Amnesty and Horizontal Thinking During COVID
Our social and policy mistakes were not simply honest mistakes, but rooted in a deep, festering, cultural wound.
A recent article appeared in The Atlantic that has been widely shared and discussed. It asks for amnesty to be afforded to those who made mistakes when in a high pressure novel situation we look back on as the COVID pandemic.
The idea is that nobody knew what to do and we all made mistakes, mostly out of good faith, and should not focus on those mistakes but refocus on fixing what went wrong. But many of us did know.
Those mistakes included
Supporting mandates of a vaccine that reduces severe illness and death, but does not stop the spread of COVID and was never tested for those purposes in the first place. Many medical personnel that were on the front lines who caught and cleared COVID, earning natural immunity, were then fired if they didn’t get vaccinated. Heroes quickly turned villains.
Shutting down schools, and as we see now, further delaying the educational attainment, most acutely, of the people for whom some were rioting that same summer.
There’s tons more, but I wanted to focus in one one specific absurdity as it relates to a deep schism in our modern era. It also focuses on the why behind so many of the mistakes made. They weren’t simply randomly assigned mistakes made by good people on both sides trying to achieve the same ends. There is an underlying world view that is creating a schism: We’re quickly moving from vertical to purely horizontal thinking.
Once the vaccines were available, many people did not trust the technology for multiple reasons. The why is beside the point here. As some of the unvaccinated got sick, there was a discussion being had at family dinner tables and amongst elites on social media as to whether or not we should even treat those sick, unvaccinated people. Some even cheered their death.
The concept was this: “If you don’t care enough about your own health, much less the health of other people enough to get vaccinated, then you deserve the illness and death that comes.”
Now this sounds harsh, and hard to believe, but that’s the beauty of the internet. It’s somewhat permanent. Here are a few examples, one from George Takei, who is quite the darling of Progressives and likely an otherwise nice man. I had the pleasure of meeting him long ago, and he seemed just as sweet as you would think, but this was shocking.
But what is it that not only makes a person say something like this, but then say it publicly? When they say it in a forum that garners reactions, and many thousands of those reactions are positive, what does that say about the public stance on this? What kind of culture creates a situation where someone is ok with saying this out loud, and even gets positive feedback when they do?
Here’s my theory: In a progressively secular society, fundamental ideas about the nature of humanity that are deeply rooted and easily accessible in religious thinking, are slowly degraded until the masses resort to acting in ways that are more popular than good. This lack of fundamental precepts is what leads many of us to make many urgent and poor decisions, and even shame people for questioning them.
Upon hearing arguments in favor of letting the unvaccinated perish, my first thought was: “No, you can’t do that. All human beings are created in the image of God and deserving of dignity in action and thought. Additionally, it is not on us to make those types of life and death decisions. If we do, it will lead down a path to hell on earth.”
Now yes, I hear you my atheist friends. There are a lot of really good atheists out there who would never jump on that insane band wagon and did not. But that is in part why I included the term “easily accessible” above.
Most people who are self described atheists do not jump out of the pews and head straight for the library, check-out a copy of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and study up on the true nature of virtue. Most have never heard of his Ethics. Even those who may have heard of it and possibly read it in early education, couldn’t tell you how or if they incorporate Aristotle’s, or any other Enlightenment thinker’s words, into their ethical actions.
What mostly happens is people declare themselves free of religious ideation, and then do as others do. They simply navigate using societal norms. They do what is popular and seems immediately practical, not thinking about where those norms and rules come from.
Now if you are one of those who has taken the time to understand a secular, rational argument for the nature of virtue in relation to the nature of man, bravo. I have no qualms with that and do it myself.
But the masses are fickle and we both know they have no solid framework otherwise.
This is why people who did what we thought was normal five minutes ago are not only castigated, but “cancelled.” When you don’t have an agreed upon solid framework for what is good or what is evil, that’s what happens. We do what seems immediately practical instead of what we have all agreed upon as good. This is why so many poor decisions were made surrounding the pandemic. Otherwise intelligent people were flailing around trying to do what seemed immediately practical instead of having a North Star to guide their decision making processes as practical information poured in. They thought only horizontally and not vertically as well.
Vertical thinking is concerned with what is good (above, towards the heavens) and what is evil (down, towards hell). Horizontal thinking is strictly practical according to the rules of man. Carl Jung discussed this very thing when describing the meaning crisis of modern man.
“…the irresistible tendency to account for everything on physical grounds corresponds to the horizontal development of consciousness in the last four centuries, and this horizontal perspective is a reaction against the exclusively vertical perspective of the Gothic age.” — Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Jung goes on to describe the horizontal thinking of modern man as a manifestation of the crowd-mind and should not be treated as the minds of individuals. This sounds exactly like what we experienced during the pandemic. Anxious people found something to blame their anxiety on, then gathered together on a socio-political team which fostered a sense of belonging and purpose. Team loyalty became more important than understanding what is and is not good and true. Lonely and anxious people found purpose and sense of belonging. Additionally that object of focused anxiety came with a scape goat: anyone who was off program.
Really look back and think about what happened here.
People were comfortable enough to publicly state that they wanted other human beings to die if those human beings did not submit to taking a vaccine which turns out not to stop the spread of disease anyways. This is a perfect example of thinking horizontally. There is a practical element in using this shaming to encourage people to get vaccinated, but it ignores the vertical component of treating all human beings as equally deserving of sovereignty and care regardless of your fleeting annoyances. Vertical thinking focuses on what is eternally right and good as a means to save us from our emotionally tainted reasoning.
We all have fleeting (hopefully fleeting) thoughts of annoyance, derision, and violence. But to be comfortable enough to express them in public, receive praise for those statements, and double down with a whole line of logic and reasoning as to why you’re justified in saying so, is on another level. A level we’ve seen before that formed the logic and justification to kill millions of people for the sake of an imagined, abstracted, ideal society. The practical thinking of an abstracted ideal society should be hemmed against what is a non-evil way to treat each individual human being.
History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes.
In Exodus, when Moses decided to strike down the Egyptian that was beating a Hebrew slave, he looked “to and fro,” realized that no man was there to witness his actions, and killed the Egyptian slave owner. Even though killing a slave owner who is actively beating a slave might sound like the right thing to do, somehow Moses didn’t end up being praised by his fellow Hebrews. Instead, he ended up spending forty years in a desolate land herding sheep in contrast to his former life as the adopted son of the Pharaoh. Looking to and fro, left and right, horizontally, according to the rules of man, he got away with it. The Egyptians never caught him. But vertically speaking, he was punished for his poor choice.
Instead of looking to and fro, he should have looked up and down, assessing in which direction he was headed: towards good or towards evil.
Whether we choose a logic and reason based set of rules for our ethical behavior, or do so through scripture, it’s about time we all say them out loud and stick to them in all situations. Even when we’re scared and anxious.
As the power of our horizontal thinking increases, having a vertical axis upon which to aim that power becomes more and more crucial. Simply relying on social norms is not enough when those social norms sway with the wind and are largely based on fundamental ideas our societies are now rejecting.
We in the developed world are incredibly fortunate to live somewhere where being good is easy. But there is no guarantee that this easy life will last. Not if, but when we face hard times, we will need some common set of rules for aiming up and avoiding moving down.
Being good is easy, when you’ve never been hungry.