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Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

By Andrew Marantz

Viking

During the postWorld War II era, anti-democratic extremist movements faded into political irrelevance in the Western democracies. Nazis became a subject for comedies and historical movies, communists ceased to inspire either fear or hope, and while some violent groups emerged on the fringes, they were no electoral threat. The mass media effectively quarantined extremists on both the right and the left. As long as broadcasters and the major newspapers and magazines regulated who could speak to the general public, a liberal government could maintain near-absolute free-speech rights without much to worry about. The practical reality was that extremists could reach only a limited audience, and that through their own outlets. They also had an incentive to moderate their views to gain entre into mainstream channels.

In the United States, both the conservative media and the Republican Party helped keep a lid on right-wing extremism from the end of the McCarthy era in the 1950s to the early 2000s. Through his magazine National Review, the editor, columnist, and TV host William F. Buckley set limits on respectable conservatism, consigning kooks, anti-Semites, and outright racists to the outer darkness. The Republican leadership observed the same political norms, while the liberal press and the Democratic Party denied a platform to the fringe left.

Those old norms and boundary-setting practices have now broken down on the right. No single source accounts for the surge in right-wing extremism in the United States or Europe. Rising numbers of immigrants and other minorities have triggered a panic among many native-born whites about lost dominance. Some men have reacted angrily against womens equality, while shrinking industrial employment and widening income inequality have hit less-educated workers particularly hard.

More from Paul Starr

As these pressures have increased, the internet and social media have opened up new channels for previously marginalized forms of expression. Opening up new channels was exactly the hope of the internets championsat least, it was a hope when they envisioned only benign effects. The rise of right-wing extremism together with online media now suggests the two are connected, but it is an open question as to whether the change in media is a primary cause of the political shift or just a historical coincidence.

The relationship between right-wing extremism and online media is at the heart of Antisocial, Andrew Marantzs new book about what he calls the hijacking of the American conversation. A reporter for The New Yorker, Marantz began delving into two worlds in 2014 and 2015. He followed the online world of neofascists, attended events they organized, and interviewed those who were willing to talk with him. Meanwhile, he also reported on the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley whose companies were simultaneously undermining professional journalism and providing a platform for the circulation of conspiracy theories, disinformation, hate speech, and nihilism. The online extremists, Marantz argues, have brought about a shift in Americans moral vocabulary, a term he borrows from the philosopher Richard Rorty. To change how we talk is to change who we are, Marantz writes, summing up the thesis of his book.

Antisocial weaves back and forth between the netherworld of the right and the dreamworld of the techno-utopians in the years leading up to and immediately following the 2016 U.S. election. The strongest chapters profile the demi-celebrities of the alt-right. As a Jewish reporter from a liberal magazine, Marantz is not an obvious candidate to gain the confidence of neofascists. But he has an impressive talent for drawing them out, and his portraits attend to the complexities of their life stories and the nuances of their opinions. Marantz leaves no doubt, however, about his own view of the alt-right and the responsibilities of journalists: The plain fact was the alt-right was a racist movement full of creeps and liars. If a newspapers house style didnt allow its reporters to say so, at least by implication, then the house style was preventing its reporters from telling the truth.

As Marantz describes them, the white nationalists, masculinists, and other elements of the alt-right were metamedia insurgents interested chiefly in catalyzing conflict. They took for granted that the old institutions ought to be burned to the ground, and they used the tools at their disposalnew media, especially social mediato light as many matches as possible. As they expanded their online presence, they tailored their memes to the medium. On Facebook, they posted countersignal memes to shock normies out of their complacency. On Twitter, they trolled mainstream journalists, hoping to capture wider attention. On sites such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, they felt free to be more overtly vile and started calling themselves fashy or fash-ist, sometimes baiting normies by claiming that Hitler did nothing wrong.

In the old world of mass media, extremists had an incentive to temper their views to gain access to the mainstream, but now the incentives have been reversed.

The online alt-right, together with the presidential candidate they decided to champion, Donald Trump, played a key role in making white nationalist ideas part of the national conversation. Until 2016, the two major parties and national media reflected a broad consensusat least in rhetoric, if not in actual policythat America was a nation where immigrants were welcome and people of all races and religions were equal. When Republicans played the race card, they did so obliquely in deference to the consensus. Under George W. Bush, the Republican establishment was still pushing immigration reform, while the party was increasingly in opposition to legislation and succeeded in blocking it.

But a few on the far right called for Republicans to go further. They assailed the Narrative, their term for the dominant liberal ideas about racial and gender equality. Marantz highlights the role of Steve Sailer, an opinion writer who had been arguing since the early 2000s that Republicans should openly cast themselves as a white-identity party, enact pro-white policies, and take aggressive action against immigration, including the repeal of birthright citizenship. Others on the right called this the Sailer strategy. Social media gave Sailer and like-minded hereticsmany of whom Buckley had banished to the fringes of the movement years earliernew ways of disseminating their views that were more powerful than what was appearing in a print magazine like National Review.

