We’ve paid steeply to control this virus. The price has not just been in government borrowing but in the tattered warp and weft of our common life. Maybe the price has been worth paying: even under lockdown, a staggering 126,000 UK citizens died within 28 days of a Covid test over the last year. But the cost has been unfathomable as well, both individually and collectively — and it has not been evenly borne.
Over the past year, I ran more than a thousand miles. I counted my blessings with every step. Compared to many I have been lucky. I kept running as the hedgerows blossomed, greened, fruited and blew bare, and the world outside came increasingly to resemble a bleak and hallucinatory shadow-show. Even if everything else has seemed insubstantial, the paths under my feet stayed put: unchanged except by the seasons coming and going.
It’s easy to conclude that it’s all unreal, and to turn away. But the point is precisely that that out there is not a shadow-show: it’s an emerging new normal. It’s just difficult to see, because everything now, from our media to government lockdown policy, seems geared toward “just me” or “everything” — but nothing in between.
Who cares about local life, now our public conversation happens online, at colossal scale, in terms set by Chinese ambassadors and Ivy League social justice evangelists and massaged by algorithms? The answer has to be: us. We care. Even as it’s grown harder to see our life in common, we need it more than ever. The alternative is a future governed purely by Aella’s Law: an unjust, atomised, deeply inhuman place.
I’m hesitant to belabor this point, especially because I’ve already written about this. Additionally, I’ve become more hopeful about things on this side of the pond, with the accelerating output of vaccinations and whatnot. I’m also trying to think in more constructive terms generally — not just bitching about Things That Grind Robbie’s Gears. But, I think that Harrington’s warning about Aella’s Law bears hearing. I encourage you to read the entire piece.
I sometimes (often?) express antipathy toward media, corporate, and governmental institutions, and I worry that I sound like a raving anti-mask Q-anon enthusiast to my friends and family. But this last year has been boon for entities that parasitically thrive on crises. The pandemic gave our Bay Area overlords the opportunity to augment surveillance capitalism with the shock doctrine. When I hear politicians (whose campaigns often receive considerable financing from Silicon Valley) extol the virtues of draconian health and safety measures, the reality of “disaster capitalism” colors my perspective. Amazon, Zoom, and Netflix have all had a banner year.
Like I said, I’ve been feeling something like hope, maybe even optimism, lately. Spring is arriving here in Virginia, I just returned from a road trip through the deep south to Florida (the subject of another post), and I have my first Pfizer Nectar appointment scheduled. This optimism causes me to cringe a bit at Harrington’s use of that damnable phrase, “new normal”. As the risks of conviviality and embodiment continue to abate, I think people will be beating down the doors of bars, churches, and music venues; I’d even say they already are.
The remarkable thing about the attention economy is that in order to be free even while living in the midst of it, you simply need to be deliberate about where you direct your attention. As people are increasingly unhappy with the psychological regime of outrage and terror, they discover all they need to do is walk away. It doesn’t take much to remember that Doordash, YouTube, and livestreams are poor substitutes for the things they mediate.
Harrington says that we need to be the people who care about our local life. If the conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues are any indication, many already do care. And this gives me hope.
Happy fourth anniversary to my beautiful, hilarious, joyful, and faithful wife @jensaplin. ❤️ Thanks for all the memories, and for keeping better records than I do.
This video is probably the most Orange County thing I’ve watched in a long, long time. Maybe it’s the pandemic, or the icy winter we’ve been having here, but, much as I consider VA home now, watching this made me a little homesick.
The strange, new circumstances of 2020 entailed a number of strange, new behaviors — “social distancing”, wearing masks, working from home, “toobin” (for some). I think I uttered the phrase “public health” more in one month than I had in my entire life until March 2020. Suddenly, my blissfully unaware self was inundated with a string of strange, new directives, necessitating strange, new thoughts and behaviors.
Of course, the strange, new thing was a little understood, highly contagious virus that was spreading rapidly. Our governments were thoroughly unprepared for it. The United States, historically seen as an economic, diplomatic, and military leader, found itself less equipped to handle the disaster than a Texas grocery store chain. In a scramble to maintain the stability of our health care system, we forced ourselves minimize embodiment. The bodies and breath of others, those essential, irreducible aspects of their humanity, became “transmission vectors” to avoid. Hugging and singing suddenly entailed considerable risk. Of course, covering the lower half of our faces and leaving six feet of space between each other were ways of acknowledging and honoring our embodiment. By striving to protect one another in this way for a time, we recognized that life is bound up in our bodies.
Nonetheless, I think that many people have come to realize that such a way of living and relating is fundamentally undesirable and unsustainable. Most people I talk with, even those who adjusted quite well at the start of the pandemic, are eager to get vaccinated and once again embrace a grandparent, work in an office, go to a basketball game, or listen to live music. What was often called the “new normal” has proven to be deeply abnormal, a recognition I’ve heard echoed by many people. But there are also subtle and not-so-subtle advocates for the normalization of our new habits. I don’t think theirs is the dominant preference; it seems to be a view espoused by the very online, the future-oriented, for whom human life is more experiment than experience.
