On the unreasonableness of it all
The president today has said that churches and houses of worship should open as soon as possible. Some will see it as a permission slip for behavior likely to spread contagion. But it will come as a welcome encouragement to many.
Earlier this week, the bishops of Minnesota announced that churches in the state will defy the governor and reopen to congregations at one-third of their capacity. They tried to work with Gov. Tim Walz on a mutually agreeable plan, but he declined their offers.
While shopping malls and big-box stores are free to open at 50 percent, welcoming hundreds in the process, Gov. Walz considers it a clear and present danger to public health for more than 10 people to gather in the cathedral of St. Paul — seating for 3,000. The bishops put it mildly, saying the governor’s order “defies reason.”
Walz, of course, leads a state that has previously elected a professional wrestler as governor, so defiance of reason is not unknown to his office. But he is not alone in appearing to have a particular concern about the contagious nature of religion.
Increasingly, local government leaders are shifting gears on social distancing, the insufferable neologism of our age, from ‘observance’ to ‘enforcement.’
Also this week, in Chicago police fined churches for holding services at 10 percent of capacity, instead of 10 people or fewer. Last month, the mayor of New York made it clear to the city’s Jewish community that “the time for warnings has passed,” and that if they persist in trying to gather at funerals the way others are at Manhattan bars, they will be arrested.
Washington, DC — so far as I am aware the only major US city with a serving councilman who thinks the weather is controlled by the Rothschilds — waits with bated breath to see what its enlightened administration has in store.
Religious leaders have a right to feel aggrieved, and insist on their rights. And the bishops have a special responsibility to defend the integrity and independence of the Church from the secular order. But they will likely find, as the bishops of Minnesota did, that they are trying to reason with the unreasonable.
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While the mayors and governors seek to impose their wills on bishops and rabbis, we should expect to meet similar unreasoning impositions in our own daily lives.
Churches may not be allowed to open in many places, but malls, casinos, and other “essential” public spaces are. While the best advice seems to be observing reasonable precautions for the time being — wearing masks when in close quarters, washing our hands with the kind of regularity we should have been anyway etc. — we can be sure many will not, and many more will not want to.
However wrongly, and whatever the real risks of reinfection, many people will likely file ‘pandemic’ away with ‘plane crash’ and ‘mass shooting’ as terrible things that happen on the news. To other people.
Since our governors and mayors already have the police busy staking out church parking lots, there will be a need for someone to patrol our parks and restaurants and theaters as they reopen, ensuring that social distancing is being observed.
In all likelihood, keeping us safe in this brave new world will be ranks of newly minted social distancing officers; a thin line of polyester standing between us and each other.
Britons have long since become accustomed to Community Support Officers stalking their streets like demented hall monitors, armed with the power to harass and fine the public for a range of nebulous ‘anti-social behaviors,’ like smoking, swearing, or talking too loud.
I doubt it will be long until we see something similar in America.
Much as the tragedy of 9/11 changed air travel forever, so I suspect this is how coronavirus will change our daily lives — not altering them beyond recognition, just making them inescapably more tedious. And much as the creation of the TSA has shown, the mix of serious public safety concerns with the vast scope for petty enforcement authority is nothing to look forward to.
Anyone who has flown in the last 20 years can tell a story of suffering at the hands of arbitrary, unreasonable authority visited upon them just because it was their day. And they will not welcome being told their table is a little too close to the next one at a restaurant, or that they are sitting too near someone else in a park.
They will have to be made to respect the rules — probably with fines. And when a local government starts fining people as a deterrent, you can usually start the clock on how long it will take to become an essential revenue source, turning an emergency measure into the ‘new normal’ we are all waiting for.
It is a vision of the future at once Orwellian and banal. The TSA, everywhere. Forever.
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Of course, we should not be surprised if our authorities are unreasonable. Even if we were grown up enough to wash our hands, it would not be enough to ward off the nanny state. We are the henpecked citizenry of a petty tyrant class, and the truth is we would be henpecked whether we washed our hands or not. And most of us like it that way.
As a people, we have long since turned our politics — and therefore our government — into an exercise in dominating ‘the others’ among us.
The baseball hats we wear, the stickers we put on our cars, the signs we stake in our lawns, are not expressions of solidarity or identity, they are provocations; a way of ‘owning’ whoever it is who is against us.
As a society, we have never had so much discussion — on TV, online, in our media — but none of it is reasonable. So much of it is characterized as being conducted in bad faith, and this is true to a point. But it would be better to say we have no faith — in our institutions, in our common society, in each other. I think Yuval Levin has a new book on this, but I cannot be expected to keep reading books during a pandemic.
St. John Paul II wrote one of his many great encyclicals on the essential link between faith and reason, how the one elightens and guides the other in the search for understanding. Currently we are spoiled for choice with examples about what happens when the link is broken: In many places, requests to take basic precautions, like don a mask when entering private premises, are met with hostility — even violence.
Otherwise adult members of society openly tout for internet conspiracy theories over the warnings of medical experts — some are prepared to believe the virus is spread by cellular phone towers (no, seriously) instead of close human contact.
How did we possibly get here? As the bishops of Minnesota will tell you, there is just no reasoning with a lack of faith. In the divine, and in each other.
