Rod Dreher's Blog, page 168

Preparing Your Church For Coronavirus

A reader sends in this How To Prepare Your Church For The Coronavirus tipsheet from Lyman Stone, a missionary in Hong Kong. Please distribute widely. Stone is a Lutheran, and as he notes in the text, congregations in other traditions will have to adapt this to their own traditions. There’s a lot of wisdom here. A link to the Google doc is in his tweet.

Hey folks,

I prepared a tip-sheet for how churches can prepare for and respond to a COVID outbreak in their community. Religious bodies have not acquitted themselves well in the COVID outbreak thus far. We must do better. https://t.co/14CFZfb5ZH

— Lyman Expand the House Stone, AKA 石來民 (@lymanstoneky) March 1, 2020

The full text is below.

—

Is COVID a serious problem we should be worried about?

Yes. COVID is much worse than the flu, and has the potential to kill many people.

When should we begin responding to the risk of COVID?

Immediately. Begin purchasing supplies today. However, you do not need to implement any special procedures until there is actually a case of local transmission in your state.

Should we cancel church if there is a COVID outbreak nearby?

No. Spiritual care is vital, especially in an epidemic, when people will be afraid and confused. However, it is your moral duty to protect your community by taking reasonable precautions so your church does not spread disease. Moreover, this is part of your Christian witness. Do not abandon your post, but don’t be stupid.

What precautions should my church take?

Buy large supplies of hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. Masks too if you feel like it, but masks are not as essential as disinfectant materials.

Establish a single, controlled point of entry to your church which you can use to force congregants to wash their hands and check for disease symptoms.

Strongly discourage people with any sickness in their household from coming to church; the pastor or deacons can make a house call later.

Eliminate non-essential activities at your church like social groups. Consider suspending church schools or peripheral activities.

Communion is your highest-infection-risk element of the service. Avoid passing a communion plate, intinction, or a common cup. The safest way to take communion is in individual cups and pieces of bread, in small groups, at the altar.

Other personal-touch service elements like peace-passing, offering, or attendance books should also be restructured or suspended.

Put more space between chairs or encourage bigger seating gaps in pews.

However, informal interpersonal contact at church and church fellowship time does not need to be cancelled, provided a few basic precautions are taken, like limiting food to individually-packaged snacks.

It is especially important for church workers to wash their hands fanatically, wear masks, and maintain good personal hygiene.

The Long Version

What is this document and why am I reading it?

This document is a simple tip-sheet on how your church can reduce the risk of an outbreak of some infectious disease in your congregation. It’s prepared specifically in reference to COVID-19, the novel coronavirus originating in China which was identified in December, 2019, and which has since killed several thousand people. You’re reading it, I hope, because you want to protect your church congregation and your neighbors from an unpleasant, and quite avoidable, death.

What makes you a reliable source about COVID-19?

I am not a doctor or an epidemiologist, so that’s a very fair question. If you have a trusted church member who is a specialist in infectious diseases, they can definitely advise you better than I can. However, I am the Chief Information Officer of a population consulting firm called Demographic Intelligence: we give advice to Fortune 500 countries and government entities about future population trends. So drug companies like Merck and Pfizer, baby products companies like Proctor & Gamble and Gerber, and multiple U.S. state, county, municipal, or territorial governments have all decided to trust my advice about population dynamics. You might disagree with their choice, but, while I’m not an epidemiologist, I do routinely work in detail with the medical and demographic literature around infectious disease, mortality risks, and especially fertility. You can find my work published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, South China Morning Post, The Federalist, Vox, First Things, American Interest, Christianity Today, Economics21, and other publications.

But perhaps more importantly when it comes to churches, I, along with my wife, Ruth, and our daughter Suzannah Theophania Hei, serve as a missionary in the Lutheran Church-Hong Kong Synod. Hong Kong has been dealing with COVID for some time now, and has a long history of managing infectious diseases, including SARS and the massive 1957 and 1968 “Asian flu” and “Hong Kong flu” pandemics. Thus, I am a well-informed expert in a field related to mortality risks, who is on the ground near the frontline of the fight against COVID, in a role where I am working directly with churches.

Someone told me to read this, but I’m not really convinced: COVID isn’t really that bad is it?

COVID is an infectious disease. Academic research thus far suggests the typical person infected by COVID will infect 1-3 other people, which is similar to influenza or Ebola in terms of the infection potential. Death rates for people infected by COVID are still being figured out, but the range of estimates runs from about 0.4% (in areas with strong quarantines, advance warning, good medical care, and healthier populations) and 15% (among people exposed to many severe cases, without good medical care, or with other severe conditions). My preferred estimate is near the scholarly consensus: about 2%, or 1-in-50, of people diagnosed with COVID will probably die from it. (However, evidence from South Korea suggests a rate closer to 0.6%).

I mentioned Ebola and influenza, so you may wonder how they compare in terms of lethality. Normal influenza kills about 0.05% to 0.2% of infected people. Thus, a bad flu season is probably about half as lethal as a good COVID outbreak. A bad COVID outbreak would be many many times worse than a flu outbreak. The only flu outbreak ever recorded to have a death rate similar to COVID is the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. It killed 2% of the entire population of the planet. That’s bad.

On the other hand, at the extreme upper end, COVID might kill 15% of infected people in a very poorly-managed, worst-case scenario. But Ebola kills 25% of victims in mild outbreaks. For bad outbreaks, Ebola kills as many as 95% of its victims. So COVID is much worse than the flu, but not nearly as bad as Ebola.

COVID is worse for some people than others. Research on COVID’s cousins, SARS and MERS, suggests they cause higher rates of miscarriage for pregnant women: COVID might have the same effect, especially in the first trimester of pregnancy. People with respiratory conditions like asthma have higher death rates, and most likely so do people who live in areas with high air pollution. If you have some other sickness at the same time, that of course makes COVID worse. But even “mild” conditions like high blood pressure (and especially hypertension) dramatically increase death rates.

Thus, anyone telling you COVID is “just a flu” is misinformed. It is a significant disease which, if it infects a large share of the population, could kill a lot of people, especially older church members or those with other health conditions. It could also cause miscarriages in pregnant women. The only good news is that children appear to be highly resistant to COVID, with negligible death rates for the under-10 population (however, children can still get sick, have symptoms like a fever and a cough, and spread the disease).

Okay, you’ve convinced me: COVID is bad. But this is a problem for public health authorities, not my church!

I understand that feeling. It feels like too big of a problem for churches to tackle.

But you don’t have a choice. If your community develops an outbreak, you will be forced to decide how to respond. How you and your church respond matters for your congregants’ safety, the health of their faith, and your Christian witness in your community.

I’m a Lutheran, so I’m very interested in the historic Lutheran witness related to disease. Luther wrote a detailed and informative tract on the topic during a Bubonic plague outbreak during his life. His view was simple: to refuse to help put out a fire in a burning house is murder. To abandon the sick reminds of Christ’s words about “whatever you did for the least of these,” namely, “I was sick and you took care of me.” To abandon the congregation of the faithful and deny them preaching and communion, to eschew gathering together and postpone the baptism of children or new believers, is to add spiritual harm to the physical risk of an epidemic.

Since the earliest days of the Christian church, and indeed in the Old and New Testaments themselves, the witness of God’s covenant people has been consistent: we care for the sick. The Christian response to plague is, as Luther put it, not to be too afraid of “some small boils.” Pastors and missionaries should die at their posts. During the plague, the Luther household had to be quarantined because they took in so many sick people, and their second child, Elisabeth, died as a consequence of the plague.

One could argue Luther took things too far and was a bit negligent with regard to his own family. But the general principle stands: Christians do not abandon their posts.

On the other hand, one of our “posts,” one of our duties, is to help and serve our neighbor. If we recklessly expose our neighbor to a lethal disease, we have as good as murdered him. To ignore the infectious nature of disease is a violation of the Fifth Commandment. Luther’s Small Catechism reads:

You shall not murder.

What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need. (emphasis added)

Thus, Christians have two crucial duties. First, not to use plague, and the fear of the death of the body, as an excuse to abandon our God-given duties. We must care for the sick, both the sick in soul and in body. Where disease kills parents, we must care for the children. Where disease kills children, we must tend to the wounds of the family. Where disease spreads fear, we must be bold in faith.

But we should not be idiots. We have a moral obligation to protect others by limiting the spread of disease. To ignore that duty murders our neighbors.

Don’t abandon your post, but also don’t be an idiot. Okay, that seems fair. Any other important general principles before we get down to logistics?

Yes. Beyond that moral duty, we also have a duty to the witness of Christ. Paul says to “do no wrong in the eyes of anyone.” We must take care not to heap shame on the name of Christ by our actions.

Religious bodies have heaped shame on themselves in Asia. In Singapore and Korea, huge shares of the infected became infected via religious gatherings. In many cases, these were Christian gatherings, though some fringe cults were even more infectious. In Hong Kong, one of the largest disease clusters was associated with a Buddhist temple.

If we are reckless and allow our churches to become centers of disease, then we damage the reputation of the Gospel in our communities. Don’t do that. Do no wrong in the eyes of anyone! In a time of plague, Christians should not abandon their posts, and should also be examples of good disease management. Christians invented hospitals during the first 5 centuries of our faith, because Christians thought it was important to have a good witness through our care for the sick. Let’s keep up that good record passed on to us from the saints of the past.

Thus, churches should not only think about fulfilling their duties and avoiding unnecessary risks, but should also understand that times of plague are times of great risk and great opportunity: risk of destroying the reputation of the church through stupid choices, but also opportunities to show that Christian faith motivates courage, sacrifice, compassion, and love in times of danger.

All right. Sign me up. What should we do?

Okay, let’s begin!

When should we begin to apply disease-management procedures?

As soon as there have been any confirmed “local transmission” cases within your metro area or within one adjacent county of any county in which any of your congregants live, adopt a strenuous disease management procedure. Do not wait for transmission nearby. Do not wait for a sick church member. As soon as there is any transmission in your region, take precautions.

If your region has quarantine cases but no local transmission, you should take some milder precautions, but might choose not to adopt the most serious procedures. The remainder of this document assumes that your church is in a region which has sustained local transmission of COVID at a significant level. That is, I am giving advice on how to respond to a situation where there are dozens of people or more getting COVID in your metropolitan area.

