Alan Jacobs

My questions concern Adrian Vermeule's already-much-talked-about argument for “Common-Good Constitutionalism” — especially this paragraph: 

As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. The state is to be entrusted with the authority to protect the populace from the vagaries and injustices of market forces, from employers who would exploit them as atomized individuals, and from corporate exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. Unions, guilds and crafts, cities and localities, and other solidaristic associations will benefit from the presumptive favor of the law, as will the traditional family; in virtue of subsidiarity, the aim of rule will be not to displace these associations, but to help them function well. Elaborating on the common-good principle that no constitutional right to refuse vaccination exists, constitutional law will define in broad terms the authority of the state to protect the public’s health and well-being, protecting the weak from pandemics and scourges of many kinds — biological, social, and economic — even when doing so requires overriding the selfish claims of individuals to private “rights.” Thus the state will enjoy authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals who so often place their own satisfactions (financial and sexual) and the good of their class or social milieu above the common good.

The entire paragraph is cast in the future tense: the auxiliary verb “will” appears seven times. But note that it undergoes a transformation. At the beginning we learn about what common-good constitutionalism (CGC, let’s call it) will favor; but most of the paragraph concerns what will happen under the beneficent rule of CGC. Vermeule starts with a dream and then assumes that the dream will come true. 

But what are the chances? How will CGC manifest itself electorally? Will the Republican Party be converted to CGC, or will there be a new party that emerges to promote and embody it? 

More: What is the role of Congress in this vision of CGC-in-action? At one point Vermeule says that “the general-welfare clause, which gives Congress 'power to … provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,' is an obvious place to ground principles of common-good constitutionalism,” but if so, why does he describe how it works exclusively in terms of "a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy”? The whole vision seems to be focused on policies created and overseen by the Executive branch — what need has CGC for Congress?

And if there is no substantive role for Congress, then in what sense is CGC “constitutionalism”? It sounds more like Viktor Orban’s Hungary than the United States of America. It’s hard for me to see how CGC emerges, at least as it’s described here, without significant changes to the Constitution itself, including perhaps changes to the Bill of Rights. (In one mention of rights he puts the word in scare-quotes, in another he writes, "Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go.”) What are the rights recognized by CGC? Or, to put the point another and more general way, what is the constitution in relation to which this is constitutionalism? 

Finally: Who, in Vermeule’s vision of CGC, determines what the common good actually is? As I read the essay I kept thinking of Rousseau’s “general will,” which does not know itself and therefore has to be instructed, in a sense created, by Those Who Know. 

I see a whole bunch of Christian pastors and intellectuals going online to articulate a Theory of Worship for Coronavirustide. But of course those theories widely diverge. Here’s why we must livestream … Here’s why we must not livestream. Here are our precedents. Here are our theological guardrails. 

Come on, folks. We’re trying to build this plane while flying it. We don’t get to patiently articulate a theory and then generate from that theory a practice. The only theory applicable to our situation is the theory of bricolage — of DIY, of making-it-up, of using-what's-to-hand.

In The Savage Mind (1952) Claude Levi-Strauss writes, "The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage.'” In coronavirustide, ritual action takes on the traits of mythical thought: it has to have recourse to a "heterogeneous repertoire” of acts and gestures, ways and means.

Let’s just accept the necessity of so heterogeneous a repertoire and see what comes of it. And let us do this in good hope! Levi-Strauss writes, "Like ‘bricolage' on the technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane.” I think I’m already seeing some of those “brilliant unforeseen results.” Let’s not worry too much about the theory and just play this out, using whatever resources are to hand, and while we’re doing so make sure to say, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” 

It has come to my attention that some among you don’t believe death is a very bad thing; or at least that there are many things more precious than life. This is in fact not true; life is the greatest of the gifts of God, because it is the one that makes every other gift possible. This is why we often honor those who sacrifice their own lives in order to save others. They give up something of unique value to themselves; we think of this as the greatest of sacrifices for a reason.  

