Greetings, This week I have some thoughts on our public hellscape, and why politics makes all of our discussions more stupid. Then I have some somewhat-more-preachy-than-usual thoughts on Jesus. Politics makes us stupid One of the weirder things about the last few years was the way in which COVID got rapidly encoded with political meaning. The progressive position was to be very afraid of COVID and enthusiastic about masks, shutdowns, and the like, while the conservative position was to downplay the risks of COVID and deride public health measures as a sinister attack on our liberties. The strangest thing to me about this dynamic is how ideologically arbitrary it was. It’s very easy to imagine an alternative world in which Donald Trump consistently denounced COVID as the dangerous “China Virus” that was yet another threat to our homeland. Conservatives could have enthusiastically embraced star-spangled be-decked “freedom masks” in the battle to preserve our way of life against the foreign threat. Progressives would have then denounced conservative xenophobia and insisted that Trump was over-stating the risks of COVID as part of yet another sinister lurch toward authoritarianism. The freedom masks would have been compared to brownshirts in very serious essays in Jacobin and Slate. Anthony Fauci would have become widely detested on the left as the witless technocratic enabler of Trump’s lurch toward tyranny. This story strikes me as just as ideologically plausible as the narratives that in fact developed. The very arbitrariness of the ideological reactions to COVID suggest to me the intellectual poverty of our public discussions. We use political ideology as our catchall explanation for everything despite the manifest weakness of our political ideologies as explanations of the world.
Why politics makes us stupid and "Lord, is it I?"
Why politics makes us stupid and "Lord, is it…
Why politics makes us stupid and "Lord, is it I?"
Greetings, This week I have some thoughts on our public hellscape, and why politics makes all of our discussions more stupid. Then I have some somewhat-more-preachy-than-usual thoughts on Jesus. Politics makes us stupid One of the weirder things about the last few years was the way in which COVID got rapidly encoded with political meaning. The progressive position was to be very afraid of COVID and enthusiastic about masks, shutdowns, and the like, while the conservative position was to downplay the risks of COVID and deride public health measures as a sinister attack on our liberties. The strangest thing to me about this dynamic is how ideologically arbitrary it was. It’s very easy to imagine an alternative world in which Donald Trump consistently denounced COVID as the dangerous “China Virus” that was yet another threat to our homeland. Conservatives could have enthusiastically embraced star-spangled be-decked “freedom masks” in the battle to preserve our way of life against the foreign threat. Progressives would have then denounced conservative xenophobia and insisted that Trump was over-stating the risks of COVID as part of yet another sinister lurch toward authoritarianism. The freedom masks would have been compared to brownshirts in very serious essays in Jacobin and Slate. Anthony Fauci would have become widely detested on the left as the witless technocratic enabler of Trump’s lurch toward tyranny. This story strikes me as just as ideologically plausible as the narratives that in fact developed. The very arbitrariness of the ideological reactions to COVID suggest to me the intellectual poverty of our public discussions. We use political ideology as our catchall explanation for everything despite the manifest weakness of our political ideologies as explanations of the world.