Bill Maher, Moral Panic, And The Problem Of Agnostic Collapse

The late-night comedian Bill Maher the other day made one of his routine critiques of politicall;y-correct society:

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher lamented that “woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist,” and the left has become “the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.”

. . . After listing some examples of people on the right being more permissive on sex and drugs, and other examples of the right being morally strict, Maher stated, “We need to restore the natural order of things. I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us.

I don't normally follow Maher, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out that Maher was raised Catholic, but "Owing to his disagreement with the Catholic Church's doctrine about birth control, Maher's father stopped taking Maher and his sister to Catholic church services when Maher was thirteen." Since Maher was born in 1956, he would have been 13 in 1969, when the collap;se of unexamined or agnostic religious faith was well under way.

The incongruous thing about Maher's regular attacks on political correctness is that he's generally aligned with all the elites' received causes. He's been on the board of PETA since 1987, for instance, and he supports legalizing marijuana. In many ways, he's a kind of secular Protestant, substituting private judgment over individual points of liberal doctrine, an agnostic's agnostic. He's decided certain aspects of current cancel culture are moral panic, but he doesn't want to try to tease out the full extent of the panic, or its underlying causes.

So his program is basically a wink and a smirk, which means he's nobody's friend. The underlying reason for the moral panic in polite society, it seems to me, is fear of the plebs, its actual cultural influence as reflected in the popular cable shows, and its growing power at the ballot box -- they ousted Trump in 2020, but they're terrified he'll return in 2024. Maher is clearly just as terrified of this as anyone else in his social stratum.

But this reflects a bigger problem: nain line Protestantism and other mainstream agnostic religious outlooks -- Reform Judaism or Kennedy Catholicsm, for instance -- collapsed beginning in the postwar period. The result has been moral ambiguity and increasing social chaos. These are things that Catholic thinkers from Frederick Kinsman to Paul VI anticipated.

The challenge is to rebuild the social and cultural consensus on a Catholic basis, which hasn't been tried in the modern period. I think this is the project Bp Barron recognizes needs to be undertaken.

Herd Immunity: What Happened In California?

California is currently thouight to be the most-improved US state for COVID, having reversed the late 2020 surge soon after the new year, with no new third surge as happened in the US northeast and Canada. But since Los Angeles County accounts for a quarter of the state's population, much of this success is attributable to LA County's performance. Although Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties are both in the least restrictive "yellow" tier, San Francisco's population is less than a million, while LA County's is over ten million.

The chart above shows cumulative totals for LA County cases and deaths, as well as case mortality rate, since the start of the pandemic. While the numbers, being cumulative, don't go down, they do show how the spread of the disease has been mitigated. More important, the dark curve at the bottom of the graph, reflecting cumulative deaths, shows a much more gradual curve than the light pattern at the top, which is cases. The overall case positivity rate of those tested, accorsding to a May 2 county press release, was More than 6,513,000 individuals tested simnce the start of the pandemic, with 18% of people testing positive. However, the current test positivity rate is well under 1%.

But LA County's statistics raise interesting questions. The first is why the COVID curve reversed so quickly after January 1, as shown at right. Vaccines were distributed only starting im mid-December 2020, supplies were limited, and they were concentrated among health care workers and long term care patients at that time. In addition, people needed two shots spaced over four weeks to be "fully vaccinated", since the J&J vaccine wasn't yet available. But the overall trend reversed within the first immunity waiting period. It's hard to think vaccine was the only explanation.

This leads to the question of herd immunity. So far, the received wisdom on herd immunity is reflected in this Johns Hopkins piece:

As with any other infection, there are two ways to achieve herd immunity: A large proportion of the population either gets infected or gets a protective vaccine. What we know about coronavirus so far suggests that, if we were really to go back to a pre-pandemic lifestyle, we would need at least 70% of the population to be immune to keep the rate of infection down (“achieve herd immunity”) without restrictions on activities.