Should we cancel physical church?

No. Cancelling church should be a last resort. The physical means of grace through communion and baptism, and the great comfort of person-to-person community at church, are vitally important. As long as a non-infected congregation and leader exist with access to a space where infection risk can be managed, church members should take every possible measure to maintain regular assembly together. Do not neglect the fellowship of believers. The rest of this document assumes that your church intends to remain open as long as possible during the epidemic.

How should we manage our physical structure?

Cancel space-sharing activities. If social groups or clubs meet in your facility, cancel them immediately. If you do not cancel these activities, then force them to adopt the identical disease management procedures your church adopts.

Seal entrances from the outside. Fire safety rules mean you must maintain the possibility of exit; but you should prevent people from using side doors for entrance. Place some kind of sign on the door exterior reminding congregants not to use it. Limit entry into the church to one controllable point.

Run humidifiers, air purifiers, and air conditioning. Better air quality and higher humidity can reduce the severity of symptoms like coughing, which reduces spread, and can also reduce how long disease particles hang in the air. Very dry air causes water droplets to aerosolize quickly, making infection risks worse.

Maximize sunlight. There is some research that suggests sunlight and UV radiation can help kill germs. Open the blinds and get light in as many rooms as possible. Portable UV lamps can be an easy way to make disinfection easier as well.

Sanitize all surfaces frequently. Every surface touched by any person should be disinfected every day.

Seal off low-usage parts of the building. Keeping your space clear of infection is easier if you have less space to clean. So consider just putting up tape or other barriers to limit access to unnecessary parts of the building.

Purchase significant quantities of gloves, masks, disinfectant wipes, and hand sanitizer for your congregation, enough to keep every attendee cleaned and masked, and every pew and hymnal and doorknob wiped down, for at least 6 weekend service schedules.

What about our parochial school?

Cancel school immediately if at all possible and transition to online-education. This will dramatically disrupt families’ lives, so you will have to make accommodations: staff can take turns coming in to school to provide a space for a limited number of families with justifiable needs to come during the day. Even before an epidemic arrives, you should develop a continuity-of-operations plan and test procedures for online education.

After cancelling, help parents develop a parent-share to ease childcare burdens. Provide these parent-shares with access to masks, wipes, and hand sanitizer from central supplies.

Purchase significant quantities of gloves, masks, disinfectant wipes, and hand sanitizer for your school, enough to keep every child and staff member cleaned and masked, and every marker and scissors wiped down, for at least 6 weeks of class.

In the event that school cancellation is not possible, you must take every possible measure to limit the spread of disease. This is not a guide for school management, but you can look at the rest of this guide for some ideas.

What should we do as congregants begin to arrive on Sunday morning?

Before anyone arrives, wipe down all surfaces like chairs, pews, hymnals, and door knobs with disinfectant wipes. As much as possible, prop open any doors you are allowing people to use in order to limit the need for touching. Scrupulously disinfect bathrooms.

You’ve already limited entry to ONE DOOR. At that door, post four healthy, low-infection-risk individuals, wearing well-fitting N95 respirator masks, surgical gloves, and clean, non-absorbent clothing.

Your door managers should check every single person’s temperature using a handheld infrared thermometer. Anyone with a fever should be turned away. Options for turnaway vary: they could be sent home to await a house call by the pastor to deliver communion (see the section on pastoral visits below), or they could be sent to wait for communion in their car. Neither symptomatic individuals NOR THEIR HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS should be allowed into the building. Household-level transmission is by far the most common source of infection for COVID cases, and so even apparently-healthy family members pose a risk to the congregation. Congregants should be notified of this policy well in advance, and should be encouraged to stay home if they are at all sick.

Your door managers should compel anyone allowed into the building to thoroughly wash their hands using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Do not use mild hand-washes, herbal products without strong disinfectant chemicals, or essential-oil blends. Do not permit people with sensitive skin to avoid washing. I have sensitive skin and my hands hurt all the time these days because of the frequency of hand-washing: they can get over it, or even bring hand-lotion for themselves to apply after washing. Do not make ANY compromises on hand-washing.

Require all people to wear masks. Surgical masks do not do ANYTHING to prevent individuals from inhaling disease particles, although properly-fitting N95 respirators do. However, surgical masks reduce the spread of disease particles from coughs, and they also help remind congregants to keep a safe distance from one another and not to touch their own faces too much: eyes fluids, saliva, and mucus are the major disease-carriers for COVID, so reducing facial touching can save lives. Thus, reusable masks are acceptable provided that congregants boil their masks between uses, or use a strong disinfectant detergent. The main purpose of masks is not to filter the air you breath, but to reduce how much you spread.

Your door managers should keep detailed attendance records of every individual who enters through the designated entrance point and their measured temperature if possible. In the event of an outbreak, officials from the Centers for Disease Control will need to trace the spread of the disease. Your church’s records will make this much easier and thus can accelerate efforts to contain the disease. This will save lives. Also, taking attendance at the door reduces infection risk from passing attendance books during the service.

Encourage congregants to arrive at church early, or in pre-established arrival cohorts. As you may have noticed, this door management process will dramatically slow down how quickly people can get into the church. However, waiting in long lines creates a crowd which can itself spread disease. Thus, it is important that congregants arrive at a steady pace over an extended period of time, not all arriving 2 minutes before the service. If an epidemic forces your congregation to learn some timeliness, all the better.

Once people are inside the building, they can be allowed to move about freely. Especially if they are arriving early, children may get antsy. Having some child-focused programs going on in the 30 minutes before the service is a good idea. There is no need to force congregants to proceed directly to their seats or pews; they should feel free to have their normal community life once within the church. That communion together is, after all, the whole point of resisting cancellation.

Interpersonal touch between congregants should not be institutionally discouraged. Again, the point of maintaining strict hygiene is to make it possible for people to come to church for a refuge. While congregants might wisely choose to avoid lots of handshakes and hugs, it is absolutely inappropriate to say or do anything which directly discourages or shames congregants for showing affection and care for one another. Especially if your community has imposed quarantine measures, the mental and psychological health of your congregants is important.

Two additional door managers should be posted at the door to the church sanctuary itself. They do not need to take attendance, but should be checking to ensure all congregants are wearing masks, and they should force congregants to re-apply hand sanitizer. Absolutely do not allow any greeters or welcoming staff to shake hands with large numbers of people. It’s fine for individual congregants to have physical contact, but having one or a few individuals contact large numbers of people is very unwise. “Fist-bumps” do reduce germ transmission, but they’re also silly and juvenile. Just have your greeters drop a friendly dollop of alcohol-based hand sanitizer on each person’s hands instead.

Do we need to adjust anything about our service timing or seating arrangement?

Households should be encouraged to leave at least 2 to 3 feet between their personal belongings in a pew, or at least 2 chairs. If chairs are mobile, they can be spread out with more space between each chair. Note that this should be 2 to 3 feet between personal belongings, not between people. This can help lower the risk of incidental infection due to touch.

If this results in insufficient seating capacity, then services should be split up. More services can be offered, with fewer people at each service. At least two hours should be allowed between each service so that all surfaces can be re-sanitized.

Do we need to change anything about our actual order of service?

That depends on your order of service. I will go through specific elements of the service below. But before I do, let me note that you should only manage infectious disease insofar as is theologically viable in your tradition. Please do not read my comments to imply that disease management should take precedence over something you believe to be essential to eternal life. I am giving helpful tips, but they may not all be options for your community. I do not think it is a good idea to force a church to adopt protocols which are offensive to the consciences of worshippers. Nor is this advice “all or nothing.” You might find some pieces helpful and other pieces paranoid. They’re just tips intended to help churches think about how to respond to a serious infectious disease.

Should we abstain from communion?

No.

How can we reduce the risk that communion spreads disease in our church?

Reduce the number of people who approach the altar, table, or rail at a single time. Ensure that they can maintain at least 18 inches of distance between each household taking communion. Even if it slows down the services, allow plenty of space.

Do not call individuals forward for communion until it is actually time to go and receive. Do not have lots of people standing around in lines. This is an infection risk. Have a given pew or aisle “on deck” and ready to speedily-but-reverently proceed to the altar. This will keep your ushers on their toes, so have them practice in advance!

Do not pass a communion plate down the pew or row. By the time it gets to the last person that plate is a massive infection risk. Don’t do it. If at all possible, avoid this method of communion, in favor of calling communicants forward to a specific altar(s)/table(s)/rail(s).

Do not use a common cup or intinction. Although the alcohol content in wine does reduce the risk of disease surviving on the cup, it does not eliminate it. Common cup communion is the single highest-risk element of communion. If at all possible, remove it from your practice for the duration of the epidemic, and replace it with individual cups. Intinction by the communicant is also very risky given that hands carry germs.

Do not ask celebrants to place the elements into a communicant’s mouth. That communicant’s breath and saliva is a major vector of disease. The pastor’s hands may become contaminated and thus spread disease to others.

Use wine. For any given method of communion, the alcohol in wine is considerably more sanitary than the warm-fuzzies you Baptists and Methodists feel about your Jesus-Drank-Grape-Juice stories. Sorry for the Lutheran shade here but I couldn’t resist it (don’t worry, I was raised Methodist and remain an except-for-communion teetotaler; I appreciate your faith commitment to abstention but seriously Jesus drank wine).

The lowest-risk strategy for communion is for small groups to approach a designated place to receive communion, and there take the bread in individual pieces and the wine in individual cups. Even the bread should not be heaped high; a small number of pieces of bread should be available for the congregant to take. Or, the pastor could place an individual piece of bread into communicants’ hands, ideally without direct hand-to-hand touch.

What are other high-infection-risk parts of a common service, and how can we reduce risk?

“Passing of the peace” involves a large number of people touching each other, in many cases even anti-social people like me feel pressured into touching others. Don’t do this. As long as the epidemic continues, consider removing the free-wheeling infect-a-thon of peace-passing.

Passing offering plates spreads infection. Consider replacing offering plates with a model whereby congregants come forward and place their offering in a receptacle of some kind. Naturally, transitioning to online giving would reduce risk even more, but many people value the experience of giving in a community.

