Rev. John F. Naugle, Brownstone Institute, 3/2/24
Sometimes you find evidence that a prior generation had thought through and solved a moral problem in the oddest of places.
Several years ago, while pondering the fact that life went on perfectly normally during the 1968-69 flu pandemic (even to the point where Woodstock occurred!), Jeffrey Tucker asked the question:
What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For Covid-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century, and at the urging of the media and myopic advice from governments. It’s all very strange. And it cries out for answers.
I stumbled across evidence of a partial answer to Jeffrey’s question while watching for the first time the third episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series entitled “One of Our Planets is Missing.” This episode, which aired just a few years later in 1973, is about a sentient cloud that consumes entire planets and is threatening the planet of Mantilles and its 82 million people. When the danger is perceived, the crew debates whether or not to even inform the planet of the danger which they are in:
KIRK: Bones, I need an expert psychological opinion. Do we dare tell the people on Mantilles, try to save a few who could get away?
MCCOY: How much time do they have?
AREX: Four hours, ten minutes, sir.
MCCOY: It’s certain there’d be planetwide panic.
KIRK: Blind panic.
SPOCK: On the other hand, notifying them may still save some small fraction of the population, Captain.
MCCOY: Who’s the governor of Mantilles, Jim?
KIRK: Bob Wesley. He left Starfleet for the governorship. He’s no hysteric.
MCCOY: Then tell him.
Because the governor is considered to immune to hysteria, contact is made with him:
WESLEY [on monitor]: Three and a half hours, Jim. That’s not enough. Even if I had the ships available to totally evacuate the planet.
KIRK: You have time to save some people, Bob.
WESLEY [on monitor]: That won’t be long enough either, but it’ll have to do.
KIRK: How are you going to choose?
WESLEY [on monitor]: There is no choice, Jim. We’ll save the children.
When asked later about the status of the evacuation, Wesley responds: “As best it can. There was some hysteria at the beginning, but most agreed to let the children be taken off first. But it’s only five thousand children out of eighty two million people.”
Moral Norms Widely Known and Then Forgotten
I’d like to suggest that the script of this episode is evidence that both the writers and audience considered the following moral facts to be self-evident:
- Panic is such a grave evil that it may be better for people not to know about looming dangers that cannot be avoided.
- Ideal leadership is completely immune from hysteria, even in the face of near certain death.
- The well-being of children is of paramount importance and an adult should never prefer their own well-being even to the point of death.
These were, on a cultural and civilizational level considered to be solved moral problems, analogous to how we simply memorize our multiplication tables or that water is H2O. These moral facts existed in the background as things we were simply supposed to take for granted.
This was still true in 1973. The fact that it was true five years earlier in 1968 is why the world barely reacted to the Hong Kong flu. It was even still true to some extent in 2009 as evidenced by the fact that life stayed completely normal during the spread of H1N1.
We then are forced to confront a very uncomfortable reality that we, as a civilization, have forgotten things that we used to definitively know to be true. Twenty-twenty is proof of said forgetfulness.
Instead of caution while reporting the events of early 2020 so as to avoid panic, our government and media conspired to utter lies with the intent of guaranteeing panic.
Ideal leadership was now defined as being extremely hysterical, insisting that something be done even if there’s no reason to think it will make a difference.
Finally, and most horrifyingly, children were treated as filthy disease spreaders whose lives could be permanently ruined with impunity to assuage the fears of adults.
Much like how a computer virus can remove legitimate software components and replace them with malware, we should consider the fact that something similar has happened to us on a cultural and moral level.
What seems to have happened is that the part of our collective consciousness that calmly accepted suffering and death as existential to the human experience has been replaced by a radical rebellion against suffering, to the point where even the slightest of emotional discomfort makes one either the victim at the hands of an oppressor or a patient in need of powerful pharmaceuticals.
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What We Lost Between Then and Now
What I’m putting down here is indirectly related to pandemics.
Yes! we can fault a failure of leadership.
Back then, we had public servants who would put God, country, and their constituents before themselves because they had the soundness, the decency, of character to do that. They had moral characters with the self-discipline necessary to serve.
Not today. Today we have self-servers who put themselves and their ideology first and are willing to disown their constituents, such as the recent rabid rhetoric against rural Americans. These self-servers have either grossly indecent deformed characters or none at all. They have nothing of value to contribute, they only live to attack the well-adjusted citizens of the USA.
Of course these un-American attacks have disoriented the American people who were once protected from such attacks but they no longer are.
They’re the wolves attacking the sheep. Now let’s see if the sheep dogs go into action.