Much of Marantzs story describes how more traditional right-wingers moved further right and brought others along with them. In 2012, a group that had previously supported the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul started a blog called The Right Stuff, describing themselves as post-libertarian before adopting the term alt-right. As a result of the rising numbers of immigrants, they argued, libertarianism wouldnt be enough to stop the replacement of whites; stronger measures were necessary. The Right Stuffs arch, antic, floridly offensive tone, Marantz writes, attracted a growing cohort of disaffected young men who often referred to the blog as a key part of a libertarian-to-far-right pipeline, a path by which normies could advance, through a series of epiphanies, toward full radicalization.

Some of these right-wingers went all the way to out-and-proud fascism. Richard Spencer, who coined the term alternative right in 2008, advocated the creation of a white ethnostate on the North American continent, to be achieved through peaceful ethnic cleansing. At an alt-right conference just after Trumps election, Spencer declared, Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory. This last phrase, the literal translation of Sieg heil, led some members of the audience to rise with Nazi salutes. When the leaders of a movement call for peaceful ethnic cleansing, it ought not to be surprising that one of their followers decides to do it the old-fashioned way. In October 2018, just before killing 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the murderer posted a cartoon on a right-wing social media site with the caption The libertarian-to-far-right pipeline is a real thing.

Before he became Trumps campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, publisher of the web tabloid Breitbart News, said of his own site, Were the platform for the alt-right. Later, though, the association became toxic, and Bannon and others who were anxious about the company they were keeping then relabeled their position as civic nationalism rather than ethnonationalism. In the United States, however, civic nationalism has long been associated with the liberal, pluralist view that embraces ethnic diversity and immigration and insists that American citizenship and identity demand only adherence to the nations civic principles. Bannon and others in his circle were trying to appropriate the term for a movement that sought to reverse immigration and citizenship policies that have treated nonwhites as equals.

The normalization of white nationalism on the right and the growth of online media helped prepare the way for Trumps election. With his disregard for the truth and incendiary use of social media both as a candidate and as president, Trump has been the pivotal and emblematic figure in this political transformation. Repeatedly over the previous decades, as far back as 1987, he failed to get any traction when he floated the idea of running for president. The mainstream news media did not take him seriously, and his views and even his party affiliation werent clear. In 1999, he mentioned Oprah Winfrey as a possible running mate when he suggested he might run for president the next year.

In 2011, Trump again tried to stir up support for a presidential campaign, but as Marantz points out, he initially had nothing to command peoples attentionno news hook, no controversy, no meme with momentum. Then he turned to two far-right figures, Joseph Farah and Jerome Corsi from World Net Daily, a right-wing online site that had played a central role in promoting the lie that Obama came from Kenya and his Hawaiian birth certificate was a forgery. Seizing on the myth about Obamas birth, Trump generated the political attention he had always craved, though once again he decided against a presidential run. But Marantz is right that the episode had an obvious lesson: the more incendiary your message, and the more loudly and forcefully you repeated it, the more attention you could get.

Marantzs view of the online media revolves around this central point: Messages that pack a high emotional punch go viral, while low-arousal messages do not. The viral power of emotionally arousing messages is clearly part of the explanation for why extremism has flourished online at a historical moment when native-born whites, particularly men, have felt they are losing control. In the old world of mass media, extremists had an incentive to temper their views to gain access to the mainstream, but now the incentives have been reversed. High-voltage lies flourish in the environment created by social media. Not only are there no editorial gatekeepers; the platforms algorithms have amplified messages that generate user engagement, which high-arousal racist lies unquestionably do.

Whats missing from Marantzs account, however, is the critical role of Fox, Breitbart, and other major right-wing media organizations that have developed over the past quarter-century. The new mass media of the right and social media work in tandem. Social media were supposed to create wider public participation, and for better or worse thats what we have on the right: a system of participatory propaganda (as some analysts have begun to call it), involving both media with large audiences and legions of lesser influencers.

When the major social media companies began in the early 2000s, their founders did not see themselves as having any responsibility for the content on their sites. The culture of the tech industry has long had an affinity for libertarian ideas that provide a ready justification for a hands-off policy. An absolutist view of free speech has also been economically advantageous for the companies because it relieves them of any obligation to hire the employees that would be needed to monitor all the content users post.

But since 2016, the revelations about the complicity of the tech industry in spreading disinformation have forced the platforms to make adjustments. Reddit serves as Marantzs chief case study in the techno-utopians retreat from free-speech absolutism. Founded in 2005, the company hosts forums (subreddits) for virtually unlimited and unrestrained posting of opinions, images, and other content. According to one of its founders, Steve Huffman, the site was built around the principle of No editors. The people are the editors. In its early days, it sold T-shirts with the slogan Freedom from the press.