This is also why people who refuse to compromise their strongest commitments even when it leads to their own death are so greatly praised and long remembered. When people do this for their Christian faith we call them martyrs — witnesses to that faith — and we give them the highest praise, because of how much their obedience and faithfulness cost them. We never expect people to be martyrs, and have compassion for those who fail to rise to that height.

But when people do give up their lives in such praiseworthy ways, why do they do so? They always do it for life: they give up their own so that others may have life and have it more abundantly. “Ah,” some of you may say, “but that refers to spiritual life.” That, my child, is an error. It is certainly true that we may distinguish between bios and zoe, but in this created order you cannot have the latter without also having the former. We are made embodied creatures and will remain so: this is why the resurrection of the body is the penultimate item of our Creed. This is also why Christians have historically practiced burial rather than cremation, as a sign that we love and treasure the physical body and hope to see it filled with life again, just as the dry bones in the valley Ezekiel saw regain sinew and then breath. 

Now, some of you have already perceived where I am going next. If life is so very good, does it not follow that death is proportionately bad? Yes, my child, you have rightly discerned the logic! Death, let us remember, is the curse laid upon Adam and Eve, and all of us since, for disobedience — and it is a mighty curse. When Jesus sees a gathering at Bethany weeping for the death of Lazarus, he too weeps; he too “is greatly disturbed.” (Les Murray: "he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it.”) Death is our great enemy — indeed, as St. Paul tells us, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” 

Our lives are not our own — as the Heidelberg Catechism teaches me, my only comfort in life and death is that I am not my own, but belong body and soul to my faithful savior Jesus Christ — but stewardship begins with our physical lives. We are to care for them, treasure them, take great pains to preserve them — and we are to do the same for the lives of our neighbors. And if we are ever called upon to give up our lives, we should do so only for the sake of the lives of our neighbors. We should certainly take greater care for their lives than we do for our own; but that is saying a lot, for we are accountable to God for the lives he has given us. 

All this is so elementary, so basic to Christianity that it should not need to be spelled out. But apparently it does. 

Giorgio Agamben: 

The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity. 

Rusty Reno: 

That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical professionals who fully understood the spread of disease and methods of quarantine. Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death. They bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives. 

I find this convergence quite interesting, and wish I had the time to trace the intellectual genealogy that led a post-Heideggerian, quasi-Foucauldian continental philosopher and a traditionalist Catholic to make precisely the same argument. Reno’s contemptuous dismissal of the value of “physical life” echoes Agamben’s “purely biological condition,” his famous concept of “bare life,” while Reno's attack on "a perennial state of fear and insecurity” echoes Agamben’s "perennial crisis and perennial emergency,” his equally famous “state of exception." (One common ancestor, I think: Carl Schmitt.)

But for now I’ll just note that perhaps the strongest obvious link between them is indifference to the truth of their historical claims. What Reno got wrong about the American response to the Spanish flu I mentioned in an earlier post; for a refutation of Agamben’s claim that a sense of emergency in plague time is a new phenomenon, see, for instance, this post by my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins, and Anastasia Berg's critique. When the facts get in the way of the narrative, print the narrative. 

UPDATE: One brief thought: We see here an excellent example of what happens when you over-extend a plausible thesis. For both Agamben and Reno technocratic modernity is really really Bad — that’s the plausible thesis! — so when they see uncomfortable social constraints occurring in the reign of technocratic modernity they think that technocratic modernity must, perforce, be the cause of those uncomfortable social constraints. So they instantly assume that earlier societies did not respond to plagues in the way that we do. But, it turns out, the primary factor shaping social behavior in time of plague is not technocratic modernity but rather the actual transmission of infectious disease. Imagine that: human behavior shaped not by ideology but by plain old, unavoidable old, biology. 

I am teaching three classes right now, distance-learning style. My students and I are isolated from one another, confined to our homes, denied the free movement we are accustomed to. Oh, and those classes?  

• In one we are reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, which John Bunyan began when he was in prison. 
• In the second we are reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. 
• In the third we are reading letters that St. Paul wrote while in prison. 

