NYT on Romania: Orthodox Church is evil

A report on liberalism during the epidemic

Liberals are funny people, nobody combines arrogance & ignorance quite the way elite liberals do, & their readers approve innocently, all the while priding themselves that they are independent thinkers, no doubt busy following the science. This is often endearing, a reminder of a better time, when Americans would docilely plug their hearts into the heart of the modern American home, sitting in front of the TV come evening, & listen to manicured mediocrities tell them about politics. Those were the days when journalism was a great business to be in…

Back to 2021: Here’s the NYT reporting on my native Romania. There’s a COVID catastrophe, worse deaths per capita than anywhere in comparable countries in Europe or elsewhere, judging, I suppose, by GDP per capita… What does liberalism have to offer in such a crisis? Well, the story the NYT tells is predictable: Evil fake news, online conspiracy theories, & evil priests stoke “vaccination hesitancy.” A doctor is quoted as a selfless martyr of science, hesitant even about using scare tactics; a military fellow in charge of the vaccination effort is commended while he opines weakly—liberals love the new style of military persons who don’t fight, certainly can’t win wars, but might be useful against the civilian population, you know, in case of insurrection… For background, they throw in the Communist past—Bulgaria & Latvia also have very low rates of vaccination, like Romania; never mind that these three countries have nothing in common besides the horror of the USSR, which they share with many other countries that don’t have this vaccination problem… The writer is probably a stupid fellow, but in the ordinary way, a stupidity caused by arrogance—it cannot really be his fault, since many other stupid people want to write for the NYT, & many do! That’s the path to success & therefore the price of success. Still, he surely can tell that this sort of explanation explains nothing, but he also knows that his liberal audience knows nothing & wants to learn nothing about Romania. Spitting on Christians is all liberals need to make them happy, because these are trying times. I get it…

So let me explain what everyone in Romania can be expected to know—the reporter, if he knew anyone, could simply have asked, & he could have taught American liberals the beginning of wisdom. Romania is a small place no one cares about, but a crisis is enough to make it interesting, & therefore to remind us that asking an intelligent local is always better than asking a liberal, even if you can find an intelligent liberal, one who is not blinded by the prejudices of his elite class or their aspirations.

But first, the NYT report reminded me of something a friend in Eastern Europe told me recently: “Why are we always called ex-Soviet or former Communist countries? Nobody calls the Germans former Nazis!” Of course, he’s right, the NYT didn’t say the Germans won the Covid Wars because of their Nazi virtues or the strict Prussian authoritarian, militarist past, reminding Americans that Germans invaded Paris twice in a century, the last time within living memory… This is because victory excuses more or less anything & it is only the defeated who need contemptuous explanations: Germans are rich & Romanians are poor—the liberal has not been found at the NYT who can or cares to look past that fact, which is admittedly always important. I would add to what my friend said, the only thing Romanians can do to avoid the contempt of American liberals is to abandoned their religion—of course, Romania would still be doing badly, but at least it would not be because of the priests: That’s Enlightenment!

ANTI-VAX PROTEST IN DOWNTOWN BUCHAREST; I THINK THE CROPPED BANNER IS SAYING OUR KIDS AREN’T LAB RATS

Now, on to asking the locals—I don’t mean myself, for obvious reasons—I asked the most intelligent man I know concerning political matters in Bucharest, who follows events fairly closely, not only out of concern for justice or self-interest, but also for love of the game, & who has served in gov’t in various positions as staff, so he knows the run of things. This is of course a very rare source, which is not really available to the dainty fellows at the NYT. Moreover, to talk to such men, you have to throw a party, drink, smoke, joke around, & then talk politics. You can’t do this masked or fulminating about social distancing, never mind worrying about your pronouns or whatever woke pieties exercise American elites. This is not to say that intelligent Romanians wouldn’t talk to Americans, even to liberals, but there would be more than a little suspicion of their arrogance & ignorance, as there is around the world & in about half of America...

My source blames the Romanian president, Mr. Klaus Iohannis, & the gov’t run by his Liberal party (nothing to do with American liberalism), because they didn’t tell people to get vaccinated last Spring—there was no insistent public campaign ramping up to full vaccination (or nearly) of the adult population, but instead a lukewarm encouragement at best, then largely silence or indifference over the Summer, so that the state didn’t seem concerned with anybody except its own cadres, while people went on to their Summer vacations. His argument is as follows: A significant minority of the population—call them the collegiate cohort—will get vaccinated because that’s scientific opinion & that’s what they believe. (So it doesn’t matter if you went to college under Communism or the democracy, it doesn’t matter if you are in the your 30s or 60s.) Also, a significant minority will not get vaccinated, they more or less hate the idea as instinctively as the others dutifully line up. But the majority of Romanians are in-between & they can be persuaded by open, repeated appeals by the president, who is the only directly elected official in the country.

