That the coronavirus pandemic is testing social resilience is perhaps an observation too banal to command your attention; but what might be called the etiology of the crisis itself is fascinating. We have become accustomed to accepting a spurious certainty as applied to very uncertain situations, often by assigning them to the ready-made categories of our political polarization. Two complex issues that come to mind are those of vaccinations and of school closings.
After a nearly miraculous scientific feat in so rapidly developing several effective vaccines, we seem to be floundering before the requirements of mass production and, especially, distribution. As an ailing geezer I do have a dog in this fight, or maybe only a puppy, but I am far from having a certain idea of what should be done. I saw a fairly convincing newspaper opinion piece arguing random, opportunistic vaccination as the most sensible course in our current circumstances of limited supplies of vaccine and makeshift protocols for distributing and administering them. Vaccinate anybody you can whenever you can, and eventually you’ll get there. That is not what we have, at least in New Jersey. Here there is an elaborately bureaucratized scheme with clearly identified priority groups, telephone numbers to call, and on-line lists on which to enroll for appointments, none of which seems to have any relation to actual reality. That reality is—if not yet quite dog-eat-dog—so opaque and capricious that it cannot possibly encourage the demonstration of patience, cooperation, confidence, and that sense of shared adversity circumstances require. The only consistent advice one gets is to be as squeaky a wheel as possible. There is, however, a gleam of light in my little corner. The University has announced its intention of establishing its own vaccination center. There is no vaccine yet, of course, and no knowledge of when there will be any; but unlike such offices of the State of New Jersey with which I have had to deal over the years, Princeton University is a highly efficient organization where most people, including several known personally to me, actually answer their phones. The regular annual “Flu Fest” mass vaccination organized by the University each year is a marvel of convenience and efficiency.
My second topic is the mandated closure of the public schools and many other educational institutions. I have a vested interest in this one too, as I have grandchildren in New York City and in Montreal, two cities separated by an international boundary, four hundred miles, and differing ideas of the civic good. The issue of school lockdowns is full of paradoxes and uncertainties, though you might not know that from listening to spokesmen of the teachers’ union in Chicago or San Francisco. The problem of protracted school lockdowns is coming to a boil in many places here and abroad, as the desperation of parents becomes more acute and the danger to children more apparent. That there was a brief segment about the crisis on last night’s PBS “News Hour” may portend the beginning of a wider and more honest national discussion. There are of course already some voices of troubled, honest inquiry, and I recently heard a few in some sobering interviews on the British UnHerd website. UnHerd (you grasp the pun, of course) is an eclectic heterodox platform that the ideologues of moral certainty have not yet been able to silence on the grounds that it on occasion lets Wrong People write.
You are perhaps aware that in this moment of national awokening, the woke are calling out crimes of intellectual associations. When last summer various thought leaders signed the “Harper’s letter”-- in my opinion a rather anodyne defense of free speech and plea for civil debate about debatable civic matters--the Super-Woke attacked some signers thus: “How could you append your signature to a document signed also by X, who, as all the Enlightened recognize, is a well-known fascist shill?” Well, how indeed! How could you drink water? Don’t you know Hitler drank water? Testy old Saint Jerome, when it was pointed out that he attacked a position taken by the great Augustine, said: “I address myself to what is written, not the person who wrote it.”
In the video referenced, an appealing, intelligent, and articulate young man interviews three women teachers on the question of the “morality” of the school lockdowns. Unlike many talking head, the three women interviewed are credentialed by experience, like Chaucer’s Parson. First he wrought, and afterwards he taught. Of course what they wrought was also teaching. Katharine Birbalsingh, is the head of a state school in an unposh part of London; Miriam Cates, a science teacher turned Tory MP from the north of England; and Alex Gutentag, a teacher in the public school system of Oakland, California. All three were just as impressively thoughtful and articulate as their interviewer. They addressed the question posed to them—the closing of the public schools in the cause of the public good—with the nuanced thinking and acknowledgment of competing goods that it deserves. It would be a disservice to their intellectual scrupulosity to pretend to summarize their views in a few short paragraphs; if the topic interests you, I strongly recommend the video.
All three make a plea for honesty, beginning by asking whether the supposed social protection secured by school lockdown outweigh the possible long-term harms being inflicted on a whole generation of children. Are we simply kidding ourselves that passing out free laptops is a serious educational benefit, that zoomed classrooms are sites for anything approaching adequate learning, and that on-line school really is school? Ms. Birbalsingh, obviously a person with great experience and love of students, yet very deferential to the opinions of medical and political experts, says baldly: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as good on-line learning.” She also points out that the neediest students—the disadvantaged and immigrants—are the most severely affected, exacerbating yet further the chasm between haves and havenots. It is quite astonishing to hear the expression of so many deeply informed and disquieting opinions expressed with such a winning lack of dogmatism. All three teachers thought that the situation had already created a serious juvenile mental health crisis with uncertain but likely severe long-term social implications. Does Ms. Cates, a Conservative politician who can talk about issues of moral philosophy in a sincere and nuanced way, have any even vague analogues on this side of the Atlantic among conservatives in Congress? “Why do we live?” she asks? “It’s not just to avoid death.” All three of them had strong, articulate concerns of community, cooperation, a shared aspiration for making things better. These are not bomb-throwers, though Ms. Gutentag shows a little edge in her lonely, brave questioning of the omniscience of the governor of our most populous state, the position taken by the officers of her own teachers’ union, and the majority consensus of her colleagues.
One of the advantages of being out of the swim is that it becomes very hard to drown. My own uncertainty and probable fallibility on the question of school closings is without much risk, and certainly without practical import of any kind. And even the effects of the possible incompetence and errancy of the swimmers that we spectators feel licensed to lament from the cheap seats are mitigated by the frequent demonstration of kindness and fellow feeling one finds from family, friends, neighbors, and not infrequently total strangers. Even among the chaos we see many evidences of those “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love” that, according to Wordsworth, make up the best portion of a good life.
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