How’s that for a convergence? When I planned the semester I never noticed this rhyming of theme — nor, needless to say, did I anticipate that our very lives would be playing the same theme at this moment. 

Super-spoilery. 

I think my earlier prediction that Season 5 would not primarily be about Jimmy/Saul — because the transformation from the former into the latter is complete — has been borne out by subsequent episodes. Notice that the Saul storylines are largely comical, about his scams and tricks: filming stupid commercials, playing pranks on Howard, etc. It’s great fun, but nothing fundamental is at stake, because the character arc is essentially complete. 

Which leads us back to Kim. Episode 6 ends with a shocker: Kim suggesting to Jimmy that they get married. (At which my wife cried out Nooooo, and for very good reason.) I’m going to make another prediction: She doesn’t mean it. She is bitterly angry with Jimmy for having played her in the Mesa Verde case, and she is in turn playing him. This is payback. For a change, Kim will, at least for a moment, be the puppeteer pulling the strings. 

Think back to the beginning of the episode: young Kim standing outside her school, in the dark, waiting for her mother to pick her up. Mother finally arrives, drunk, and Kim takes a good look at her and says: I’m walking. Mother pleads; Kim walks. Mother pleads and wheedles and threatens; Kim keeps walking. Kim knew then when to draw the line, when enough is enough, when she’s not going to be played any more. And she still does. 

Thus my prediction. Let’s see if I’m right. 

[UPDATE: Wow was I wrong.] 

Nicholas Shackel: 

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed.

Scott Alexander has done a great job of explaining the widespread relevance of the motte-and-bailey tactic. And it is a tactic that is getting a heavy workout these days, especially from certain parts of the Christian Right (especially its Catholic-integralist, nationalist-fundamentalist, and snake-handling Baptist wings.) Here’s how the conversations go: 

A. We’re not going to practice any sissified “social distancing” — we’re followers of Jesus, and ours is not a spirit of fear. We’re not afraid to die! We know we’ll go to be with the Lord! 

B. Okay, that’s fine for you, but what about all the people you might infect? What if they aren’t ready to die? What if they’re not even Christians? And anyway, should you be making that decision for them? 

A. Ah, those people aren’t going to die. This thing is basically just the flu, and the whole panic has been whipped up by the media to discredit the President. 

A’s first statement is the bailey, his second the motte. First he makes a bold show of defying death, and then, when his position is challenged, he avers that death isn’t at all likely. But that’s a completely different position. “People of faith should not fear” bears little resemblance, as a moral claim, to “People who are in no real danger should not fear.” The second position acknowledges what the first denies: that wisdom requires discerning the dangers of different situations and adjusting your behavior accordingly. (I cross my driveway without looking but I wouldn’t cross a highway during rush hour without looking.) Not adjusting your behavior according to risk is the first principle of True Faith in A’s initial statement; but, sensing that that stance won’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny, he beats a quick retreat to the motte of “No real danger here,” which is at least more defensible than the absolutism of the first claim.  

Alexander writes, “So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement” — or perhaps a statement that’s widely accepted in your social circle — “so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.” And that’s how it goes with the Ours-is-not-a-spirit-of-fear crowd too. 

There’s a lot to be thought and debated about how to reach the right balance of policies in a time like this, to minimize both loss of life and economic devastation. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. Here I’m reflecting on how Christians should understand these matters, and maybe one way to start is give up the motte-and-bailey dance and decide what your actual position is. If what you really think is that Christians should never be afraid of death, then grasp that nettle. That restaurant server who attends your church, who desperately needs the money but is afraid of getting seriously ill because she has pre-existing health issues and there’s no one but her to take care of her children? Person of weak faith. Failure as a Christian. “Get out there and bring me my quesadillas.” 

Rusty Reno: 

That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical professionals who fully understood the spread of disease and methods of quarantine. Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death. They bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives. 

