Isn’t It Romantic? – The Dispatch

Dear Reader, (Including those of you who had a crush on Jennifer instead of Bailey from the WKRP crew, you traitors),

Thats some bad hat, Harry.

Thats a line from Chief Brody in Jaws. An old dudenamed Harryannoys Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) by making fun of the chiefs mild aquaphobia while he is trying to spot a shark that will likely eat another kid.

Brody responds, Thats some bad hat, Harry.

Now, Ive seen Jaws many, many times. And its not like I had actually forgotten the scene. But it wasnt until I saw it at drive-in last weekend that I connected the dots to Bad Hat Harry Productions, the production company founded by Bryan Singer, responsible for many of the X-Men movies, The Usual Suspects and the TV show House. They werent hard dots to connect. The companys original logo was literally a drawing of the Jaws scene.

So those are easy dots to connect, and I failed. If I were a member of a pop culture-obsessed offshoot of the Yakuza, I might have to remove the tip of my pinky as penance. Fortunately, thats not the case.

But Ive got other dots to connect (warning: Dot connection addiction is dangerousyou have to know where to draw the line). As I mentioned on the podcast the other day, watching Jaws during a pandemic was interesting. Obviously, the movie is not an intentional allegory about a virus that wouldnt hit until nearly five decades later. But its hard not to see some of it that way. In particular, nearly every scene with the mayor feels awfully familiar. Watch this:

Dreyfuss is basically an epidemiologist explaining that the shark doesnt care about the crucial summer months for Amitys economy. And theres the mayor playing, well, not quite Donald Trump, but certainly one of dozens of Republican politicians looking for excuses not to listen to the scientists. Dreyfuss says he found the tooth of the shark in the hull of a boat. And despite being informed that the owner of the boat, one Ben Gardner, wasto use a scientific termeatenby the shark, the mayor wont believe any of it because Dreyfuss cant produce the tooth. I mean, maybe Brody could have brought Ben Gardners head?

Anyway, what really gets the mayors goat (presumably so long as the goat doesnt go swimming) is the fake news contained in a vandalized billboard.

Remember, a bunch of people have already been eaten by the shark. But closing the beachesnot the bars, not the restaurants, just the beachesis too terrible a thing to contemplate, so the mayor and most of Amitys residents simply pretend theres no shark. It feels amazingly familiar.

The one scene where the mayor isnt analogous to our moment is when the moral enormity of his reluctance finally hits him and Mayor Vaughn comes to his senses.

We havent had that scenenot really. Some of the politicians and pundits who ridiculed those who took the pandemic seriously in March have changed their tunes. But none of them, as far as I know, have admitted to any serious failure, moral or intellectual. Most of the people who said its just the fluor something similar have either stuck to their guns or just gone silent. And, until about a month ago, this asininity was disproportionately a partisan affair. But you cant have asininity without an assand an ass, just like the old French General Assembly, is divided on a left-right spectrum (lets forgo the easy quips about what this says about the center).

Prior to the George Floyd protests, Jaws worked mostly as a parable for a big chunk of the Republican party, starting with Donald Trump. Shark repellent is for cucks and cowards! This is just a typical shark season, you stupid galeophobes! You just want to use this shark to defeat Mayor Vaughn in the next election!

But then the tables turned. The Richard Dreyfusses, righteously dismissive of the bourgeois and commercial concerns of the gentry, suddenly insisted it was fine to get in the water. Hell, while youre at it, defund the lifeguards and tear down the lifeguard towers!

Not only did they say it was fine to get in the water, they said it was fine to stay in the water indefinitely. Was there a single prominent public health expert who initially supported the protests but, after say, the second week, said, Okay you made your point?

If there was, I missed it.

Covid, Chapter 2.

I never thought Donald Trump deserved much blame for the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in the U.S., or even for our faltering early responses. America rarely gets anything right on the first try. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, You can always count on Americans to do the right thingafter they've tried everything else.

President Trump often says that he saved millions of lives by closing down travel from China. He didnt really close down travel as much as he claims, but what he did was better than nothingand given that he was condemned for it by Biden and many other Democrats he has every right to brag about it. But the move surely didnt save millions of lives. The EU didnt ban air travel from China (or anywhere at all) until mid-March. Theyre doing much better than the U.S. Oh, and Italy closed down travel from China before the U.S. did, how much good did it do them?

The only point to closing borders during a pandemic is to buy yourself some time. We wasted whatever time Trump bought us. When he says he saved millions of lives, it is only to make it sound that were lucky to have lost only 131,544 Americans (as of this writing). Thats a quarter of the global reported COVID-19 deaths. America, the richest country in world, with 4.25 percent of the world population, is punching way above its weight

This chart alone tells the tale:

The romantic pandemic.

In Suicide of the West I argued that perhaps our biggest problem is romanticism. Romanticism is a complicated term because, for even the fairly educated layman, it conjures everything from painting and poetry to Lifetime Movies of the Week. Even Isaiah Berlin, who literally wrote the book on Romanticism, considered offering a clear definition of the term to be a trap.

