:

“The mask mandates are especially cruel to young children. Adults are supposed to ease their fears, to reassure them that monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. Instead, we’re frightening them into believing they’re being stalked by invisible menaces lurking in the air. A year of mask-wearing will scar some of them psychologically—and maybe physically, too.”

From The Federalist, The Scariest COVID-19 Casualty You Can’t Talk About Is Free Speech:

“Whatever happened in March to create the Great Mass Delusion, it involved a failure of free expression. And when free expression breaks, freedom more generally is at risk. We decided the world desperately needed a research institute devoted to the mechanisms governing free expression and how they relate to society. Free speech shouldn’t be left to lawyers.”

From The Guardian, How do faithless people like me make sense of the this past year of Covid?:

“Perhaps the key contrast between the past and present—and between people who still belong to religious communities and those of us who don’t—lies in the 21st century’s lack of opportunities for people to simply come together.” 

From Gene Expression, Verwoerd’s revenge:

“The liberal democratic compromises of the late 20th century were good. They established an equipoise for a pluralistic society. What is happening now is cultural radicalism is destroying the social capital and trust that liberalism needs to survive and persist.”

From Politico, How Substack Revealed the Real Value of Writers’ Unfiltered Thoughts:

“Yes, Substack looks like a revolution and smells like a revolution, but as many have noted, it’s really a throwback to the origins of journalism in the Middle Ages, and the emphasis on who is writing the copy as opposed to what is being written can be traced to the late 19th century. Substack may be educating the industry about who adds the high value in journalism, writers or editors.”

 

As the third wave of COVID panic steamrolls on

Sharing various and sundry links I’ve been collecting over the last few weeks, waiting for the tidal wave of election hysteria and COVID fear to die down. Alas, neither of those things are happening.

Just as some light at the end of the tunnel emerges ever-so-slightly, it seems to dissipate, and winter in the Northern Hemisphere is approaching.

From the Law & Liberty blog, “A Declaration of Independence from COVID fear:”

“Waiting in isolation for months without a clear set of goals decreases cohesion and trust among the governed. At the regime level, this opens up the possibility for a growing chasm between the governed and governors.”

From Mike Solana of the Pirate Wires blog, “No More Clown Shit:”

“Trump is an entertainer, and on Twitter he’s a troll — a darker kind of entertainment for a darker kind of world. There were questions early on if America could survive its first Mad King, but notwithstanding his gaudy, golden palaces Trump is not a king of any kind. There is no king. At every level of government we are a nation adrift with no leadership. What we’ve rather become accustomed to from our president is a kind of stewardship, a man in whom we expect, above all things, a presidential tone, a patting of our heads, and a presidential reassurance that everything is fine. Trump could never give us that because Trump is also not a steward. He’s a jester. He is I think technically the most successful clown in human history, and from America’s vacant throne he did what all truly great clowns do: he pulled back the curtain of our reality, he showed us who and what we really are, and he laughed.”

Matt Taibbi, “Which is the Real Working Class Party Now?”—he’s a journalist I wasn’t enamored with some years ago, but who has emerged as one of the sharpest observers of our increasingly degraded national political press:

“The 2020 election showed that the Democrats’ imperious smart-set arrogance, open belief in the idea that minorities owe them their votes, and basically undisguised hostility toward the ordinary small-town person who hasn’t “learned to code,” finally began competing with Republican tone-deafness on race as a negative factor to be weighed by working class voters, of all races.

“Unless they stop lying to themselves about this, and embrace a politics that pays more than lip service to the working person, they will become what the Republicans used to be: an arm of the patrician rich, sneering at the unwashed majority and crossing fingers every election season. It’s not that Trump deserved those votes more. But he at least asked for them, and that was almost enough.”

From British journalist-turned flak Matt Townsend, a Twitter screenshot of a paywalled column by Janet Daley, “How modern democracy has given rise to lockdown totalitarianism,” in The Daily Telegraph and as a second national lockdown in the U.K. is underway:

“Something in our political culture and our view of ourselves, must have changed very dramatically—and oddly, almost without our noticing—for the founding principles of our liberty (not to mention the basic understanding of what gives life meaning and value to human life) to be so readily discarded.”

