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I went to the agora at seven o’clock this morning. Not counting me, six customers were in the supermarket. All of us stayed more than six feet apart; the checkout woman wore heavy, black rubber gloves; three customers wore masks and gloves. Everyone feared contracting the covid-19 virus and dying.
Death has always been a pest perched on our right shoulders. Before the covid-19 virus, 7,452 people died every day in the United States and approximately 150,000 worldwide. The first principle of Buddhism — nothing is permanent in this world — is undeniable. Buddha taught that an encounter with death, no matter how brief, opens us up to reality, at least for a moment.
We cannot deny that the US economy is rapidly falling into a depression. The underlying economics is simple: One person’s spending is another person’s income. Social distancing has closed schools, colleges, universities, museums, theaters, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and health clubs; a good (forget about best) federal response to avert economic disaster is not clear, so probably like us, our political leaders will stagger on and hope for the best.
Reality clears away stupid ideas. In good times, each American feels pride in his independence and self-reliance, even boasts he is self-made, achieved success on his own without the help of others, and curses the federal, state, and local government for interfering with his life. When a nationwide economic disaster befalls him, he sees his isolation from his neighbors and grasps that he is helpless to change the social and political events that overwhelm him; furthermore, because of individualism, he cannot expect substantial help from his fellow citizens, for like him, “they are both impotent and cold.”[1] In such circumstances, reality forces Americans to demand a stronger central government, one that is “absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle.”[2]
The reality is that individualism is a stupid idea that exists in our heads and does not correspond to how we live. In our highly technological society, no person knows how to produce everything that he or she consumes or uses in a single day. What person knows how to grow broccoli, make eyeglasses, weave cloth, generate electricity, and fabricate a microchip? The community of humans supplies all our needs. The farmer is given the fruits of ten thousand years of experimentation with the growing of crops; the poet, a language and the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; the physicist, the understanding of Newton, Einstein, and Bohr. No farmer, no poet, or no physicist could ever pay for all the gifts he or she receives gratuitously. Each one of us can humbly accept what is freely given, preserve and add to it if possible, and then pass it on to others. When we understand ourselves as parts of a whole and recognize that our lives are possible only because of the group, we see that such destructive emotions as anger, envy, and self-pity are contrary to our social nature, and we willingly work for a community life that promotes peace, cooperation, and generosity.
In the Covid-19 Experiment, some local and state governments responded quickly and creatively, but the reality is that only the federal government has the economic resources needed. The commentators on Fox News no longer deny the covid-19 crisis (see How Fox News Has Shifted Its Coronavirus Rhetoric); soon, these commentators will be calling for their beloved President Trump to act decisively with massive bailouts.
I am at heart an anarchist, but I acknowledge that my political sentiments are contrary to history: The Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the September 11 attacks progressively increased the powers of the federal government.
Recognizing the inevitable continued growth of the federal government means that we lovers of freedom must resist in our own way the “administrative despotism”[3] and the “network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform”[4] that extend from the federal bureaucracy to the regulations of the local department of motor vehicles, to the rules of insurance companies for health care, and to the policies of the agencies that grant accreditation to colleges and hospitals.
When I was the academic dean of Magdalen College, I was at loggerheads with the New Hampshire Postsecondary Commission and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The goal of the Magdalen College Program based on Great Books and Socratic Seminars was the interior growth and development of each student, a goal foreign to accreditors, who saw students as consumers interested in acquiring knowledge and techniques to realize their career ambitions. After every meeting with accreditors, I returned to the College and threatened to take down the American flag and hoist the black flag of anarchism. The impasse between the College and accreditors was resolved in the usual American way: the threat of a lawsuit backed by substantial financial resources.
The Covid-10 Experiment forced many of us to see reality. If we walk away from this experiment in social distancing, understanding in our bones that nothing in the universe exists as an indivisible separate entity and that human beings, the other animals, and plants exist only in relationship, then we have profited enormously from the Covid-19 Experiment.
Endnotes
[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966 [1835, 1840]), p. 672.
[2] Ibid., p. 692.
[3] Ibid., p. 693.
[4] Ibid., p. 692.