The stimate of 70% to "go back to a pre-pandemic lifestyle" is actually at the low end of what we've seen from the public health establishment, with other authorities offering 80% or 90%. But the evidence we see in LA County is at variance with the overall theory in the link. The LA County graph at the top of the post, plus the county press release, gives overall positivity -- in other words, immunity as a result of infection -- at well under 20% of the population. A link in yesterday's polst gives the "fully vaccinated" percentage of LA County's population as 40% -- but that's right now. 40% plus under 20% is less than 60%. But the curve headed downward well before we approached 60%.

Dr Ferrer, the county health director, doesn't really disagree with this conclusion.

Asked why L.A. appears to be outpacing neighboring counties in reducing case rates, Ferrer credited residents and businesses for adhering to health guidelines. But she also said the winter surge in infections is also a contributing factor to the current low case numbers.

“We had a devastating surge here with huge numbers of people that got infected, and many of those people are still carrying around some natural immunity,” she said.

She goes on to warn about the danger of easing off on protective measures, but her own health department has just endorsed the CDC's guidance that it's OK to go without a mask outside, and the "yellow" tier relaxes the guidelines primarily for sports events and outdoor concerts, the sort of things that used to be verboten unless George Floyd was involved.

But the example of Texas, which has never had controls as strict as California, shows that even with greater laxity, it's been possible to show a steady downward trend in infections -- and Texas weather was much colder than California this past winter. But even Dr Ferrer acknowledges that an infection rate well under 20% of the population had a favorable effect on LA County's performance, leaving vaccine aside.

It's hard not to conclude that even with a compliance rate for masking and social distance in LA County generally acknowledged to be over 90%, there was an irreducible level of infections. Court-imposed relaxation on church attendence restrictions had no adverse effect on the pandemic, since people could go back to church roughly when vaccines became available, and increased church attendance has been part of the current COVID environment. (Has anyone in Canada looked at this?)

On one hand, I think the data shows that some level of disease transmission is simply unavoidable no matter what restrictions are imposed. But at the same time, the transmission leads to immunity in any case. Health authorities at this point are severely underestimating both the effect of the vaccine and the benefit of immunity from infection.

California: What Next?

As of this past week, both Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties fell into the state's least restrictive "yellow" tier of COVID restrictrions. The counties currently in "yellow" are otherwise sparsely populated and rural, but LA County alone, with over 10 millon people, accounts for about 25% of the state's population. As I've noted, other counties are likely to follow LA into the "yellow" tier within weeks.

I have lots of questions. The first is that LA County's aggressive vaccination program has led the state, putting a quarter of California's population in the least restrictive tier. But it's done this with about 40% of the county's population "fully vaccinated", two weeks after their final dose. It would seem that LA County, one of the hardest-hit areas of the state, is approaching herd immunity. But received opinion, as in the New York Times, is dismissing such ideas:

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”

The problem in California is that Gov Newsom's tier system never had a "green" category after "yellow". In fact, for much of the population, the change from "orange" tier to "yellow" means very little. A few days ago, my wife and I left LA County, "yellow" to spend some time in a rural part of Fresno County, "orange". Restaurant restrictions, 50% capacity with social distance, were unchanged. At least you could sit down and have a good meal, depending on what table they'd let you use, and provided they'd checked your mask and your temperature. But at what point will this stop?

The answer is we don't know. Gov Newsom is still figuring this out. He says the tier system will go away next month, but I don't think for a moment this means he'll make us like Texas and lift everything. He'll just substitute some other control and we'll keep on with masks, social distance, and so forth.

Just yesterday, the CDC changed its guidance on how COVID is spread:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday updated its public health guidance about how COVID-19 spreads, acknowledging that the virus is airborne. It's an important change from previous guidance, which claimed the virus was spread by "close contact, not airborne transmission."

. . . "Current evidence strongly suggests transmission from contaminated surfaces does not contribute substantially to new infections," the CDC states.

Wait a moment. Does this mean the constant business of wiping down restaurant tables and chairs, church pews, barber chairs, and everything else between uses is just a big "never mind"? Just like the masks outdoors thing? Sure sounds like it.

There's a strong faction that wants to continue a new normal. The good news is that, with states like Texas and Florida showing it's possible to come all the way out of this mess, it will be harder and harder to maintain these controls.

