Finding New Gods

Wanna start a fight?

Get a whole bunch of relatively well-read, politically and culturally conscious folks in a room and say two words:

"Andrew Sullivan."

Step back and pop the popcorn.

I like reading Andrew Sullivan.  He's smart and passionate, but he does paint with too broad a brush sometimes, and ends up over-generalizing, which sometimes looks like exaggeration.  And he's a gay conservative with progressive tendencies, which makes just about everyone crazy.

But if you read a lot, you always need to consider your source, and adjust.  Including here, at "The New World."  No one's perfect.

Sully's swan song at "New York" magazine is a long essay about how plagues re-make the societies that survive them.  In the sixth century, the plague was the final blow that doomed the Roman Empire and ushered in nearly a thousand years of regrowth and rebuilding.  But the plague that devastated the fourteenth century in Europe ushered in the Renaissance, probably a couple hundred years early, and re-made the landscape of work, pay, and innovation.  The plague outbreak in London in 1665, which killed one in five Londoners, and the Great Fire a year later, led to city-wide regulations that in turn led to a modern city that was prepared for both fires and plagues.

Toward the end, Sullivan surveys the impact that the current pandemic is having, and predicts some that have not yet appeared.  He paints a somewhat extreme picture of the new world, where everyone wears masks always (because this is only the first of the post-globalized pandemics), populations are decentralized, climate change is everyone's top priority, and travel is substantially curtailed.  You may not buy it all, but it's important that you read and digest it, and come to your own conclusions.  It's all worth thinking about.

One of the common factors in massive-impact plagues is, according to Sullivan, a change in gods.  When we don't understand how things work, we invent gods who do understand, and manipulate, the world around us.  When a plague destroys everything, and our traditional gods aren't coming to our aid, we look elsewhere.  In sixth century Rome, "Christianity showed itself able to assuage the existential angst of constant death in a way the old religions couldn't."  In the fourteenth century, mystical sects appeared and challenged the institutional Church's response, probably hastening the Reformation.  And the Native Americans living through generations of smallpox, finding their gods unresponsive, turned away, to new "healing ceremonies and rituals," and later to despair and suicide.*

Is this happening today?  Have our gods failed us, and are we willing to try new ones?  The pandemic is not bringing death and misery to most of us; no bloody pustules or "Bring out your dead!" (which was a real thing).  However, we are experiencing a destruction of our economy and an expansion of infection and death due to catastrophic incompetence and greed, and our gods are those in control of these processes.  Will we turn away from them?  Will we find new gods, who will see fit to use their power to save us?  And will the new gods actually do that - will we be saved?

And who exactly will those new gods be?

Stay tuned. 


 * - There's a robust discussion in the Comments section about this, for those who have the stomach for it.