It seems self-evident that without an understanding of and commitment to our own basic principles, the underpinnings of both our government and our institutions are undermined. At some point – and we can argue about exactly when it happened – in the last century (maybe with its beginning even earlier), the right stopped paying attention as the left took over the institutions ordinarily tasked with performing the transmission of such things to the next generation. This includes, in particular, education, popular entertainment, the church, and the press.
The right may have thought these things were on automatic, and that not much attention needed to be paid. Little by little, as they were undermined, it either was not noticed, or thought localized or trivial.
Then all at once it became very very apparent. But by then it was either way too late, or at least so late that the scope of the effort required to undo the harm seemed (and still seems) enormous and perhaps impossible. The institutions and shared beliefs that had once seemed so solid remained only as facades and hollowed-out shells, if that.
It’s only in the last decade or so (accelerating during the Trump years, on watching the self-styled “Resistance”) that it’s become clear that the philosophy of “the ends justifies the means” has become acceptable operating procedure not just to far left activists (who always believed that), but to most rank and file Democrats. It’s also become clear that way too many Republican legislators lack either the will or the guts or the ability to fight it, and that there are powerful other forces working for it behind the scenes – the administrative state and all the agencies, as well as foreign interests such as China.
Commenter “PA Cat” draws our attention to this Tablet article that focuses on COVID and China, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about:
Lockdowns, the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?
Indeed; good question. We have plunged into something unprecedented in the West, and which was sold to us as highly temporary. Remember that? It’s hard to overestimate the changes that have been wrought by these lockdowns, not just in patterns of societal interaction and assembly that have lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years, but in people’s thinking about how acceptable or unacceptable such things are.
More:
Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media.
China didn’t just give us the disease; it gave us the template on how to fight it. We only implemented these lockdown measures in a half-hearted way compared to China, but it was enough to send shock waves through our society and economy.
One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed.
I don’t think we would have accepted lockdowns seventy-five years ago or even twenty years ago, no matter where they came from. It was understood that risk was always part of life and that there was no avoiding it, and that the cost of trying to do so would represent a “cure” that was worse than the disease. What preceded our acquiescing to lockdowns (or more than just that 2 weeks to “flatten the curve”) was fear and the desire to control all negative outcomes, plus the idea that we had the knowledge to do so.
I suppose you could call it a kind of hubris. At any rate, we have lost a great deal, much of it psychological and philosophical. And by “we,” I mean the developed Western world. It didn’t take much, either; this virus was nowhere near as bad as the storm we weathered in 1918 without destroying ourselves.
The article goes on to say that we believed fraudulent news that China had controlled the virus through lockdowns. I had once assumed that reports of Chinese success in that endeavor was most likely a lie by China, but at some point I decided that we really don’t know. It might even be true that China controlled it by Draconian measures.
But so what? Does that mean that it would be worth it for us to do the same in order to fight a virus of some lethality but not so very out of the ordinary? In other words, what price liberty? After all, “Hitler made the trains run on time” and all that. We have long known that tyrannies are better at some things than messy republics are. We have to decide whether giving up our liberty is worth it to us.
If our children haven’t been taught to value liberty, it’s very easy for them to surrender it. And that’s what’s been happening. From the start of the COVID mess I noticed huge generational gaps – at least, for the people I know – which followed a seemingly counter-intuitive pattern. It was older people like me who were somewhat more cavalier about the virus: less likely to support lockdowns and more likely to assert that in a pandemic losses are inevitable. It was our children who were much more lockdown-friendly. That breakdown may not be universally true, but my own observations (and those of friends) led me to believe that the attitude was in line with a greater concern for absolute and total safety that I’ve noticed recently in a lot of young people.
More from the article:
Journalists have flailed about to construct reality in a way that pleases the CCP and their investors while being at least remotely plausible to their middle class readers. To date, this is the best they’ve come up with: A supervirus emerged that was so deadly only Chinese totalitarianism could stop it; it caused spontaneous death in Wuhan (but nowhere else) until Xi’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated it from all of China (but nowhere else), while a steady stream of “variants” now demands indefinite lockdown measures.
Journalists’ downplaying and suppressing any information that contradicts this science-fiction narrative has left those that trust them confused and scared, faced with a seemingly unbeatable virus with inexplicable characteristics and a crisis that makes no logical sense. “The science” changes constantly, sometimes overnight…
…[There] is a widespread government and media-inspired terror of the virus that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses…
For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible. Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government’s decision to employ drastic lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.”
A feedback loop creating a cycle of lockdowns.
This is the ending of the essay, and I have bolded the part that is directly related to the point I’m making in this post:
From journalists and judges to politicians and common professionals, the public has granted health officials one exception after another to their most fundamental rights, and they’ve been misled every step of the way. Whether out of gullibility, face-saving incompetence, or something worse, they’ve brought the world to a frightening place.
For political watchers, it’s been baffling to watch leaders muddle through the most inexplicable geopolitical debacle since the Thirty Years’ War. It is equally terrifying to know that a policy catastrophe of this scale is possible in the 21st century. But judging by his regime’s activities and the story of how all this began, at least one world leader was well aware of this potential.
For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. As lockdown policies grind on into their 18th month, it’s increasingly difficult to disagree with him.
Those “norms and institutions” were passed down more recently without inculcating the reasons behind them: why they are important, how they function to protect us, and what the dangers are in subverting them in what is perceived as a crisis. Without knowledge of those things, adherence to those “norms and institutions” is hollow. It is so weak it can be knocked over and destroyed by a threat as relatively minor as COVID, which although destructive is nothing like as bad as what many past generations weathered. This destruction would not have occurred had the ground not been fully prepared.