Offerings of cash should be discouraged, as physical currency carries far more germs than checks do. Whoever counts the money will be at much lower risk if congregants avoid cash gifts for a few weeks.

Attendance rosters can also spread infection. They should not be passed during the epidemic. As noted, taking attendance at the door eliminates the need for passing attendance sheets during the service.

Hymnals, especially leather covers, might be able to carry the virus. Switching to power-point or disposable printed bulletins may help reduce risk. However, wiping leather hymnal covers with disinfectant wipes is also effective, albeit more costly and time consuming.

“Children’s sermons” involve a lot of kids, who tend to produce mucus and saliva, getting up and milling about during the service. Providing a children’s lesson without moving the kids may be preferable.

Sunday school for kids can be continued, but kids should have their hands sanitized at the beginning and the end of Sunday school, and activities should be planned which don’t require too much excessive touching or many shared craft supplies.

You can help the public health authorities in a very useful way: during the service, have someone go up into the choir loft or balcony. Take a high-resolution photo of the entire congregation. This can help establish who sat close to whom, which can be helpful in tracing an outbreak.

What about church fellowship time?

There is no need to curtail or reduce church fellowship times after the divine service. Again, the aim of keeping the church open is to ensure continued access to the good gifts God gives His people through the Spirit’s work in the visible church. One of those good gifts is, as the Augsburg Confession puts it, “mutual care and consolation.” Having a church fellowship time, even one with food and beverages, does not have to be an infection risk.

But if you have a fellowship time with any food or drink you must take extra precautions. Shared meals are a huge infection risk. To protect your church’s fellowship time, extra measures should be put in place.

Once again: designate some church members to stand at the entrance of the fellowship hall to ensure hands are sanitized and masks are worn (although obviously masks can be removed while eating and drinking).

Do not provide any open food containers with self-service. For example, do not provide a casserole/hotdish from which congregants serve themselves a portion. Any open dishes should be put into individual containers in a clean kitchen, with those individual containers given to congregants.

Do not provide a condiments table with shared condiments which everyone touches. Individual packets of condiments are preferable.

The safest way to provide food is to supply individually-wrapped snacks.

Do not pre-pour lots of cups of beverages for people to take, or even set out empty cups: a single cough or infected breath on such cups could infect dozens of people.

If you want to have beverages, then have a designated person with gloves and a mask take individual clean cups from a clean location, and pour beverages into them at the request of individual congregants. Alternatively, have one individual take requests for canned or bottled beverages and then give them to congregants out of a clean cooler.

After any fellowship event, scrupulously disinfect all surfaces.

I’m a pastor, and I’m getting house calls. What precautions can I take to ensure I don’t get infected, or spread infections to people I visit?

Wash your hands.

Wash your hands.

If you have a beard consider removing it as it reduces the effectiveness of masks and can hold germs.

Wash your hands.

Wash your hands.

Wash your hands.

Don’t touch every random surface in somebody’s house and don’t eat random food out of their refrigerator.

Bring your own thermos of coffee or water bottle.

Wash your hands.

Clean your hands.

Un-dirt your hands.

Your hands; have you washed them recently?

Give us clean hands, oh Lord.

Wearing a mask is fine too, but mostly wash your hands.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY: thank you. From a layperson experiencing the fear of an epidemic, thank you that you are reading this and trying to protect your church. Thank you for looking for ways to ensure you can visit the sick. Thank you for taking the call to serve God’s people. Also wash your hands you are a pastor not a superhero you can die like anybody else and while the Spirit can easily enough call somebody else leaving your congregation without a pastor during an epidemic is a significant burden on them. Take care of your people, but take care not to get infected. Luther took it a bit too far.

The post Preparing Your Church For Coronavirus appeared first on The American Conservative.

Coronavirus & The Surveillance State

Fascinating article in the NYT today about how China has used its unmatched surveillance capacity to manage the coronavirus crisis. Excerpts:

As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces.

But a New York Times analysis of the software’s code found that the system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk. It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.

More:

The Times’s analysis found that as soon as a user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and an identifying code number to a server. The software does not make clear to users its connection to the police. But according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency and an official police social media account, law enforcement authorities were a crucial partner in the system’s development.

While Chinese internet companies often share data with the government, the process is rarely so direct. In the United States, it would be akin to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using apps from Amazon and Facebook to track the coronavirus, then quietly sharing user information with the local sheriff’s office.

And:

“The coronavirus outbreak is proving to be one of those landmarks in the history of the spread of mass surveillance in China,” she said.

Read the whole thing. 

The thing is, without its mass surveillance capabilities, the Chinese police state would not have been able to slow down coronavirus as well as it has. This piece from Science magazine explains how the state’s aggressive measures really did keep a terrible situation from becoming far worse. But:

How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable. “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development: “No one else in the world really can do what China just did.”

Nor should they, says lawyer Alexandra Phelan, a China specialist at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “Whether it works is not the only measure of whether something is a good public health control measure,” Phelan says. “There are plenty of things that would work to stop an outbreak that we would consider abhorrent in a just and free society.”

That’s right, we would normally consider them abhorrent, but would we consider them abhorrent if people were dropping dead left and right, and the government said it needed to implement these measures to stop the dying? Are you sure that you would say no to that? And then, once the system is in place, it could set “a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.”

And this is how an unprecedented public health crisis in the digital age could lay the groundwork for the expansion of the Pink Police State.

The post Coronavirus & The Surveillance State appeared first on The American Conservative.

Coronavirus & Systems Fragility

Here’s a link to an unrolled Twitter thread by former USAID official Jeremy Konyndyk. It begins:

Later in the thread:

Read the whole thread. His basic point is that the US Government did not want to see data that would indicate community transmission, so it didn’t look for that. What do you think? I’m especially interested in what medical professionals in this blog’s readership have to say.

I received this e-mail from Wyoming Doc a couple of days ago, and have his permission to post it:

I have just learned of the first Coronavirus Death in the USA. It is now getting real.

I would point you to the following links — I am seeing myself — but to a greater degree hearing about rather concerning things happening in our hospitals across the country.

The first is this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iz0dQbGLbE

The second is this website I showed you the other day:

https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

I would start first with a little background. I have been a physician now for almost 30 years. It has been a career spanning the very end of the “Marcus Welby” era, and then piece by piece the complete dismantling of the medical profession by the insurance companies and now “non-profit” corporations. When I was young, the leadership structure in the hospitals was completely and utterly controlled by three groups: the physicians, the nurses, and in the case of Catholic hospitals, the church and the nuns, or in non-Catholic hospitals, philanthropic community leaders.

The focus at the time was mostly on taking care of the most patients the best that could be done in a compassionate way with the resources available. And believe it or not, in my opinion, the care that was given in that time was far superior than what is going on now. The leaders of the hospitals were community leaders, and so was the medical and the nursing staff. To put it succinctly: they cared about their neighbors. Many, many nights while on call I would see the nuns right along side the nurses and physicians working themselves to death to take care of sick patients. These hospitals were never in debt — the resources and the donations coming in were used for the expenses going out. There were no four-star mahogany and marble lobbies. There were no 2 million dollar annual salaries for the hospital CEOs. There were no non-profit corporate boards extracting every bit of wealth from the patients to maintain multimillion dollar salaries for the board members and the middle managers.

When I was a young medical student, a very old professor taught a course in medical ethics. In one of his most pressing lectures, he discussed the fact that the goals and ideals of medicine and public health were a complete 180 degrees from the wants and desires of a free market. He added that every time combining public health/medicine and free markets had been tried in history it ended in tears — usually bankrupting the society. It was his fervent desire that we not allow this to happen to the profession as we entered its ranks, and to keep an eye out for this at all times.

Well, as everyone knows by now, his worst fears have been realized. Many, probably not most, members of my profession — especially the procedure-based specialists and surgeons — in the past 10-15 years have completely lost sight of the public well-being. Their sights are now on lucre. The one desire for many of them has been how to make more money more quickly. They have been aided and abetted by the governing agencies and Boards of all the various medical specialties. These national leadership organizations have made all the activities of being a physician so onerous and the billing so difficult that the vast majority of physicians have no choice but to become employees of these mega-corporations. The physicians have made a deal to take a back seat to these “businessmen” to keep the cash coming. The leadership of our hospital systems are no longer physicians, nurses, nuns, and philanthropists. Nope –it is all MBA all the time. Even the physicians who are nominally in charge — ie the ubiquitous Chief Medical Officers of the corporations — do not get considered for the jobs unless they have an MBA after their name. And the credentialing of the leadership teams are just absolutely ridiculous. Look at the websites of your local hospital and its leadership. It is usual to see things like this:  John Doe, MD MBA FACP PhD FACC. The non-MD credentialing is even more hilarious — I have no idea what 95% of these abbreviations mean — but they have to puff themselves up anyway. The hubris and the arrogance would be hilarious, but now the crisis is upon us.

About 10-15 years ago, the change began in earnest. One by one, the physicians in charge were replaced with MBA bureaucrats. The usual committee structure in the hospital — “Pharmacy & Therapeutics”, “Patient Care Committee” etc — had their physicians, nurses and pharmacists replaced with bureaucrats. Some of these bureaucrats were MDs and RNs — the paycheck was awesome —and they turned their backs on their duties and their colleagues and patients on the ground to keep the cash coming. I even lived to see the day when one of my hospitals fired the MD and RN leadership of the Medical Ethics Committee and replaced them with an MBA.

Suddenly, the only ethical thing to do was whatever was needed to maximize cash flow. And any MD or RN who did not like it? Well, you’re fired — see you later. We began to completely corporatize medical care. Advertisements and billboards everywhere, customer service feedback surveys flowing in the mail, the list is endless. Public health concerns began to be confined strictly to things that would boost revenue: colonoscopies, mammograms, labs, vaccinations, bone density studies, etc. Things that have no revenue flow — like mental health issues, opioid abuse, elder care — well, who cares about that? Very soon, the hospitals began to merge into gigantic corporations and then they began to collude to control the health care costs in the community. Our health care systems in all our big cities are gigantic monopolies. This despite the fact that this kind of behaviour is illegal under federal statutes. And please note: this is why insurance costs are so enormously high in this country — and getting higher every year. Obamacare did NOTHING to stop this; it actually in many ways has made it much easier to pull off.