When Marantz visited its offices in San Francisco in October 2017, Reddit had a million subreddits and was the fourth-highest-traffic site in the United States after Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Huffman, now the ceo, had become alarmed about the presence of neofascist activists on the site. Just a few weeks earlier, white supremacists had marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.

After some deliberation, Reddit slightly modified its existing policy against encouraging or inciting violence, adding language enjoining participants not to glorify or call for physical harm against an individual or a group of people or the abuse of animals. Marantz was invited to observe a group of Reddit employees as they sat around a table eating snacks and making decisions about which subreddits to ban109 of them that day, such as r/KillAllJews and r/KilltheJews as well as r/SexWithDogs. But the scene Marantz describes only raises more questions: How were those subreddits accepted in the first place? What others with equally noxious content survived because they had less explicit names? Is it even possible for a company with a million forums to exercise responsible control?

Social media companies have created new and powerful means of political communication without the traditions of editorial responsibility that in liberal democracies have helped make the media into partners of democracy. The companies have now taken some steps to limit the damage they have been doing. Facebook has taken down billions of fake accounts and recently adopted measures against coordinated inauthentic behavior to counteract disinformation campaigns by both domestic sources and foreign governments. But it has also declined to block lies in political advertising.

The techno-utopians promised disruption, and they have delivered it. What they havent delivered is the ability to prevent that disruption from undermining liberal democratic institutions. The online media havent produced the right-wing surge all by themselves, and Marantzs book doesnt persuade me that the online right-wing extremists have changed who Americans are by changing how we talk. But the changes in media and politics have shown us something about what the United States can become. Fascism is a real and present danger in America. Everything we do now politically has to take that into account.

See the rest here:
How the Right Went Far-Right - The American Prospect

By John Authers

The coronavirus pandemic is a test. Its a test of medical capacity and political will. Its a test of endurance and forbearance, for believers a test of religious faith. Its a test, too, of a different kind of faith, in the strength of the ideas humans choose to help them form moral judgments and guide personal and social behavior.

The epidemic forces everyone to confront deep questions of human existence, questions so profound that they have previously been answered, in many different ways, by the greatest philosophers. Its a test of where all humans stand.

What is right and what is wrong? What can individuals expect from society, and what can society expect of them? Should others make sacrifices for me, and vice versa? Is it just to set economic limits to fighting a deadly disease?

The lieutenant governor of Texas thinks that those over 70 shouldnt sacrifice the country by shutting down economic activity, but should instead be ready to sacrifice themselves. A 22-year-old partying on Spring break in Florida becomes a social media sensation with a different critique of social distancing, saying, If I get corona, I get corona. Consciously or not, both men are placing themselves in distinct moral traditions.

Several philosophies of social justice have claimed wide adherence in the modern world. They do not line up neatly with party political labels, and most people have sympathy for more than one. Here is a guide to some of the leading idea systems undergirding competing conceptions of right and wrong. Each is being put to the test. As you are put to the test, which do you choose?

RawlsiansMany westerners are Rawlsians without knowing it. Fifty years ago, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls tried to work out how people would construct their society if the choice had to be made behind what he called a veil of ignorance about whether they will be rich, poor or somewhere in-between. Faced with the risk of being the worst off, Rawls posited, humans would not demand total equality, but would need to be assured of the trappings of a modern welfare state. The assurance of basic necessities and the opportunity to do better would form the foundation for social and political justice and provide the ability for people to assert themselves.

Rawlss monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is now regarded as the clearest moral and intellectual justification for modern center-left mixed economies. But the idea comes from somewhere deeper. Rawls was not religious, but his philosophy is essentially in line with the golden rule handed down by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus, that we should do as we would want to be done by. Some religious leaders have approached the awful dilemmas presented by the coronavirus just as Rawls would, by taking treatment of the worst off as the criterion for social action.

I hope the lessons we take from our countrys experience with Covid-19 arent about food or avoiding the spread of germs, wrote Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention in the New York Times, but about how we treat the most vulnerable among us. A pandemic is no time to turn our eyes away from the sanctity of human life.

Pope Francis also invoked sympathy for the most afflicted as he addressed a prayer to an empty St. Peters Square. "We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other," he said.

Perhaps because of their religious resonance, Rawlsian ideas have guided the approach to the pandemic chosen by authorities in the western world. Societies are mobilizing, and governments are taking extra powers to mandate claustrophobic lockdowns in a bid to minimize the death and suffering of the weakest.

Even those who arent religious tend to accept the logic of the veil of ignorance. If a person is unwilling to be abandoned, governments are not entitled to give up on them; they must do their best to protect everyone, particularly the weakest.

