- Rural areas seem better positioned to be isolated from the coronavirus.
- Despite decreased density and global connectedness, rural areas might be more vulnerable in other ways.
- Rural areas are poorer and have fewer health care resources.
- There is also the factor of attitude.
- The East Asian countries that have responded most successfully to the pandemic had long prepared themselves to do so because of their previous experience with SARS and MERS.
- In the case of Europe, the countries that are suffering now from the pandemic have a reputation for not taking the rule of law seriously.
- In the USA, attitudes toward coronavirus fall along familiar political, cultural and geographic fault lines.
- However, the resistance to social distancing is not inherently conservative.
- In the USA in particular, there is a libertarian and populist streak in the flaunting of calls to self-isolate.
- Conservatism leans toward caution and realism, but this disposition can play out in at least two ways.
- The classic conservative response is to immediately guard against risk.
- Depending on how far the remedy diverges from familiarity and tradition, there might be a tendency in the conservative character to waffle in the face of outside threats.
- Also, today, conservatives in the USA are allied with libertarians and populists.
- American conservatives can be seen as the conservative wing of liberalism.
- Both major political parties in the USA are ultimately liberal.
- In terms of American conservatism, however, there is a pocket or reservoir of organic traditionalism embedded within the liberal individualist paradigm.
- That is, the European conservative ideal of the organically united society lives on in the USA -- although this ideal is largely not applied at the societal level.
- Uniquely, in the USA, this organic conservatism is largely relegated to the private realm within the framework of a liberal, individualistic, capitalistic society.
- Again, for European conservatives, society is a complex organic whole.
- In conservative rural America, this holism transferred onto the microcosm of the family and community.
- The family and the small town are perceived as complex organisms within an atomisitic liberal worldview.
- In the modern world, there is thus "eversion" or turning inside-out of the traditional worldview.
- Hence, the transformation and privatization of conservatism's organic ideal amid the hegemony or domination of a liberal order and an atomistic worldview.
- Populism is something altogether different from conservatism or liberalism.
- However, because of the USA's unique historical development, those who are the most populist tend to be the most libertarian.
- Certain populist rural areas of the USA were particularly slow to act in the coronavirus pandemic.
- These areas might become more afflicted with the coronavirus than the more urban, liberal areas.
- The complacent small towns that already have so many problems may be permanently laid waste.
- In fact, cities may emerge more vibrant than they already were.
That might be predictable.
NYC is famous for its density, and LA is famous for its sprawl.
Also, its much more cold this time of year in NY than in CA.
Rural areas seem better positioned to be isolated from the coronavirus.
Internationally, however, it is provincial areas -- Wuhan, northern Italy, Spain -- that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus.Despite decreased density and global connectedness, rural areas might be more vulnerable in other ways.
Rural areas are poorer and have fewer health care resources.
Also, rural areas tend to have older populations.https://www.vox.com/2020/3/28/21197421/usa-coronavirus-covid-19-rural-america
It’s these kinds of equations that make epidemiologists particularly concerned about rural America. “If we believe that the way seasonal flu spreads through the country is likely similar to Covid-19, the rural eruptions tend to be later and briefer, but more impactful than in big urban areas,” said Roger Ray, a retired neurologist, physician executive, and physician consulting director with The Chartis Group.
There is also the factor of attitude.
Some people are taking the coronavirus crisis more seriously than others.The East Asian countries that have responded most successfully to the pandemic had long prepared themselves to do so because of their previous experience with SARS and MERS.
A lack of seriousness might explain why in Europe, it is provincial areas that have been most afflicted by the coronavirus.In the case of Europe, the countries that are suffering now from the pandemic have a reputation for not taking the rule of law seriously.
For example, Italians either regard laws as interesting suggestions or as personal challenges to creatively evade.https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/03/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order-lockdown-social-distancing/608857/
In the USA, attitudes toward coronavirus fall along familiar political, cultural and geographic fault lines.
Young, educated, urban, secular people are socially distancing.Their older, less educated, rural and religious counterparts are prone to considering the coronavirus crisis as exaggerated or even a hoax.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/social-distancing-culture/609019
In recent days, Republican governors in Alabama and Mississippi have resisted calls to enact more forceful mitigation policies. Polling data suggest that Republicans throughout the U.S. are much less concerned about the coronavirus than Democrats are. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Trump won 23 of the 25 states where people have reduced personal travel the least.
However, the resistance to social distancing is not inherently conservative.
In the USA in particular, there is a libertarian and populist streak in the flaunting of calls to self-isolate.
