Why We Need to Resist the World of Pure Action
Last week, Michael Osterholm went on the Joe Rogan Experience for the second time.
Osterholm, some might recall, went on Rogan early in the pandemic. Later Rogan guests decried him as a “chicken little” who was just trying to hawk his book. Osterholm said things that turned out to be wrong (e.g., he said COVID wouldn’t go away with warmer weather). In the COVID wars, he was on the Left.
But he went on Rogan last week and almost immediately said that the pandemic, nearly two years later, has taught him the importance of humility.
I didn’t listen to the rest of the podcast (I’m COVIDed out, to be honest), but I was impressed by the acknowledgment.
I don’t think I need to review all the problems associated with lockdowns. Alcohol abuse, mental illness, domestic violence, and obesity increased significantly. Small businesses died. Economic inequality skyrocketed, as big businesses and Wall Street gleaned profits from the lockdowns while the world’s poor suffered the most. People died because they couldn’t get their customary medical care (like my young diabetic cousin who couldn’t get his insulin pump calibrated and died of a heart attack). The lockdowns were such a debacle that the Biden administration is now saying they were a Trump-era thing, notwithstanding that the administration’s blue fellow-travelers locked down far more fiercely than their red opponents.
That’s what a debacle the lockdowns were.
But at the time, they seemed to make sense. I supported the first wave of lockdowns to flatten the curve.
There was that human urge: We have to do something! It’s an urge, de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, that is especially prevalent in America.
We are a culture of pure action.
Albert Jay Nock wrote an essay that has become a classic: “Snoring as a Fine Art,” in which he recounts the great success of the Russian General Kutusov against Napoleon. Kutusov beat by Napoleon by . . . doing nothing. He fell asleep and snored loudly during important meetings. He didn’t act when people thought he should act. He screwed around on personal interests when he should’ve been working.