No Dancing At Weddings In DC

The other day, Washington, DC Mayor Bowser imposed a new control as part of her "reopening" protocols: no dancing at weddings. Two things immediately struck me. First, her poorest constituents, those who keep her in office, tend not to have weddings at all. Second, those who most notably do dance at weddings are the Jews. Thus do decrees cut across the social order.

We actually know next to nothing about how COVID is transmitted, and banning dancing may have no effect. There must now be plenty of Jewish weddings in Texas and Florida, and I read of no new outbreaks there. But this actually illustrates another of the points Edward Feser makes in the essay I linked Wednesday:

Gnostic moral practice veers between the extremes of puritanism and libertinism. Initially this might seem puzzling, but it makes perfect sense given the Gnostic’s other commitments. On the one hand, given the Gnostic hatred of the created order and of conventional moral and social life, what the normal person takes to be permissible or even necessary to ordinary life is prissily condemned. Hence, Gnostic heretical movements over the centuries famously emphasized vegetarianism, pacifism, the purported evil of capital punishment, and similarly utopian attitudes, pitting the “mercy” of a Gnosticized interpretation of Jesus against what they regarded as the sinister Old Testament God of justice. On the other hand, since the material world is taken by the Gnostic to have no value, nothing that happens within it ultimately matters, and the most licentious behavior can be excused. Hence, sexual immorality was often tolerated in practice – as long as it was not associated with marriage and procreation, which would tie us to the ordinary material and social order.

Forced by court decisions to allow church and synagogue services, Mayor Bowser nevertheless now makes a special effort to inhibit wedding celebrations -- indeed, Jewish weddings in particular. But I've noted here several times that the curfews still imposed in some countries are implicit bans on fornication, and the detailed codes of conduct imposed on bars in even some US jurisdictions seem to have a similar intent. For instance, in California

If you're like, wait my neighborhood bar has been open this whole time that's because breweries and wineries that serve food are technically restaurants (it's confusing). And restaurants have are [sic] allowed to be open outdoors in the purple tier, which we are currently in.

As far as indoor service at breweries and wineries – that won't be allowed until counties reach the "orange" tier.

Ok, now that we've got that cleared up, let's talk about bars.

Bars will still be closed until a county makes it to the "orange" tier. But when they do, they'll be allowed to reopen outdoors.

Bars won't be allowed to reopen indoors until a county reaches the least restrictive "yellow" tier.

This explanation, which places LA in the most restrictive "purple" tier, dates from March and has been overtaken by events. LA, now in the least restrictive "yellow" tier, nevertheless still restricts bars to 25% indoor capacity and I believe no counter seating, whereas breweries and wineries can operate at 50%. The assumption seems to be that higher-class customers will behave with greater discretion, or something like that.

But in places like Texas and Florida, nobody cares. The gnostics are out of office there.

Anglicans Can Somehow Become Catholic Without Anglicanorum Coetibus!

It should be no surprise to regular visitors that I'm on several of Bp Barron's e-mail lists. Last week I received this announcement from his Word on Fire Institute:

Meet the new Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture at the Word on Fire Institute

Oxford and Yale Educated Former Episcopal Priest Andrew Petiprin Contemplates Catholicism and Popular Culture for the Word on Fire Institute

Petiprin, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture, analyzes media through the lenses of philosophy and theology

[Irving, TX] – The Word on Fire Institute, the arm of Bishop Robert Barron’s apostolate focused on educational and evangelistic formation, is pleased to highlight the work and accomplishments of its Fellows. Each Fellow brings unique gifts and a track record of noteworthy service in the fields of theology, apologetics, cultural renewal, and more. Andrew Petiprin’s work is shaped by his pastoral heart and his admiration for great art as found in literature, movies, and music.