Because of this situation and for many other reasons, I decided to make a change in my life a few years ago. I have now moved to a very small hospital in rural America. In my life now, the corporate board has now been replaced by a board elected by the taxpayers: they are truly leaders of the community and do everything in the spirit of what the people need and are counting on from their hospital. The hospital is led by an MD — and there are administrators — but they too are members of the community. There is an obvious care about the community and its needs. I have spoken to colleagues across the country this week — some big hospitals have done nothing at all to prepare for the crisis. It is no surprise to me that people in all levels at my current hospital have gone to enormous lengths to make sure everyone here is ready to go. I feel like I have stepped back in time twenty years. It is a very good feeling.

In the big city, I had become very accustomed to going to important meetings in the hospitals — all controlled by the business leadership now — and no medical facts or issues being discussed at all. Anything medical is distilled down to number crunching, revenue cycles, and “profit centers.” Never a word is said about medical facts, public health, impact on patients, or morality like it used to be — at least most of the time. Anyone who voices dissent is ostracized, and finds themselves disinvited and even dismissed from employment.

So the Youtube video is old hat to me. The people in charge of these critical things in our world often look like Barbie and Ken. They are cool cucumbers. They know all about branding, deceptive advertising, maximizing revenue, hiding truths, sucking up. But when actually asked questions that are critical to the issue at hand — they often know nothing. And because they know nothing, nothing gets done. I have seen it many times before and am sure I will see it again. I read commentary online that people were shocked by that DHS Chief’s answers to questions. I am not shocked — I am very accustomed to it. Please note: our entire corporate health care system at the local hospital level in the big cities is now under the control of people just like him. They are looking for every way they can to defuse this crisis with calming advertising, words, pleasantries, smiles, and soothing statements. I am sure that they are also looking for any way they can profit financially from it as well. All I can say is: Good Luck.

A case in point was the following interaction I was told about yesterday by an old student of mine who is now a fellow at a major medical center on the East Coast. I heard the same exact recollection of the story from someone else in the room.

This was a meeting with the upper administration of the hospital system and heads of departments and multiple physicians and nurses. It occurred between the CEO and a DOC who is older and near retirement and who is an infectious disease specialist. The discussion about the current crisis went something like this:

CEO: I am not sure that we need to be preparing like this – this is obviously overblown – and is really going to damage our budget projections. The HHS seems to think this is going to go away in the spring anyway.

DOC: Why in God’s name would you want it to go away in the spring?

CEO: (chuckling) What the hell are you talking about? We all want this thing to go away as soon as possible.

DOC – Historically, when pandemics are spread by aerosol droplets,  and are as infectious as this one seems to be, they may recede in the spring — but then come back in the fall with horrific fury. Remember the last one — the Spanish Flu? The first wave was nothing, but the second and third waves turned the planet into a funeral home.

CEO: Oh for God’s sake – don’t you get it? That will give us time to get a vaccine — we will not need to worry about it in October.

DOC: A vaccine? you must be kidding. It is never a good idea to rush a vaccine. Remember the first polio vaccine was rushed to market. It did not work and actually harmed many children. Remember the swine flu vaccine in the 1970s? It was not properly tested. Very few died from the swine flu. Hundreds and thousands were maimed or killed by Guillain Barré Syndrome because of it. And I doubt that half of our population would be even willing to take it. You do not understand.

CEO: Oh I understand way more than you obviously do. There is already an antiviral — we will have that as well.

DOC: Really? Again, not really fully tested. And have you looked at the cost? Even a conservative estimate at the dosing they are using it would be $5000 a day. What is that going to do to your budget projections when you have 100 people in here in the hospital on that drug? Do we even have enough in the country for a sudden mass need? I do not know.

And then CEO looked DOC in the eye and just moved on to something else.

And DOC found out later that he would no longer be welcome at any of these meetings.

Please know this: viruses are not Republicans, they are not Democrats. Viruses are not going to respond to advertising, sweet words, or revenue cycles. They are going to accomplish their mission, and that alone. There may be things we are able to do, but we will need all the medical wisdom in the world focusing on our country as a whole and our local communities. That is just not happening to the extent it should be. We are going to fight this one with business school principles.

I again pray all the time that this virus will burn out — that it will stop, that it will not get worse. I pray that God will have mercy and allow this to be a close call. But I am afraid that we have let our society crumble in so many ways –not just medicine — that it is going to take a punch in the face to get our attention. This coronavirus may very well be the brass knuckles.

A follow-up e-mail from him:

This has been one of the most harrowing weeks in my career. The patients are really wigged out. Multiple times this week,  I have seen patients with a cough or fever — and we cannot ID a pathogen. That has caused a constant boogeyman to be sitting on my shoulder: fear. I can see the fear in my staff’s eyes, and then on Friday, a  nurse suddenly after lunch developed a 101 fever and a bad cough — again no pathogens. I have a feeling this is happening in many other places in this country.

We have no way to test these people. I can offer little if any hope. I am telling them to stay at home, and I can see the horror in their eyes. I am now at the same level of those physicians in Milano 700 years ago –

So when I get this kind of soul crushing fear in my life, I always call one of my elder family members. My parents and grandparents are all gone now. The only one left is my 92 year old Auntie Marina. She lived through hell in Greece during the Nazi occupation and immediately thereafter. She is an amazing woman. And this is what she said to me.

“My dear, I was there when your parents handed your life and everything you are over to God. I was right on the front row. He has been preparing you every day of your life since you were a baby for the duties that you must now perform. Be brave, and sturdy, and do everything in His name. He will surround you with courage — and fear not, if he decides this is your time to go, you will be welcomed by all the saints and angels. But here in our house, we are going to be lifting you up in prayer, multiple times a day. And I am certain that your parents are looking down and are very very proud of you.”

I am a member of my community and my church. I cannot leave my post — and I would ask that you pray for me and my staff for the bravery to continue on. I know that is a lot of drama,  but we are really having fear here on the front lines. I would ask that you keep all the health care workers in America in your prayers right now.

In further conversation, the doctor said that we should be thinking about a world in which a large number of health care workers can’t come to work because they are in quarantine or sick with the virus. We are looking at this problem right now.

He also recommends that people follow the coronavirus Reddit, which he says is well-moderated, and a source of solid information: https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/

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The Sweet Pain Of Prostralgia

If you’re an observant Orthodox Christian, chances are your lower body aches today. That’s because Sunday night was Forgiveness Vespers, the service that begins Lent. From the Orthodox Church in America:

Then, after Vespers – after hearing the announcement of Lent in the Great Prokeimenon: “Turn not away Thy face from Thy child for I am afflicted! Hear me speedily! Draw near unto my soul and deliver it!” [and] after making our entrance into Lenten worship, with its special memories, with the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, with its prostrations – we ask forgiveness from each other, we perform the rite of forgiveness and reconciliation. And as we approach each other with words of reconciliation, the choir intones the Paschal hymns, filling the church with the anticipation of Paschal joy.

What is the meaning of this rite? Why is it that the Church wants us to begin Lenten season with forgiveness and reconciliation? These questions are in order because for too many people, Lent means primarily, and almost exclusively, a change of diet, the compliance with ecclesiastical regulations concerning fasting. They understand fasting as an end in itself, as a “good deed” required by God and carrying in itself its merit and its reward. But, the Church spares no effort in revealing to us that fasting is but a means, one among many, towards a higher goal: the spiritual renewal of man, his return to God, true repentance and, therefore, true reconciliation. The Church spares no effort in warning us against a hypocritical and pharisaic fasting, against the reduction of religion to mere external obligations. As a Lenten hymn says: “In vain do you rejoice in no eating, O soul!  For you abstain from food, but from passions you are not purified.  If you persevere in sin, you will perform a useless fast.”

I’m not sure that all Orthodox congregations observe Forgiveness Vespers as we do in ours — an OCA parish — but it really is a physical workout. First, it began with our pastor following the example of the late Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas, who started Forgiveness Vespers by confessing his sins against the congregation in the previous year. (It’s not a sacramental confession, but rather an acknowledgement of his own failings.) This is not standard, but it’s something that ++Dmitri did, and our priest, ++Dmitri’s spiritual son, has taken up. Then, each of us ritually asks the other members of the congregation, personally, for forgiveness — and offers forgiveness to the others.

When I say “personally,” I mean that we do it face to face. You say something like, “Forgive me, brother,” and the other person says the same thing. Then you both say, “God forgives, and I forgive.” Then both do a full, head-to-floor prostration to each other, to signal humility. Then rise, move down the line, and do it again. We had about thirty people in church yesterday, so that was quite a bit of prostration. Not everybody did it — folks with bad backs did not. Still, most of us did. This morning, my legs hurt so much that it was a chore to get out of bed. I’ve coined a word to describe the Monday-morning, aches-and-pains condition of faithful Orthodox, after Forgiveness Vespers: prostralgia. 

You really do feel it in your body, which is how it’s supposed to be. In Tom Holland’s wonderful history Dominion, I learned of a saying carved into the Abbey of Saint-Denis, in Paris. It’s a saying of Abbot Suger, who oversaw the construction of the first Gothic church: “The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.” This, too, is what Lent is about: to subject our bodies to ascetic rigors for the sake of sharpening minds grown dull to the reality of God.

We have been attracting more and more young people to our services. Yesterday after the morning liturgy, I introduced myself to a new young couple, and asked them what brought them as visitors to the Orthodox Church. The man said that he was raised non-denominational, and has been practicing the faith in a non-denominational church, but “you just get to the point where you ask, ‘Is this all there is?'” This is a common thing among Orthodox inquirers, especially young men. They’re bored or at least unfulfilled by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in their own churches. I don’t know which church this young man attends, but my guess is that it’s pretty conservative in its theology and moral teaching. But that’s not enough for him. Somehow, he wants more.

He doesn’t realize it yet, but he longs for prostralgia. We see this a lot with younger seekers, especially males. They respond to a form of Christianity that asks them to do something more than sit quietly and think, or adjust their emotions. Mind you, Orthodox Christianity is not merely ascetic exercises. If you want to get sore muscles, go to the gym. If you want to change your diet, you don’t need church for that. As the passage above from the OCA website points out, fasting (and prostrations) are not ends in themselves; they are only spiritually effective if they are experienced by the worshiper as a way to God. It’s interesting, though, how the rigors of the Lenten fast have a way of sharpening a dull mind.