Richard J. Hatchett, Carter E. Mecher, and Marc Lipsitch (2007): 

We noted that, in some cases, outcomes appear to have correlated with the quality and timing of the public health response. The contrast of mortality outcomes between Philadelphia and St. Louis is particularly striking. The first cases of disease among civilians in Philadelphia were reported on September 17, 1918, but authorities downplayed their significance and allowed large public gatherings, notably a city-wide parade on September 28, 1918, to continue. School closures, bans on public gatherings, and other social distancing interventions were not implemented until October 3, when disease spread had already begun to overwhelm local medical and public health resources. In contrast, the first cases of disease among civilians in St. Louis were reported on October 5, and authorities moved rapidly to introduce a broad series of measures designed to promote social distancing, implementing these on October 7. The difference in response times between the two cities (≈14 days, when measured from the first reported cases) represents approximately three to five doubling times for an influenza epidemic. The costs of this delay appear to have been significant; by the time Philadelphia responded, it faced an epidemic considerably larger than the epidemic St. Louis faced. Philadelphia ultimately experienced a peak weekly excess pneumonia and influenza (P&I) death rate of 257/100,000 and a cumulative excess P&I death rate (CEPID) during the period September 8–December 28, 1918 (the study period) of 719/100,000. St. Louis, on the other hand, experienced a peak P&I death rate, while NPIs were in place, of 31/100,000 and had a CEPID during the study period of 347/100,000.

Let’s be clear about this: Reno thinks the city of Philadelphia got it right, while the city of St. Louis “lived under Satan’s rule.” 

UPDATE: I just read Damon Linker’s column on Reno's essay, which is outstanding. 

When it comes to comfort food, our number 1 go-to in the Jacobs household is a thoroughly Americanized version of the Italian classic spaghetti carbonara. Don’t bother telling me that they wouldn’t do it this way in Rome. I know that. This is adapted for American ingredients and American palates. But it’s darn good, and dead easy to boot. 

Ingredients: 

• One pound pasta, ideally shells or orecchiette 
• Four slices thick-cut bacon 
• One medium onion  
• One large or two small green bell peppers  
• Two eggs 
• Freshly ground black pepper 
• Freshly grated Parmesan cheese 

Method: 

• Get a lot of salted water in a big pot and heat it to boiling 
• In a skillet, fry the bacon on medium heat until done, then remove and set aside 
• While the bacon is cooking, dice the onion and pepper 
• Remove some of the rendered bacon fat, if you’re that kind of person, then add the diced pepper and start to sauté 
• After a few minutes, add the onion; sauté onions and peppers until soft 
• When the water starts to boil, throw the pasta in there  
• While the veggies and pasta are cooking, chop the bacon into bite-sized chunks 
• When the pasta is done, drain it and return to the pot 
• Add the onions, peppers, and bacon to the pasta; stir 
• Crack two eggs into the pot and stir around like crazy for 30 seconds or so; that will coat the pasta with the egg and cook it gently with the retained heat of the ingredients 
• Grind lots of pepper into the mix, and I mean LOTS; grate Parmesan into the mix to taste 
• Distribute into bowls and eat while hot. 

You don’t need to add any salt because there’s plenty in the bacon and Parmesan. Shells and orecchiette are good for this dish because they have little cups that catch pieces of the bacon, onion, and pepper. This should serve 4 as a one-dish (plus salad, if you’re into that kind of thing) meal. A robust, earthy red wine is a perfect accompaniment. 

I disagree with pretty much everything in this post by Ephraim Radner. I don’t think consolation of lonely people is distinctively “motherly”; I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with the church being “motherly” — that’s not just a “well-worn trope,” that’s part of the job description; I don’t think any of the things he believes we ought to learn are in any way compromised by livestreaming services. I don’t see the value of seeking, in a time of deprivation, still more deprivation.

So why do Radner and I see things so differently? I wonder whether it has something to do with the difference between a priest (Radner) and a layman (me). Radner might well ask whether it makes sense for churches to keep trying to do the same things that they’ve been doing all along; but church is not something I have been doing all along. 