Andrew Petiprin is the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture. He earned a master’s degree in European literature as a Marshall Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then received another master’s degree at Yale Divinity School. He served for over nine years in ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church before joining the Catholic Church in 2019. He published Truth Matters: Knowing God and Yourself in 2018 with New Growth Press, and has written for The Catholic Herald, National Catholic Register, The Living Church, and Evangelization & Culture: The Journal of the Word on Fire Institute. In his role, Petiprin will produce written content and courses that analyze the Catholic integration of popular culture and evangelization.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen was a savvy observer of culture and a prophetic voice. He combined intellect and charisma to become a master of modern media. Petiprin stated, “Fulton Sheen wasn’t a disconnected commentator or an aloof analyst. This man of the Church took up space within the public square to convert the world and transform the culture. I want to follow his example by engaging with things in popular culture that touch upon life in both its brokenness and fullness, and thereby point to hope in the kingdom of God. I’m honored to have the fearless and winsome Archbishop Sheen as the patron of my fellowship.”

While Bp Barron clearly venerates Joseph Ratzinger as a theologian, he seldom if ever mentions Benedict XVI's apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, and here his foundation introduces an Episcopalian convert to Cstholicism without any reference to the Church's provision for such people. Will Petiprin be working out of Irving, TX? Will he be attending any of the Divine Worship masses available in that area? Will he become part of any ordinariate community?

I suspect that if he did, it would basically be beside the point. I get the impression that if he and Bp Barron are speaking of Archbishop Sheen, it's because they're facing outward toward society at large, not inward toward a retro thee-thou liturgy. But if Petiprin shows up at an ordinariate mass, I'd love to hear of it.

For that matter, I wish I could chat privately and off the record with Bp Barron about the ordinariates. Except that the last time I mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus to a diocesan priest, all I got was a quizzical expressiom. I have a feeling that Bp Bsrron and Mr Petiprin are too busy evangelizing to have much to say about it.

Edward Feser On Gnosticism

In yesterday's post, I talked about Jordan Peterson's belated and puzzled response to the collapse of main line Protestant academic culture, something that took place largely in the 1960s and 70s. By concidence, I ran into an essay by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser that appeared this past January in Catholic World Report, The Gnostic heresy’s political successors. It talks about the academic side oif the culture that replaced main line Protestantism, gnosticism. Feser defines gnosticism as follows:

First, it sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things. You might wonder how this differs from the Christian doctrine of original sin. It differs radically. Christianity teaches the basic goodness of the created order. It teaches that human beings have a natural capacity for knowledge and practice of the good – the idea of natural law.

. . . Second, the Gnostic mentality holds that only an elect who have received a special gnosis or “knowledge” from a Gnostic sage can see through the illusory appearances of things to the reality of the incorrigible evil of this world.

. . . Third, the Gnostic mindset sees reality in starkly Manichean terms, as a twilight struggle between the sinister forces that rule this evil world and those who have been “purified” of it and armed with gnosis.

Feser expands on gnosticism's influence on current woke culture, and in my view it adds much perspective to a two-part YouTube presentation on gnosticism and New Age by Dr David Campbell that I referenced several times on the old blog. Part I:

Part 2:

Raised a not especially observant Presbyterian, I had no effective resources to fall back on as I watched main line Protestantism collapse around me while I was in college, brought down by the Pill, the Playboy Philosophy, and Viet Nam protests. What filled the gap in public culture at the time was the drug-hippie movement, which as Dr Campbell points out has morphed into New Age, all a form of gnosticism. This persists as well in the very pervasive Star Wars quasi-religion of Jedi, the sage Yoda, and the Force.

But Feser takes this farther. The political movement of the 1960s and 70s was the New Left, which was recognized at the time as nothing more than a rebranding of the Old Left. While New Age appealed to me in my youth, the New Left never did. Environmentalism in the early 1970s was something separate as well. Feser recognizes that the gnosticism that began as New Age religion has metastasized inmto intersectionality:

Other forms of woke Gnosticism have their own bogeymen – “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” etc. – which, like “whiteness,” are abstractions spoken of as if they were concrete demonic powers. And just when you thought you’d heard of every kind of “oppression” imaginable, the Critical Theorists come along with the notion of “intersectionality,” by which ever more exotic forms can be fantasized into being. For example, if you are a transgender lesbian woman of color, you suffer a special kind of oppression – one defined by the “intersection” of oppressions suffered by each of the groups to which you belong – that is different from the kind suffered by (say) a gay immigrant with disabilities. (Wokesters don’t play the victim card; they play a whole 52 card deck.)

