Hey, This Is an Emergency—Not Altruism’s Saturnalia
No single theme, no emotional message, now dominates our public life more than an unrestrained glorying in altruism—altruism triumphant, altruist cut free of constraint. This is the overwhelming public, media, and intellectual response in America to the tragedy of COVID-19. It is a saturnalia, an orgy of wild merry-making, and a black mass—a mockery of the American sense of life.
It is as though a long and frustrated yearning for a society of collectivism and sacrifice had burst from its underworld and gone racing and shouting.
As I write this, on NBC-TV is a show, “One World Together at Home,” a songfest of wailing, heartfelt lament of sorrow by aspiring musicians delighting in the spotlight. Now, Michelle Obama is introduced to tell us “We are all in this together.” Now patients, attesting to the sorrow of “dying alone.” It is as though a long and frustrated yearning for a society of collectivism and sacrifice had burst from its underworld and gone racing and shouting—not through the streets but onto the TV screen.
An epidemic, certainly a pandemic, is a body-blow to any society, an emergency and a time for us to join in the task at hand: dealing with the emergency, getting back to normal. Getting back to where our individual lives, private interests, and chosen goals can be pursued. See “Tackling the Wuhan Pandemic without Wrecking the Economy.”
But this appropriate response to a genuine emergency does not imply glee in how the threat—but above all, the dictatorial edicts being justified by it—freeze the striving, achieving, competing market economy into stasis. Imply unbounded joy that all those selfish, striving, wealth-accumulating, “one percent” rich bastards are frozen in place. They finally are out of the picture. Now, all eyes are upon suffering, upon need, upon duty, upon sacrifice.
Altruism is the moral code that exalts self-sacrifice as the epicenter of human morality and nobility. Whether derived strictly from Christianity or more likely evolved from it and reinterpreted and reasserted in the Nineteenth Century by philosophers like Auguste Comte, altruism has dominated Western morality for much of the last two thousand years. When the dominance of faith has retreated before reason, science, individualism, and capitalism—as in the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Reason—altruism (and religion) have gone into decline. With that decline, cultural space has been created for the ethic of rational human self-interest, human flourishing, and human voluntary cooperation that have created unprecedented wealth in market economies.
Quote: “As I said, it’s almost funny: Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic. But the laugh catches in your throat, because the only joke here is the sick one American society plays on workers every day.”
Need unlimited. Need as the sacred focus of “morality.”
But always, the lingering power of the altruist creed, religious or otherwise, has demanded that man’s “better nature,” “his higher instincts” be expressed in sacrifice of personal values, personal achievement, and personal happiness to—need. All need. Need worldwide. Need unlimited. Need as the sacred focus of “morality.”
Quote: “This is as it should be. The baby boomers are the first wave of COVID-19’s Omaha Beach, flattening the curve so that if and when a second wave of the virus hits, the young can go on living. We will have done our duty and sacrificed for our country.”
Now, the coronavirus and COVID-19 illness have supplied the opportunity of literally a century to cast aside individualism (we are together, together, together), self-interest (it is “no longer about each of us,” no longer about “me”), and profiting from work (not essential, close it, stay home).
In a sense, the achievement of the mainstream media has been extraordinary, replacing hours of ordinary daily programming with endless images of suffering, helplessness, reproachful selfishness, and diktats of governors (stay home, wash your hands, wear your mask, and don’t touch your face). Yes, think about NOTHING but THIS. It is no small achievement to fill hours and hours of TV with a combination of warning, threats, appeals to altruism, and declarations of membership in a single suffering organism. Along with recurring performances of music that expresses the sacred creed of altruism.
And, as I write, the NBC special goes on, a virtual job fair for rappers, hip-hoppers, blues singers, and crooners crying to us of the tragedy of the human condition. Their faces distorted in expressive agony. Wailing sorrow. But, after all, hasn’t that been their theme since the 1960s? A “man of constant sorrow”? But only now, can we sit at home, as legally mandated, and contemplate constant sorrow all together, collectively.
The guy on the TV, with the Bob Dylan hair bomb and guitar, laments. The screen flashes to empty streets, solitary wanderers. But hey, what is new? Hasn’t that ALWAYS been their predominant sense of life?
It is only that now, by the good grace of COVID-19, that everybody is … well … more or less FORCED to listen.
Quote: “If ever there’s been a time for altruism and self-sacrifice, it’s now,” added Heather Cavanagh, president and CEO of the Stamford Chamber of Commerce.
Everything to keep us safe. How? Stay home. Close your business. Stop, for God’s sake, earning wealth and creating innovations and enjoying luxuries we cannot ever conceive. If Bernie Sanders fumed and ranted at the “one percent”—and only the naïve listened—now the one percent of America’s most productive can watch their wealth plunge almost daily to an extent literally unknown in America.
The long-frustrated dream of the altruists, the collectors of human sacrifices, are spread across the skies. All attention is upon a universe where man’s fate is to suffer.
And so, for a moment, the long-frustrated dream of the altruists, the collectors of human sacrifices, are spread across the skies. All attention is upon a universe where man’s fate is to suffer, all private and selfish activities are deemed “unessential,” and everywhere is the appeal to forget about yourself because we are all in this together.
What is astounding is that in this welcoming Petri dish of altruism and sacrifice there are thousands of personalities, faces, almost instantaneously on the air lecturing, singing, sighing, and sincerely testifying about the nobility of altruism—how this crisis will change us, how it will judge us, how (we hope?) things never will be the same. Nothing indeed can be as sweet to them as the sunrise of altruism.
I don’t know if it is true elsewhere, but in New York every moment of the day and night now must be filled with the “it.” My colleagues as far out as Australia say it is the same. “It” is what we love. We love the brotherhood, the organismal absorption, of shared suffering and sacrifice.
Quote: “The United States is an immensely wealthy nation, one of the richest in history. We can afford to sacrifice a substantial chunk of our gross domestic product to save a substantial number of lives. What better do we have to spend our money on?”
Already, we perceive the coming battle between those who would prolong the wonderful high of shared suffering and tragedy and those others who demand “get back to work.” Those who have gloried in the public spotlight, such as New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, appearing for hours daily in the political opportunity of a lifetime, who already are assuming 18 more months of fun. And President Trump whose chief focus is to get us back to business, to normal, to life. He is cautious, certainly, but projects the priorities of a healthy man. There is no danger greater than to give up human initiative, production, and control in the face of fear. To fear to meet the imperative of production is a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
I do not minimize the danger and tragedy of this pandemic. I do not doubt the urgent imperatives of science in deciding next steps.
I do not minimize the danger and tragedy of this pandemic. I think of my son, who lives and works in New York City. I do not doubt the urgent imperatives of science in deciding next steps.
But I gradually have become annoyed, and then astonished, and now alarmed at the satisfaction, and the energetic celebration, and finally the blissful drugged high of our media, politicians, and celebrities at this saturnalia of self-imposed helplessness and altruistic triumph.
It would be preferable in the end to die of this honest illness than to lodge the enduring moral infection of altruism in the human spirit.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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