UtilitariansOther philosophies produce very different ways of dealing with the epidemic. Under utilitarianism, most associated with the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, rulers must be guided to the total happiness, or utility, of all the people, and should aim to secure the greatest good for the greatest number.

In Victorian Britain, this was a radical creed, and the first utilitarians were passionate liberal reformers. But the utilitarian calculus opens up a new possibility that in situations such as a pandemic, some people might justly be sacrificed for the greater good. It would benefit society to accept casualties, the argument goes, to minimize disruption.

Explicit utilitarian thinking still seems beyond the pale. Last weekend, Britains Sunday Times reported that Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had advocated in private meetings a policy of letting enough people get sick to establish nationwide herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad. It caused an outcry and met with an immediate and impassioned denial by Downing Street. Even Cummings, an iconoclast, refused to be attached to such brutally utilitarian ideas.

Mill himself would not have advocated putting money ahead of peoples lives, but a utilitarian calculus is not about balancing money and life. If a recession could lead to shorter lives and widespread misery, it is possible that making less of an attempt to save every last life from the pandemic now could lead to greater total happiness.

In the U.K., a paper by an academic at the University of Bristol used mathematical techniques developed to measure the cost-efficiency of safety measures in the nuclear power industry to calculate the likely savings of human life by different approaches to the virus, and found that a 12-month lockdown followed by vaccinations would be best. But it cautioned that this would only create a net saving of life if the reduction in gross domestic product could be kept to 6.4% or less.

That paper, broadcast on the BBC, provoked a fiery response from economists, and some research suggests counterintuitively that recessions lengthen lives. Most people find the mere attempt at such an exercise callous, but its difficult to dismiss it. Governments and insurers do indeed put a notional price on a human life when setting policy. Must every last patient be given the utmost care if this plan of action causes greater suffering in the long run? Or, as President Donald Trump put it: We cant have the cure be worse than the problem.

Its intuitive to view moral problems through a utilitarian lens and then to find outcomes like this distasteful, and to reject them because they conflict with the golden rule. If the lockdowns drag on for months, utilitarian ideas may bubble back to the surface.

LibertariansThe libertarian place in American thought is long and distinguished. Its lineage goes back at least to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and the founding fathers, and in its modern incarnation gains inspiration from the author Ayn Rand, who outlined her ideas in novels and essays. For her, man had a right to live for himself and an individuals happiness cannot be prescribed by another man or any number of other men.

The most famous libertarian thought experiment was conducted by another Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, in a riposte to Rawls. He imagined what kind of political state would be built, and how much personal liberty citizens would surrender, if everyone were dropped into a utopian landscape with no social structures. The novelist William Golding gave one answer in The Lord of the Flies. To avoid the descent into violence that the schoolboys of Goldings novel endure, Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, reckoned that people would set up a very limited state dedicated to self-defense and the protection of individual rights but nothing more.

The western coronavirus response has hugely expanded state powers and limited individual rights with little debate, and to date populations have consented to privations that Rand and Nozick argued they should never accept.

But wait. There have been objections to lockdowns on the libertarian basis that they infringe on rights. Critiques are appearing saying that politicians havent proven that such drastic measures are necessary. Before the coronavirus, the U.S. suffered a measles epidemic as the result of anti-vaccination activism, a libertarian cause that put parents right to choose not to vaccinate their children above the states attempt to defend other parents right to expect that their own children wouldnt have to mix with unvaccinated peers. Panic buying, and hoarding of medical equipment also show that many people are following Rands idea of self-determination and putting themselves first. Such ideas may grow more appealing after a few more weeks of self-isolation.

In public spaces around the world, libertarians are in conflict with the state. Social media is full of images of big social gatherings, often in luxurious social settings. If I get corona, I get corona, as the 22-year-old said on video in Florida. At the end of the day, Im not gonna let it stop me from partying. Oklahomas governor even felt the need to tweet that he was at a packed restaurant.

Libertarians are not only found on the political right. As the crisis began to unfold, the American Civil Liberties Union made a statement accepting that civil liberties must sometimes give way when it comes to fighting a communicable disease but only in ways that are scientifically justified. It said, The evidence is clear that travel bans and quarantines are not the solution.

The right to walk in a park looks like a flash point. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was furious to see crowds expressing libertarian sympathies whether they saw it that way or not by gathering in parks. Its arrogant, Cuomo said. Its self-destructive. Its disrespectful to other people. And it has to stop and it has to stop now!

New Yorkers are organizing to keep the parks open.

In these conditions, individual choices become freighted with moral significance. How, for example, will society eventually judge behavior like that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul? Arguably the most prominent libertarian in the U.S., he continued to socialize as normal for a week after being told that he had had contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. He had no symptoms. Recall that there are many elderly members of the Senate. Last weekend, after a workout in the Senate gym, he discovered that he had himself tested positive.