Katherine Vincent-Crowson, a 35-year-old self-defense instructor from Slidell, Louisiana, has watched in horror this month as businesses around her city were forced to close by state decree. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Vincent-Crowson told me Louisiana’s shelter-in-place order was a frightening example of government overreach.
“It feels very militaristic,” she said. “I’m just like, ‘What the hell, is this 1940s Germany?’”
But when we spoke, she seemed even more aggravated by the “self-righteous” people on social media who spend their time publicly shaming anyone who isn’t staying locked in their house. “It really reminds me of my kids who tattle on their siblings when they do something bad,” she said. “I’m a libertarian … I don’t really like being told what to do.”How to explain this conservative resistance to social distancing?
Conservatism leans toward caution and realism, but this disposition can play out in at least two ways.
The classic conservative response is to immediately guard against risk.
An example would be Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52113186
As the coronavirus outbreak barrels throughout the US, states have scrambled to get ahead of its spread, often after weeks of inaction. But one governor imposed sweeping measures days before a single case had been reported in his state.
On 5 March, after resistance from organisers, Mr DeWine got a court order to shut down much of the Arnold Sports Festival - an annual event featuring 20,000 athletes from 80 countries, around 60,000 spectators each day, and an expected $53m for Columbus, the state's largest city.
The state had yet to report a single case.
Over the next three weeks, Mr DeWine moved to bar spectators from major sporting events - days before US professional leagues decided to cancel their seasons. He was first in the nation to declare a state-wide school shutdown. He invoked an emergency public health order to postpone Ohio's presidential primary the night before it was scheduled on 17 March.However, the flip side to the conservative cautiousness would be a conservative tendency toward complacency and a resistance to altering habit and custom.
Depending on how far the remedy diverges from familiarity and tradition, there might be a tendency in the conservative character to waffle in the face of outside threats.
When a dangerous threat requires altering the status quo, conservatives who would otherwise be at the forefront of reducing risk become ambivalent about responding to those threats.Also, today, conservatives in the USA are allied with libertarians and populists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/covid-conservatism.htmlThe first point is that what we call “American conservatism” is probably more ideologically and psychologically heterogeneous than the conservative mind-set that social scientists aspire to measure and pin down. In particular, it includes an incredibly powerful streak of what you might call folk libertarianism — which comes in both highbrow and middlebrow forms, encompassing both famous legal scholars predicting minimal fatalities from their armchairs and “you can’t stop the American economy … for anything” tough guys attacking social distancing on Twitter.
This mentality, with its reflexive Ayn Randism and its Panglossian hyper-individualism, is definitely essential to understanding part of the American right. But it’s very much an American thing unto itself, and I’m doubtful that it corresponds to any universal set of psychological tendencies that we could reasonably call conservative.A "truer" conservatism than the American fusion might be found in Europe.
European conservatives are not inherently opposed to "big government", and so are often aligned on policy with modern liberals and socialists.
European conservatives are more opposed to modernity -- science, technology, capitalism and individualism.
European conservatism is thus quite different from American conservatism.
American conservatives can be seen as the conservative wing of liberalism.
Liberalism can be understood a political ideology that emerged in the 1700s that prioritizes the autonomy and dignity of the individual.The emphasis of liberalism is on freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.[1][2][3] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support free market, free trade, limited government, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), capitalism, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion.This stands in stark contrast to European conservatism, which revolves around the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic party.
Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy and the rule of law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies and other barriers to trade, instead promoting free trade and free markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy
The Catholic Church historically regarded liberalism and its individualistic ethos as the ultimate modern heresy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabus_of_Errors#Summary
For the Catholic Church, in contrast to this liberal individualistic worldview, society should be organized like an interdependent organism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Corporatism is a political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, scientific, or guild associations on the basis of their common interests.[1][2] The term is derived from the Latin corpus, or "human body". The hypothesis that society will reach a peak of harmonious functioning when each of its divisions efficiently performs its designated function, such as a body's organs individually contributing its general health and functionality, lies at the center of corporatist theory.
Corporatist ideas have been expressed since Ancient Greek and Roman societies, with integration into Catholic social teaching and Christian democratic political parties. They have been paired by various advocates and implemented in various societies with a wide variety of political systems, including authoritarianism, absolutism, fascism, liberalism and socialism.It has been much lamented that in the USA there is a political "duopoly" because of a seemingly exclusive two-party system.
Ideologically, however, the monopoly on power is even more restrictive than the two-party system would suggest.
