I’m actually optimistic about the general direction of COVID policy in the United States now. As Walter Kim declared a couple of days ago: I would also direct you to Eugyppius’ recent “how we get out of this” post which, after you get past the first paragraph, is optimistic as well. And because it is relevant to my post today, let me just mention that, in a comment, I said that for a day or two there in 2020 I thought the BLM protests in the US might be the “end” of COVID here. Not that the disease would go away, of course, but rather that we have a culture, and especially a media culture, that just flits from one obsession to another, and therefore it seemed briefly possible that racism obsession would replace COVID obsession. Or, put another way, secularists looking for a god keep jumping from one presently popular deity to another. I appreciated his reply. Remember that in Germany they don’t know about capital letters (little joke there!).
"The people who.... now..." is a template that used to require a decade or more (e.g. "whoah, both sides sure shifted on anti-Russian hawkishness") to be fully accurate, but now you can literally shift news stories by 365 days and find it everywhere. A story about cops beating down a septagenarian in the streets during a protest would be (and indeed was!) the focus of days of social media outrage about police brutality in 2020, but provokes little more a shoulder shrug when it happens in Austria in 2021.
The disorientation brought about by this kind of narrative churn is part of its purpose. It's a flex by the media power structures, demonstrating that they can change the rules of the game at any time in any way they way. But it trains the general public to trust authority rather than tradition, so that the New Religion becomes one more similar to a modern cult than to a historical faith community -- I'd say "Mormonism not Russian Orthodoxy", but that's horribly unfair to the Mormons I've known!
I agree that “secular societies (and progressivism) are very spiritually and psychologically unstable”. Unfortunately that does not imply that "deeply traditional, religious societies" are stable. They offer a much more fertile ground for individual human beings to achieve incredible things from solid foundation (think Bach), but things can still go very wrong (book recommendation: Vesper Stamper, A Cloud of Outrageous Blue).
What elements of our present societies are incompatible with a "deeply traditional, religious society"? Twitter? Centralized data collection and surveillance (definitely not "local surveillance" by your neighbours and the village)? The concept of a profile (cf the discussion of identity formation via sincerity, authenticity or profilicity, HG Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio)?
One way the World War Two analogy appeals to me is that in the '30s in America, there was a lot of ideological tumult, a lot of despair, not a lot of good reason to have faith in government. Total war generated a clear ideology, a sense of purpose, enormous government power, and willingness to obey the exertion of that power. You see the parallels with covid lockdowns.
It might be worth thinking about Plato's idea of the transition from democracy to tyranny, e.g.: "Indeed, excess in one direction generally tends to produce a violent reaction in the opposite direction … the only likely reaction to excessive freedom, whether for an individual or for a polity, is excessive slavery … the chances are that democracy is the ideal place to find the origin of tyranny – the harshest and most complete slavery arising from the most extreme freedom … At this point, it seems, the thing is an acknowledged tyranny. The people have jumped out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire … they have exchanged the ample – too ample – freedom they had before for the hair shirt of the most harsh and galling form of slavery, the slavery imposed by slaves." (from 'The Republic', book 8).
"The people who.... now..." is a template that used to require a decade or more (e.g. "whoah, both sides sure shifted on anti-Russian hawkishness") to be fully accurate, but now you can literally shift news stories by 365 days and find it everywhere. A story about cops beating down a septagenarian in the streets during a protest would be (and indeed was!) the focus of days of social media outrage about police brutality in 2020, but provokes little more a shoulder shrug when it happens in Austria in 2021.
The disorientation brought about by this kind of narrative churn is part of its purpose. It's a flex by the media power structures, demonstrating that they can change the rules of the game at any time in any way they way. But it trains the general public to trust authority rather than tradition, so that the New Religion becomes one more similar to a modern cult than to a historical faith community -- I'd say "Mormonism not Russian Orthodoxy", but that's horribly unfair to the Mormons I've known!
I agree that “secular societies (and progressivism) are very spiritually and psychologically unstable”. Unfortunately that does not imply that "deeply traditional, religious societies" are stable. They offer a much more fertile ground for individual human beings to achieve incredible things from solid foundation (think Bach), but things can still go very wrong (book recommendation: Vesper Stamper, A Cloud of Outrageous Blue).
What elements of our present societies are incompatible with a "deeply traditional, religious society"? Twitter? Centralized data collection and surveillance (definitely not "local surveillance" by your neighbours and the village)? The concept of a profile (cf the discussion of identity formation via sincerity, authenticity or profilicity, HG Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio)?
One way the World War Two analogy appeals to me is that in the '30s in America, there was a lot of ideological tumult, a lot of despair, not a lot of good reason to have faith in government. Total war generated a clear ideology, a sense of purpose, enormous government power, and willingness to obey the exertion of that power. You see the parallels with covid lockdowns.
It might be worth thinking about Plato's idea of the transition from democracy to tyranny, e.g.: "Indeed, excess in one direction generally tends to produce a violent reaction in the opposite direction … the only likely reaction to excessive freedom, whether for an individual or for a polity, is excessive slavery … the chances are that democracy is the ideal place to find the origin of tyranny – the harshest and most complete slavery arising from the most extreme freedom … At this point, it seems, the thing is an acknowledged tyranny. The people have jumped out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire … they have exchanged the ample – too ample – freedom they had before for the hair shirt of the most harsh and galling form of slavery, the slavery imposed by slaves." (from 'The Republic', book 8).