Centralization v. Cultural Diversity
Abir Ballan, who is more radical than me as regards things COVID (despite having a Master’s in Public Health), had a nice thread a couple of days ago about the bigger battle being waged in our society today being a battle between centralization and decentralization. Our response to COVID is just one field in that battle. Who really gets to make the rules about how society will function - a few people at the top, or is decision making spread throughout the population (and ultimately down to the individual)?
Around the same time I saw a tweet from the good Wrath of Gnon.
Now I don't know if Wrath is literally correct about that, but it is true that styles of architecture and city design that Americans enjoy can only be found in older US cities and Europe, in part because... it would be illegal to build them today. We have decided to prioritize safety and convenience (what we thought was such anyway), and wrote zoning and planning laws around those concerns that made our cities less human. (You might therefore say that making our lives less human in order to make them a little more safe is not a new thing - COVID has pushed that tendency into absolute overdrive, but it isn’t a new thing.)
But it also makes the point that strong central governments are inherently antagonistic to cultural diversity, in the broadest sense of the term. A few people get together. They decide on “best practices”. Those practices are then promulgated to and mandated upon the masses. And so you get a great uniformity in life (I’ve seen the word “smooth” employed a lot lately, we have a very “smooth” society, everything is the same everywhere). Indeed, people who want to do something else are seen as threatening. Given how much progressives say they love diversity, and plainly love a strong central government, they might pause for a moment and consider how much those two impulses are at odds with each other.
I’ll give you one more local example on my mind - Libertas Christian School, a nearby school which became a target of their county health department for continuing to have chapel services and not masking students. One argument they made went something like “we grew out of an association of homeschooling parents and it is wrong to apply to us the same standards you wrote with industrialized public schools in mind”. I don’t think it’s wrong to rephrase that as, “we are culturally different from you and would like a right of self-determination”. And what did the state say to that? They said what centralized government is always inclined to say - “pshaw, you’re going to do what we say”.