The suffocating planning of our existence
I freely admit this short post is mainly an excuse to share a couple of quotations I found interesting… but with a little independent thought around them. So here we go.
NUMBER ONE. I follow a fair number of Australians on Twitter, including several Australian pastors, actually. And it has been interesting to watch their evolving reaction to their own government’s COVID-19 measures. At first, I would say there was overwhelming support for them, and perhaps that made sense at first. Claire Lehmann of Quillette has been mocked a lot lately for saying that unlike Americans, Australians trust their government, but perhaps that was true. And after all, aside from vigorous efforts to keep any ill person from entering the country, life continued quite normally compared to what was seen elsewhere in the Anglosphere. For a time there, I think a lot of us wished we were in Australia.
But Australia had its own version of “15 days to flatten the curve”, and measures that were supposed to be brief and temporary dragged on, and got more oppressive (and very oppressive, there), with no indication now of what conditions could be met that would ever cause them to stop. And so people reevaluated their support. As part of that, lately we’ve seen some very large protests in Australian cities against vaccine mandates.
Commenting upon those protests, from a long-time Australian follow yesterday, and a Roman Catholic as you might guess… but I do like this quotation.
I think that’s right. As far as vaccines go, I’ve said this before, but if people really believed “just two shots and we’ll never bother you again”, there would be much less opposition. Some people don’t want ‘em, but if that was going to be it and then you’ll leave me alone forever, OK, you’re a bully, and your behavior is immoral, but if this is our country now I’ll pay that bribe to get you off my back. But people sense, and have excellent evidence now that their sense is correct, that what they’re really endorsing is an indefinite and always growing amount of “expert” planning of their lives, that our “to control COVID” measures could quite easily be repeated even post-mass-vaccination (indeed we are seeing people make those demands right now in geographies that have 90-100% vaccination rates), and also easily extended to cover other areas of life, especially since “public health” is itself an extremely vague term just asking to be redefined in whatever way serves the powerful.
This is not a quotation I intended to share, but I thought Wes Pegden had quite a perceptive comment a couple of days ago on what you might call the political psychology of state interventions.
NUMBER TWO. If you don’t like Ratzinger and need a safe Reformed fellow, one of those really quality presbyterian types… OK, this is a pretty well-known classic quotation now, but Ratzinger above did also remind me of a quotation from the libertarian Machen. And just to say it explicitly, both make the point that the planned-by-others life is a diminished life, that such planning is inherently anti-human-flourishing, to use some popular language today.
If you’d like some more reading on the topic, I would direct you to R.R. Reno’s good essay on Safetyism in the November issue of First Things.
Loss of faith in the authorities is a big part of opposition to lockdowns/mandates. When you say an emergency justifies you taking enormous amounts of power, and then you completely fail to resolve the emergency, people will start seeing you as useless, and really, worse than useless.