History is better than punditry (3-3-21)

https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137510 A great benefit of therapy is that you begin to see many more options in your life. I would typically come into a session with a problem where I only saw one or two ways out and my therapist would help me see many possibilities. I would think I had to respond this way or that way to an obnoxious person and my therapist would help me see I might be best served by not responding at all.

Similarly, a great benefit of reading history is that you learn new ways of understanding the present. There’s a right-wing trope these days that we live in unprecedented times of restrictions on our freedom, but when you read history, you soon see that almost everything that is supposedly unprecedented about our current cancel culture, Big Tech collusion and Corona Virus restrictions have happened before and that there are certain circumstances that are likely to give rise to this repression. It’s not an aberration, for example, for journalists to cheer on censorship of their competitors.

The primary reason I did not react with rage to Covid restrictions like most right-wing pundits did is that I read a book by Paul Barry about the 1918 Spanish Flu, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. I don’t know how anyone could learn about how that respiratory illness devastated the world a century ago and still believe that individual freedom in the face of such a challenge was the important thing. After reading that Paul Barry book, I concluded that a collective response might make more sense.

The biggest difference between me and other dissident right livestreamers is that I read more books and therefore I’m less susceptible to the hysteria that comes from watching videos that reinforce your prejudices. I know people who got taken in by crackpot Ivor Cummins who propounded that if you had a previous corona virus, like 80% of the population, you would be immune to this one, and that deaths by Covid-19 cost but one year of life.

I am a structuralist. It’s the structure of reality and the shifting nature of power that shapes how individuals act. I see individual freedom as circumscribed by genetics, context and events. For example, our policies towards China won’t be profoundly affected by who is in charge of America and China. Personalities don’t matter as much as structure for international relations. The structure of our great power rivalry dictates that America pivots to Asia and away from Europe to confront the rise of China.

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