CommunitariansYet another approach is based on the notion that everyone derives their identify from the broader community. Individual rights count, but not more than community norms. These notions go back to the Greeks, but in modern times, the philosophy is most widely connected to the sociologist Amitai Etzioni and philosopher Michael Sandel. Sandels Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is another riposte to Rawls, arguing that justice cannot be determined in a vacuum or behind a veil of ignorance, but must be rooted in society. He sets out a theory of justice based on the common good.

Speaking last week to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Sandel said: The common good is about how we live together in community. Its about the ethical ideals we strive for together, the benefits and burdens we share, the sacrifices we make for one another. Its about the lessons we learn from one another about how to live a good and decent life.

The virus has attacked in exactly this place, depriving everyone of life in a community. And communitarian ideas are showing themselves. Across Europe, people on lockdown have arranged to go to their windows and balconies to applaud their national health services. These are seen as bedrocks of society. At Londons Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, a pageant of Britishness, the organizers celebrated the National Health Service with dancing nurses wheeling hospital beds. For many countries with a modern welfare state, celebrating and supporting the workers of their public-health service is seen as a communitarian duty.

This is a critical point of difference with the U.S., where the expansion of medical care is a hugely contentious issue. Communitarians like Princetons Michael Walzer argue that any system of medical provision requires the constraint of the guild of physicians. The coronavirus promises to bring this debate to a head.

Communitarianism also underlies much social conservative thought. When the very conservative Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said on Fox News that the rest of the country should not sacrifice itself for the elderly, he was making a communitarian argument, not a utilitarian one.

No one reached out to me and said, As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? Patrick, who is 63, told the host Tucker Carlson. And if thats the exchange, Im all in.

In this telling, it is the patriotic duty of the elderly not to force privations on their country, and make life worse for their grandchildren. Such a communitarian ethic has always resonated within the U.S. (just read Alexis de Tocqueville), and it provoked an outcry on social media.

China practiced another kind of communitarianism after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan in January. The people of that city were told to lock themselves in, and often forcibly quarantined, for the good of the community and the state, largely identified with the Communist Party. Under Xi Jinping, the Party has rehabilitated the Confucian thought that long justified obedience to a hierarchical and authoritarian but benevolent state. That the notion of social solidarity remains strong showed in the spectacular discipline with which China and other Asian nations dealt with the problem.

We Are All Rawlsians NowFor now, the approach being adopted across the West is Rawlsian. Politicians are working on the assumption that they have a duty to protect everyone as they themselves would wish to be protected, while people are also applying the golden rule as they decide that they should self-isolate for the sake of others. We are all Rawlsians now.

How long will we stay that way? All the other theories of justice have an appeal, and may test the resolve to follow the golden rule. But I suspect that Rawls and the golden rule will win out. That is partly because religion even if it is in decline in the West has hard-wired it into our consciousness. And as the epidemic grows worse and brings the disease within fewer degrees of separation for everyone, we may well find that the notion of loving thy neighbor as thyself becomes far more potent.

Read more:
How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe - Economic Times

You? she said, incredulous. Essential?

She started laughing and has been laughing pretty much ever since.

I think she has cabin fever, or maybe even a real fever.

Im no doctor, but I think the missus is a couple days shy of chasing me into the bathroom, chopping a hole in the door, then sticking her head through and shouting, Heres Johnny!

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But the opposite is true, too.

So I decided to go outside, sit in my car and call somebody.

And just who," my wife asked, "are you going to talk to?

Nobody, I replied, walking out the door.

Nobody lives in Keene, N.H., about 60 miles away from where were staying in Vermont. Last year, he legally changed his given name, Rich Paul, to, well, Nobody.

Nobody is part of the libertarian Free State movement. He thinks government is too big and pretty much useless, and believes people should smoke more weed, which, in the middle of a pandemic, sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Nobody didnt fare so well in the mayoral election last year.

I got about 2 percent of the vote, he said.

He saw the vote as tactical.

Clearly, he said, the good citizens of Keene would prefer I be governor.

So now hes challenging Governor Chris Sununu.

I talked to Nobody for an hour, and I must be crazy, because Im pretty sure he is and he made more sense than most people Ive talked to the last few weeks.

Nobody thinks Charlie Bakers decision to keep the liquor stores open while shutting down the recreational cannabis shops is logically and morally inconsistent, and even potentially dangerous, depriving people of a substance that reduces stress at a time of heightened anxiety.

I know alcoholics who stopped drinking because it was killing them and now they smoke weed, Nobody said. If you deprive them of marijuana, theyre going to start drinking again. Thats dumb.

Nobodys critics like to dismiss him by pointing out that he has a long criminal record.

