https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-shatters-complacency-11586717230
With 30 minutes’ notice, I got invited to a dinner with the writer Tom Wolfe in dot-com era Palo Alto, Calif. Oddly, I arrived first and was led to a corner table for four, where I grabbed the best seat, overlooking the restaurant. Wolfe arrived late, dressed in white, naturally, and sat opposite me—his back to the restaurant. He asked questions about Silicon Valley and then told stories of trying out for the New York Giants as a pitcher and getting cut because he only had a sinker and no fastball. Great metaphor, actually. Eventually other diners figured out who was in the house, and I watched with delight as the chirping in the room grew deafening.
I recalled this recently while rereading his December 1987 American Spectator article, “The Great Relearning.” In 1968, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic was observing all sorts of long-gone diseases. That’s because hippies had become prone to “sweep aside all codes and restraints from the past and start out from zero,” and thus were “relearning the laws of hygiene by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” There was a long postwar economic expansion, and it was almost as if everything useful had already been invented. Heck we were exploring space and going to the moon. It meant an entire generation could spend their parents’ money, drop out and rewrite the rules.
Sound familiar? The long boom that ran from the 1980s until last month, with a few temporary interruptions, created chronic complacency. Everything was so easy. No one really knew where stuff came from anymore. The internet just worked, without even a dial tone. Click and a book showed up at your house. Click again and a car picked you up. Again and someone rented you a spare bedroom. Too easy. Medicine just showed up at pharmacies. Milk and cookies overflowed store shelves. Some dreamed of utopia.
Soon modernity was swept aside to “start out from zero,” as many Americans old and mostly young embraced socialism and demanded big government and the end of capitalism. People got their political views from comedians and Teen Vogue. Just one short month ago, 1,548,025 Californians actually voted for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. Amazing. Like “Night of the Living Dead,” antimodernity took over parts of the body politic. How stupid—a mental grunge, mental scroff and mental rot.
We were a rich culture obsessed with a climate “crisis” based on centurylong models that are as pie-in-the-sky as current doomsday pandemic models. Activists insisted that housing, health care and college were human rights. A cancel culture viewed the world, as Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research writes, as “marred by appropriation, microaggression, identitarian denialism, and structural racism/sexism/imperialism.” Take your pick. Yes, awareness is important for those slandered, held back, disadvantaged. But should “social justice” decompose America’s entire $22 trillion economy? No thanks.
When times were good, this swept-away thinking was given free rein, and then it ran wild.
Bizarrely, the world these antimodern mental twitchers were pining for has the same stench as the lockdown we’re now in. Today we have 17 million freshly unemployed, but . . . carbon emissions have plummeted, dolphins returned to Venice, wolves walk the streets of San Francisco and pot use is at an all-time high. Unicorns and equality everywhere? Not quite. Pollution and crime are down because we’re all basically in prison. It’s awful. Set us free.
Fortunately, the joke’s on them. Modernity rules. We’d all starve save for digitized supply chains. We instantly sequence killer-virus DNA. We 3-D print ventilator parts, stream entertainment everywhere, DoorDash takeout food, Zoom virtual happy hours and watch almost-realistic baseball simulations from “MLB The Show 20” (though I miss real sports). All modern flourishes, definitely not provided by “start from zero” cave dwellers.
There will be relearning for sure—with progress comes questions. Is technology evil or mostly useful to solve problems? Will robots kill jobs or save lives? Do we protect privacy or track movement during a pandemic? Do we trust government?
Social relearning is inevitable. For a while anyway, no more high-fives, nonfamily hugging, air kisses, Seinfeldian close-talkers, overcrowded restaurants, eating bats—good riddance to all. But no way are we starting from zero. I’d bet half as many Californians would vote for Bernie today (though Anthony Fauci might get a million votes).
We can’t go backward. The good news is that modernity is unbridled. So let’s try to hold off on repeating past mistakes. Be wary of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent scroffy promise of a “progressive agenda” to “reshape how we do business.” Instead, markets need to keep providing capital to fund great ideas that will create a safe future. That’s the defining feature of a free society. Mental rot is not.
