Quiet

On the way in to work, it occurred to me that I guess I should fill up the car with gas. It felt quieter on the road this morning, almost lockdown quiet. There were, to be sure, more cars than in lockdown, but they were still, somehow, quieter. It felt a little bit like the coming of a hurricane. Our neighbor had gone to the grocery store on Sunday and told us that all the toilet paper was gone from the shelves again. Well, at least, all the name brand toilet paper.

It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands… They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

The cruel walls most will be staring tonight will be projecting images and maps, I'm sure, but I doubt any more light.

Not what I had in mind

What then, comes the anxious question, comes next?

I wrote that question to close my last entry. Now, two weeks later, the Monkey's Paw has obliged and it seems quite a bit more ominous. The last few mornings, I've woken up, swiped through my phone for a minute or so, and been relieved that nothing cataclysmic has happened. Doomscrolling, as it's called, is a process that we've slowly become used to in the course of the last few months. We spare a few minutes to find out what next bad thing has happened; murder hornets and pool parties and tear gas at our fingertips. I now know, for instance, that the CDC releases national and state-by-state all cause mortality data on Fridays at about 11:00 Eastern. We adjust ourselves to these strange patterns and daily and weekly liturgies.

Everything is seeming to coalesce into what Adam Elkus calls the omni-crisis. If you are conspiratorially oriented, you imagine this as the machinations of some cabal of organizations working about to bring the world under its control. Maybe you are listening intently on the scanners or looking for the drops, eager to find what's coming next. (Maybe you should make sure your tin foil hat isn't too tight and maybe you should turn off InfoWars.) Maybe it's just an outworking of myriad factors in an unstable situation. If we remove enough bricks from the Jenga tower, things go from fine to wobbly to unpredictable in a hurry. I'm not sure how far back we look to determine the first brick removed, but it seems like we've been playing the game to get it over with in the last few years.

A key theme of Elkus' essay is that an effect of the omni-crisis is to make even our near-term expectations of the future incomprehensible—"The simplest way to understand the omni-crisis is as the sustained breaking of expectations and disruption of the ability to simulate the future forward using assumed constraints." As the crisis lingers, the previously unthinkable becomes the half-rational—"prolonged disruptions tend to alter the calculations of those still capable of calculating at all during stressful times. Once-sure bets are cast aside, forcing hedging behaviors and consideration of previously taboo actions and operations."

We've seen this sort of disruption on a personal level, first with the advent of Coronatide and then the Lockdowns. As the situation on the ground changed, we started referring to it as "the new normal." Several took exception to that labelling, insisting that it was "anything but normal." Still though, I can't think of anyone who has suggested that, when this is all over—for some incredibly hazy value of "over"—that everything would be the way it was. There was briefly the opportunity for some hope that this could turn out a change for the better, but that hope is fading, if it is still burning at all.

As the protests and riots increased in intensity, and the President did his level Presidential best, I started to think about an essay by Ezekiel Kweku, written shortly after his inauguration. This was published two months into his administration, before even the turmoil of Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally (such simpler times). I don't believe there was a precipitating event for the essay, at least in the way of a hashtag-protest, but it was rather a commentary on the President's campaign and first address to Congress. Kweku considers the man a product of his times, having seen crime rise every decade of his life in New York City and then soar in the 1980's.

Calling this a “wave” or even a “spike” is accurate in retrospect, but it doesn't capture the climate for those who lived through it. We call a pattern a wave because we know it will eventually crest and collapse. It is the return to normalcy that gives a trend the shape of a spike. But for people who were living through this time, there was no reason to believe that they would see the other side of the wave. If, like Donald Trump, you were 44 in 1990, crime had risen in every decade of your life. High crime would have felt like the new normal.

The idea here is that the President's worldview was built around that trend continuing. Despite the fact that it didn't happen, that was the normal that formed him, and from which he made his projections about the future. We are, now, presumably living through another sort of wave. The pandemic itself is spoken of in such terms, with the fears of a second wave and its associated morbidities. The current protests make the water choppier still, and we struggle to stay on the top, to stay afloat, and to see calmer waters ahead. We do not know when they will come, nor to what seas the current will carry us. What projections forward do we now make, mired as we are in our present circumstances? Elkus, again (though I have inserted the link annotation at the end):

The omni-crisis drags on because there is little desire or ability on the part of authorities to resolve the confusion prolonged disruption generates. Their actions are often at negligent or irresponsible at best. At worst, they are deliberately malicious and hateful. ... [The] omni-crisis has significantly enlarged the space of possible outcomes beyond that normally considered day-to-day by most Americans. And it is not clear how many people in positions of influence and authority recognize this at all. They cheer on their favored factions and issue inflammatory declarations and demands. Do they know there are dragons where we are going? And, more disturbingly, do they even care?

