Visions of Samson and Samwise
Dealing with last things
A report out of France - confirming what is blindingly obvious, well at least should be:
Lockdowns will take more years of life than they will save.
Our modeling results in an estimated gain of 500,000 life-years and an estimated loss of 1,200,000 life-years nationwide [France] between March 2020 and April 2021.
According to this think tank, a million French citizens have crossed into poverty because of lockdown. Young people have lost income at a rate of 5 to 10%, whilst retirees have lost nothing.
When you slide into poverty, you lose years of your life. Social science is quite clear on this. So ultimately, according to this model, more years of life will be lost to the clear costs of the lockdown than gained via the tenuous benefits of lockdown.
We used to think about public health like this - holistically. No longer. We have been warned from the start - lockdowns cause poverty, poverty causes death. Yet we did them anyway, because we were scared. So we took action that had a definite cost for a benefit that was never plausible anyway. You can find no correlation between a territory`s lockdown policy and its virus burden. I think the report is being generous about benefits of lockdown. Viruses spread in the air indoors. How do you stop that?
Only travel bans worked. A sensible policy would have been to shield the vulnerable, not everybody.
It is time for people to be honest with themselves, and to try to make amends.
The further tragedy is that lockdowns exacerbate a pre-existing problem: the rise of deaths of despair in western countries.
The term “deaths of despair” was coined by Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton (a Nobel laureate), after they uncovered something shocking in lifespan data.
In the 20th century, average life spans in the US rose from 50 to 80 years. But in the 1990s - the apparent Clinton boom years - white men`s lifespans began to plummet. (I know, you`re not meant to care about those guys…)
Digging deeper, they discovered the reason: white working class men were killing themselves, either directly, or indirectly, with painkillers, drugs, and alcohol. Blue collar jobs had fled to China and Mexico, and the social fabric which had existed in prior hard times, such as church and family, had withered away too. Despair sets in, and, it turns out, despair kills.
One other curious thing they discovered - today`s middle aged people experience more pain than the older generation. I have noticed this. I often hear about people talking about their backs, their legs, their knees, their necks, what to do, which kind of health experts to see.
There was no physical cause discoverable behind much of this increased pain, especially pain found in the lower back. It seemed simply to stem from hopelessness…
I have been thinking lately about that Old Testament character, Samson. The judge of Israel whose strength depended upon his abstaining from alcohol and keeping his hair long - the symbols of some kind of ancient religious vow.
Of course, we know he eventually reveals the secret of his strength to his wife, Delilah, who betrays him to the enemies of Israel. He is blinded and imprisoned. But the Philistines forget to cut his hair.
When he is put on parade in the temple of the Philistines, a place of human sacrifice, he is able to find his way to the temple pillars, and destroy his enemies in one final show of strength, at the cost of his own life, however. A strange, tragic redemption.
Leonard Cohen has a haunting song that features the image of Samson tearing down the temple. He also mentions him in the famous song, `Hallelujah`.
I am not quite sure why Samson is on my mind.
Perhaps Samson is a fitting figure to contemplate in our age of false gods and despair. Is our society not blinded, its strength sapped?
There is no guarantee given to Christians that the world improves, that history somehow progresses. Jesus told his Jewish followers their own temple would be destroyed, their whole way of life burnt to the ground, never to recover, for the age of Gentiles had come.
After the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, they ended up destroying churches and freedom in their sphere of influence for a century. Things can, and often do, get worse. We are told in the Bible that a time of antichrist comes before the end. Perhaps the best we can hope for in this world is one last heroic effort to tear down the temple of the false god - the nexus of forces which today attack beauty, family, and wisdom.
Here I move from Samson to Samwise, that great character of JRR Tolkien`s. It is not depicted in the film, but Samwise is meant to be quite a bit younger than Frodo, and explicitly his servant. That is why it is poignant that it is Samwise who allows Frodo to finish his task.
Samwise famously says this when everything reaches its lowest ebb in Middle-earth:
“We shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually — their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on — and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end…”
Our paths have been laid to live in this time. We have landed in this story. Been `thrown` into it, to use Heidegger`s term.
There is some hope - if you press on, see the story to the end, then you will be one of the characters that appear in the tales told in some different world of the future.