Under the cover of disease control, most nations in the world have lived through the equivalent of war—never officially declared as such and never officially ended with a peace treaty—and this has swept into place vast changes in our lives, politics, culture, and economy.
Consider the big-picture thinking. Nearly every nation in the world attempted the eradication of a respiratory pathogen that is spread through aerosols and has an animal reservoir—an ambition that any competent medical professional could have told you was insane. And they sought to achieve this great goal through maximum control of the human population. And toward this end, they exercised total control for several years.
A devastating feature of total wars in history is the loss of cultural continuity from prewar to postwar. What came before fades into memory, replaced by trauma, and then the desperate desire to forget that it ever happened and then create something new.
The development of society and its growth—technological, informational, political, and cultural—is supposed to be organic. War changes that, deprecating some features and elevating others, usually to the detriment of human flourishing.
We saw this after the Great War. The difference between 1910 and 1920 was more than a decade. It was a different age. The fashions, music, literature, painting, and architecture all changed and dramatically so. The Belle Époque and its manners, customs, and ideals receded far into the past and were replaced by something else entirely.
Monarchies and old multinational states were blown away completely, and nationality came to mean any and every external sign of group solidarity, each struggling for recognition. Most cultural signs were suddenly darker, embedding a new awareness of the grim realities of life and death on earth. The old writers were forgotten, as were old habits, professions, and ways of being. The old idealism was gone, too.
This was especially obvious in high-end art culture, which turned against all forms of the past. It was precisely in this period when what we call “modern” art took hold. In the lower rungs of society, the trauma was palpable in broken homes, displaced workers, permanent consciousness of mass death, public distrust, and a turn toward substance abuse and ill health. The only fortunes were depleted and divested, and a cultural anomie gained ascendence throughout the West.
Only a few decades later, the same upheaval took place during and after World War II. Following that war, once again, the music shifted, as did the architecture, painting, literature, demographics, and the ideas we held about the future. Optimism in general experienced its second massive blow in a century, replaced by an advancing nihilism that could not be contained until it exploded two decades later.
Once again, the distance between 1940 and 1950 was far more than a decade. There was a multinational reset with the formation of “neo-liberal” world political institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, plus the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which were supposed to guarantee global peace. And only a few years later, the Cold War wrecked those plans with the creation of walled trading blocs.
The writers of the interwar period seemed to vanish, dismissed as old-fashioned and out of touch. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nock, Mencken, Wharton, Garrett, Flynn—these were all household names in the 1920s and ‘30s but gradually evaporated from the 1950s and onward. Magazines changed and industry, too, with the old wiped away and the new granted a subsidized prominence.
This is a consequence of the perception of new times and the irrelevance of everything that came before. This was coupled with a Freudian-style unwillingness to speak about the horrors of the war.
Although never announced and rarely acknowledged by corporate media, we’ve lived through our own form of trauma with the policy response to COVID-19. It took a form without precedent. Without a shooting war and without a declared peace, all the signs of war surrounded us from March 2020 onward.
It was characterized by an explosive shattering of how life was supposed to work. Holidays were canceled. We faced global and domestic travel restrictions. We obeyed sudden and untested protocols from anti-social distancing to masking to closures of everything, together with the turn-key socialism of multiple trillions in stimulus spending (and money printing).
The conscription came later, as millions were pumped full of an experimental medicine called mRNA delivered through a novel system with an injection. Most had no choice. Whole cities were closed down to the refuseniks. Even the students and kids were drafted into the great push for what was called vaccination—a moniker playing off past successes—but had no sterilizing effects and made no serious contribution to ending the pandemic.
It was more like war than is usually admitted. Certainly, most countries imposed a form of what felt like martial law. It felt that way because it was that way.
When the lab leak from China became obvious—sometime in the fall of 2019—the preparations began, without consultation of elected leaders or even career civilian bureaucrats. By the time the response was implemented, it must have seemed like the only viable path, which is probably why President Donald Trump agreed to the preposterous plan of shutting down society.
The U.S. Constitution nowhere authorizes such emergency-based abolition of liberties and rights. Justice Neil Gorsuch was correct in calling this “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” And notice the qualification: in peacetime. But can anyone think of any wartime measures that included canceling holidays, mass quarantines of the healthy, closing businesses and schools, and universal censorship of dissidents?
Both the Great War and World War II authorized universal censorship and surveillance, but the targeting was specific to high-profile objectors and hardly touched the average person. And at no time during these wars did the government dare to issue countrywide edicts that everyone had to stand six feet apart from each other at all times or cover their faces just to shop. This did not happen in wartime.
We can safely edit Justice Gorsuch’s comment to simply say the greatest intrusions on civil liberties, period.
And so what cultural trends can we track as marking the difference in pre-lockdown and post-lockdown times? We can note five terrible trends in particular:
Add it all together and you get less individualism, initiative, and even desire to grow in prosperity. In other words, not surprisingly, the dramatic collectivized response has led to a greater degree of collectivism than we have heretofore experienced. With that comes inevitable spiritual despair.
As for changes in art and music, it is too early to say, but here we can detect something unusual as wartime goes, not a forward-thinking effort to create the new but a clawing back of the old forms, probably because there is nowhere else to go.
And this introduces the other side of the coin, which is that the dramatic loss of trust in media, government, academia, corporate power, and science has led to the following:
This is only a sketch and it is too early to see precisely what kinds of changes have been initiated in our country and world because of the wartime tactics of the COVID-19 response. The closest analogy we can name is the Great War more than a century ago, which closed one chapter in history and opened a new one.
Making sure that what comes next is better than the corruption we left behind will take all our efforts. It is precisely for this reason that there is so much mandatory forgetting that is being urged upon us. You can see daily in the corporate news, which wants to forget about the whole ugly chapter for fear that the peasants will get too restless. Dr. Anthony Fauci, in his depositions and congressional testimony, summed up the theme of all official institutions today: “I cannot recall.”
We dare not comply with this mandatory forgetting. We must remember and take full account of the deception and destruction the ruling class has caused for no other reason than profits and power. Only then can we learn the right lessons and rebuild on a better foundation for the future.
