After a lifetime offering my opinions on virtually everything
for money – which is to say, as a professor – I retired, and almost immediately
started offering my opinions on virtually everything for free – which to say, I
started a blog. Now, after eleven years of
blogging about politics, economics, ideology, and even literary criticism, I am
confronted with something that actually affects my life directly, and
dangerously. I find that my impulse is
not to offer my opinions about it, but rather to concentrate my energies, such
as they are, on making as sure as I can that my wife and I are provided for, with
laundry detergent, cat litter, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. It is desperately important to me that my
wife should have adequate supplies of her medications, that for as long as
possible we keep the virus from our doors.
“Social distancing” does not begin to describe the isolation that is now
our daily routine. Fortunately, we live
in a rural area, so we can venture out on drives into the country and even get out
of the car for brief walks.
If I were forty again, or even sixty, I could view this as
an interesting adventure, but at eighty-six, this is not how I would have chosen
to spend one of the relatively few years I have left.
9 comments:
Could you really view it as an interesting adventure if you were forty or sixty, when the lives of your parents and their generation were in danger? Maybe if you were fifteen because no one at age fifteen has much interest in anything besides their own hang-ups and sexual desires.
I don't think you realize just how satisfying your blog is to a lot of people. One might search the internet for days on end without finding such a wise, well-written and well-intentioned counsel as your's. I for one start my day with a cup of coffee and an interested curiosity about what you have to say. Do keep going.
I'm 60 and this is an interesting adventure to me, much like the occasional cold or flu, which is inconvenient but which affords a welcome opportunity for sleep and reading undisturbed by other responsibilities. It's interesting in the way tuberculosis is interesting for Mann in Magic Mountain. But then I realize that unlike an ordinary illness I'm not the only person inconvenienced or, worse, suffering. Nor is the inconvenience and suffering likely to be so temporary. I had a two-hour phone call yesterday with a friend in Seattle. He's very much my junior in terms of age, but he's also at Ground Zero (or one of them). This frightens me. I'm frightened, too, for my young children, elementary and middle school students. And for my almost 93-year-old mother who, fortunately, moved from Southern to Northern California to be near us early last year. At least she lives in an assisted living facility that appears to me to be secure, but of course we aren't allowed to visit.
Bad news. Good news.
Bad news: the numbers here are getting worse. 800 Italians have died in the last 24 hrs.
The good news is that once again, the Cuban show of solidarity is extraordinary.
800 Cuban medical doctors are now in route to Lombardy.
https://bit.ly/2WAEg2w
Well I know you are scared and I am scared too even though I'm relatively young at 52. Which isn't young. It's a really scary thing what is happening. But as far as I know you aint going to get it by using your telephone and talking to your family often. And you won't get it by writing blog posts on your computer. So do the first frequently and when you have time the second. And stay well and I wish you well and do your best not to get too worried.
an interesting adventure? Take what is happening in Italy now, multiply it by 50 or 60, and that will be happening there in 10 weeks. Such estimates are probably overly optimistic.
I'm a 37 year old, and I find the entire situation surreal, like life has suddenly become a movie. Aptly enough, I've said to my offline friends that I feel like Pippin and Gandalf in Minas Tirith, awaiting the attack of Sauron's forces. Specifically, though, I am thinking of how this was portrayed in Peter Jackson's excellent, though flawed, adaptation (this would be in the third book and movie, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).
I work in a MN hospital (non-patient care, currently), and I feel like we're all just holding our breath, waiting for the first trebuchets and seige towers to strike.
Just about any time Trump and his supporters open their mouths, I brace myself in expectation of a shamelessly specious argument with deeply questionable motives; *and*, as a student of philosophy, I face the additional annoyance of feeling obligated to diagnose the argument's fallacy - the exercise would be merely tiresome (or at best, occasionally entertaining, or useful in keeping one's mind sharp) if not for the fact that the argument conceals a deep disregard for human welfare.
To illustrate: As Trump now considers reopening the economy (in opposition to expert counsel), he argues as follows: "You look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we're talking about. That doesn't mean we're going to tell everybody no more driving of cars. So we have to do things to get our country open."
For what it's worth, here's my attempt to evaluate the argument. (But I feel like I'm missing something, and am curious to see other readers' takes.)
Stated a little more rigorously, Trump's argument would appear to be: (1) There is some feature of American life, F, which (a) requires car-driving to be a common practice, and (b) is such that it would be less harmful for American life to incur the negative consequences of car-driving than to be deprived of F. (2) Reopening the American economy at this stage of the pandemic would harm American life in ways that compare to the negative consequences of car-driving. (3) But the refusal to reopen the economy at this stage would cause American life to be deprived of F. (4) So, by analogy, the American economy should be reopened at this stage.
Right away, two things suggested themselves to me. First (although it's technically irrelevant to the status of this argument), it's doubtful that Trump would accept his own reasoning as applied to the issue of (e.g.) undocumented immigrants. After all, he would not endorse the argument that says, "Undocumented immigrants contribute to violent crime at a lower rate than the general population; so, it would be illegitimate to treat undocumented immigrants differently than the general population simply on the purported grounds of mitigating violent crime" - but (at least it seems to me at first glance), this argument involves a similar pattern of reasoning to that of the foregoing.
Second, Trump of course has a reputation for flagrantly misrepresenting the facts, so the factual claims implied in (2) are automatically suspect; and indeed, from what I read, the number of annual road traffic deaths in the U.S. has been close to the mid-30,000's for the past few years, whereas that would be an exceptionally *optimistic* figure for the country's COVID-19 deaths in 2020. (FiveThirtyEight: "The expert consensus is to expect about 200,000 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 this year, but the uncertainty around that number is also huge: There's an 80 percent chance the final number will be between 19,000 and 1.2 million, according to these estimates.")
A formally valid argument with even one false premise is still unsound; so, given the figures that falsify premise (2), we can pronounce Trump's argument unsound even without attempting to state the plausible meanings of "F" in premises (1) and (3). Still, I suspect there's a stronger and more interesting critique to be found in the attempt. But I can't say I'm up to the task right now.
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