Rapid Fire Thoughts
Dana Gioia seems like a fascinating poet. He dropped out of his graduate program in creative writing at Harvard to do an MBA program at Stanford so that he could work a normal job and be a poet. Here is a downright beautiful and inspiring conversation with him about poetry (and how professional academics have almost ruined it)
Thabiti Anyabwile has a perspective on critical race theory and Christianity that is well worth listening to if you have an hour and want to know more
Apparently Amazon has decided it will be more active in curating what books and products it offers on its site - going so far as to remove an extremely popular book on a controversial topic. Go look for When Harry Became Sally by Ryan Anderson on Amazon. It’s not there anymore.
Also, Google doesn’t let people watch (watch mind you!) videos anonymously on YouTube. They want to know what you are doing and have a record of it…If that doesn’t bother you, go read Orwell’s 1984 (or any other dystopian futuristic novel for that matter)
On Masks
I’ve been thinking a great deal about face masks and politics recently.
Apart from specific policy questions, or the grossly underestimated social and personal costs of mask-wearing, our society needs to deal with significant social and psychological dimensions too. It will be hard for many people to stop wearing face masks or to accept other people not wearing face masks - even after vaccines have been widely administered and case counts are down.
Why is that?
It is because wearing face masks has become a new social norm (at least in some highly populated parts of the country). In the past, we wore masks in very rare and circumscribed settings. Now, for many people I interact with and observe, it is the reverse. They only don’t wear masks in rare and circumscribed settings.
Public health officials and their cheerleaders in the media are primarily to blame. Their “more restrictions are better than fewer” approach to public health (after all, it is just “common sense” that two masks work better than one) will slow the transition back to old norms. What if people can still carry or spread Covid-19 after they have been vaccinated? What if there are other consequences to getting Covid-19 even if you are not hospitalized? What if…?
There is no end to that line of questioning. Furthermore, now that the camel’s nose is under the tent (in terms of massively restricting economic and social activity and personal responsibility), who knows when there will be a “new” pathogen threat that will lead public health officials to declare that masks should be worn again.
Let me give you the most striking example of how mask-wearing has become a fetish and psychological talisman of safety - many towns and states in the northeast require that people wear face masks outside. Tell me: how many people have gotten the virus from walking past someone in a park or on a trail? Or tell me how the viral load people experience in open air is dramatically changed by someone wearing a mask or not?
But then again, my wife warns me not to bring up ideas like “viral load” if someone thinks I should be wearing a mask outside….
This pandemic highlights, yet again, how readily our society sacrifices spiritual, cultural, political, and moral well-being for material well-being. And even that is a narrowly defined sense of well-being ignoring economic prosperity and security, quality of life, and other margins of health besides Covid-19.
As long as we can keep people healthy and safe (from the virus), that’s what we should do. It’s part of the long line of concern about the body but not so much about the soul. I think Jesus said something about this…
On Politics
As much as I wish this weren’t the case, Trump is still around and still has high approval rates among Republicans. Why is that? What can we do about it?
Trump’s popularity seems to come largely from his lack of political correctness. He simply refuses to say or do what elites of both parties want him to do. There is a kind of courage, and recklessness, in his unwillingness to back down. As people are angry or afraid that their way of life will be changed by liberal elites imposing their will from D. C. (not like we have any microcosms of what this could look like in, ahem, New York, California, Washington, or Oregon), they look for champions who won’t compromise.
I think this largely explains why Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is far more popular among Republican voters than Rick Scott (former governor and current senator) and Marco Rubio (current senator), and even more popular than Trump. He calls things the way he sees them and refuses to back down under pressure or criticism.
This quality, whether courage, hubris, or plain stubbornness, looks like a kind of antidote to modern cancel culture - and I think that is why so many people are drawn to figures with this quality.
The danger is that the infantile and the arrogant can exercise this quality as well as the wise and the virtuous. The same quality that is admirable in defense of truth or doing what is right, is destructive when implemented in defense of one’s vanity or when holding to conspiracy theories and refusing to change one’s mind about anything.
Whether or not Trump runs for President in 2024, Trumpism is not going anywhere and we need to think about how to constrain, direct, or even resist it depending on who takes the mantle and to what ends.
On the Economy
I wish I had more to say here, but keep an eye on the 1.9 trillion stimulus bill as well as states reopening lots of areas of business over the next three months. A lot of crazy things may start happening in housing, the stock market, inflation, and interest rates. Prepare yourself for shortages and lack of availability of all kinds of things as the economy overheats.
Oh, and prices will almost certainly be going up - unless we have a massive bout of debt deflation coinciding with financial distress and culminating in a recession. Then we may not.
Reasons for Optimism
But I will say, despite being pessimistic about how well people will be able to transition away from mask-wearing, and pessimistic about the prospects of the economy over the next couple of years, and pessimistic about “Trumpism” being here to stay, I see some glimmers of optimism on the horizon.
I hope these troubles will be temporary. It turns out an awful lot of people really don’t like to have their lives put on hold, or potentially ruined, by bureaucrats - especially when they disagree about the reasons proffered by said bureaucrats for messing up their life. We know this because people are fleeing, fleeing mind you, from places like New York City and California to freer places like Texas and Florida even though (gasp) they don’t have as many Covid protocols in place (or none, anymore, in Texas).
Even large amounts of bailout money from the federal government, at the expense of the rest of the country, will not save NY and CA if they don’t change their governance structures and corruption. What I see happening in the next ten years is an acceleration of the trend of the last ten years - namely money, business, people, and political clout shifting away from badly managed blue states to more red and purple states. We will also likely see more diffusion of capital and talent to other major metro areas like Denver and Atlanta.
This is all to the good, except maybe for the blue states that refuse to get their act together and find themselves facing problem after crisis after budget shortfall.
What I Have Been Reading
Biblical Theology by Michael Lawrence
I will write more about this for next week, but Michael was one of my pastors in D. C. for a couple years before moving to a church in Portland. He preached an incredibly formative and memorable sermon series on Numbers that I highly recommend.
Thanks for reading!