Tonight begins the prayers of the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, the four-night penitential service that involves a lot of prostrations. Here’s an explanation of what the Canon is about. It’s a dialogue between the eighth-century saint and his soul:

The Great Canon was written by a holy man to teach himself the right way to live. We cannot benefit from it unless we make it a priority to stand in prayer, in the church, and listen to it, with a great desire and expectation for God’s grace to teach us and heal us. Our theology is first and foremost – experienced and prayed, and not only “studied”.

Here is the entire Great Canon, broken down into what the choir (and the congregation) chant in prayer each of the four nights. Here, for example, is Ode Two, that will be sung tonight:

Attend O heaven and I will speak,I will sing of Christ,Who from the Virgin took flesh to dwell with us.Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.

Listen, O heaven, and I will speak. O earth, hear the cry of one returning to God and singing His praises.

Look down on me in Your mercy, O compassionate God and Saviour, and accept my fervent confession.

More than all have I sinned; I alone have sinned against You, O God my Saviour, but have compassion on me, Your creature.

Through love of pleasure has my form become deformed and the beauty of my inward being has been ruined.

O compassionate One, as You saved Peter when he was about to sink, so reach out now to me, for a storm of evil surges around me.

O Saviour, I have defiled the garment of my flesh and polluted that which You fashioned within me according to Your own image and likeness.

With passions have I darkened the beauty of my soul and permitted my whole inward being to become mire.

I like naked, having torn up the garment which my Creator fashioned for me in the beginning.

I am ashamed, for the serpent deceived me and my garment is in tatters.

O compassionate One, like the prostitute who anointed Your feet so now do I offer You tears. Have mercy on me, O Saviour.

I like naked and ashamed, for the beauty of the tree, which I saw in the middle of the garden, deceived me.

The demons have cut deep wounds of passion into my back; their lawlessness has made it like a plowed field.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

O God of all, I sing of You as One yet Three in Person, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

O Most holy Theotokos, Virgin alone praised everywhere, pray fervently that we may be saved.

Here is the Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, said many times in the Orthodox Church during Lent. Each recitation of it requires three full body prostrations from those capable of doing them:

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.

Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.

This what it means to pray with your whole body, not just with your mind, or your mouth. It is not easy! But after you’ve done it, you can’t imagine not doing it. If you’re curious, find a local Orthodox parish, and go to services one night this week, for the chanting of the Canon which, as I’ve indicated, dates back to the eighth century. It’s an experience of the Christian faith that is really alien to modern America, in the best way.

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Miranda’s Trumpy Doll House

Well, here’s a Rorschach test for this blog’s readership. My guess is that people are going to feel passionate about this article, and that we’re going to have eleventy-jillion comments.

Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post profiles Miranda Murphey, a 39-year-old high school English teacher from Augusta, Georgia. She’s been married to Philip for 12 years. By this story’s account, he’s been a good husband to her. She wasn’t a conventional pick for someone like him, from a society family, but he loves her. He’s a churchgoing Trump voter, but doesn’t seem to much care that she’s come to hate Trump, and has stopped going to church. Here’s how McCrummen describes him:

He did not chafe at her independence. He never complained when she decided to pursue her doctorate instead of having children. Never asked where his dinner was. He was kind to her older sister, who was born with mental disabilities, and who Miranda referred to as “my heart” and “my girl” with an air of fierce protectiveness.

He also supports her friendship with Liz Hahn. This, alas, is going to mean the end of their marriage, I predict.

Liz — a divorced woman and liberal activist — has led Miranda to a Great Awokening. Excerpts:

And then came Liz, a new English teacher in her district who was outspoken and had a sticker on her cellphone with an image of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the word “Dissent.” She was not like anyone Miranda had met before, a Republican who’d become a Democrat and who described her Trump-era self as a “full-on rage machine.”

A “full-on rage machine” — like that’s a good thing. Miranda’s unhappy experiences with other Southern white conservatives in the Trump era had begun to alienate her from that world, in which she was raised. Liz articulates her alienation and anger well. More:

Miranda listened. She was by now used to how Liz talked. Women in bondage, the white male establishment. Liz, the daughter of a minister, now described the evangelical church as a “fear-based cult permanently intertwined with a patriarchal power system.”

Miranda was surprised by how often she found herself seeing what Liz meant. She had come around to Liz’s view that being pro-choice did not mean being pro-abortion, for instance. She had stopped attending church partly because her Sunday school had turned into one long baby shower and she did not have children, and partly because of the day a teacher had gone on a rant about the growing Muslim population.

“The message to me was, ‘They’re here to out-populate us,’ ” Miranda said now. “I took it as: ‘Wow, I guess I’m not doing my job having white children to add to the fight.’ ”

“It’s like this way of life is threatened,” said Liz. “This white way of life.”

They stopped for a moment for water, and Miranda thought about that. She thought about how her husband’s friend had kidded her about her friendship with Liz, and kidded Liz about the bumper stickers on her car — “Tolerance” and “Coexist” and “READ” — and how she had laughed it off until one day it wasn’t funny anymore.

“Exactly which one of those do you disagree with?” Miranda had said sharply.

“It’s like they’re wondering, ‘Are you changing?’” she told Liz now. “It’s a subconscious thing of, ‘What’s next?’ Meaning, if my mind can be changed, what else could happen?”

Here’s one more passage:

Phillip’s friends had been the same since high school. Hers had expanded to include a group of female teachers that Liz called “the coven,” who often met at Liz’s house to drink wine, and talk about school and how stifling life could be in suburban Augusta.

“Love you,” Phillip said, dropping Miranda off on one of these evenings, pausing for a moment to wave at a group of women he barely knew.

“Love you,” Miranda said, and the wine was poured.

They talked about codependent female characters in movies, which somehow led to a conversation about the actor Tom Hiddleston, and Liz played a recording of him reading a racy E.E. Cummings poem.

“Y’all,” said Miranda. “I’m going to have to take a shower.”

There was more wine, and they talked about the night they all went to a downtown Augusta club to see a fellow teacher who moonlighted in a burlesque troop called Dirty South. She had performed as Marie Antoinette and smashed cake all over her body.

“Liz kept saying, ‘Look at Miranda’s face!’ ” one of the teachers said now.

“I kept pouring wine for Miranda,” Liz said. “I joked that she was out of her comfort zone, but actually it was me — I still have that evangelical Christian girl in there.”

Here’s where the future is foretold:

[Liz] had told Miranda about her first marriage to a conservative Christian man with whom she had two kids and “this cute little family,” and how it started falling apart when she began reading Dostoyevsky, pursuing a teaching career, making different friends, having different thoughts, and how “this internal voice got louder and louder saying, ‘this is not a role I can play anymore’ ” until she finally got a divorce, after which she felt guilty for years.

Liz tells the story in the mode of a religious conversion, in which she loses everything in her life for the sake of her new Truth, leading to a dramatic moment of deconversion that is straight out of a liberal Hollywood script. Now she exults in her new freedom, and the progressive activism that gives force and purpose to her life.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do. Every paragraph is pregnant with meaning.

Here’s what I think is going to happen: Under the influence of the coven, especially full-on-rage-machine Liz, Miranda is going to leave her Trump-voting, Rush-listening husband, and start a new life as a liberal activist who takes as her mission turning the school where she and Liz teach into a vector of progressive values injected into this horrible, hate-filled white Southern suburb. Poor Philip, who is a good ol’ boy in the best sense of the phrase, is not going to see any of this coming (unless he reads this Post piece and has an awakening of his own). Liz is a Pied Piper figure, exploiting Miranda’s understandable alienation from Trumpworld, and politicized Southern Evangelicalism, and turning it into rage against everything that has given Miranda’s life meaning till now.

The thing is, I get why Miranda is put off by the conservative politics of her community, especially how those politics express themselves in her Baptist church. Why don’t they find a different church? Why stop going to church altogether, as if Trumpy Evangelicalism was the only option besides disaffiliation? If she’s bothered so much by the kind of politicized racial talk around her, well, talk to Philip about it. Talk to your friends about it, tell them that it bothers you. Decades ago, my family in Louisiana and I pretty much quit talking about politics because we found that we got on each other’s nerves — and I’m a conservative! But you know, that was no big deal. It was manageable. They loved me, and I loved them, and we weren’t going to let politics separate us. It sounds like Liz is encouraging Miranda to make politics the be-all and end-all of her life. I’d bet my next paycheck that Liz is every bit as exhausting in her political harangues as the right-wingers who get on Miranda’s nerves — but she’s a pain in the ass for the Left, so that makes her a Prophet.

I genuinely think this is a powerful story, one with almost mythic force, and I’m glad McCrummen wrote it. But note well: you will never, ever read a profile of a woman who gets fed up with the hyperpoliticization of her left-wing society, makes a conservative Evangelical convert friend, and starts to feel the impulse to escape her life. And if such a thing did happen, if the Evangelical friend were to urge her, even implicitly, to leave her otherwise kind, loving secular liberal husband for the sake of “freedom” and self-realization, she would be a terrible friend.

But the story of Miranda’s deconversion from conservatism, Evangelicalism, and marriage, into a world of self-discovery and self-realization, and divorce, is a narrative with immense power in our culture. In the late 19th century, Henrik Ibsen caused a scandal with his play A Doll’s House, which told pretty much this same story. In the play, Nora Helmer is a bourgeois housewife married to Torvald Helmer, a bank manager. They have a nice house, with kids, and a seemingly perfect life. But Nora feels stifled within it, as if she were playing a role. Over the course of the play, a domestic crisis reveals the cracks in their marriage, and causes Nora to spite Torvald, who can only think of her as a wife, mother, and homemaker. In their confrontation, in which Nora says she’s leaving him and the children, she says that during their eight years of marriage, “We have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.” Off she goes, never to return.