A commercial I recently saw for Amazon Web Services, the cloud infrastructure platform provided by Amazon, illustrates such an attitude. It was narrated by a young girl. We see her waving to and thanking a Doordash delivery-woman as she drops off some food on her family’s porch. We see her father riding a Peloton, followed by her submitting school assignments on Blackboard, watching a movie on a projector in the backyard, and chatting with elderly relatives on Zoom. “Well, things are different these days, but we’re figuring it out”, she says. She tells us that her dad’s made some new workout buddies, and that, while doing school online, she’s “learning a lot”. The ad closes with text telling the viewer that AWS is how Zoom, Doordash, Peloton, etc. keep us all “connected”.
I saw this ad while visiting in-laws in rural Texas. I can only speculate as to why this ad was on cable television, whose audience is unlikely to have any direct use for AWS’s offerings. Neither can I imagine that anyone who actually would use AWS infrastructure to host a digital product would be swayed either way by this commercial. I don’t think cute ads play much of a role in enterprise software decision-making. The ad’s very existence only makes sense as a propaganda piece — it isn’t selling a service, but a worldview. “Food, health, learning, human interaction — whatever your need, we make possible its fulfillment”, the ad implies. “Everything is okay because of us”. Never mind that the family in the ad lives in a spacious suburban home, replete with devices. Never mind that the masked Doordash driver “smiling with her eyes” probably cannot make a living wage. Never mind the lost work, the closure of locally owned business, the economic devastation of communities, the well-documented shortcomings in education for the most vulnerable. The frightening dissonance between the experiences of our society’s technocratically-minded professional class and those most acutely afflicted by the pandemic’s effects is on full display.
This economic, political, and cultural disconnect existed well before a virus jumped from a bat to a pangolin to a human. But the alienation and fear that were already embedded in people’s psyches were exacerbated as we had to turn away from one another and toward the black mirrors in our hands and homes. I don’t think it requires much imagination to see how such compounding circumstances could make a large number of people vulnerable to believing and internalizing a set of delusions — delusions that, in turn, compel their believers to do something like invading the seat of American democracy in the hopes of overturning a presidential election.
Countless thinkpieces explore the whys and hows of such an event. “It’s the evangelicals”. “It’s the Democratic party’s betrayal of the working class”. “It’s the president’s rhetoric”. “It’s cowardly Republican politicians who want to be reelected”. “It’s disinformation and radicalization on social media platform XYZ”. I think all of these theses are correct to some degree. But I think that the last one points to a latent malaise that exacerbated the others.
The winners in our current economic and technological order have an incentive to perpetuate the conditions that make the events of January 6th possible. To shift away from the physical toward the virtual is to shift away from one reality to another. These virtual realities enrich their maintainers though engagement; the veracity of the realities that users are engaging with is irrelevant. Their business models necessitate the perpetuation of falsehood, since falsehood has proved effective in maintaining engagement.
I think repairing these virtual realities is impossible. Their viability as a product for their true customers (advertisers) requires them to double-down on the same features that cause profound psychological harm to their users. If we cannot fix virtual realities, then we must walk away from them altogether. We must return to one another in the real world, from “cyberspace” to “meatspace”, from abstractions to bodies.
This pandemic season has forced on many of us the painful absence of face-to-face relationships. When we are once again free to pursue these embodied relationships, we might discover that they also represent our best antidote to the information virus: other human beings who force us to confront complexity rather than caricature, and who challenge us to maintain friends, not just followers. But antidotes, like vaccines, don’t always come easily. They take work, risk, and perseverance.
Work, risk, and perseverance are, of course, the very necessities that the purveyors of technologically mediated ease want to nullify. Why talk with waitstaff and wait for a meal when it can be brought to you? Why go to a smelly gym or risk the discomfort of the elements when you can ride an exercise bike in the comfort of your own home? Why crowd into a theater and bump elbows with strangers when a personally optimized algorithm suggests viewing options to you from the comfort of your couch?
The pandemic allowed those fortunate enough to afford it the opportunity to eliminate considerable friction from their lives. But in order to recover our communities and ourselves, more friction may be the very thing we need. We learn patience as we wait on food, await our turn for the squat rack, and try to find a seat in the theater. When we go to a restaurant, we are slightly less removed from the hands that prepared our food. We can observe and mimic the form of another when working out in a gym or class in a way that we can’t while watching a workout video. And we share collective laughter and tears when we watch a movie in a theater.
Friction is not a guarantor of virtue, but neither is ease. Friction can break us out of our solipsism and myopia; it opens us to otherness and expands our horizons. It both disenchants us of our illusions and re-enchants the world with the mystery of the unfamiliar. For many, this pandemic has exacerbated the friction of existence to a nigh intolerable degree — the healthcare workers facing death daily, the already disadvantaged students regressing in their learning, the small business owners who have lost their livelihoods, and those who have lost loved ones or their very lives to this disease. But for the rest of us who haven’t experienced such loss, it afforded us the opportunity to mitigate a lot of friction.