For our purposes, Romanticism as a philosophical movement was all about the primacy of emotions and feelings, a rebellion against reason and rationalism. Romanticism, Joseph Schumpeter observed, arose almost immediately as a part of the general reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century that set in after the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Hegel described it as absolute inwardness. When Blake wrote, A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage, the cage he had in mind were the coldly scientific rules and codes of the Enlightenment. The hero of Franz Sternbalds romantic novel Wanderings declared: Not these trees, not these mountains do I wish to copy, but my soul, my mood, which governs me just at this moment.

Donald Trump is an amazing example of one form of the romantic spirit. He often says his instincts are more important than expertise and experience. He even recently told Sean Hannity that he always believed talent is more important than experience. He famously explained in a deposition that the best metric for measuring his net worth was how he feels about himself any given morning. (Im not even going to get into the Romantic roots of modern nationalism, including Trumps version of it). His response to the pandemic has been a textbook case of romanticism trumping (no pun intended) reason. The virus will just disappear because he feels that it will. He scorns masks because he feels that wearing one is a sign of weakness.

But our problems are so much greater than Donald Trump. One of Jonathan Haidts Great Untruths is Always Trust Your Feelings.

A word about feelings.

Let me interrupt my extemporaneous diatribe for a moment.

Im okay with telling people Always listen to your feelings because I think your feelings and instincts tell you important things. A lesson I learned too late in life is that fear alone is never a good reason not to do anything. You need to ask yourself why you fear something. Sometimes your fear is well-placed, other times its not. You need to use your intellect to figure out the difference.

Which is to say, theres a difference between trusting and listening, because when you listen you still have the option to say No. Think of all the things youve learned to do or succeeded in doing because you didnt listen to your feelings. Would you have learned to swim? To dive into water? Ride a horse? Pet a dog? Gotten or stayed married? And then theres the problem of bad feelings. Suffice it to say, that if everybody did whatever their feelings told them to do in a particular moment, groin punching would be our national sport (Tonight on ESPN, The Ocho!).

Woe, woe, feelings.

Okay so where was I? Oh right, Haidts Great Untruth. I think so many of our problems these days stem from the fact that Americans, regardless of ideology, trust their feelings too much. If you find yourself throwing punches or having what looks like a nervous breakdown, because a private business asked you to wear a mask during a pandemic, youre listening to your feelings too much. If you think its outrageous to open churches in a pandemic but awesome to occupy City Hallbecause that will end racism or somethingyou should stop trusting your feelings.

More broadly, so many of the policy disputes we have these days seem to have less to do with things like math or experience and more to do with feelings. It just feels like disparities in male-female pay across a wide variety of occupations can be explained solely by sexism. It just feels like we should be able to afford a Green New Deal. It just feels like abolishing the police should work.

I think intellectual honesty requires admitting that people have been saying Go with your gut for a very long time. Even Obi Wan Kenobi said trust your feelings a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (personally given how far away the nearest galaxy is, I always thought the second far was gratuitous). And, I suspect that feelings always played a bigger role in policymaking than we might like to think. I mean, FDR set the price of gold based on what numbers he thought were lucky.

The difference now is that were not just telling people to trust their own feelings. Were creating a worldview that other peoples feelings are sovereign. The intentions of the offender do not matter, only the feelings of the offended. Even when the offenses happened doesnt matter. Five minutes ago or five years, its all the same. An official at Boeing was just forced out of his job for being wrong about something 33 years ago.

Instead of clear rules, rationally conceived and universally applied, the new rules are opaque, emotionally conceived and subjectively applied. If we lived under some fickle absolutist king, who arbitrarily decided what was offensive, outrageous, or even criminal, wed all recognize the illiberalism of it. But when a mob arbitrarily rules the same way, we call it social justice. Its really just the tyranny of feelings.

Various & Sundry

Goldberg update, four-legged and two: I finished writing this from the front passenger seat of the family funwagon barreling toward NYC. Were spending the Fourth with Grandma and Fafoon (Id watch that cop show). The quadrupeds are in good hands with Kirsten and she will be sending proof of life both this weekend and next week when we go to Alaska. Pippa continues to roll sporadically in stygian foulness. Zo continues to make outsized threats to critters. Ralph is warming to me, Gracie remains demanding. And I gotta go.

ICYMI

Last weeks G-File

Last weekends Ruminant

Pull out your Remnant bingo cards, everyone; its time for The Parties Are Weak!

Politics infects everything: NBA Edition

The weeks first Remnant, with return favorite Kevin Williamson

The members-only Midweek Epistle, in which the culture suddenly comes over to my side on the legacy of Woodrow Wilson

My appearance on Dan Crenshaws podcast, Hold These Truths

The weeks second Remnant, with the mellifluous Niall Ferguson

What if we voted like Belgians for a day?

The rest is here:

Isn't It Romantic? - The Dispatch