Every night I put my daughter to bed, telling her a "Princess Abby" story and then reading one of the chapters from the Jesus Storybook Bible. Last night we read "The Captain of the Storm" - the story in Mark 4:35-41 where he calms the storm on the lake. I'll leave this is as the final note, because it's the perfect counterpoint to everything I've thought about here—our inability to map out what the future might look like, where the present crisis will leave us, and whether or not those in authority even care.

“HELP!” they screamed. “Wake up! Quick, Jesus!”
Jesus opened his eyes.
“Rescue us! Save us!” they shrieked. “Don’t you care?”
(Of course Jesus cared, and this was the very reason he had come–to rescue them and to save them.)

Turning and turning

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

The hardest thing to get used to is the vacillating. Before this was full-force, I remarked that I struggle to know what action to take, and that still holds. We expend non-significant sums of energy trying to decide what to do with work and children and plans. With our daycare once again open, that disqualifies me at work for some of the partial compensation I was getting when taking days off to watch the kids. At the same time, is it really necessary or prudent to send them back yet? Probably not. How much do we still worry about our neighbors and our friends, and in what settings?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I am critical of lockdown policy, though not as someone that believes the threats to our lives or our liberties are overstated, or that the threats to our livelihoods are undersold. I am generally persuaded that they might not do as much as they are given credit for. Unfortunately, it seems the thing they are most efficient at doing is destroying goodwill towards actually effective policies. Reagan's stupid quip about the nine most terrifying words is true not because they represent tyranny with a smile, but because incompetence can burn down important bridges.

At my despairing worst, I fear in the re-opening we are to be left to the vices of the libertarian hordes. The condemnation of the closing of the Book of Judges becomes a commandment - "Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." We who are conservative are admonished to not come out of our homes if we are not comfortable, and we reduce ourselves to a perpetual Groundhog Day existence—we look out of our homes, see an unmasked shadow, and prepare for six more weeks of Covid.

Talking with a friend a little while ago, he and I share the same fatalistic assumption that eventually we'll all get it. Or it least if we shall not all get sick, we shall all be exposed. There is a certain temptation to give in, in that case, and figure we may as well spin the wheel and see if the ball lands on red or black for us. I am not inclined to bet against the house if I don't have to.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Very early on, I held out a vague sense of hope that there might be some deus ex machina, some Gandalph cresting the hill to turn the tide with the forces of light. Whether it would be warm weather killing the virus off or a miracle cure or treatment was immaterial to the hope. Hell, we could just try splashing the infected with glasses of water we'd left around the house. Worked once, at least.

It never occurred to me that this would functionally be the same as the official plan. There was, for a little while, the lockdown and the "flatten the curve" mantra. One could have been forgiven early on if one expected that to act as a brief retreat or timeout to formulate the next steps. Those, of course, never really came. The White House released a guide to re-opening that it has since sought to actively undermine when it is not ignoring its existence.

I think of American exceptionalism. We're the ones that make the movies about being down and out and coming back at the last moment, roaring and victorious. We're also the ones of whom Otto von Bismarck reportedly said "God has a special Providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." We seem terribly excited to put God and the Chancellor to the test.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

(Something something sphinx of cement and aluminum.)

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

A few of my friends on Facebook shared a meme with a cowboy riding into the sunset, talking about missing the America they grew up in. I suspect the meme would have got about the same reactions with or without the virus, but what has been changed is seen in sharper relief with it. Our experience during the pandemic is a considerable departure from our expected way of life, and everyone calls it "new normal," but the experience has also heightened our sense of just how much has changed. We find that the foundation has slipped from under us, and the walls are not as square as they were in the blueprints.

What then, comes the anxious question, comes next?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A Tale of Two Cities

A friend of mine texted me a couple of days ago. He asked if I thought we would ever "civilize the internet." By this, he was asking if would ever regain a sense of common, authoritative voices, or would we forever be trapped in a state where everyone would prefer to make sense of the world through the Matt Walshes and John Olivers of the world, as they appear to us at sundry times and in divers manners. For my own part, I am skeptical that such a future exists. The age of Walter Kronkite and even Peter Jennings (the first newscaster that I really own any memories of) is over.