Such frictionless-ness has hidden costs. When the complexity of things is abstracted away, it doesn’t cease to exist; it is simply placed out of sight. As we eliminate friction from our lives, we replace it with illusion. And collective illusions, about our own righteousness, about the wickedness of others, about our lack of responsibility for ourselves and our communities, have brought us here. As the risk of this new virus is mitigated, we need to embrace friction and embodiment again. Drink a cup of coffee with a neighbor. See a movie. Meet a stranger and shake their hand. Hug a grandparent. Sing songs in church. Smell the sweat of another. Wait in a line. And while you wait, try not to check your phone.
Happy New Year! It feels like it was both so recently and so long ago that I wrote up my list of favorite reads from the first half of 2020. Going forward, I think I’ll write one of these entries quarterly, if only for the fact that it’s easier to summon thoughts about something I read three months ago, rather than six.
S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland —— When I wrote the previous “favorite reads” list, I was in the middle of reading this southern noir and so badly wanted to include it. This novel has all the elements of a page-turning crime thriller while also grappling with themes of race, class, and family. Cosby’s a Virginia native, and his home state also provides the setting for the novel. It was the perfect book for my first full summer living in my new home state.
Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom —— This short book also made it onto my list of suggested reading for new and recovering Christians. It’s a brief but profound guide on communing with God, and understanding how the love of God frees us from the falsehoods we believe about ourselves.
Zadie Smith, Intimations —— A collection of short essays/meditations written during the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to drop what they were doing.
John Scalzi, The Last Emperox —— A stellar conclusion to Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead —— I really admire Jacobs, and enjoy almost anything he writes. This book, a guide to developing a tranquil mind through encountering the past, was no exception. Look for a forthcoming piece over at Mockingbird, putting Jacobs’ book in conversation with Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black, which is also featured on this list.
Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips, Pulp —— Another graphic novel(la) from Brubaker and Phillips, this one about an aging pulp writer in America during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. I really like this straight-to-hardcover approach they’re taking, publishing entire stories at once. It allows creators to experiment with stories that don’t lend themselves to the serialized format that’s the current standard for comics.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. 1 —— Bob Dylan’s memoirs were really interesting to me. They provided such an intimate portrait of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in the 50s and 60s, and made a legendary place and the people associated with it feel very approachable, even mundane.
Christopher L. Heuertz, The Sacred Enneagram —— Jenoa and I took an Enneagram test during premarital counseling a few years ago. I was initially skeptical of the whole thing, but over the years have found its descriptions of motivations and behaviors to be pretty reliable. Heurtz’s book helped me deepen my understanding of the Enneagram as a tool for better understanding people.
Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black —— Also on my list of suggested reading for new and recovering Christians, McCaulley’s book is easily one of my top favorites from all of 2020. McCaulley introduces readers to “Black ecclesial interpretation” of scripture, a little-understood and often neglected hermeneutical tradition. Although a scholar himself, McCaulley’s book is primarily written for laypeople, and he draws heavily on his own experiences struggling with both scripture and the injustices that acutely afflict African Americans. As I mentioned earlier, I recently wrote something putting McCaulley’s book in conversation with Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead, so be on the lookout for that.
Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive —— This book radically changed my thoughts on self-driving cars, and driving in general. A medley of philosophy, memoir, and journalism, Crawford’s book grapples with and calls on readers to resist the increasing bureaucratic administration and streamlining of our lives by both corporations and government. A really original, thought-provoking, and surprisingly fun piece of political writing that does not adhere to any of our current partisan pieties.
Marilynne Robinson, Jack —— Jack is the most recent entry in Marilynne Robinson’s series of books that began with Gilead. The novel’s protagonist is an enigma to himself, and forces the reader to reflect on matters of free will and spiritual determinism (predestination!) in a way that, in the end, summons us to both sober self-assessment and compassion. I really enjoyed learning this character’s backstory, and the novel deepened my appreciation for Robinson as a writer.
Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park —— I needed a really potent distraction during the month of November, so a book about dinosaurs hunting humans on account of scientific hubris fit the bill. I had read this probably ten years ago, but enjoyed it this time even more than I remembered. The book differs from the movie in some significant ways, enough that it will feel fresh even if you’ve just watched Spielberg’s adaptation.
John Bellairs, The Letter, The Witch, and The Ring —— Although it’s the third book in a series and I hadn’t read the first two, Bellairs’ novel for young readers was still great fun. Road trips, old houses, magic, and coming of age.
Michael Jecks, The Last Templar —— A medieval murder mystery set in an English village in the early 14th century that deals with the trial and extermination of the Knights Templar.
trans. J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo —— I read Sir Gawain for an English lit class in college, and remember enjoying it. After talking about it with some friends recently, I decided to re-read it for Christmas, this time with Tolkien’s translation. It was a pleasure to read, as were the other poems, “Pearl” and “Sir Orfeo”.
trans. Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf —— The last book I read on 2020, finishing it on New Year’s Eve, might also have been my favorite. Dahvana’s feminist translation humanizes the characters of Beowulf. Her translation employs contemporary idiom, slang, and profanity in a weird alchemy that almost seems to unite the psyches of the poem’s readers and subjects. My friend Kendall wrote up some great thoughts on Headley’s translation that you should check out if you’re not already convinced to pick it up.