In the first part of this year, before the coronavirus and its consequences hit, I wasn’t at church very often. Some Sundays I was traveling. On others I was trying to recover from exhaustion, because for the past few months I have had, for the first time in my life, ongoing insomnia. (I have never been a good sleeper, but this level of sleeplessness is something new to me. New and not good.) And some Sundays I was just lazy, wanting some few hours in which to drink coffee and watch soccer. Only when I couldn’t go to church did I realize what price I might have been paying for missing it. And that’s when I started to crave it. 

In my biography of the Book of Common Prayer I discuss the transformation, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, of parish worship services from a model based on Morning Prayer to a model based on weekly Parish Communion. That hasn’t been universal but it has certainly been widespread, especially in the U.K. and the U.S. This recession of Morning Prayer from Sunday worship has led also to a general lack of familiarity with that service, and a lack of interest in participating in it. That, plus rigid work schedules, helps to explain why at my parish church, St. Alban’s, we might have 350 people show up for Communion on Sunday and then seven people show up at Morning Prayer for the entire rest of the week. I think I have been to Morning Prayer at St. Alban’s twice, ever. 

But last week I did Morning Prayer four times (I only missed Monday because I forgot). My wife and I sat in our living room and listened to the reading of Scripture; we made our intercessions at the appropriate time; with our knees touching and our prayer book opened before us, we followed along with the service and said the responses. And gradually we are gaining a better understanding, a felt understanding, of why Morning Prayer has been so important for so long to so many people. The rite is beginning to reshape our hearts. It is of course possible that when all this is over we’ll lose this habit; but I hope not; and even if so, we’ll know what we are missing, and perhaps will be drawn back to it again in times of need. 

I don’t see how this experience can in any way be a bad thing. 

If you’re interested in participating, however virtually, in the services of St. Alban’s, you can find the streams and recorded videos here. 

What if I made for my students a guide to Auden’s “Horae Canonicae” that looks like this?

Sometimes I get obsessed about something and can only manage the obsession by writing about it. So, from nine years ago: 

I'm not sure exactly what to call this kind of music, but in my mind I think of it as NCM (New Chamber Music). A small group of musicians play pieces that are technically demanding in the way that classical music often is, but they’re playing often with non-classical instruments and often in non-classical styles and with non-classical techniques. Chris Thile seems to me the prime instigator and exemplar of this movement. 

What's exceptional about the Goat Rodeo Sessions, within this larger world of NCM, is that these sessions are conducted by musicians who have a serious claim to being the very best at what they do. Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, and Yo-Yo Ma are commonly thought of as the epitomes of excellence on their instruments, and while probably no one would say that Stuart Duncan is the best violinist in the world, more than a few people would say he's the best fiddler around. In any case he more than holds his own with these three titans.

This song opens in the key of A, as fiddle tunes often do. It begins with a rhythmically intricate introduction by Chris Thile, the sort of thing that he often plays, and it's not necessarily a sign of pleasure to come. One of the problems with Thile's work is that he really is, as T-Bone Burnett has said, a once-in-a-century musician, and the things that are fun and interesting for him to play are not necessarily the things that are the most fun and interesting for ordinary listeners to hear. There is a cerebral quality to much of his music that I happen to enjoy but that many people don't, because it's too distant from what they think of as … enjoyable music. This song may start in that complex mode, but very soon you get, first the violin of Duncan playing a drone, and then the lovely primary melody played by Yo-Yo Ma on his cello.

You should notice even at this early point the essential role played by Edgar Meyer's double bass. Throughout the song he moves with perfect fluidity between bowing and plucking, always in a way designed to accentuate the beauty of his colleagues’ playing and the rhythmic integrity of the performance. He is the most musical of bassists — nothing is mechanical with him, everything he plays is melodically and rhythmically delightful. If you can listen to this on speakers that offer a reasonable degree and quality of bass response, please do. 

So after the mandolin introduction, the violin drone, and the melody played by Yo-Yo Ma, we get the elaboration of that melody on Duncan's fiddle. Duncan has a magnificently velvety tone – there's an interview with the four musicians in which Ma comments on the beauty of it – and he adds both urgency and plangency to the melody that Ma has initiated. Their lines intertwine and rise together, and take us into a delightful dance above which the violin soars. 