He freely admits to his run-ins with the law, saying, I cant even count how many times Ive been arrested.

But he says most of his arrests were misdemeanors, and insists some others amounted to harassment, that law enforcements interest in him is based on a false belief that he supports potentially violent subversion. He says his most serious infraction was a setup.

I sold a pound of weed to a guy I used to buy ecstasy from, he said.

The guy was wearing a wire for the feds.

The most dangerous drug cartel in America is Big Pharma," said Nobody, "and the government is their muscle.

Hmm. I cant imagine why the government hates this guy.

Undaunted, Nobody has scheduled a rally at the state capital, on Aprils Fools Day, no less, challenging what he calls Sununus arbitrary ban on gatherings of 10 or more people. He is willing to take the risk of being arrested and even infected to make a point.

Im going to update my will to say dont give me a respirator if I get the virus, because I will have brought it on myself, he said. Frankly, if it werent for the governors order, I wouldnt go to Concord, Id just stay hunkered down in my house. Im more scared of the government than the virus.

Until April 1, hes sitting tight at his house in Keene, where the lights are on and Nobodys home.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.

See the original post:
In a pandemic, Nobody thinks we should smoke more weed - The Boston Globe

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The coronavirus pandemic is a test. Its a test of medical capacity and political will. Its a test of endurance and forbearance, for believers a test of religious faith. Its a test, too, of a different kind of faith, in the strength of the ideas humans choose to help them form moral judgments and guide personal and social behavior.

The epidemic forces everyone to confront deep questions of human existence, questions so profound that they have previously been answered, in many different ways, by the greatest philosophers. Its a test of where all humans stand.

What is rightand what is wrong? What can individuals expect from society, and what can society expect of them? Should others make sacrifices for me, and vice versa? Is it just to set economic limits to fighting a deadly disease?

The lieutenant governor of Texas thinks that those over 70 shouldnt sacrifice the country by shutting down economic activity, but should instead be ready to sacrifice themselves. A 22-year-old partying on Spring break in Florida becomes a social media sensation with a different critique of social distancing, saying, If I get corona, I get corona. Consciously or not, both men are placing themselves in distinct moral traditions.

Several philosophies of social justice have claimed wide adherence in the modern world. They do not line up neatly with party political labels, and most people have sympathy for more than one. Here is a guide to some of the leading idea systems undergirding competing conceptions of right and wrong. Each is being put to the test. As you are put to the test, which do you choose?

Rawlsians

Many westerners are Rawlsians without knowing it. Fifty years ago, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls tried to work out how people would construct their society if the choice had to be made behind what he called a veil of ignorance about whether they will be rich, poor or somewhere in-between. Faced with the risk of being the worst off, Rawls posited, humans would not demand total equality, but would need to be assured of the trappings of a modern welfare state. The assurance of basic necessities and the opportunity to do betterwould form the foundation for social and political justice and provide the ability for people to assert themselves.

Rawlss monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is now regarded as the clearest moral and intellectual justification for modern center-left mixed economies. But the idea comes from somewhere deeper. Rawls was not religious, but his philosophy is essentially in line with the golden rule handed down by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus, that we should do as we would want to be done by. Some religious leaders have approached the awful dilemmas presented by the coronavirus just as Rawls would, by taking treatment of the worst off as the criterion for social action.

I hope the lessons we take from our countrys experience with Covid-19 arent about food or avoiding the spread of germs, wrote Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention in the New York Times, but about how we treat the most vulnerable among us. A pandemic is no time to turn our eyes away from the sanctity of human life.

Pope Francis also invoked sympathy for the most afflicted as he addressed a prayer to an empty St. Peters Square. "We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other," he said.

Perhaps because of their religious resonance, Rawlsian ideas have guided the approach to the pandemic chosen by authorities in the western world. Societies are mobilizing, and governments are taking extra powers to mandate claustrophobic lockdowns in a bid to minimize the death and suffering of the weakest.

Even those who arent religious tend to accept the logic of the veil of ignorance. If a person is unwilling to be abandoned, governments are not entitled to give up on them; they must do their best to protect everyone, particularly the weakest.

Utilitarians

Other philosophies produce very different ways of dealing with the epidemic. Under utilitarianism, most associated with the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, rulers must be guided to the total happiness, or utility, of all the people, and should aim to secure the greatest good for the greatest number.

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In Victorian Britain, this was a radical creed, and the first utilitarians were passionate liberal reformers. But the utilitarian calculus opens up a new possibility that in situations such as a pandemic, some people might justly be sacrificed for the greater good. It would benefit society to accept casualties, the argument goes, to minimize disruption.