Both major political parties in the USA are ultimately liberal.
Ironically, this ideological near-consensus may be one major source of conflict.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
The narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation.In Europe, there are multiple political parties with often drastically different ideologies who must join together to form a parliamentary majority.
In the USA, there are two political parties that have the same basic ideology.
There is a temperamental difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.
In other societies, one can find this temperamental difference within a political party and its two wings.
For example, in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was an idealist who argued that promoting communist insurrection abroad would ultimately serve the interest of the USSR.
Stalin, a realist, argued that the policies which promoted the self-interest of the Soviet state would eventually benefit world communism.
It is counter-intuitive to conceive Stalin as a communist conservative.
But leftist are quick to remark that at one time, the liberal ideology of the USA was a radical and revolutionary ideology, and that it has become a conservative force.
In terms of American conservatism, however, there is a pocket or reservoir of organic traditionalism embedded within the liberal individualist paradigm.
That is, the European conservative ideal of the organically united society lives on in the USA -- although this ideal is largely not applied at the societal level.
Uniquely, in the USA, this organic conservatism is largely relegated to the private realm within the framework of a liberal, individualistic, capitalistic society.
In fact, this organic, traditionalist model is paradoxically embedded within an extreme libertarian model.It's all about how the ideal of "freedom" is conceived and interpreted.
For example, young, overeducated, urban liberals associate freedom with the First Amendment of the Constitution.
For them, FREEDOM = FREEDOM OF SPEECH = SELF-EXPRESSION = INDIVIDUAL SELF-FULFILLMENT = CREATIVITY = PROGRESS
In rural America, freedom is associated with the Second Amendment.
For rural Americans, FREEDOM = GUNS = SELF-RELIANCE = PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY = RESPECT = MORALITY = FAMILY & COMMUNITY = PATRIOTISM
Here is a photography project carried out by an urban liberal photographer which documents the relationship of rural American youths with guns.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-gun-owners-of-the-parkland-generation
GUN COUNTRY
A new generation of American kids embraces firearms.
All but one were born in the decade after Columbine; like the student gun-control advocates activated by the recent massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, most are in their teens. But the children depicted here—hunters, target shooters, competitors in trap and skeet—occupy a parallel realm, where guns signify not danger, alienation, and the threat of death but safety, discipline, and trust.The photographer is ambivalent, and he seems puzzled by current trends in American attitudes toward guns.
Millennials’ attitudes about guns cut along seemingly opposing lines: most support fewer restrictions on which weapons can be bought but tighter regulations on who can buy them.Intellectually, the photographer has gained an appreciation of rural values.
Emotionally, he has only grown more terrified of these rural attitudes.
Indeed, gun manufacturing in the USA has skyrocketed.
However, the percentage of gun owning households is in decline.
Also, the number of background checks has risen substantially.
The statistics reflect a few trends:
- Fewer people own guns, but they own more guns.
- Gun owners are increasingly solid, reliable citizens.
- The so-called "gun culture" is really rural culture.
- The USA continues to suburbanize, with 55% of Americans living in suburbs and 20% in "rural" areas (which are also largely suburban in character, and not farms).
- As rural American shrinks through in-migration to suburbs, the rural identity intensifies.
Again, for European conservatives, society is a complex organic whole.
In conservative rural America, this holism transferred onto the microcosm of the family and community.
The family and the small town are perceived as complex organisms within an atomisitic liberal worldview.
In fact, this transference of the ideal of an organic whole to a microcosm can even be found among young, urban, over-educated romantics.They see their own individual psyche as a complex whole, and the mission of their lives is to attain a balanced form of self-fulfillment (for example, the archetype psychology of Karl Jung).
There is an example in philosophy of a complex interconnected world being replaced by an interior organic unity in conception of the "monad".
There were all sorts of problems with Descartes formulation of the mind-body dualism (for example, how mind and body actually connect).
To get around these problems, the philosopher Leibniz theorized that all of existence is purely contained within the subjective experience of each entity in the world.
For Leibniz, even inanimate matter possessed mental states.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#PanpHistWestPhil
Leibniz’s monads are fundamentally to be conceived mentalistically—they are in a way mentalistic automatons moving from one perceptual state (some conscious and some not) to another, all according to a God imposed pre-defined rule. It is highly significant for the development of contemporary forms of panpsychism that Leibniz could find no intrinsic nature for his basic elements other than a mentalistic nature—the only model he found adequate to describe his monads was one of perception and spontaneous activity.It is as if every single thing in the universe were a brain in a vat watching a movie unique to itself but in sync with the movies that all the other brains were watching.