I think L.M. Sacasas' essay "The Analog City and the Digital City" goes a long way to help explaining why. The key idea here is information super-abundance. In this paragraph, he uses it specifically in reference to the doomed project of fact-checking the internet:

The anodyne insistence on fact-checking to bridge chasms in worldview misunderstands the nature of our new media environment; it fails to see the difference between the economics of information scarcity and the economics of information abundance. Information scarcity may lend itself to a measure of credulity: When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolter has called it, encourages the view that truth isn’t real: Whatever view you want to validate, you’ll find facts to support it. All information is also now potentially disinformation. Fact-checking, however well-intentioned, does not solve the problem; paradoxically, it may in some cases make it worse.

There are two ways that we can use information super-abundance to deceive ourselves and rob us of the truth. The first is as Sacasas presents it—we decide a priori what must be true and find the sources and charts and methods to "prove" it. In the event we are presented with contradictory information, we either plug our ears and point to the sources that support us or we dismiss them as coming from the wrong sorts of sources with obvious biases against our own position (and therefore, against the truth). The other option is that we give in to epistemic nihilism: in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of facts and alternative facts, we throw up our hands and assume the truth to be unknowable and, thus, non-existant. This neatly allows us to hang on to our own version, as it asserts that nothing can really be disproven.

The methods that the major media platforms are resorting to regarding fact-checking in particular seem especially bound to backfire. In the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, various targeted advertisement and disinformation campaigns came to light. The uproar was enough to get the heads of the media conglomerates hauled into Congress for a special sound-bite session where the public would be assured that nothing so nefarious would ever happen again. The first go at this was fairly innocuous, usually with some little tag appended to note that their reputable sources (already discounted by half the population to begin with) considered the post incredible. More recent attempts, where offending posts and videos are summarily removed are more heavy-handed. With exhortations like "watch this before they take it down again," their methods are more likely to lend a perverse credence to the sorts of things they are trying to discredit.

I mused a couple of months ago about the possibiltiy of pandemic denialism being a coping mechanism. When we were on the cusp of what promised to be a great storm, it seemed a reasonable and charitable enough interpretation. In the two months since the idea first crossed my mind and the storm has come State-side, denialism has paved the paths for floomerism and other sorts of conspiracy theories. If you are not in New York or one of the handful of other very hard-hit areas, you are more likely to look around and ask "Where's the beef?" and assume it was never there to begin with.

Hannah Anderson revived this train of thought for me on Twitter, saying "I wonder if conspiracy theories are actually a form of coping w/ awfulness that is right in front of us. Rather than see the obvious, we look for evil that is hidden & ultimately unprovable. This allows us to restructure evil to something that is manageable & potentially avoidable. If evil is contained in school system or medical establishment, you just have to opt out. Mischief managed." In the quest to make sense of a world-altering, hugely disruptive event, with the option for unlimited information at our fingertips, and the "uncivilization" of the internet and a lack of common social authorities; conspiracy theories offer a neat, tidy little package.

Adrienne LaFrance has a spell-binding article in The Atlantic about the rise of QAnon. Prior to the last few years, the possibility of the distributed conspiracy theory that is QAnon would be almost unthinkable. The phrase that seemed to keep coming back was "Do your own research, make up your own mind." In Sacasas' Analog City, that advice spells the end for a ruse. There's no "there" there. But in the Digital City of limitless "information" (happily scare-quoted), it finds new life.

Where then, does this leave us? As Sacasas notes in the opening of his essay, it was an error to assume that the coming of the Digital City was an unalloyed good-that peace, progress, and prosperity lay necessarily ahead; with better democracies, better information, and better lives assured. There is, certainly, a tension in the liminal period, but that is not to say that the converse is true—that the Digital City and all that it represents is a grave error. To extend the parallels with the Cities of God and Man would be a mistake, it is not the case here that we ought to (or can) choose between one or the other.

It will require wisdom and imagination and prudence to understand how to adapt as the Digital City takes pre-eminence over the Analog. It is important, then, that we recognize our own tendencies and our own limitations. I am certainly not immune to the temptations now available. Despite the promise of limitless information, we must still operate in a fog of something less than omniscience. This should not be confused with what I called epistemic nihilism above. There is a path forward with humility that can recognize the limits of what we can know while still earnestly seeking to find the truth.

It was always going to be Ginsberg.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

The disorderedness of society has a tendency to call the second part of Ginsberg’s Howl to my mind. I’ve quoted it once before on this blog. Maybe I’m just read enough to be able to quote something when it seems apt, but not enough to quote that many different sources. When all you have is a hammer, I suppose.

