Small steps to bring hope and wonder
It is a season of wonder and hope. For some, the wonder propelling it all is the manger, the event that gave rise to our celebration of Christmas. For all of us, surely, the specific hope we embrace most fervently right now is that this dark winter of pandemic will yield to recovery before too long.
But there are other ways to think of wonder and hope, and they can be found on a quite practical level.
President-elect Joe Biden bluntly reminded us Tuesday that, even as we near the end of the deadliest year in American history, “Our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us.” Painful as it is to weigh that, I take hope from a leader who tells us the truth. It is a welcome change.
Americans are a mostly resilient lot. A new poll from Axios reveals that one-third of us expect our physical and mental health, as well as our finances, to improve in 2021. That’s hope worth savoring and encouraging.
Let’s be amateur linguists for a moment, though, and use that word “hope” not as a noun meaning what we have faith will occur, but as a verb implying what we want. Here’s what I hope: I hope people will do the right thing to help us escape this pandemic. And to minimize our losses as much as possible in the months before widespread distribution of the vaccine protects us, public health experts offer simple requests: Wear a mask and stay away from other people. That will protect our loved ones, our co-workers, strangers and ourselves. It is ungenerous to behave otherwise.
So while we’re changing the use of words — English is fun! — let’s get back to “wonder.” As a verb meaning something one ponders, here’s what I wonder: You people who refuse to wear a mask, what are you thinking ? You’ve got to wonder, for example, about the maskless mass in a conga line at a party in Queens earlier this month of the Whitestone Republican Club. A video of the party has been shared 3.5 million times, drawing criticism and ridicule. “COVID conga lines are not smart,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said. To that, the club responded with a statement that cited members’ First Amendment rights. “Adults have the absolute right to make their own decisions,” the group said, “and clearly many chose to interact like normal humans and not paranoid zombies in hazmat suits.” Cute hyperbole, but that’s not the choice. Our constitution protects our rights, but there’s more at stake here than the freedom of a bunch of over-served bit-part politicos to wiggle to the BeeGees in a bar.
Americans won the right to equality and freedom of speech, religion and the press, in part because our founders were influenced by the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. In that period, from roughly the mid-1600s to the beginning of the 19th century, ideas such as liberty, tolerance and the value of constitutional government developed, undermining the authority of royalty and church hierarchy. The Enlightenment brought an emphasis on the scientific method as an alternative to religious dogma.
Of course, there was pushback. Many people said that a world ruled by reason would be soulless and immoral. Science only seemed to rule the world, they said, because people were looking at it through a scientific lens, rather than a spiritual one.
There are those who argue that we are still locked in those arguments. In the recentlyreleased book “Patriots of Two
Nations,” Spencer Critchley links the Counter-enlightenment philosophy to conflicts throughout American history, culminating in the presidency of Donald Trump.
“To his most committed followers, it makes no difference when Trump makes no sense,” Critchley writes. “In fact, not making sense can be the point, when the enemy is seen as both relentlessly sense-making and spiritually empty.”
Take, for example, Trump’s dismissal of scientists’ conclusion that climate change played a role in this fall’s historic California wildfires. The president said the world would soon start to cool naturally; when he was reminded that science showed otherwise, he replied, “I don’t think science knows, actually.”
To many supporters, the obvious lies that Trump spouts continuously matter less than the fact that he’s speaking to a sort of higher truth: what they identify as a spirit of America. And when the president holds White House gatherings that turn into COVID -19 super-spreader events, to many supporters it exemplifies the overarching value of freedom in our national charter — and serves as an example to be followed.
In a civil society, though, our security depends upon protecting one another, and equating selfishness to freedom mocks our heritage. “Civilization is first of all a moral thing,” the French philosopher Henri Amiel wrote in the mid-19th century. “Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of society is alone the basis of civilization.”
Morality requires protecting each other as we can. Right now that means, simply, masking and distancing. In this season of hope, I wonder: Isn’t that the least we must do?
In a civil society, we must protect one another; equating selfishness to freedom mocks our heritage.