Will COVID mean a seismic cultural shift?

One of the benefits that comes from age is learning from experience. One thing I’ve learned over the years is I don’t know as much as I think. Another thing I’ve learned is that there is often a deep disconnect between a person’s experience and a culture’s experience. Children contracting polio was a life changing experience for whole families. It did not, however, radically change the world.

At my age I have lived through the Club of Rome’s environmental apocalypticism, back when it was a global ice age we were supposed to fear. I’ve lived through the certainty that we would soon be buried under hyper-inflation. I’ve lived through the AIDs crisis. I survived the millennium bug. I have yet, however, to see the mountains melt and the stars fall from the sky.

Because there are disagreements over the dangers and spread of COVID, because governments rarely miss an opportunity that comes with a crisis, this illness is raising the specter of permanent totalitarian rule. They’re telling us if we can meet for worship, whom we can invite for Christmas dinner and if we can sing Christmas carols. It is all terribly draconian, no question.

What it is not, is new. Did you know, in the midst of the Cold War, there was a country where the national government made it a crime for any business to raise its prices, or to give an employee a raise? That this same country witnessed consumers lined up for block after block, hoping just for the chance to buy necessary goods? That, after a regime change the new head of state went so far as to forbid his comrades to heat their homes above a certain temperature? For decades this country has cut people off from educational opportunities if they don’t get vaccinated. To this day, in that same country, if you want build a shed in your backyard you must wait for a government bureaucrat to come and give his approval, which won’t happen if you don’t write a check.

That country, of course, is the land of the free and home of the brave. The intrusiveness would most certainly shock our founding fathers. We, on the other hand, have gotten used to it. Do I expect a seismic shift? Not at all. That is long behind us. Do I expect Big Brother’s mask to slip further? That I can see. He has been in power, however, across generations.

We are already deep into the bowels of institutional entropy, that law that says all institutions tend toward apostasy unless acted upon by an outside force. For the state, apostasy falls in two directions. One, the state falls to fulfill its calling, protecting life and property. We’ve had this for decades as police stand guard at public centers for the murder of the unborn. We have frequent Purge nights in our cities as the police are ordered to stand down while looting runs amuck. Two, the state intrudes where it does not belong. That camel has long since followed its nose into our tent and is now curled up in our sleeping bag, snoring to beat the band.

No, no seismic shift. Just more of the same.