COVID-19 is the occasion again for another post, or at least a reaction to the reaction to the reaction (I think that’s the stack depth at the moment, it can be hard to keep track sometimes).

There is the first order reaction - the dramatic and sudden reordering of societies. Social distancing, working from home, gatherings and sporting events canceled. And of course, the massive fluctuations in the economy and the stock markets as the algorithms and traders freak out and panic until a 15-minute reset gives everyone enough time to go outside and have a smoke and calm down. Wall Street probably needs more nicotine and less cocaine, but one can only expect so much.

A few days ago I thought I’d have a chuckle and so said to myself, “I’m 34 years old, I can do this with no repercussions to my mental health; I’m going to check on my 401k.” When the first entry in the rotating banner on the homepage for the site that manages my 401k was an article with the lede “Life comes at you fast,” I found it incredibly funny. Others have had less bemused reactions to the state of the market. There’s a handful of oft-dunked on tweet threads on Twitter, wondering why we don’t just get it all over with and let the olds die so that the market can re-stabilize. I know that there have been a handful of cable news interviewees complaining as much. Another “Won’t anyone think of the retirement funds!?” screeds landed in my Facebook feed.

We did not shut down public events and institutions to try to slow the spread of the flu. Yet we have already destroyed $5 trillion in stock market wealth over the last few weeks in the growing coronavirus panic, reports The New York Times, wiping out retirement savings for many.

In this one, I suppose, there’s at least feigned concern that more yet will suffer when it comes time to retire, to find there is nothing in their accounts. This is not to deny the impending economic hardships that will be ahead. In the short term, there’s going to be people coming to retirement that are going to be screwed. There will be more, due to testing and treatment and gluttonous insurance companies that are sure to bankrupted because of treatment for the disease, or some compounding effect (losing a job and income, losing a home, etc.). But with wall of that, I fail to see how leaning in to a mass die-off is going to help the market, they usually seem to respond better to more and healthy workers, but I’m just spitballing here. Which brings is to the third degree, my own reaction.

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!

And we’re back to Ginsberg. The idea is repugnant. In seething anger I try to reason the motivations for why some may see something and pass it on with somberly nodding heads, instructing us that the ideas are “worth a read.” I try, and often fail, to read charity into the situation, and try to wonder that it’s a coping mechanism to the overwhelming catastrophe. To deny that the situation is not as dire, and so the consequences should not be so bad either. I cannot know if this is true, but it is less heinous than other possibilities.

In the end, I believe the root of this plan is in a shameful, utter hopelessness. The olds are going to die anyway, they say. Look at these charts! These actuarial tables! This glorious mathematics! Why, then, should we let a drowning man bring down a survivor? Why can they not be allowed to die and so decrease the surplus population? One post did the math to surmise that those at risk correspond to a handful of months of population growth, is this proof they are not replaceable? Particularly now that they are no longer productive members of society? They are drains on our resources as it is.

In Lombardy, the medical system is well beyond its capacity. They have essentially begin a war-time triage, making the choices about who gets life-saving equipment and treatment and who gets last rites. It is a grisly, terrifying, sobering reality. I am doubtful that they will not be the only ones to do this. These are hard choices, and I feel for those who have to make them, and I would hesitate to be their judge. This was, and always should be the last choice for a decent society.

If we think that we can jump straight there just so we can save a few dollars in our bank account, if we are unwilling to consider another life before our future comfort, if we are willing to trade the lives of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents for a few crumbs, then we have no need to carry on at all. I am grateful that this is not the aim of those making policy now, but given that it’s not just coming from random extremists and that plenty are nodding along, perhaps without realizing what they are signing up to - it dismays me a little.

I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

Virus

“When we have a superabundance of information and a failure of trusted institutions, any effort to make sense of a situation, to connect the dots, will seem (and perhaps feel) not unlike conspiracy theorizing. The materials are there in the massive digital archives we all dip into constantly. The urge to make sense of things is more or less a given. All we need is a provocation, say the assertion that a baseball player was wearing a hidden buzzer to signal the pitcher’s next pitch. Within minutes, we’ve all got our dark-rimmed-Kevin-Costner-in-JFK glasses on.”

