Journalism in a time of plague is unseemly, a loudmouthed frittering about the deck of the Titanic, post-iceberg. There are questions worth asking: “How fast are we sinking? And will we be rescued?” But there seems to be a corporate mandate that all such concerns will be padded with inane reflections designed solely to stave off any thought of death: “What novel forms of entertainment are young people engaging in while they sink? And what are we all wearing, by the way?”
As barber shops close, several thoughtful press organizations have given their reporters leeway to muse on the fact that male grooming habits are changing. One headline milks the obvious with a banality that nears a passion: “Expert Predicts Long Hair, Beards Back In Style By Summer.” Why, precisely, a soothsayer was required in this instance is a good deal more mysterious than the fact that uncut hair follows from closed barbershops. One may as well have reported that “As More Stay Inside Rooms, Expert Predicts More Will Grow Familiar With The Patterns on Their Ceilings.”
There is something interesting here, but it is not the fact that men deprived of barbers will become barbarous. It is that barbaric beards will become “fashion.” Fashion is a word that is used to obscure its own meaning. It seems to mean the production of attractive-looking shorts; it really means the production of the “normal” within a mass society. For an expert to predict that our quarantine-hair will become “fashion” is to predict that the plague will not destroy this same mass society. Beards grown out of necessity will become beards grown as the choice of a consumer responding to desires manufactured by marketing. Long hair will not be a sign of dearth, it will become a product, and the world will spin as it did before. The prediction that the consequences of disaster are just fashions in utero is a vague hope that we will not learn from our plague, but will restore an identical social order to the one that is falling about our ears.
For instance, a report from the New York Times argued, in its usual pandering style, “America stress-bought all the baby chickens,” and the Associated Press, not to be outdone, told us that “In chaotic times, gardening becomes therapy.” Our press has uncovered the sordid secret that when people are worried about the production of food, they begin to produce their own. There is an argument here; a knife worth sharpening. The plague has revealed what has been the case for a few hundred years, that we have built a society in which the poor and the middle-class are dependent on the wealthy for their material survival; in which the basic features of a free peasantry — productive land ownership, communal interdependence, and an intellectual formation in non-capital-intensive skills — has been exchanged for the basic features of slavery — debt-driven wage-work for those who own the means, not merely of industrial production, but of the production of the food, drink, shelter, and skills necessary for material survival. We depend on potatoes appearing in the grocery store, through the machinations of commercial farming, available for our money to buy, in order to live. Having seen those strangely empty shelves, we have turned to grow them ourselves. This is obviously the first step any re-establishment of a peasantry out of a mass society must make. Lauding this small, hapless attempt and encouraging it to endure would be the role of a truly revolutionary press.
But within these attempts to squeeze a few interest-pieces from the grapes of wrath, that same will to normalize ferments. Americans are stressed out and need “stress relief.” They are anxious and so they garden as a form of “therapy.” The insistence that the habits of the plague-ridden are reducible to the habits that preceded them is almost endearingly stubborn — Americans used to go to bars and pay their therapists for tranquilizers; now they’re raising poultry in their backyards and establishing use-based, communal ownership of garden plots.
The assurance screaming between every line is that “nothing will change,” that Americans are spiritually committed to working for money in order to consume goods produced by capital-intensive technologies. The poultry article bemoans that most people buying chickens are first-time buyers who do not know how to treat chickens properly, humanely: “What seems like a great idea when everyone’s at home with plenty of free time won’t be so appealing if or when life returns to normal.” This is the logic of the Israelites wandering in the desert, for whom an Exodus seemed like a grand idea when the slave-state was afflicting them harshly. Once freed, they resented the labor that came with freedom and longed for the days in which they were slaves, and received everything at the end of a supply chain. The press, in its interest-pieces on life under quarantine, provides the pessimism which ensures the continuation of the regime, or rather, its intensification; the assurance, in advance, that no peasantry will arise, and that the social order that follows from our afflictions will be as boring as the one that made us worthy of the afflictions in the first place.
This is the trouble with those write-ups on the “acts of kindness” this tribulation has inspired in our people. The placement of charity within the news strips it of its radical potential as the source of the new society. When it is not commercialized entirely as more “stress relief” for anxiously scrolling thumbs, it is touted as a reason to have “faith in humanity,” a phrase which sounds good whenever anyone categorically refuses to investigate what it means.
“Faith in humanity” cannot mean what it claims for itself. Humanity is not a worthy object to have faith in, being abstract and without arms to catch a falling cradle. Even considered as a sum total of human individuals, it makes very little sense. That sum total includes the libertarian stockpiling toilet paper in his bunker alongside the charming Italian singing to her quarantined neighbor. It seems to me that whenever we are told that watching this or that clip will restore our “faith in humanity” we are surreptitiously told that the charity we see in our newsfeed is evidence of the capacity for charity that lingered within “humanity” prior to the afflictions which brought it out. Acts of kindness are evidence of the goodness of the old habits that we were engulfed in. The old social order is praised; if it produced people who would leave such sweet packages on the doorsteps of their neighbors, it must be good. Have faith in the humanity that we already are.
The alternative analysis is that a genuinely new thing is happening; that the Holy Spirit is moving; that an avenging angel is striking Jerusalem with its pestilent sword in order to admonish a people who would live as a mass. In this perspective, splendid acts of charity cannot be reduced to evidence of the goodness of the social order. They become evidence of the genuine possibilities of charity that grace provides when the social order that dared to contain it gives and cracks. Families growing closer, neighbors organizing in the absence of effective central authority, the wealthy giving their excess to the poor, leaders leading, diminished affluence, a return to prayer, a will to do good — these are not reasons to have “faith in humanity,” these are reasons to have faith in God and His Church, peeking through the cracks of the technocratic State. They are reasons to establish a new social order wherein the real bonds of dependence and love which inspire such “acts of kindness” are not only emphasized when we start dying but while we are living; where loving one’s neighbor is not an exception that bubbles up to the surface when we no longer trust the State to deal with our neighbors, but the order of law in a time of health and abundance. Let us not use “acts of kindness” to feel better about our day, but to build, for the first time in a long time, a Christian society.