Explicit utilitarian thinking still seems beyond the pale. Last weekend, Britains Sunday Times reported that Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had advocated in private meetings a policy of letting enough people get sick to establish nationwide herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad. It caused an outcry and met with an immediate and impassioned denial by Downing Street. Even Cummings, an iconoclast, refused to be attached to such brutally utilitarian ideas.

Mill himself would not have advocated putting money ahead of peoples lives, but a utilitarian calculus is not about balancing money and life. If a recession could lead to shorter lives and widespread misery, it is possible that making less of an attempt to save every last life from the pandemic now could lead to greater total happiness.

In the U.K., a paper by an academic at the University of Bristol used mathematical techniques developed to measure the cost-efficiency of safety measures in the nuclear power industry to calculate the likely savings of human life by different approaches to the virus, and found that a 12-month lockdown followed by vaccinations would be best. But it cautioned that this would only create a net saving of life if the reduction in gross domestic product could be kept to 6.4% or less.

That paper, broadcast on the BBC, provoked a fiery response from economists, and some research suggests counterintuitively that recessions lengthen lives. Most people find the mere attempt at such an exercise callous, but its difficult to dismiss it. Governments and insurers do indeed put a notional price on a human life when setting policy. Must every last patient be given the utmost care if this plan of action causes greater suffering in the long run? Or, as President Donald Trump put it: We cant have the cure be worse than the problem.

Its intuitive to view moral problems through a utilitarian lens and then to find outcomes like this distasteful, and to reject them because they conflict with the golden rule. If the lockdowns drag on for months, utilitarian ideas may bubble back to the surface.

Libertarians

The libertarian place in American thought is long and distinguished. Its lineage goes back at least to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and the founding fathers, and in its modern incarnation gains inspiration from the author Ayn Rand, who outlined her ideas in novels and essays. For her, man had a right to live for himself and an individuals happiness cannot be prescribed by another man or any number of other men.

The most famous libertarian thought experiment was conducted by another Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, in a riposte to Rawls. He imagined what kind of political state would be built, and how much personal liberty citizens would surrender, if everyone were dropped into a utopian landscape with no social structures. The novelist William Golding gave one answer in The Lord of the Flies.To avoid the descent into violence that the schoolboys of Goldings novel endure, Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, reckoned that people would set up a very limited statededicated to self-defense and the protection of individual rights but nothing more.

The western coronavirus response has hugely expanded state powers and limited individual rights with little debate, and to date populations have consented to privations that Rand and Nozick argued they should never accept.

But wait. There have been objections to lockdowns on the libertarian basis that they infringe on rights. Critiques are appearing saying that politicians havent proven that such drastic measures are necessary. Before the coronavirus, the U.S. suffered a measles epidemic as the result of anti-vaccination activism, a libertarian cause that put parents right to choose not to vaccinate their children above the states attempt to defend other parents right to expect that their own children wouldnt have to mix with unvaccinated peers. Panic buying, and hoarding of medical equipmentalso show that many people are following Rands idea of self-determination and putting themselves first. Such ideas may grow more appealing after a few more weeks of self-isolation.

In public spaces around the world, libertarians are in conflict with the state. Social media is full of images of big social gatherings, often in luxurious social settings. If I get corona, I get corona, as the 22-year-old said on video in Florida. At the end of the day, Im not gonna let it stop me from partying. Oklahomas governor even felt the need to tweet that he was at a packed restaurant.

Libertarians are not only found on the political right. As the crisis began to unfold, the American Civil Liberties Union made a statement accepting that civil liberties must sometimes give way when it comes to fighting a communicable disease but only in ways that are scientifically justified. It said, The evidence is clear that travel bans and quarantines are not the solution.The right to walk in a park looks like a flash point. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was furious to see crowds expressing libertarian sympathies whether they saw it that way or not by gathering in parks. Its arrogant, Cuomo said. Its self-destructive. Its disrespectful to other people. And it has to stop and it has to stop now!New Yorkers are organizing to keep the parks open.

In these conditions, individual choices become freighted with moral significance. How, for example, will society eventually judge behavior like that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul? Arguably the most prominent libertarian in the U.S., he continued to socialize as normal for a week after being told that he had had contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. He had no symptoms. Recall that there are many elderly members of the Senate. Last weekend, after a workout in the Senate gym, he discovered that he had himself tested positive.

Communitarians

Yet another approach is based on the notion that everyone derives their identify from the broader community. Individual rights count, but not more than community norms. These notions go back to the Greeks, but in modern times, the philosophy is most widely connected to the sociologist Amitai Etzioni and philosopher Michael Sandel. Sandels Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is another riposte to Rawls, arguing that justice cannot be determined in a vacuum or behind a veil of ignorance, but must be rooted in society. He sets out a theory of justice based on the common good.

Speaking last week to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Sandel said: The common good is about how we live together in community. Its about the ethical ideals we strive for together, the benefits and burdens we share, the sacrifices we make for one another. Its about the lessons we learn from one another about how to live a good and decent life.