I’ve had that paragraph, and this one bouncing around my head lately:

“[It is not that we are] living in a post-truth society, it is that we are living in a post-trust society. Trust has always been a critical component of our apprehension of the truth. The question was not whether trust was required of us, the question was whether enough of us could hold our trust in common, that is trust common sources of knowledge and truth. In the age of mass media and of the expert, our institutions commanded widespread trust. Today, that is hardly the case. Trust has been splintered, and society with it. We are too aware of the failure of institutions and we’ve been disabused of the notion that they might arrive at some disinterested, neutral account of things as the basis for collective action.”

Those both come from the newsletter recently started by L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society. The latter paragraph comes from his most recent issue, and the former is the reference he makes in the opening.

The novel coronavirus is officially settling into the Northern Virginia area, with the first reported cases trickling in over the last few days. I’ve suspected it has been in the area for longer than that, but due to the lack of testing, it’s impossible to know when and where.

I keep on thinking about John Carpenter’s THE THING and how I should finally watch it if I end up on quarantine. Someone argued in the early days of the outbreak, as we were just watching it unfold over there in China how most people don’t really respond to significant threats with panic, but what is more likely to happen is that the people as a community come together in support of one another, invoking the “togetherness” following 9-11 and the bonds formed during the Blitz on London. The Blitz, in particular, seemed a rather poor analogy to be making. There was a vast threat facing London, but its character was entirely different. Safety and camaraderie was found huddling together in close quarters in air raid shelters and tube lines, which is less advisable in a viral pandemic. More importantly, the threat there was always external. There was no bomb the Germans could drop that would turn you into a Nazi. With the coronavirus, you become victim and, while contagious, silent, unwitting enemy. At work, the co-worker with the office next to mine has just returned from France, which is by most calculations about 10 days behind Italy on the curve. He doesn’t and I don’t suspect that he has the virus, but I don’t suspect him not to, either. Maybe we’ll find out in the next fourteen days.

We tell ourselves that no one knows which way this thing is going to go. I think that is in part because it provides us the slightest bit of reassurance, it leaves the door open to a milder possibility. But then we look at the growth in China and in Italy, and it’s hard to reasonably see the outcomes here not being similar. We realize that when we say “we don’t know which way this is going to go,” the uncertainty is that we don’t know how it will affect us personally.

I do not believe that the virus will be restrained in America. I don’t think the sort of community sacrifice that significant social distancing, the only thing that seems to be useful to slow the spread, requires is in our ethos. I think too many will continue to work while sick for want or need of the money. I think too many will choose to risk it because they don’t get sick or don’t want to believe the hype (see the paragraph on post-trust society).

I wonder sometimes how much of the advice of “wash your hands” and “don’t touch your face” and “stop licking other people” is reasonable preventative measure and how much is meant to be calming reassurance, a modern day version of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” (indeed, there are plenty of Keep Calm and Wash Your Hands posters online). This is not to say I doubt the efficacy of handwashing, but it does seem like that represents the point when the horde have already broken through the castle walls in the first place.

I am grateful that the disease seems to spare children. I’d probably be a paranoid wreck if it didn’t. For myself and my wife, we are probably still in the “okay” range of the curve. Even then, it’s not entirely smooth sailing. Reports seem to indicate that hospitalized cases, which are somewhere between 1-in-5 and 1-in-10 are slow to recover. There is talk that some that get it that are young and healthy are showing problems post-recovery. And then we have parents and grandparents that we think about.

I struggle to know myself what action to take, and when. I am convinced this will be bad. Much of the preaching that this is nothing to fear and it is no worse than the flu has me thinking about that first paragraph I quoted, about paranoia and conspiracy theories. I am not, insofar as I am aware, positive for the virus. The parent of a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old, there’s a pretty good chance at any given time I have a cough anyway (as I do now, but not the kind of cough associated with the virus). Every time I do cough, it sets off a series of internal checks. Not surprisingly, not much usually changes in five minutes. When do I stay home, to either avoid getting it or transmitting it myself? When do we keep the children home? Even if they are not vulnerable, they may still be a vector from one person to another.

There is a lot of uncertainty ahead of us, and we will find out what happens in the coming weeks. I have nothing else to do but pray. I pray for the safety of my family, and of my church, and of my friends. I pray for those that are sick and infected. For those that are vulnerable and will need assistance. For those with other ailments that may get crowded out, or see their injury increase as a side effect of this all. For those that are working tirelessly to provide care, for those that will get sick and die while doing so. I pray for our leaders, that they could discern the right and have the wisdom and courage to act on it. For our communities that we would not be overwhelmed.

This too shall pass. But it is, for the time, our storm to weather.

Wild