Merit-Based

This is a theology that says that the natural world thrusts people into their proper order, like a god damn Sorting Hat, shuffling through the Brave and the Weak and the Intellectual and the Sneaky

Although I am not flashy in my love for my country, I freely admit that I often wake up and feel grateful that I have been able to research and write about the subjects that have interested me academically over the years; and I often find myself on a drive on a Sunday morning – if in spring, sometimes with a cigar – and remind myself not to take for granted the opportunity I have to go where I please, with a cigar if I want, and not go to church, and no one is going to ask me where I’m going, why I’m going there, and how I can justify myself.

For a lot of Americans, this is the definition of freedom as it is seen in the Bill of Rights.

But today, I had to come to grips with the fact that I can’t protect, or restore, or fight for freedom without first understanding why I love it so much.

I drive often past a stone monument under a tall flagpole on a lawn. It says, “Freedom isn’t free.” The stencil used to paint this, blue on white, is unmistakably the kind of stencil you might see on a piece of military equipment, even something as mundane as a footlocker. Or black on a tank. The implication is obvious. The sentiment clear.

I also see signs that show rainbows of skin tones or rainbows of ribbon shapes, and sometimes they use the word love, sometimes welcome, and sometimes respect.

I have also heard that respect is earned.

I wonder if love and welcome are too; if there are behaviors or even states of being that are more welcomed and loved than others.

These words aren’t working for me right now.

I fall back on another one, one that strikes me as something that can’t be earned or solicited or invited. It is an Enlightenment word, surely, which puts it in Locke and Mill, and with Franklin and Jefferson.

It’s dignity.

I’m not very good at being a scold. I’m not capable of writing a piece imploring you to remember the dignity of your fellow beings. I’m so much more logos than pathos; more even than ethos. I’ve been told often enough that just because I want something (like universal human dignity) there’s no reason I’m going to get it, or even that it should be gotten. The Enlightenment also had Hume in it, after all.

I think back thirty-five years to when I was a Reagan voter more by default than anything else. Daddy was so mad when Carter won that he said he wasn’t coming out of his room for four years, and that upset me because my birthday always falls in the week of Election Day and I didn’t want him to miss it. I voted for Reagan’s second term with my first vote. Then I just let politics ride, young as I was and struggling for all the things we struggle for in our twenties, although I did for sure bemoan Dan Quayle’s spelling ability (I was in grad school to become a professor of English Language and Literature, like my hero, A. Bartlett Giamatti).

A friend who was the first vegan I had ever met showed me a book in 1989. It was a tawdry trade paperback with a lurid red cover with an illustration of the outline of a woman, drawn the way those butchers’ posters depict beef cattle – dotted lines, rump, flank, etc. That was a klong time ago but I see it still. The point of the book was as glaring as its cover: If we as a society are capable of reducing higher-order mammalian species into usable parts, it was only a short step to reducing lower-order humans as well. You don’t have to follow me to the back cover or inside of that book to know exactly which groups the book defined as “lower-order.”

I knew it was off, somehow. My intensive studies in logic didn’t come until years later, so I couldn’t necessarily pinpoint the fallacy, but I objected to it in much the same way that I had once asked my father in church why Luke 14:26 where Jesus asks us to hate our mother and father wasn’t really mean to mothers and fathers, vaguely aware as I was that some other part of the Bible said something about honoring them, and my father gave me his Republican version of how normal people, good children, did stay with their mothers and fathers, but Jesus was special and his followers were saints.

I therefore rejected the (what I later saw as Marxist and feminist) book’s call to a radical shift in life – strict veganism for moral and ethical reasons – as something only saints and special people could do, but the rest of us normies had to eat meat (except on Fridays, of course). Especially me, a first-generation Italian-American for whom braciole is a benediction and a meatball on a fork when you walked in the door was the highest form of Grandma-love. And also for me, a first-generation Italian-American whose Mediterranean heritage had passed a genetic trait that left me chronically, but not dangerously, anemic and constantly encouraged by my doctors to eat red meat. I packed B-12.