Now things get a little quieter. The bowed instruments recede into the background, and we get an intricate interlude from Thile’s mandolin. This is followed by a witty contrapuntal passage (a few moments of Celtic Baroque, maybe) and the return of the dance. Then the four musicians walk the theme down to a stop....

But we’re not done. Duncan, solo at first, leaps into a reel in G. (When the other instruments come in, take a listen to the rumble of that bass!) The pace accelerates, and now we’re headed for a breakdown — not in the psychological sense but in the bluegrass sense. Everyone is now playing at breakneck speed, and make a special note of how the fingers of Ma’s left hand move as quickly as a fiddler’s, but over a much longer neck.  

And then as the breakdown achieves maximum velocity, we ascend back to the first theme, once more in A. The full articulation of the theme is followed by another slowdown, but this time instead of the mandolin we get the violin and cello meditating together, weaving their lines quietly in and out. 

Then the music rises, and we get a return to the dance, now at its most joyful. Even the relatively stoic Meyer is caught up in the delight of it. And then another walk down, this time to the finish. 

I love this performance more than I can say. It has given me such comfort and consolation in these past few days. I hope it will do something similar for you. 

And soon the Goat Rodeo Boys will be back! 

I have written before about the experience I had growing up in the same house as my paternal grandparents. When I was very young, I had an inchoate sense that my mother and father and sister and I were living in Gran and Grandma’s house. But later, after my father got out of prison and after Gran was forced into retirement after a horrific automobile accident, the terms and conditions seemed gradually to shift, and I started to feel that the house was somehow now our house and Gran and Grandma were living with us. But in fact all along we were just a family living together, and never at any point was this an odd thing. It was common enough in our social class — working class, lower-lower-middle class — in those days that I don’t think either of my parents were ever the least bit ashamed of it, though surely they were at times frustrated by it.  

These days, though, there can be great shame associated with living in extended families, because of the peculiar sense of independence that so many of us have. Young adults don’t feel independent unless and until they are living away from their parents; and as for the parents, as they age they dread the loss of independence that would accompany having to move in with their children. 

There is at least the chance that the current crisis will change those feelings. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans are going to lose their jobs in the coming months. Not all of them will have homes to go to — “homes” in the Robert Frost sense of a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in — but those who do will have a chance to revisit our assumptions about the necessity, indeed the very value, of independence. And that may not be an altogether bad thing. 

Each weekday at 7:30am, my parish church, St. Alban’s, is livestreaming Morning Prayer. It is a simple service but I have found it moving and meaningful. I’ve been reminded of the consolatory function of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (Matins and Evensong) for so many Christians for so many years of pain and trouble and fear. I’m going to post here a relevant passage from my biography of the Book of Common Prayer.  

So days were begun and ended in communal prayer. In institutions that featured chapel services — the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge most famously, but also public schools, preparatory schools, the Inns of Court — and where attendance was mandatory, this rhythm of worship was still more pronounced. Cranmer’s 1549 order, which would later undergo significant change, begins with the priest reciting the Lord’s Prayer “with a loud voice” — this in contrast to the old Roman practice, which likewise began Matins with the Lord’s Prayer but instructed the priest to say it silently. After centuries of liturgical prayers being muttered in low tones, and in a language unknown to the people, the new model demands audible English. After this prayer comes a beautiful exchange taken from Psalm 51: the priest says, “O Lord, open thou my lips,” and the people reply, “And my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.” Then “O God, make speed to save me” calls forth the answer, “O Lord, make haste to help me.” Such echoes and alternations are intrinsic to the structure of liturgical prayer: praise and petition, gratitude and need. The whole of the Matins service repeatedly enacts this oscillation.

After further prayers and readings from Scripture, the service comes to a close with a series of “collects” (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable): these brief but highly condensed prayers were a specialty of Cranmer’s. He did not invent them — Latin liturgies are full of them — but he gave them a distinctive English style that would be much imitated in the coming centuries. Here is the final collect of Matins:

O Lord our heavenly father, almighty and ever-living God, which hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day: defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger, but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight: through Jesus Christ our lord. Amen.