Experience is thus prerecorded and played out in synchronicity with -- but without connection to -- the predetermined experiences of all other entities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology
Leibniz surmised that there are indefinitely many substances individually 'programmed' to act in a predetermined way, each substance being coordinated with all the others. This is the pre-established harmony which solved the mind-body problem, but at the cost of declaring any interaction between substances a mere appearance.Leibniz's "nomadology" is a perfect description of American life.
In the modern world, there is thus "eversion" or turning inside-out of the traditional worldview.
This might not be unique to the USA.In traditional societies, there is a public, official, orthodox state religion (e.g., Confucianism) and private mystical heterodox cults (e.g., Taoism, Shinto).
As the orthodoxy, Catholicism adopted an Aristotelian framework which emphasized holism.
For example, the Church is guided by the "principle of totality" in medical ethics, which dictates that the organs of a body are subordinate to the well-being of the organism as a whole.
This comes straight out of Aristotle.
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cp28/docdble.htm
Thomas Aquinas followed the philosophy of Aristotle. So, he believed that the universe is organized so that each thing in it has a purpose or goal. Reason helps humans discover and achieve their goals. Actions which are in accordance with our natural goals are good and those that interfere with these goals are bad. So, for example, since we are capable of reasoning we should develop our intellect and since all living things are inclined to preserve their own lives, committing suicide goes against nature and is wrong.
The Principle of Totality: An individual may not dispose of his organs or destroy their capacity to function, except to the extent that this is necessary for the general well-being of the whole body. Destroying an organ or interfering with its capacity to function prevents the organ from achieving its natural purpose.Interestingly, in the modern age, the principle of totality becomes the basis of the Church's opposition to abortion.
(The fetus is not regarded by the Church as a subordinate organ that can be removed for the health of the organism, but rather an organism in its own right.)
Even more interestingly, the Church's contemporary concern with abortion is really liberal in orientation -- the focus being on individual rights (of the fetus).
In traditional Christendom, Platonism was the equivalent of a heterodox private religion.
Platonism is more oriented toward a focus on the individual's personal progress up the "divided line" of knowledge toward sun-like realm of pure Forms.
And so alongside the Aristotelian orthodoxy, there is this parallel shadow spirituality in the West that flirts with esoteric knowledge.
In popular form, secret societies mix Platonism with Gnostic and Manichean elements.
In the religious realm, the Renaissance in southern Europe and the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe brought an eruption of unorthodox thought back into Christendom.
The Scientific Revolution in the 1700s overthrew the Aristotelian framework in the private world of scientific research.
The Enlightenment of the 1800s sought to apply the Scientific Revolution to the public, political realm.
The Romanticism of the 1900s is the point in which things were fully turned inside out ("everted").
The private, inner world was now perceived as organic and holistic, whereas the public, outer world was understood as mechanical, atomistic and individualistic.
Hence, the transformation and privatization of conservatism's organic ideal amid the hegemony or domination of a liberal order and an atomistic worldview.
Populism is something altogether different from conservatism or liberalism.
However, because of the USA's unique historical development, those who are the most populist tend to be the most libertarian.
Populist libertarianism runs more deep in certain rural areas of the USA where ancestry can be traced back to the border region between Scotland and England.[map of self-declared Scotch Irish and "American" ancestry in the USA]
Certain rural areas of the USA were particularly slow to act in the coronavirus pandemic.
These areas might become more afflicted with the coronavirus than the more urban, liberal areas.
There is also the question of who will recover from the coronavirus.This question is medical and economic, and personal and societal.
Coronavirus afflicts all, but by degree.
Healthy children seem completely unaffected by infection.
There have been a few cases of teenagers without underlying health problems dying.
Young adults, especially healthcare workers, have perished, often excruciatingly.
But the disease is consistently deadly toward elderly people, especially those with health issues.
This pattern may recapitulate itself geographically.
The complacent small towns that already have so many problems may be permanently laid waste.
Now on lockdown, cities that were so recently economically and culturally vibrant may spring back to life.For the survivors, there may no longer be a housing crisis that now afflicts the cities and suburbs dominated by anti-development NIMBYs.
In fact, cities may emerge more vibrant than they already were.
In that case, culturally, things might veer even more toward the secular and urban than prior to the pandemic.This is what happened almost seven centuries ago.
[James Burke's "Connections", episode 4, "Faith in Numbers", @17:19]
