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By Adam Gopnik
Very many other words can mean very other things. A good example of this occurs in the tale of the nativity of the gospel of Luke. In the King James edition (which we all know of “Charlie Brown’s Christmas”), the angels proclaim: “On earth, peace, intelligent will toward men.” Other translations, in more militant Bibles, translate the Greek expression as “peace on earth to men of intelligent will”. Like the question of whether Edwin Stanton sent Lincoln, on his deathbed, to angels or toward ages, anything that may be the subject of an e-book, the small difference in biblical words makes a big difference in our vision. Is the good news that the dispensation from heaven of ever greater trust in all men? Or is it a special favor reserved for those who already have an intelligent will toward us?
This Christmas conundrum comes to mind in a rare way as we contemplate the state of the global in this unimaginable year of 2020. Thinking about the pandemic that has swept through the global in so many ways, one of the most irritating and vital questions about it. it is the dating between intelligent will and intelligent health, that is, the dating between the pernicity of the plague and the presence or absence of social capital in the put that suffer it. Are the sales options with the highest degrees of social acceptance true and do strong civil society establishments do better than those that do not? Does the intelligent will toward men help fight the virus, or does what angels sing makes no difference?
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By social capital, academics sometimes refer to all sectors of society that, although not explicitly political, foster ties and bridges of non-unusual sympathy and accept as true. Created both through volunteer chimney departments and amateur opera societies and through government, through block parties rather than through political parties, the social capital in this regard is necessarily what Frederick Law Olmsted, in Construction Central Park, called “banal civilization”. (It included in this category “game clubs, boat clubs, ball clubs and all kinds of clubs”). The likely political and cosmopolitan cafes have become the citadel of 19th-century social acceptance. Social capital is what allows us to act with a concept of citizenship, rather than clanism, so that in things big and small, we have the back of the neighbor and our neighbor has ours instead of being on the neck.
It is a complicated, multifaceted and infrequently chimeric concept. It was soon articulated through the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who actually meant through capital what a Marxist means through capital: anything that other people who have it do not share. But over time, the concept has expanded and almost reversed its meaning, so for the American scientist Robert Putnam, it has a fairly positive meaning: “the express benefits that come from accepting as true with, reciprocity, data and cooperation related to social media. networks.” Meanwhile, the question of the extent to which devoted teams announce that social media accepts as true through inclusion, or diminishes it by being exclusive, is hot, as the angels’ dispute suggests.
We are all able to assess social capital through our own measure. Mike Lee, Utah’s conservative Republican senator, sponsored just three years ago a Senate review of social capital among the states that found, unsurprisingly, that the devout Utah held a very high place, while the skepticist New York was in a very low place. But the concept is, historically, as observational as it is statistical: we know that coffee department stores accumulate social capital by reading the memoirs written there rather than reading the civic statistics of Warsaw and Berlin.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has probably presented the ultimate new and clarifying meaning of the idea: his so-called ability technique emphasizes our access to civic intelligence created through social capital. There is no point in having a lot of social capital in the bank if you cannot issue a check yourself; There is no merit of living among the liaison and bridge networks that Putnamians celebrate if you are excluded. But the positive intelligence of social capital for Sen is as genuine as it is for Putnam. Successful emerging economies, Sen writes, “have moved ahead of a major expansion of education. ArrayArray in many cases before breaking the limitations of general poverty. He continues: “Our conceptualization of economic desires is necessarily based on open public debates and discussions, ensuring which requires an emphasis on basic political freedom and civil rights.” An unusual step for public health, surveillance against threats, especially an investment in education: those are not for Sen the ornaments of the windshields in the engine of human development, are the very engine.
Now all the general truths about the pandemic are premature. But the empirical effects so far seem to recommend at least an intriguing paradox: options with significant social capital were the most affected by the virus and then recovered more quickly. This is the case of the lay and social democratic countries of the European Union, none of them are religious, but many of them are rich in shared networks of trust.
It’s a position paradox: other people who weren’t socially estranged at the beginning of the plague were easier to learn from a social distance at the end. A surprising study in Italy, for example, found that offers with the largest “civic capital” in lifestyles tended to “show greater mobility,” i.e. other people traveled more than offers without it. But, “as soon as the threat of the virus became real, communities with the highest civic capital began to control themselves and internalize the threat of spreading the infection through social contacts.” Translated from academicism, other people who are accustomed to many outings stopped when other people they trusted told them it was a smart way to get sick. It’s a family procedure for New Yorkers. Damned by our density and our position of cosmopolitan crossroads to suffer the plague to the fullest, our ability to self-regulate under the leadership of rational government has made us move significantly, or rather, downwards. For the April high, we had a positive verification rate of more than 20%; Now, living our mask and (at most) outdoors the bars, we’ve driven the number below one percent.
What is true for cities and regions is true for countries. Those of us living in Canada have witnessed the difference between a country that, no matter how much social friction it may have, still maintains the highest levels of social capital, maintained through universal fitness care, a strong family circle subsidy program and a culture of interpartisan citizenship, and a country like United StatesArray that does not. Canada had COVID-19 early and bad, especially in Montreal, but since then the country has largely recovered and reopened. Toronto, which was first affected, reported a minimum of new cases and several days without death. (Success is, of course, limited and partial; new hot spots continue to appear and will have to be packed and removed.)
Canada identifies itself as a civil society in each and every sense of the word: Canada’s most celebrated joke asks how to get 20 Canadians out of a group; The answer is that you ask them to leave the pool. But this Canadian detail is not a genetic trait. It is a social status acquired and accumulated during many years of hard-won social acceptance as true, threatened in centuries of negotiations, some individual and other empirical, between conflicting linguistic and national teams. Politics in Canada is still largely proposed as a means of easing, not exacerbating, organizational conflicts. It is simply not imaginable to turn the use of masks into a party factor in Canada; Conservatives and liberals see the meaning and just put things in place. And Canadians accept as true the expert experience, perhaps because they can participate in a strong, affordable, publicly funded university system. (My expatriate partner David Frum has written entertainingly about how Ontario officials are investing in quarantine taxes for newcomers from the United States.)
In the United States, we are experiencing a kind of four-year delight about what happens to a country where social acceptance as true and social capital are not only poorly maintained but also actively corroded. In Donald Trump’s administration, the favor goes from head of state only to men of intelligent will, that is, those he believes are on his side. We are living a four-year training to destroy social acceptance as true and update it with the values of gangsters: loyalty to the kingpin at all costs and revenge of his competition and enemies taken under his leadership. Instead of converging into apparent truths (the limited but genuine values of masquerading with masks, the confidence that the charlatan will not solve the problem, the need for vigilance) we are told every day that all empirical arguments are fair, well, masks for extended family rivalry.
The effects are already clear. The haste to reopen in the so-called red states motivated in component through advertising impatience but also in large component through a kind of irrational rage opposed to “elitist” social networks that have the dissemination of clinical experience. If you are told that clinical medicine is a further view of the diversity of political grievances, then social diversity and masking become, like arms control, an imposition on freedom.
The disasters that have left the United States with many more deaths in COVID-19 and a much more consistent rate of infection with the capita than other countries have many reasons and many lessons, acting, as they do, as an X-ray of our social inequalities. But the likely unstoppable spread of the disease also shows the accusation of active looting of our already small source of social capital. It destroys our worldly civilization, and the largest civilization around it will also collapse. Where we struggle to create goodwill for our fellow citizens, the disease increases and then disappears. Where we only inspire it with respect to our species, the disease increases. It is an undeniable formula, however, now both a matter of life and death that would let the angels, all, cry as they looked at it.
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