Daley goes on to say that they’re “the belief that the state is now morally responsible for all outcomes” and that “the state must promise not just the best healthcare but it can provide, but a kind of immortality.”

Bingo! That’s one of the few serious thinkpieces I’ve read anywhere about what I believe underpins the mass psychosis at the heart of the Western response to COVID. With our medical advances, technology and policy expertise, advanced states presumed they could “crush” the virus.

Instead, they’ve crushed only economies, livelihoods, educations, social well-being and souls, in wholesale fashion, for nine months now. We’ll be at this through a whole year and longer, because of the other factor in Daley’s analysis that also rings true to my ears:

“But this collectivist ethic is strangely contrary to the other strand of popular culture playing a major role in today’s events. This is the legitimising of chronic hypochondria. I cannot remember a time in which there was such a neurotic obsession with health as a positive condition, rather than a simple absence of illness or disability.”

More ahead of Britain’s second lockdown, “Welcome to Covidworld,” by academic philosophers Ian James Kidd and Matthew Ratcliffe in The Critic:

“In the context of this altered way of finding ourselves in the world, a new system of rules, projects, practices and pastimes has taken hold. Fear of the virus is the single fulcrum around which everything now turns, shaping our attention, concerns, conversations, and activities. For many, the world feels altogether different, like the inevitable onset of a winter that must be endured with grim resignation.

“Over time, Covidworld tightens its grip, eclipsing all other concerns. It reminds us of Wittgenstein’s example of a culture dominated by belief in a Last Judgment, a conviction expressed “not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief”, but through its role in “regulating” all aspects of life. Similarly, Covidworld offers a simple, internally coherent substitute for the messier and more complicated reality we once inhabited.

“A reluctance on the part of many people to engage in serious debate can be understood in terms of the transition into this different world, a place complete with its own foundational beliefs and performances. Lockdowns work; masks lessen transmission; the second wave is an unacceptable threat and must be suppressed.

“Since all of this is beyond doubt, questions about the adequacy of evidence are often reinterpreted in moral terms and dismissed as irresponsible acts of ‘covidiocy’. Many of those who would more usually insist on examining alternative possibilities or challenge the party line now fall strangely silent. Lack of critical reflection is further fuelled by a distrust of those who do not belong to Covidworld.”

Interjecting here another continuing complaint—just not seeing this kind of mild skepticism, much less serious criticism—in any mainstream publication in the U.S., even the ostensibly conservative or libertarian kind.

There’s a lot more I could link to and comment on here, but some of it is so unremittingly lacking in any sense of optimism. While I share many of those sentiments, finding a way to endure and rise above a third wave of hysteria is paramount.

The manipulations of history and culture

From the ever-insightful Joel Kotkin, writing about “The Age of Amnesia” at Quillette:

“Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.”

This includes, but goes far beyond, how Google manipulates its algorithms and how the tech giants sharpen their addictive tools to ramp up easy outrage. Those inclined to resort to Maoist measures for purifying thoughts and the discussion of ideas have never had it so easy to repress speech they don’t like:

“Technology has provided those who wish to shape the past, and the future, tools of which the despots of yesterday could only dream.”

Kotkin thinks this smacks of the Middle Ages, as we may be circling back to such a time, our several-hundred-years’ “period of liberalization” seemingly coming to an end. Today’s intellectuals, he argues, are “narrowing the field of inquiry” to the Holy Trinity of Social Justice:

‘”A healthy appreciation for the past is being lost. Today, historical analysis is increasingly shaped by concerns over race, gender, and class. There are repeated campaigns, particularly in and around schools, to pull down offensive statues and murals—including of George Washington—and to rename landmarks to cleanse Western history of its historical blights.”

The consequences are frightening:

But now, with access to information unimaginable in the past, our knowledge of history is fading. Information is increasingly separated from actual knowledge; blogs replace books, and tweets replace essays. Knowledge of even relatively recent events, like the Holocaust or D-Day, is become scanty. Four in 10 American millennials, and at least one in threeEuropeans, say they know “very little” about the Holocaust, and one in five young French respondents are not even aware it took place.”

That’s because:

“This ideological rigidity has shaped a generation of progressive activists who also now represent the best educated, whitest, and most politically intolerant portion of the American polity.”