Here we see the rhetorical structure common to most collects: a salutation to God; an acknowledgment of some core truth, in this case that the people come to prayer only because God has “safely brought us to the beginning of this day”; a petition (“grant us this day we fall into no sin”); an aspiration, or hope and purpose for the prayer, often introduced by the word “that” (“that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance”); and a concluding appeal to Jesus Christ as the mediator and advocate for God’s people. Anglican liturgies are studded with these collects, many of them either composed fresh by Cranmer or adapted by him from Latin sources. They are among the most characteristic and recognizable features of prayer-book worship.

For the people of the sixteenth century, this thanksgiving for safe passage to a new day would not have been a merely pro forma acknowledgment. As A. Roger Ekirch has shown in his extraordinary history At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the early modern period in England was marked by deep anxiety about the dangers of the nighttime world. With only limited forms of artificial lighting, people found the darkness continually befuddling: friend could not be distinguished from foe, nor animate objects from inanimate ones. The moon was thought to bring both madness and disease, and the night air was perceived as unhealthy, even poisonous. Ekirch quotes one woman whose thoughts were typical of the period: “At night, I pray Almighty God to keep me from ye power of evil spirits, and of evil men; from fearfull dreams and terrifying imaginations; from fire, and all sad accidents . . . so many mischiefs, I know of, doubtless more that I know not of.” Doubtless more that I know not of: the “Terrors of the Night,” as Thomas Nashe called them in a 1594 pamphlet, multiplied relentlessly in the mind.

This was the context in which people came to Matins thanking the God “which hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day,” and the context that determines the sober mood of Evensong. One can easily imagine the felt need to come together in church, before the fall of night, to beg God’s protection, and indeed Evensong, which begins with a shortened version of the exchange that opens Matins — “O God, make speed to save me”; “O Lord, make haste to help me” — concludes with a collect frankly admitting the fear of the dark, in a prayer so urgent that it even forgoes the customary decorous address to God and rushes straight to its petition: “Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord, & by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of thy only son, our savior Jesus Christ. Amen.”

In his glorious poem “Advice to a Prophet,” Richard Wilbur begins:

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,   
 Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
 Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
 In God’s name to have self-pity,

 Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,   
 The long numbers that rocket the mind;
 Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,   
 Unable to fear what is too strange.

Oddly enough, perhaps, I think this is relevant to the proposal that has emerged today to give all Americans a thousand bucks — or, in some proposals, more — to compensate for the afflictions many will experience because of the economic consequences of the coronavirus. The idea of giving everyone in America that much money strikes us, initially and instinctively, as an insane amount of money. But let’s run the numbers.

There are 330 million Americans, more or less. Giving a thousand bucks to each of then would be $330 billion. But the federal budget that Donald Trump has just proposed is $4.8 trillion. So a thousand bucks for everyone is doable — not easily, mind you, but doable. It’s even doable more than once, especially if people like me, who are financially secure, donate our thousand to charity.

It doesn’t feel doable. The numbers “rocket the mind.” But I think we owe it to Andrew Yang that many people are able to overcome their initial feelings — their "unreckoning hearts” — and realize that this is something we can do, if we want to.

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.

If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must try to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish — a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations. We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. We notice further that this defect is less common in the unsociable and solitary than in individuals or groups that are inclined or condemned to sociability. It seems, then, that folly is a sociological rather than a psychological problem, and that it is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances: on people, a psychological by-product of definite external factors. If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years” (1943)

Incuriosity and indifference — intellectual laziness and the absence of compassion — are vices that feed each other. If you don’t care about what happens to people, then you are unlikely to seek out more knowledge of their condition; and the less you know about their condition, the less you will feel called to compassion for that condition. Exhibit A for this vicious circle is this despicable essay by Heather Mac Donald. It’s not something I even want to talk about, but perhaps some commentary will be useful. Let’s start by zeroing in on one paragraph: 

Much has been made of the “exponential” rate of infection in European and Asian countries — as if the spread of all transmittable diseases did not develop along geometric, as opposed to arithmetic, growth patterns. What actually matters is whether or not the growing “pandemic” overwhelms our ability to ensure the well-being of U.S.residents with efficiency and precision. But fear of the disease, and not the disease itself, has already spoiled that for us. Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of .000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to .12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic. 