When I first saw this play, as a single man, I sympathized with Nora. Torvald really is a stuffed shirt, the product of a society that taught him to see women as totally dependent on men, and as their servants. I re-read it last year, and was surprised by how much I hated the play, even as I did not like Torvald any more the second time than I did the first. The fact that Nora walked out on those children in search of “herself” was repulsive to me. Second, she did not give Torvald the chance to change, to turn away from the false ideas that society had given him, and that he had accepted blindly. Nora saw herself as only a victim of Torvald, and of hypocritical bourgeois society — and as a victim, she had the right to do whatever she felt she needed to do to discover her True Self. Even leave her husband and children.

Again, I can’t stand Torvald any more now than when I first encountered the play, but I am inclined to see him as a different kind of victim of stifling bourgeois society (Kierkegaard blasted the hypocrisies of this same society from a Christian point of view). Torvald is a rigid man, but not a cruel one. I think A Doll’s House is a hateful play now; the story of how Miranda is being seduced away from her marriage to a good, but in some ways limited, man, into a life of self-exploration and political activism, reminds me of how much I despise that play.

There are no children in Philip and Miranda’s marriage — for that, I guess, thank God. They won’t have to pay the price if their mother decides that becoming an activist Democrat is more important than their family’s life. To be clear, if I were Miranda, I too would find the life she describes as stifling. But is Liz Life any better? Sitting around with women bitching about their husbands, then heading off to a strip club to watch a fellow teacher demean herself sexually in public, on a pole? That’s freedom? Notice the theme of sexual liberation in the words and deeds of the coven. Liz is a wicked, wicked person. Nobody needs to be friends with a self-described “full-on rage machine.” That woman is a destroyer.

If Philip wants to save his marriage, he needs to tell Liz the Tempter to hit the road. If Miranda wants to save her marriage, she needs to stand with her husband on this, and end that toxic friendship. And then Philip and Miranda need to work on their marriage. Based on what we see in this story, he is too caught up in a middle-class suburban Southern narrative to see the crisis into which his wife has been drifting for a long time. Her decision to stop going to church was a warning sign. He sounds far too passive — remember, he doesn’t even know the “coven” — thinking that to be a good husband is to give one’s wife maximal freedom to do what she wants. As if marriage were nothing more than a contractual agreement between two autonomous individuals.

Bottom line: it sounds like Philip and Miranda have been caught up in one inauthentic social narrative, and that Miranda is being tempted to escape from it by embracing a rival social narrative that is no less inauthentic, but which is privileged by the dominant culture. Like I said, you won’t see Washington Post profiles of women getting fed up with progressive culture, and tempted to escape from it into a more traditional, even religious, rival culture. Nor would you see a Washington Post profile of a man who decides that he’s bored and stifled by his loving, conventional wife of 12 years, and is tempted by his divorced, fun-loving male friend to reconsider whether or not he’s getting the most out of life by staying with her.

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Decadence And Ross Douthat

[Note: I had a talk last week with Ross Douthat about his great new book The Decadent Society: How We Became The Victims Of Our Own Success. Here you go:]

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When most of us hear the word “decadence,” we think of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the late Roman Empire, or Weimar Germany. But that’s not what you’re talking about. Would you clarify what you mean by decadence?

I’m following a definition proposed twenty years ago by the late cultural historian Jacques Barzun, who argued that we should understand “decadence” as referring to periods when wealthy and dynamic societies enter into stalemate, stagnation, and decay – when they lose a a clear sense of both purpose and future possibility. Which doesn’t exclude scenarios like rapid moral decline or fascist or Communist takeover: A decadent society is vulnerable to both. But under decadence you’re often more likely to get a kind of moral or cultural mediocrity than either radical villainy or sainthood. And our own decadence seems to fit that pattern: In certain ways we look more stable and less flagrantly debased than in the 1970s, when crime rates and abortion rates and divorce rates and drug abuse were much higher, and our vices have a more private, virtual, numbing style.

Likewise, a decadent society can collapse under the right circumstances, and our sclerotic institutions are certainly vulnerable to certain stresses – like the coronavirus! But decadence can also last a long time: Weimar fell to Hitler quickly, but the “late” Roman empire (or the Ottoman or Chinese empires later) lasted for centuries in a condition of decay. So I don’t think you can assume that our decadence is going turn to crisis and collapse immediately; it might be a lot more sustainable than people think.

Ross Douthat (NYT)

You and I are both religious conservatives, but I think it fair to say that I’m a lot more culturally pessimistic than you are. What are the greatest differences between your concerns about decadence, and my own?

Well, as a faithful reader of your work, I would say that you see a Weimar replay as more likely, probably with an aggressive cultural left playing the totalitarian role, and I see the forces that might bring liberalism crashing down – an authoritarian socialism on the left, an authoritarian populism on the right — as themselves too constrained and weakened by decadence to swiftly impose the kind of regime that their critics fear. I think as Donald Trump has been constrained and often impotent as president, so too would be President Bernie Sanders; I think that the activist left seems somewhat more powerful on the internet than in the real world; I think a scenario where our shared Christian faith is pressured and cajoled as more likely than one where it ends up persecuted. And I think our wealth cushions us, at least somewhat, against shocks that in a different era might usher in a version of the 1930s.

More generally, I think that you see the current moment in terms of an onrushing wave – liquid modernity, carrying all before it – while I see a more cyclical pattern at work, and a lot more stasis over the last couple of generations especially. I think we lived through a real cultural revolution in the 1960s, and today’s disturbances are aftershocks – important, obviously, but less trajectory-altering than it sometimes seems.

Which doesn’t mean that we won’t arrive, eventually, at a soft despotism or a genuine Aldous-Huxleyan dystopia. But I think any such process is happening more slowly, with a lot of ebbs and flows and many persistent stalemates and unresolved conflicts, that it sometimes feels just from reading the daily incident report on Twitter.

Let me press you on this a bit. You write about decadence as “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” I accept the truth of this diagnosis, but it’s hard to muster a sense of urgency about it. I mean, I look at the collapse of the stable family, the demise of Christianity as the settled moral and metaphysical narrative of our civilization, and now the loss of the gender binary, for God’s sake, as indications of a more visceral decline – the kind of decadence that strikes me as much more directly affecting the life of my kids than the failure of Hollywood’s creativity, or the disappointment of the institutional church.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t feel the decline of Christianity or the collapse of the stable family viscerally; as a Catholic columnist for a secular newspaper and someone with divorced parents and divorced grandparents I feel them as viscerally as anyone. But the worst collapse of the family happened between 1960 and 1990, with the divorce revolution and Roe v. Wade, and since then there’s been a certain stabilization: Low divorce rates, less teen pregnancy, lower abortion rates, and even the rise of out-of-wedlock birth rates has lately leveled off. Which has left us with a different set of problems: The retreat from marriage and romance and sexual complementarianism rather than too many affairs and abortions or too much teenage promiscuity, the growth of P.D. Jamesian sterility rather than sexual chaos, the numbing effects of porn-induced impotence rather Hefnerian excess. These are problems of decadence, rather than indicators of looming social collapse.

And likewise with our shared faith’s decline: That’s a story that’s been going on for centuries, and in the United States accelerated dramatically in the 1960s – but what we’ve seen in the last twenty years is more of an after-effect, in which loosely-affiliated people stop identifying with their parents’ churches, than it is sudden and dramatic secularization. The rise of the “Nones” may be leveling off, there’s a pretty resilient core of church attendance, and the theological tendency that you and I both like to lament – Moralistic Therapeutic Deism – won its greatest victories in the 1970s, not the 2010s. Whether it’s New Age spirituality or self-help religion or even astrology, I don’t think we’re necessarily hurtling into post-Christianity so much as making an eternal return to 1975. Which isn’t a great year to return to, but we should see the cycling at work.

To what extent do you think the myth of Progress, which is something we Americans of all political tribes absorb with our mother’s milk, blinds us to decadence?

In two ways. First, the assumption that technological progress is an inevitable feature of modernity makes it hard for people to recognize when it actually slows down – which it has, I think, outside of technologies of communication and simulation, since the 1960s. The assumption that the robots must be coming for our jobs, for instance, shows up in contemporary politics all the time, even though there’s little data to back it up: The big automation shocks are in the past, and productivity growth – the best measure of technology’s effect on work — has slowed down since the late 1990s, rather than speeding up, and projects like the self-driving car keep running up against pretty major limitations (like, say, driving in the rain). Our computers and phones are genuinely amazing, but a lot of the innovations we expected in the ‘60s or even the ‘90s really haven’t yet showed up.

Then second, we tend to assume that the innovations we do have are worth more than less tangible but possibly more important goods – the forms of community and solidarity that you write about so often. Or, alternatively, we assume that even if there are costs to living our lives mediated by screens and phones, or inside McMansions or SUVs, the fact that people are choosing these things – as “free” consumers — means that we can’t resist or choose another way. I think it’s very clear that some basic forms of human flourishing require establishing more control over the role the internet plays in our lives – reducing our exposure to social media, keeping kids offline as long as possible, and censoring or restricting online porn. But it’s very hard for modern Americans to wrap their minds around the possibility that new technology can be managed or resisted; “you can’t fight technological change” is a very powerful social and cultural idea.

Walker Percy had this theory that people secretly loved hurricanes, because the prospect of impending disaster re-enchanted the world, in part by casting out the spirit of ennui. What would you say to people today who long for some sort of cleansing cataclysm to purge the rot from the system?

Be careful what you wish for! There are a lot of ways to exit decadence, and for every pathway to a renaissance there are several that just lead down to disaster. Percy is right, I think, that there are human gifts and graces that only emerge under stress, and that a sense of our own mortality is essential to being human and more palpably felt in the shadow of a natural disaster, or 9/11, or now the coronavirus. But it’s still wrong to wish for the disaster, and foolish to make choices that might hasten it.

I think a lot about the way that September 11, which happened when I was in college, made a whole cohort of young people and intellectuals feel like this was the end of decadence that we’d been waiting for, that at last there would be some grand purpose to life, some civilizational struggle for our times. And what came of that? Not an American renewal, not a successful crusade for democracy and human rights: Just a lot of dead people in the Middle East, and a war that’s devolved into the droning of terrorists and the perpetual management of frozen conflicts. That’s an example of what in the book I call the perils of anti-decadence: We can and should be discontented with our situation, but we should recognize all the ways the revolutionary or crusading alternatives can end like the Iraq War, or for that matter World War I — in death and futility and grief.