this has all taken place in the vacuum left behind by the collapse of main line Protestantism, for which society as a whole is still struggling for a cure. Unfortunately, I think moderate or never-Trump Republicanism is nothing more than wishful thinking that some version of the main line Protestant consensus can be restored -- something like what the Bush family still tries to embody. I think Feser is more correct:

Gnostic woke madness will not be remedied by aping it. On the contrary, more than ever, what the times call for is conservative sobriety. And orthodoxy. Heresies not only aim to subvert the Church, but they fill the vacuum that opens up when the Church loses its self-confidence, its fidelity to its traditional teaching, and its sense of mission – and as a consequence, loses its attractiveness. The crisis of the West is the crisis of the Church. The West will not be restored to health until the Church is restored to health. And that is a project that requires us to see beyond election cycles, and indeed beyond politics.

Jordan Peterson Meets Bp Barron, Again

Jordan Peterson has recentlly begun to reenter the public forum following lengthy recovery from a life-threatening health crisis. As part of the reentry, he's done a second YouTube encounter with Bp Barron, which is linked above.

The thing that strikes me most in the encounter is how little Jordan Peterson has changed. The guy has had as difficult a struggle against addiction and other health issues as I can imagine, but he's exactly the same Jordan Peterson who engaged Bp Barron in their first encounter in 2019.

This is to say that he continues to be a product of the mid-20th century academic culture -- and I might go a little farther to say that since he was formed in part as a Harvard professor, it's mid-20th century Ivy League academic culture, precisely what I was exposed to in the 1960s. And this puzzles the heck out of me, the guy has simply not changed.

Peterson's outlook is a largely inchoate melange of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Orwell, and whatever else strikes him -- and it leans conservative, in the sense of National Review as of about 1968. In fact, it's what you found in the oligopoly stentorian media pre-Viet Nam, Time, Newsweek, Cronkite, the papers. This was on the intellectual supermarket shelves when I was in college, although even at the time it was regarded with deep suspicion by most faculty and students. As of now, it's simply a period piece. It's a cross-section of the conservative wing of main line Protestant academic culture and Protestant morality, which in the 1960s was collapsing.

Even at the time, I had a nagging feeling that there was no there there, but main line Protestant culture, liberal or conservative, offered no systematic challenge, because, inchoate, there was no good way to parse it on its own terms. I suspect the same doubts bother Peterson, but again, formed in the same mid-20th century confusion, he has no clear path forward. And today, all that Jung-Freud-Nietzsche-Darwin-Orwell may as well have sunk with the Titanic.

What strikes me especially as I come back to Peterson after his absence of several years is his determined agnosticism. I recognize it now particularly from my recent reading of Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit, which, nothing like a reverie, makes a careful case for Protestantism as a form of agnosticism. And I can find no better example of Kinsman's view than Jordan Peterson, who is hardly Protestant but definitely agnostic.

He sees lots of good in the Bible, because it's full of Jungian archetypes. The archetypes have lots of good things to tell us, and it's hard to disagree that insofar as they teach prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, they're very good things indeed. The problem seems to be that Peterson is stuck roughly there. He doesn't seem to be able to proceed to a more unifying explanation, which is probably what makes him agnostic.

Peterson in a tentative way keeps advancing the position to Bp Barron that they agree in some basic way -- the Bible is a good thing, and the virtues are good things, but he just doesn't quite know what to make of everything else.

Bp Barron keeps responding yes, they agree, and we as humans have been endowed with reason, a tool that Aristotle and Aquinas can help us use, but then there are the Church Fathers, who take Biblical interpretation even a little farther down the road than you have, Prof Peterson. And in fact, faith can be seen as a step beyond reason. (I'm not sure if we even need to go that far, but it's a different issue.)

So far, poor Jordan Peterson is left stroking his chin and furrowing his brow. I think he's still puzzling over the collapse of mid-20th century main line Protestant consensus and what's so far replaced it, but an agnostic to the core, he's not going to make a whole lot of progress beyond that.