Essentially my youth and young adulthood boiled down to, these are all lovely thoughts, but we have to live in the real world.

What I didn’t realize was that I was taking for granted the fact that a lot of us can. Live, I mean.

I refuse to use the word privilege here, and you know why, but you also know where I’m going.

I spent the nineties working in both colleges and software development firms. I learned, I wrote, I took my jobs seriously, but I also experienced health issues like most people do at some point. I spent a good part of that decade suffering with upper respiratory infections, usually three and sometimes four a year; two serious cases of bronchitis and three of pneumonia, and one epic bout of mono. I looked, most of the time, like a person who always had a cold, but it wasn’t the traditional symptoms, the snot and the cough and the endlessly red nose, that worried others and devastated me – it was the constant fatigue. When I was “better,” when the pain in my ears or throat or chest had gone and my nose was starting to heal, I was so tired that I’d come home from work and flop on the couch or bed and do little else until it was time to drag back to work. The anemia contributed to this of course. When they couldn’t figure out the mono (and oh my God they couldn’t figure out the mono) I had to go in for blood draws almost weekly, and I would usually do them early in the morning and then go to my parents’ house so I could crash on the bed and read Jane Austen and watch General Hospital with my mother; at the same time people I knew bustled from the phlebotomist’s chair right back to work, gathering up their umbrellas and bags, while I was staggering to the car. I actually only took a total of five days off during mono, and not in a row. But I had vice presidents and receptionists alike constantly asking me if I were feeling better – full of vim and vigor. I wasn’t.

But normal people have jobs, and they keep their jobs, and they don’t stay home from work one day more than they absolutely have to especially after they are feeling “better.”

I was lucky. That period passed. In the aughts I taught full time, and maybe work stress was less, and I grew out of it or something, but I only got pneumonia once in twenty years. In fact, the last serious case I had was bronchitis in January of 2020, and due to masks and isolation and remote work, I have not caught much of anything since – not COVID, not colds. I’m still tired a lot, though, and now I have tachycardia, probably (per two doctors) due to a low blood volume from decades of anemia.

COVID was weird for me. At 54, and with a history of poor resistance to infections, I guess I was high risk, and I’m overweight, too. But I never got sick. That might have reinforced my conviction that I was normal, but rather it made me think that I was appropriately careful and didn’t take my twenty-year respite as a given. I wasn’t normal, but I survived anyway. That never left me thinking that it was easy for normies to survive.

In fact, I grew more and more suspicious of and angry with people who equated “high-risk” with the kind of lower-order humans that had appeared cut up like mutton in that book. Old people. Obese people. People with co-morbidities. People who had already, likely due to poor diet and infrequent exercise and careless acceptance of “pharma” solutions, damaged themselves in ways that allowed the disease to harm them; in ways it couldn’t harm children and healthy people. “Healthy” was used a lot in this context. Lockdown was “quarantine for healthy people.” Masks weren’t necessary for healthy people. (Right? Cancer patients, and immunosuppressed people, and other victims of the failure to live a healthy, natural lifestyle, wear masks. ) And, of course, vaccines administered to healthy people were obscene. Today, anti-vax language often includes the phrase “vaccination of healthy children.”

Because, you see, if they were sick, we wouldn’t worry so much. The seal is already broken; the goods are damaged, the loss less.

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Last week I had to spend a lot of time editing documents, which isn’t normally a significant part of my current job, but since I manage Federal and state grants for a nonprofit health center, I needed to review the texts of our existing proposals and agreements for words like “gender” and “social determinants” and “immigrant” and “underserved.” And, of course, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity.”

Now I’ve been a writer for forty years, and editing always feels like cutting away at your children, as Anne Bradstreet said in 1678, but this was particularly painful. So many of the programs we’ve built and proposed and sustained were designed especially to address barriers to care; to deal with genuine differences in health due to cultural and environmental realities, or to the limits of poverty. You can’t just pull a “refugee” here and a “cultural” there and leave any meaning. Maybe you should just not do the programs. Because these things are designed to make sure that those who aren’t healthy, who can’t drive to an appointment, who can’t take off from work, who can’t lie in their mother’s bed reading Northanger Abbey for the third time, don’t fall down. Don’t get left behind.