I’ve been working for the past year on a book about lessons we should learn from Christians who endured Soviet totalitarianism. One thing I’ve gotten from my historical reading is how much our own decadent moment resembles the decadence of late Imperial Russia, and Weimar Germany. With these relatively recent historical examples in mind, do you worry about where the inability of our political system to reform itself might take the country?

Absolutely, and that fear has been sharpened by watching the way that the coronavirus seems poised to hit us in all our stress points, from far-flung supply chains to incompetent bureaucracies to our polarized and gridlocked politics to the not-exactly-trustworthy presidency of Donald Trump.

But there are three differences between our situation and your past examples that I’d stress. First, we’re a much, much richer society than Tsarist Russia or even Weimar Germany, which both makes it easier to weather economic crises (the Great Depression gave us thirty percent unemployment but our various stabilizers meant the Great Recession wasn’t nearly that bad) and gives people a sense that they have more to lose from revolution than did people in the not-so-distant European past.

Second, we’re a much older society than the 20th century European (or, for that matter Asian) societies in which crises overturned everything and then totalitarianism took root. Age makes people more cautious and risk-averse; it also makes them much less inclined to take to the streets in mass protest or mass violence. I point out in the book, for instance, that the most enthusiastic participants in our virtual civil war, the Resistance types and the MAGA rallygoers, are often middle-aged suburban and retirees – not exactly the groups you’d expect to start brawling with one another in the streets. Meanwhile campuses and cities, the places where our 1960s tumults happened, are surprisingly calm and quiet in the Trump era.

Finally, we have the internet as a kind of safe playspace for revolutionaries – a zone where you can rebel against decadence by cosplaying 1917 or 1968, so that the impulses that lead to revolution in prior eras might end up channeled into virtual extremism instead. Occasionally online radicalism does leak into the real world, in terrible ways – as incel or white supremacist violence, or the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to murder Republican politicians. But those figures seem to me more like outliers than forerunners; so long as the internet keeps getting more immersive, I think we’re more likely to respond to institutional and cultural decay by play-acting the Russian Revolution rather than actually enacting it.

For me, the most important sign of our decadence is the loss of faith in religion – specifically the Christian religion, but more generally, in metaphysics. You’ve written a couple of books about religion – “Bad Religion,” about American heresies, and a more recent one critical of Pope Francis. Is it possible to recover from decadence without religious revival? In what form might religious revival come to us?

Barzun writes of the decadent society that “the loss it faces is that of Possibility,” and clearly a failing faith in the transcendent is a big part of that: If you cease to believe that you are part of a story, that history is more than just one damn thing after another, then you are more likely to sink into repetitive cycles and be overtaken by futility.

Certainly, both the American heresies I wrote about in Bad Religion and the Francis-era Catholic Church are marked by decadence. In the case of Catholicism, you have a combination of slow decline, disillusioning scandals, and seeming unresolvable liberal-conservative deadlocks – with Francis himself, strikingly, increasingly bringing us back to that deadlock (as in his recent refusal on married priests) after spending the first few years of his pontificate pushing in a more revolutionary direction. In the case of popular heresies, meanwhile, you have a striking failure to build new churches and institutions: The self-appointed religious visionaries of 19th century America gave us Mormondom and Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and more; their heirs and heiresses today mostly just have lifestyle brands.

So yes, although I offer a lot of different ideas for how decadence might end, my assumption is that a religious revival, in some institutional and not just individualized form, seems likely. As for where it might come from – well, it might be that the atomization and isolation of post-religious and post-familial life, pushed further over the next generation and exacerbated by the internet, will create a renewed opportunity for Christian evangelization as people feel the loss of community more palpably. Or it might be that the obvious intellectual tensions and contradictions in elite secularism, which are already giving us a kind of religious rebellion in the form of the Great Awokening, will create opportunities for the Christian synthesis to be proposed anew. Or there might be some actual pagan or pantheist synthesis waiting to emerge. Or change might come from outside; who knows that the Chinese religious landscape will look like in twenty years, or the landscape of Europe in fifty?

All that said, it’s easy to invent scenarios, but as someone once put it, we know not the day or the hour: The timing and nature of the next religious revival is known to God alone.

Finishing “The Decadent Society” made me even more confident in the Benedict Option as a kind of solution – that is, ceasing to care about rescuing an order that is beyond saving, and instead trying to focus on building up local forms of (religious) community within which people of faith can live out the decline and fall. If one were to read “The Benedict Option” and “The Decadent Society” in succession, and to ask himself, “What should I do now?” – what would be the most reasonable conclusion?

I think it depends on your position in life, your age and obligations, your place within the various hierarchies of our society. My sense is that BenOp approaches, broadly defined, are a really important way to resist decadence at the local level, with families and churches and communities as important seedbeds for growth and creativity and dynamism. At the same time, part of my argument is that renaissance comes from things happening at multiple levels all at once – so there’s a place for people working for political realignments, for artists and intellectuals embedded in ossified institutions and trying to transform them from within, and from people working in the one clear area of continuing dynamism, Silicon Valley, and trying to direct its wealth and power toward humane innovations, explorations rather than just simulation. So I think the Benedict Option offers a starting point or foundation for renewal to the extent that it remains somewhat outward-looking, not just defensive – and also the extent that it doesn’t just confine itself to pastoralist concerns (as important as those are) but also recognizes that ours is an urbanized and technological civilization and likely to remain one, and so a vocation to the city and the university and the laboratory and even the start-up incubator should not be disdained.

Last question: Where do you find hope?

In the palpable desire of many people, right and left, populist and socialist and Catholic-integralist, for a different kind of politics — as risky as that different kind of politics might be! — than just the technocratic management of decadence. In the eagerness of Silicon Valley billionaires, whose power and influence I dislike in many ways, to spend at least some of their money on possibly-futile efforts to catapult us further into space. In the exceptions to film industry decadence like Pawel Pawlikowski and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and the Coen Brothers. In my own three-going-on-four children, and the big families that make noise in our parish every Sunday Mass. In the fact that I spent the day after my book’s release, Ash Wednesday walking the streets of oh-so-secular Manhattan, and there were ashed foreheads everywhere I looked – a sign that whatever may be wrong with American Christianity, there’s also life in those dry bones yet.

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The book is The Decadent Society: How We Became The Victims Of Our Own Success.

UPDATE: Readers, before you post, please understand that Douthat is not using “decadence” as a synonym for “immoral.” His argument is much more sophisticated than that.

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Christian Coronavirus Scapegoats

You saw this tweet the other day, maybe; I mentioned it in my last post:

Medical advice from Mike Pence. #NewYorkerCartoons pic.twitter.com/rcSzedejo8

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 27, 2020

On Sunday, there was this:

Mike Pence and his coronavirus emergency team praying for a solution. We are so screwed. pic.twitter.com/p020FBIK9J

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

Repentance As Response To Coronavirus

The Trump era has taking a terrible toll on The New Yorker‘s sense of humor. It cannot publish a funny political cartoon to save its life. This from the other day:

Medical advice from Mike Pence. #NewYorkerCartoons pic.twitter.com/rcSzedejo8

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 27, 2020

I wouldn’t mind so much this making fun of the vice president’s Christian faith if the cartoon had even a slightest bit of wit. It’s just stupid, and it’s faintly ugly.

But you know, repentance is not a bad way to face this crisis. Let me explain.

We Orthodox Christians will begin Lent on Sunday night. To get ready for it, I went to confession tonight, for the first time in a long time. I’ve been struggling — struggling a lot — with some things. Not worth going into here, but let’s just say that I’ve not been in a good place, and for reasons particular to me, have been paralyzed every time I’ve thought about confession. I started going to confession 26 years ago, when I became Catholic, and have always been faithful to it. The rite of confession has been one of the great gifts of both my Catholic, and then my Orthodox, faith. Catechumens often find the thought of it intimidating, but I tell them, just you wait — you’re going to get to the point where you look forward to it. For me, it has been both a way of making spiritual progress, by having to do a spiritual inventory every two or three weeks, as well as getting free of my tendency to carry around a burden of guilt. When you leave confession, if you confessed with sincerity, then you can have confidence that your sins are forgiven. God is the one who forgives; the priest stands in for Christ. Still, there’s a certainty that comes with the priest praying over you, making the sign of the Cross at the end, and you walking out, free.

Anyway, I’ve been stuck for a while trying to deal with some things that are not right in my life. We all have them, but in my case, I have felt like I’ve been turned to stone, and unable to move. Why are things the way they are? Why can’t I do anything about them? It’s not like I’ve been mad at God, but I have simply been vexed and paralyzed. This morning, I knew that I had to find some way to get to confession, but I didn’t know where I would find the strength inside myself to do it. I haven’t been to confession in months, and therefore haven’t been to communion for months. When was this going to end? I don’t know. I felt like Dante and Virgil standing before the iron gates of Dis in the Inferno, unable to break down the wall, or enter the gates — until an Angel of the Lord came down, and through a divine act, made straight the path.

Well, I don’t want to say that God sent an angel today, but I will say that working on my forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies, this afternoon — I’m adding a new chapter — got through to me, and opened the gates of repentance. My editor and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about what the book would have to say to people who don’t really believe that the anti-communist dissidents are right, and that soft totalitarianism is upon us. The answer, as it turns out, is a chapter based on my conversations with my friend Timotej Krizka, a young Slovak photographer. Here’s a photo I took of Timo and his wife Petra at home in Bratislava last year:

Timo is an incredibly gifted photographer, and a deeply devout Catholic. Late last year, he published Light In Darkness, a collection of his photographs and interviews with elderly Christians who survived incarceration for their faith, under the communist regime. There’s an English translation in the book accompanying the original Slovak, but I don’t know how you can buy a copy of the book itself. If Live Not By Lies is successful, I hope some American publisher will buy the rights to reproduce Timo’s stunning volume.

In the chapter I finished today, Timo, who is 33, tells about how he had found a fair amount of success as a commercial photographer and filmmaker, but somehow felt empty and anxious. He began a project to honor the memory of his great-grandfather, a Greek Catholic priest in Slovakia who had been ordered by the Soviet-backed communist regime to convert to Orthodoxy (it controlled the Orthodox Church) or leave the priesthood. He refused, and had to spend the rest of his life working a secular job to support his family (Eastern Rite Catholic priests are allowed to marry).