(1) Notice the scare-quotes around “exponential” and “pandemic,” as though those are examples of Fake News. But they are precisely the accurate terms — which, in the former case, Mac Donald even acknowledges. So why the scare-quotes? Presumably they are an attempt to generate skepticism where no skepticism is warranted. 

(2) Mac Donald clearly doesn’t understand the difference between the mortality rate of a disease and any currently uninfected individual’s likelihood of dying from the disease — because she hasn’t thought about it. She’s just tossing around numbers she thinks help her case. But for the record, if .12% — that is, a little more than one-tenth of one percent — of Americans died from COVID-19, that would be approximately 400,000 deaths. She’s “happy” with that. 

(3) More to the point, MacDonald is obscuring, or is ignorant of, the relevant time-frames for considering these matters. She writes, "So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection…. By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019.” But that is to compare data about one thing for an entire year with data about another thing for less than a month. Her essay was published on March 13; the first American to die from COVID-19 died just two weeks earlier, on February 28. Even if the rate of deaths from the virus remained steady — which Mac Donald admits will not happen — that would be an annual rate of over a thousand deaths. 

(4) But this takes us back to the matter of geometric progression. In Italy, the first person to be diagnosed with COVID-19 was so diagnosed on January 30. I am not sure when the first person in Italy died of the disease, but as I write, 1,441 people in Italy have died from the virus — of 21,157 confirmed cases! — and the cases are increasing rather than slowing down. In short: this disease moves quickly. Take a look at this chart:

Full size version here. Two vital pieces of information in this chart: first, the rate at which cases in Italy are confirmed is increasing; second, the rate of infection for the United States looks a lot more like that of Italy than that of Japan or Singapore or Hong Kong. So over time the ten-thousand-fold increase that Mac Donald treats as an absurd extrapolation is certain to be dramatically exceeded. We can and should still do a lot to mitigate the effects, but a month from now the comparison to traffic deaths will not look good for Mac Donald’s case. She doesn’t anticipate this because, though she acknowledges geometric progression, she doesn’t grasp it, and as a result thinks only in terms of the present moment. Thus she writes, "The number of cases in most afflicted countries is paltry.” Yes; and the damage done to a coastal city by a hurricane is paltry — in the first ten minutes after landfall. 

(5) Similarly, Mac Donald writes, "We did not shut down public events and institutions to try to slow the spread of the flu.” Indeed, and that’s because the flu has been around long enough that many people have developed immunity to it, which means that flu cases do not increase at a geometric rate. But the coronavirus is novel, which means that no one has yet acquired immunity. That’s why it moves so fast. Contra Mac Donald, not all transmissible diseases spread at a geometric rate — those rates vary quite a bit for many reasons, including the means by which they are transmitted — COVID-19 would be even worse if it were airborne — but also according to whether they’ve been through a particular population before. These are not difficult distinctions to grasp. For those who are willing to grasp them. 

(6) We now reach the point in the essay at which intellectual laziness slides into moral callousness: "As of Monday, approximately 89 percent of Italy’s coronavirus deaths had been over the age of seventy, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sad to say, those victims were already nearing the end of their lifespans. They might have soon died from another illness.” Maybe! But — I’m not sure about the data in Italy — in the United States someone who is currently 70 years old can expect to live another fifteen years; and an 80-year-old can reasonably expect another nine years. These are not insignificant years to lose. Those can be times not just of personal satisfaction — older people are happier than younger ones — but also times when they can give counsel to their children and love to their grandchildren, or indeed give to others who are willing to acknowledge their personal value. 

The only value Mac Donald seems to cherish is that of a stock market portfolio — for financial losses she feels great compassion, though she has none to spare for human beings. She should reflect on something John Ruskin taught us long ago: “There is no wealth but life.” 

Bill Brandt. Warren Ellis posted this somewhere.