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Yesterday I decided to read something different, and boy did I. I cracked open Richard Hofstadter’s “Social Darwinism in American Thought.” And down a paper rabbit hole I went. I went to JSTOR and coaxed a “free trial” PDF of a study of Darwinism in literature (I can no longer use the “enter your school or institution’s code here” button) and, directed by citations, cracked open The Tempest, The Collected Works of Robert Browning, and Folkways by William Graham Sumner. (Yes I had them all, on shelves, in one badly beaten-up form or another. Them: “Do you actually read all those books?” Me: “Eventually.”) Between Hofstadter and John Holmes, the author of the scholarly piece, I began to assemble a three-dimensional vision of dignity.

You knew I’d get back to that, right?

And initially, when I contemplated writing this piece, I thought I’d start here – with Caliban, with natural theology, with Darwinism. I am still going to address that, another day, because I am a literary critic at heart, a daughter of Bart Giamatti in spirit, but “dignity” rattled hard at this particular cage of mine, much more than “fascism” or “authoritarianism” or “narcissism” or “technocracy” or “unitary executive” or any of the other political and social explanations; more even than “incompetent,” “amateurish,” or even “cruel.”

The current philosophy right now is neatly, perfectly, natural theology and social Darwinism in every aspect. And the main thing that social Darwinism takes away is human dignity. More than freedom or agency, it destroys human equivalence; it insists that nature has set certain human beings in lower orders and that to interfere with nature in any of a thousand ways is an insult to nature and a perversion of real theology. You know it. You see it.

Don’t support education – education allows unintelligent (“low-IQ”) people to “level up” and falsely appear to be better than they are because they have a credential or a degree.

Don’t support public health – it artificially interferes with the natural tendency of some bodies to lack strength and resilience, and it messes up the natural superiority of the rest of the bodies. Likewise, use natural cures, not chemical ones. Sunlight and muscle and grit.

Don’t support immigration – it encourages those in less developed countries to see themselves as deserving of the kinds of things you get when you are descendants of a superior race that built strong communities.

Don’t support regulations – if shit is going to kill some people, we may as well know which ones it’s going to kill right away and not drag this out.

[n.b. on this last one – once when teaching I had to warn and then lead a class through an active shooter drill. A student asked why we were giving advance notice. I, in my fifties and tachycardic, said people could be hurt if we caused a panic over a drill. The student pointed out that if one of us was going to have a heart attack and drop dead in an emergency, wasn’t it better to know which ones now? So we’d be more prepared in the real emergency?]

Don’t support pro bono (or really much of any) legal work – if they can’t keep out of trouble through their own cleverness or without paid sophistry, they’re probably guilty.

Don’t care for the elderly – if they were useful once, great, but what are they adding in value now?

Don’t support feminism (or diversity or inclusion) – if they need that much help trying to be useful, they might as well fail and get out of our way. As my scavenger diver friend often said – if it were easy, they’d let girls do it.

Don’t defend smaller nations. Let them prove themselves.

Don’t support “gender” ideology. That’s the body you brought to the dance.

Don’t defend any form of religion that offers salvation to people just because Jesus loves them. Jesus loves everybody; that hardly counts, now, does it? Next thing you know, nobody will have to go to hell.

Don’t support anti-depressants. When the apocalypse comes, can we have them dragging their asses behind and whining that they’re having withdrawals from the Effexor?

Or groping for their glasses, or hearing aids, or walkers, or support animals? There aren’t any accessible ramps on the plains of Meddigo, people.

This is not about Social Justice Warriors or non-merit-based shenanigans. This is a theology, a theology that says that the natural world thrusts people amorally into their proper order, like a god damn Sorting Hat, shuffling through the Brave and the Weak and the Intellectual and the Sneaky, and we should not lift a finger to upend that, let alone spend billions of dollars and millions of man-hours to slow or reverse it.

And they’re determined to stop it.