The virus has attacked in exactly this place, depriving everyone of life in a community. And communitarian ideas are showing themselves. Across Europe, people on lockdown have arranged to go to their windows and balconies to applaud their national health services. These are seen as bedrocks of society. At Londons Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, a pageant of Britishness, the organizers celebrated the National Health Service with dancing nurses wheeling hospital beds.For many countries with a modern welfare state, celebrating and supporting the workers of their public-health service is seen as a communitarian duty.

This is a critical point of difference with the U.S., where the expansion of medical care is a hugely contentious issue. Communitarians like Princetons Michael Walzer argue that any system of medical provision requires the constraint of the guild of physicians. The coronavirus promises to bring this debate to a head.

Communitarianism also underlies much social conservative thought. When the very conservative Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said on Fox News that the rest of the country should not sacrifice itself for the elderly, he was making a communitarian argument, not a utilitarian one.

No one reached out to me and said, As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? Patrick, who is 63, told the host Tucker Carlson. And if thats the exchange, Im all in.

In this telling, it is the patriotic duty of the elderly not to force privations on their country, and make life worse for their grandchildren. Such a communitarian ethic has always resonated within the U.S. (just read Alexis de Tocqueville), and it provoked an outcry on social media.

China practiced another kind of communitarianism after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan in January. The people of that city were told to lock themselves in, and often forcibly quarantined, for the good of the community and the state, largely identified with the Communist Party. Under Xi Jinping, the Party has rehabilitated the Confucian thought that long justified obedience to a hierarchical and authoritarian but benevolent state. That the notion of social solidarity remains strong showed in the spectacular discipline with which China and other Asian nations dealt with the problem.

We Are All Rawlsians Now

For now, the approach being adopted across the West is Rawlsian. Politicians are working on the assumption that they have a duty to protect everyone as they themselves would wish to be protected, while people are also applying the golden rule as they decide that they should self-isolate for the sake of others. We are all Rawlsians now.

How long will we stay that way? All the other theories of justice have an appeal, and may test the resolve to follow the golden rule. But I suspect that Rawls and the golden rule will win out. That is partly because religion even if it is in decline in the West has hard-wired it into our consciousness. And as the epidemic grows worse and brings the disease within fewer degrees of separation for everyone, we may well find that the notion of loving thy neighbor as thyself becomes far more potent.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

John Authers is a senior editor for markets. Before Bloomberg, he spent 29 years with the Financial Times, where he was head of the Lex Column and chief markets commentator. He is the author of The Fearful Rise of Markets and other books.

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How Coronavirus Is Shaking Up the Moral Universe - Yahoo News

President Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton in the White House in Washington, D.C., August 2, 2017(Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Charles Fain Lehman has written an assessment for the Washington Free Beacon of the policy divide among congressional Republicans on how best to confront the economic dimension of the coronavirus outbreak. He argues that the debate maps at least partly onto pre-existing political struggles within the Republican Party, pitting those open to greater government intervention, such as senators Mitt Romney, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley, against more libertarian-leaning members.

This is true, to some extent. One can quibble somewhat with certain aspects of this analyis, however. Certainly, libertarians might resent being stuck with Senator Lindsay Graham as their ostensible philosophical representative. And when a policy expert at a think-tank Lehman describes as libertarian-leaning helps design the plan of one of the supposedly anti-libertarian members, one wonders how severe and serious the distinctions his assessment focuses on are, at least amid coronavirus. (Even if Samuel Hammond isnt exactly a libertarian.)

Theres something meaningful to the fact that no one in Congress is really arguing for the federal government to do nothing, which is not what most libertarians would be on board with now anyway. Instead, theyre arguing over the best way to increase government involvement. This is an extraordinary crisis. Government does often grow in such times in ways that linger afterward. But we have no way of knowing at this time if the attitudes and policies that emerge now will carry on into the future (or if they should). Right now, we dont even know whats going to happen next week.

Or in 2024. Yet Lehman writes:

Cotton, Hawley, and Rubio are all considered potential contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential primary. A successful run by any of them could shift the balance of power in the party away from its more libertarian, business-oriented wing and into the hands of the nascent populist, worker-focused tendency awakened by, among other things, the electoral success of President Donald Trump.

Whether this framing is correct or not, the amount of things we know for certain is, at this time, incredibly low. We dont know what Congress is going to do, whether America will successfully limit the spread of coronavirus, or how it will impact the 2020 election (or if it even will). Lehman may be right that politics isnt stopping completely during this extraordinary event, even if its singular nature suggests caution regarding its utility as a reference point for politics beyond. But whatever happens, speculating about the 2024 presidential primary seems genuinely impossible right now.

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COVID-19 and . . . 2024? - National Review