By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
In a 1996 Texas Monthly report on the tiny town of
Terlingua, Robert Draper quotes a resident there who knows what deserts are
for: “I’ve had my hermit’s license for years.”
It is easier to be a hermit, or a semi-hermit, today than
it once was. We have email and social media, high-speed Internet most places
(and wonky satellite Internet in others), teleconferencing, Amazon, e-books,
Netflix, cheap flights — why leave home at all?
Who needs an epidemic to self-quarantine?
And why, in the age of coronavirus — and inescapable
annoying political conversations, and decrepit mass-transit systems, and
soaring urban real-estate prices, and hideous traffic — congregate in cities at
all? Even the cleanest and most orderly of our cities are petri dishes,
invitations to disease, disorder, and trouble of all kinds. And yet that is
where many Americans — particularly the young, the educated, and the upwardly
mobile — desire to be. We could build a million little hermit kingdoms, if we
were so inclined. But we are not.
Telecommuting was supposed to depopulate the American
office. That didn’t really happen. There was a spike in remote work when that
first became a possibility, and it is very common in businesses such as print
journalism, and in other industries in which remote work already was part of
the natural business culture. Even the high-tech firms you might expect to lead
the way have slowed down and, in some cases, reversed themselves: USDA and the
Department of Education both scaled back their telecommuting programs over the
past couple of years, while IBM and Yahoo, among others, have decided they need
to see their employees more often.
“Here in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Molly Wood writes
in Wired, “office lights are winking out one by one as businesses send
their employees home to work, and everyone’s talking about Zoom and Microsoft
Teams and Hangouts. We all know these tools don’t work that well. We can all
predict the frustration and miscommunications they will cause over the next few
weeks or months (or more?) of remote employment. As this future sails ever
closer, I can’t help but think: Weren’t we supposed to have virtual reality in
the workplace by now?”
Not everybody is cut out for remote work. In the early
days of this troubled century, I hired a young reporter who, being a
Millennial, had a lot of very detailed questions about her workday: when she
was expected at the office, when to leave, how much time she got for lunch,
etc. I told her that I didn’t care if I ever saw her again and that she could
move to Timbuktu as long as she covered her beat and had copy on my desk on
time: “The news is out there, not in here.” She did not last very long.
The hermit life is alluring, at least to some people some
of the time. There are times when it seems to me that I spend half of my day
looking for a quiet place to do my work (home, office, coffee shop — it is a
noisy world), but, even though I am a writer who can work from anywhere I want,
I choose to live right in the middle of one of the biggest metropolitan areas
in the country, in close proximity to about 8 million people. I wonder how many
faces I see over the course of a typical day: home and neighbors, the Amazon
delivery guy, the idiots idling at green lights because they are fully immersed
in Instagram or Twitter or whatever, the people at the shops and other public
places, visitors and guests, friends and friends of friends — it must be more
than a thousand faces a day, and a thousand half-overheard conversations, a thousand
people getting in my way. (Remember, Grasshopper: You are not in traffic — you are
traffic.) I like Terlingua — why not go get my hermit’s license, too?
The lesson in Silicon Valley is, strangely enough, the
lesson that is taught in much more severe form in our nation’s prisons, where
solitary confinement is used as disciplinary torture: We are not meant to be
alone. Even if we think we want to be alone, and benefit from small doses of
solitude. Human beings are intensely social creatures, so much so that some of
our behaviors and tendencies have the character not of autonomous individual
animals but something closer to colonial organisms and superorganisms, like
beehives or Portuguese man-o’-wars. Looked at from that point of view, we are
living in cities together and still going to offices together for the same
reason robots aren’t really going to take all of our jobs: The most valuable
thing in the world to a human being is another human being. We provide for one
another in the most obvious sense — “not from the benevolence of the butcher,”
etc. — and we inspire and provoke one another. Writers, artists, scientists,
and the like may do much of their daily work in solitude, but they also work in
community.
And our communities are being tested.