And the youngest among them, the tail end of the Millennial Generation just now coming out of the universities, are still to flood the adult ranks, thoroughly unprepared for the real world that harshly awaits them.

With such a limited grasp of history and culture in their schooling, it’s not surprising that in surveys many of them profess little faith in the future of democracy.

Read the whole thing and try not to weep.

Stepping outside the woke political hive mind and out into the real world

This is my “spring break” from social media, where the more intensive political (and other) ideologues live, feed, rage and breathe these days. But the stale oxygen of the hard-left “Progressive” woke element thankfully isn’t being recirculated into the air inhaled by those who identify with the Democratic Party as a whole.

That’s what Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy argue today at The New York Times, and the cool interactive is just the start of some compelling findings they flesh out that ought to be heeded by party leaders.

To start:

“Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.”

And continuing:

The relative moderation of Democrats who are not sharing their political thoughts on social media, and therefore of Democrats as a whole, makes it less surprising that Virginia Democrats tolerated Mr. Northam’s yearbook page. It makes it easier to imagine how Joe Biden might not merely survive questions about whether he touched women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, but might even emerge essentially unscathed.

It also helps explain why recent polls show that a majority of Democrats would rather see the party become more moderate than move leftward, even as progressives clamor for a Green New Deal or Medicare for all.

Above all:

In reality, the Democratic electorate is both ideologically and demographically diverse. Over all, around half of Democratic-leaning voters consider themselves “moderate” or “conservative,” not liberal. Around 40 percent are not white.

Given the litany of announced presidential candidates who appeal to the Twitterati, it’s interesting that one of the few who isn’t is suddenly grabbing most of the attention. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, an Afghanistan War veteran and openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., is getting ripped from the right by Erick Erickson for not being sufficiently Christian (especially because he’s Episcopalian, egads!) and from the cultural left by gay novelist Jacob Bacharach because being “a veteran, a Christian, and a fierce, married monogamist” somehow not “good for the gays.”

First things first. Erickson, a Southern evangelical, suggests that those of my Episcopalian ilk should leave and join the Anglicans. If Erickson weren’t already a doctoral candidate in theology, I would have kindly suggested to him that the Episcopal church is the American branch of the Worldwide Anglican Communion and why don’t you know that?

Secondly, Buttigieg’s conventionality is what so many gays have yearned to enjoy, to experience everyday acceptance by their family, in their houses of worship and in their larger communities. If Bacharach could have seen the devastation of a whole generation of gay males during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, he might have some appreciation of that.

All it took for me to understand this was on a trip to the National Mall in the late 1980s when the NAMES Project quilts covered every blade of grass, including a quilt made in honor of an acquaintance who passed in warp speed.

The whole point of the gay rights movement was all about the basic, daily incorporation into the larger society, and whose most monumental wins have been marriage equality and military service, two of the most conservative institutions in society.

I’m not sure how far Buttigieg’s campaign will go and I’m not sure what to make of his policy positions thus far, but his ordinariness is a breath of fresh air given the political derangement that’s taken over both parties.

For those of us not enamored with either of them, candidates who have something to offer beyond extreme litmus tastes of political ideologies are worth considering, not mocking or demonizing.

The illusions of the Bobos

Edward Luce, author of the excellent “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” revisits David Brooks’ beloved Bobos in the age of Trump and finds them wallowing, even as they continue to concentrate wealth, privilege and cultural advantages as never before, and much to the detriment of everyone else:

“Mr Trump’s antics are a comfort blanket to the cognitive elites. He validates our moral superiority. Yet he eats away at it too. Somewhere in our bourgeois subconscious is the realisation that Mr Trump is no accident. He holds up a cracked mirror to our illusions. When we mock him, he draws strength. When he provokes, we stumble. Yet we cannot help ourselves. He is deeply outrageous.

“Therein lies our deepest secret. We need Mr Trump just as he needs us. It is a ghastly symbiosis. Without Mr Trump, there would be no distraction. We might be forced to examine whether we live up to our own values. Do we love the highly educated? Do they deserve by virtue of credentials to be celebrated? Or should we revisit what we mean by a fair society?”