Timo said that his great-grandfather’s decision profoundly affected subsequent generations of his family. As an artist, he wanted to honor that sacrifice, somehow. So, he set out across Slovakia to find survivors of the Czechoslovak gulag, ask them about their experiences, and photograph them. His is the first generation to grow up in a free, democratic, capitalist Slovakia — and he wanted to remind people of what had been done to Christians of the older generations.

What he found turned his life upside down. What follows is from the current draft of Live Not By Lies.

At the start of his pilgrimage, Krizka met Jozef Maslej, a ninety-year-old Greek Catholic priest living in remote eastern Slovakia. In his early twenties, Maslej was convicted of treason for studying theology. He had wanted to be a priest like his uncle, who had saved The state sent him to the worst prison in Prague. He spent the first four months in solitary confinement, losing 77 pounds and contracting tuberculosis.

The elderly priest’s young visitor was startled by how calmly the former inmate discussed his imprisonment.

“I said it then, and I still say it now: those were the best days of my life,” Father Maslej told his visitor. “I did not fear anything. I was not afraid that they would lock me up or that I would die. If I die, I die. I am in God’s hands.”

He received that solitude not as a punishment, but as a gift. Maslej spent entire days in his cell, praying the Our Father. The desire for comfort lost its power over him.

This spiritual strength manifested during forced labor at the prison quarry. Because of his work ethic, the prison overseers offered Maslej a promotion to an administrative position.

“He turned the promotion down,” says Krizka. “There was a possibility that they would put someone weaker in his place, someone who would have a harder time doing the strenuous work. He sacrificed for a man he did not know. There was no one to thank him.”

Maslej was eventually released from prison because of his tuberculosis, and sent to a sanitarium. When he was finally returned to society, Maslej was kept under watch as an enemy of the state. He found a job at a canning factory, and spent his career there. After retirement in his sixties, Maslej secretly resumed his theological studies, and was ordained a priest in 1988 – one year before the fall of the communist regime.

“The idea that I would have to wait almost my whole life to fulfill my dream, like Father Maslej, is hard for me to understand,” Krizka reflects. “If I have to wait for a year to get what I want, I lose interest.”

“In his life, I found none of the things we use today to measure the quality of life,” the photographer continues. “He was not free to choose where or with whom he would spend his days. And still he lived like he lacked nothing. How is it possible that he owned nothing but had everything?”

The meeting with Father Maslej shook the young photographer to his foundations. Though a practicing Catholic, Krizka began to understand that his concept of God was too abstract and mystical. In the faithful life of this persecuted old Slovak, Krizka saw what it meant to worship a God who became a suffering flesh-and-blood man.

“Father Maslej did not fill his life with dreams of the future,” Krizka muses. “He did not run away from cruel reality, to pleasant memories. He accepted reality as God’s will, and by doing that, entered into the present moment.”

Father Maslej was around Krizka’s age when the totalitarian state crushed his dreams and threw him into prison. Yet how was it that young Maslej was free, and Krizka, who had vastly more liberty as a middle-class citizen of a free-market democracy, was not?

The answer, he reckoned, was that the prisoner Jozef Maslej grasped that true freedom is an inner state: the freedom to do God’s will, in whatever situation one is thrown. “To be able to accept it, and to want to accept it. God’s will is not what I imagine for my life; it’s what I am living.”

The time with Father Maslej — that’s him above, in Timo’s portrait — shook the photographer up. On the long drive back to Bratislava, he had to pull over and go lie down in the grass to think about what he had just heard, and what it had to say to him about his own life. More from my book:

“I felt something in me moving, breaking and transforming,” he remembers. “My body did not move, but I was somewhere else. I could no longer be who I was before this.

Krizka found more elderly survivors of communism to interview, and to photograph. The more time he spent with them, the less he felt burdened by his own problems. He would confess to them that his greatest fear was that he would lose control over his life. To this, they smiled. All of them.

“It seemed that the less they were able to change the world around them, the stronger they had become,” Krizka says.

He goes on:

“These people completely changed my understanding of freedom,” Krizka says. “My project changed from looking for victims to finding heroes. I stopped building a monument to the unjust past. I began to look for a message for us, the living, free people.”

And:

What their Christian faith gave them was the alchemist-like ability to transform suffering into joy. This is the secret of the prisoners’ freedom.

“My natural reaction had been to fight suffering. I believed that pain was bad, that it was an obstacle to living a full life,” says Krizka. “I was wrong. I saw that it was not necessary to run away from suffering. On the contrary, if one accepts suffering, one’s world will grow bigger. Accepting suffering does not mean that it will disappear but it will allow us to feel joy.

“Many prisoners, despite hunger and illness, made theater, or wrote poems in prison. There were moments when they managed to draw a spark with a piece of stone and light a cigarette. Or when they made coffee using water that came out of a lukewarm radiator. These moments filled their life with gratitude.”

Timo said that he realized from these encounters that the real oppressor he had to overcome was — himself, and his constant worrying over the future he imagined for himself. He came to realize that the will of God is the life he is living, not the life he dreams about. It is more important to seek God in the life you have than to imagine that once you get the life you want, you will find peace and inner harmony. This, then, is the answer to the question. Even if the anti-communist Christians are wrong about what’s coming, their experience of oppression, even prison and torture, has life-saving lessons for us today.

You’ll have to wait till my book is published in September to read the whole thing. But I have two copies of Timo’s book here with me. I edited the English text, so I know these stories. This afternoon, looking at the faces of those saints, my own problems and struggles seemed very small. But not just small: I realized that I ought to be looking at these seemingly insurmountable challenges as an opportunity for conversion, to become more Christ-like, to become humbler, and more grateful. If those men and women in Timo’s book were able to carry their much heavier crosses, and allow their fidelity to grow, and their love to be purified by them, then surely I can regard my own crosses in this way.

I began my confession tonight after vespers by telling my priest why I had been away from confession for so long, and that I was not there tonight of my own volition, but out of obedience to God, and from the inspiration given to me by the witness of these dear Slovak heroes of faith. And I told him that my own pride blinded me to the fact that God was giving me, in my own crosses, an opportunity to repent of my pride, and to grow in His love. I told him that I ask God to help me to see these trials for what they really are. Then I listed my sins, as one does, expressed my contrition, received absolution, and went out into the night, a free man.

On the drive home, I was thinking about the New Yorker‘s snotty cartoon about Mike Pence and repentance as a way to face the coronavirus crisis. They are actually correct. This terrible crisis is a trial for us all. None of us wants it, but it is coming anyway. The way we meet this crisis will be a test of our souls. Will we despair? Will we be angry at God, or selfish, and spiteful to our neighbors? Or will we receive this crisis and its suffering as an opportunity to rediscover God, and our family and community, and our better angels?

I was texting this afternoon with a friend, who said of this onrushing public health crisis:

When you have lived for several generations in a powerful and wealthy country untouched by deep tragedy and awash in the deep-seated belief that you are both the Chosen Land and Master of Nature, the belief that everything is manageable becomes the biggest article of faith. And the biggest blind spot.

True. This is why repentance — of the kind Timo’s saints led me to this afternoon — is one of the best things any of us can do to prepare for the struggle ahead. Maybe even haughty New Yorker contributors will see that, eventually.

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Reading Camus’s ‘The Plague’

Regular readers will recall that the Wyoming Doctor recommended in this space last week that we all read The Plague, the Albert Camus novel about how the people of an Algerian city react when the bubonic plague hits their town. I decided just now to read the book, and got it from my local library. You can order it from Amazon in paperback ($9.99) or on Kindle ($11.99). I would like us to have a book club in this space of people who are reading the book with an eye towards learning lessons about how we should behave in the midst of the crisis that appears to be fast upon us.

I will start posting on The Plague on Tuesday, to give those who want to participate time to download or otherwise acquire the book. I’ll go at it a couple of chapters at a time. I’m only going to post comments from people who are reading, or who have read, the book.

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Taliban 2, Civilization 0

At last:

The United States signed a deal with the Taliban on Saturday that sets the stage to end America’s longest war — the nearly two-decade-old conflict in Afghanistan that began after the Sept. 11 attacks, killed tens of thousands of people, vexed three White House administrations and left mistrust and uncertainty on all sides.

The agreement lays out a timetable for the final withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan, the impoverished Central Asian country once unfamiliar to many Americans that now symbolizes endless conflict, foreign entanglements and a potential incubator of terrorist plots.

The war in Afghanistan in some ways echoes the American experience in Vietnam. In both, a superpower bet heavily on brute strength and the lives of its young, then walked away with seemingly little to show.

Read it all.

I’m grateful to President Trump for making this deal, ending the Forever War — the war that our leaders knew from virtually the very beginning that we could not win (read the Washington Post‘s stunning “Afghanistan Papers” series to learn about that). It was past time to go. It’s a hell of a thing, though. The Taliban whipped the USSR and the United States — not one, but two superpowers, who were, and in our case, are, symbols of advanced modern civilization. These ragtag warriors’ greatest weapons were their fanatical faith, their cruelty, and their willingness to absorb suffering. Allied with the Saudis and the Pakistanis, the US helped create them to vex the Russians — and now they have been our downfall in Afghanistan as well. If I’m a Russian, I say that’s poetic justice.

Of course the prize of victory is that they get to rule an immiserated country. To the victor go the spoils. Them’s some spoils. Good luck with that.

The Taliban are evil, no question. But they whipped us. God help the poor people of Afghanistan, especially the women. We simply could not prevail. The richest and most powerful nation in the world could not beat these SOBs. There is a lesson there, if we are humble enough to learn it. Which we probably aren’t, or we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves mired in that blood-soaked mud in the first place.

UPDATE: I made a mistake. It wasn’t the Taliban that defeated the Soviets. Still, my general point stands: Islamic hill people fought two superpowers to a draw, and saw them withdraw from their unconquered country. That is something.

UPDATE.2: Will Ruger is right:

Read this and tell me we need to have a single soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine stay another single day in Afghanistan where we have no credible theory of getting something better than we got today from @US4AfghanPeace : https://t.co/uv3vCStVtH

— William Ruger (@WillRuger) February 29, 2020

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