In response to the coronavirus, the government of Italy
is attempting to quarantine the entirety of its population. But, even setting
aside the fact that Italy is famously full of Italians, that is a practical
impossibility, as the authorities already have discovered: Businesses are to
remain open, including many shops and restaurants, which means that people will
be working in those businesses, which means they will be traveling back and
forth between home and work. There is not much alternative: Italians are not
going to sit at home and collect eggs from their henhouses and eat produce from
their gardens, because it is not the 19th century there.
Some people — and you can find them on both the political
left and right — lament that fact, and pine for a time they describe as
“simpler” (it was anything but simple) when people were (the story goes) more
autonomous in terms of their immediate material needs, when families,
communities, and nations had a more autarkic character than they do today. This
is rooted in the same antisocial and misanthropic impulse behind camping. The
neo-Romantic autarkic posture is a very silly one: The most autarkic societies
in the world today are the poorest (e.g., North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom), and
political attempts to impose even a kind of soft autarky in the national
interest reliably produce catastrophic economic dysfunction (e.g., Venezuela),
not because they are poorly implemented or because the governments in question
have the wrong kind of ideological character, but because the intellectual,
moral, and material retreat these ideas entail is incompatible with reality,
with the physical and social facts of human life as it actually is lived.
“There is no life that is not in community,” as T. S. Eliot wrote, a sentiment
with which I suspect that many of my progressive friends would agree.
(Many of them would object to the next line in that
poem.)
Those who take the classical liberal view of political
and economic life often emphasize the competitive nature of markets and the
ways that the promise of profit provides incentives to innovate and to work.
That is legitimate, but the most remarkable thing about markets is not their
competitive character but their cooperative character: Any protozoa can compete
with the protozoa down the road — even Joe Biden can do that — but only human
beings have achieved the worldwide material cooperation toward the common good
(the real one that feeds hungry people, not the twee hypotheses of the
comfortable scolds) that we call, for lack of a better word, globalization.
Globalization has its enemies, and we are hearing from a
few of them who want to use the coronavirus as a rhetorical cudgel against
Beijing. (The value of that is non-obvious to me: “Sure, they have prison camps
and organ-harvesting and horrifying repression of every description, and
they’re a single-party gulag state, and their public-health regime is not
quite up to snuff!”) And because Americans in Anno Domini 2020 are
unserious even in the face of very serious things, we are having a side debate
about whether calling the virus from Wuhan the “Wuhan virus” is—brace for it!—racist.
(In the event a Patient Zero is identified, I hope my friends at the New
York Post go with the headline “Wuhan Flu Man! (See Page 2, Man.)” No
charge for that one.) It is comforting to tell ourselves that the root problem
here is some strange-o boiling baby pangolins in rice wine for reasons of
superstition, but if you think this kind of thing couldn’t have bubbled up from
Florida, then you haven’t been to Florida.
And so our eyes turn to the desert. In Lawrence of
Arabia, some grubby little creature of Fleet Street asks the titular hero
why he is drawn to the desert, and Lawrence replies, disdainfully, “It’s
clean.” I have been to the desert, and it is not that clean — neither in the
literal sense nor in the sense Lawrence meant. We carry the agents of infection
with us everywhere we go, because they are us. One sympathizes with the
occasional desire to become something like Fanny Osgood’s “cold, calm star.”
But we are here in the human constellation, stuck with one another whether we
like it or not. And we have the coronavirus — not the Chinese, not the
Italians, not a few people up in New Rochelle. There’s nothing for it, no
avoiding it, no running away.
I am not among those who believe that we need “a good
war” every generation or so as a source of moral and social discipline; I do
not believe there ever has been a good war, a good flood, or a good epidemic.
And I do hope that six months from now, we are looking back on this episode and
laughing about how wound up some of us were. (Guilty.) But extreme events can
be clarifying. It was only a few weeks ago that Senator Warren was advertising
herself for the job of Leader of the Free World with the slogan, “I have a plan
for that.” Now she’s making the rounds on the late-night comedy circuit. And
nobody has a plan for this. What we do have — if we are still lucky — is
a functional community, which is not synonymous with “the federal government,”
because the world is full of things that cannot be planned for, and that which
cannot be planned for must be adapted to. Some communities are more robust,
more rigorous, livelier, more energetic, and more able to adapt to challenges.
Some are less so. Challenges such as this one reveal which are which, and which
have a future.
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