The assumption behind this argument is that the Romanian people don’t really care one way or the other, but they pay attention to what is demanded of them, & they will only respond to authority. Accordingly, they will interpret the absence of authoritative demands as a sign that there’s no real problem—the gov’t would do something about it otherwise. There is obedience in Romania, however grudging, but no public spirit, no faith animating the civil society independent of the state. Neither a liberal minority forcing people through institutions to do this or not do that—nor a democratic majority to which the press can appeal for purposes of arousing indignation. I am largely persuaded by my source’s account of gov’t & presidential failure in the Spring & Summer, though I don’t know enough myself; I am persuaded without reservations about the account of the relationship between the state & the population, so I have presented it in this schema. Now, my source also pointed out something that surprised him: Talking to other middle-class, college-educated people, he noticed they were impotently angry & fanatically pro-vaccine. These are all proud atheists, the cream of the Enlightenment crop, largely Progressive people, certainly free of any reactionary prejudices. Yet they didn’t expect the gov’t to govern, but instead volunteered to blame the people for disobedience & insisted on that point. The pieties of the American liberals are well represented in Bucharest, as this quick survey of opinion suggests, but without the support of the media & the institutions of the state, they are a great disappointment… My source also tried the following argument on them: It’s perfectly reasonable for a lot of people not to get vaccinated, aside from the ones who will brook no argument on the matter—some are too young to care, some don’t really fear their exposure or think the disease wouldn’t be so bad because their in good health, & then there are a number who really don’t care either way, because the risk of death doesn’t bother them, say because they are already very old. It’s no use blaming these people or getting hysterical, my source suggested, just accommodate them, mostly silently, & encourage everyone else to be part of the ever growing minority of adults who have got the vaccines & are doing ok: Focus on the good examples, report rising numbers & insist on increasing the rates of vaccination, treat it like a professional problem & an effort for democracy, to get to the majority, with medical & political authorities squarely behind it, & of course reminding everyone that the rest of the EU is doing the same. My source reports that the answers to this proposal ranged from the uncomprehending to the hysterical. At that point, he began to suspect that the follow the science crowd might be fanatical.

I have no experience myself with these kinds of people, but I have heard from a few reasonable friends, that some of their more scientifically enthusiastic friends or acquaintances have reacted, even in private conversation, in remarkably hysterical, punitive ways to such ordinary news as that some 30-somethings aren’t looking to get the vaccine, whether because they’ve had the disease or they’ve seen others get it & make an easy recovery. I do have this experience to relate—a number of friends, ranging from the single to the ones with large families, have caught the disease & it didn’t lead to anything fearful, even in the old, so they don’t much care either about the disease or the vaccine. I think these are normal people; they do not fear that their elders or their kids are facing extinction, they do not think they’re facing terrible personal risks; these are also people largely likelier to be skeptical of the vaccines, both because of the new technologies & because they are better informed than liberals, since they are skeptics.

To say the least, the middle classes are divided & the hysterical crowd is unable even to come to an agreement with people with similar education, habits of work, &c. Religion is indeed a very important barrier here, as in several other political matters. I guess, on the basis of these opinions, that the only way to get Romanians vaccinated would have been for the enthusiasts to treat the skeptics with respect & try to reach an agreement for a public health policy that would make generous exceptions & leave much to discretion, insisting only on persuading the old & the infirm. Fear does motivate many of these people to get vaccinated, though surely not enough, given the death toll—but fear is also what animates liberals & they are much less reasonable about it. It doesn’t occur to them that their political preferences are unpopular & can only be accommodated if they make every effort to seem reasonable, trustworthy when it comes to policy proposals & competent in administration.

It will not surprise you to learn that when it comes to competent administration, everything is a mess. In Romania, the first to get access to vaccines were state employees, not merely in hospitals (medical care is largely owned by the state); this was widely & correctly interpreted as the typical corruption of an oligarchy that prefers its cadres to the population; afterwards, the vulnerable &, last, the adult population at large. The people who wanted to get the vaccine, including many young people who were educated for cowardice in college & not only there, did do so in the Spring. After that, it would have been necessary for the state to bend every effort to persuade the ill to get the vaccine, which would have involved coordinating medical information & avoiding the hysteria that leads to people lying low to wait out the storm, so to speak. This was a massive failure, but a predictable one. Authorities could have learned from that failure &, by the late Summer, tried once more, but they wasted time most of the Summer & Autumn. Leaving the ill aside, the state would have had to encourage old people, then middle-aged people, to get vaccinated. In Romania, this would have required everything from bribing people & advertising to cajoling them & forcing them under the authority of the family doctors. Romanians treat doctors like masters, who in turn treat them, not infrequently, like slaves… This could all have been done without much trouble, yet commanding authority was utterly absent, because the gov’t was incredibly moralistic & accordingly very weak.

This, then, is the situation: The state expects next to nothing from the Romanian people, who expect next to nothing from the state. You may call this a libertarian utopia. There are some restrictions—masking in public institutions or on public transport &, more recently, proof of vaccination for public places like restaurants. They are obeyed, at least for the most part, but lackadaisically. Attempts to get people to wear masks in the streets are failing. Despite liberal hysteria, the most important fact you need to know about Romania right now is that people are not only not outraged by gov’t failure, they’re not even interested. The problems facing hospitals & the incredible death toll impress no one, except in the sense that it scares some people out of going to hospitals, unless it’s urgently necessary, since the hospitals are thought to be worse than the disease. This is often enough true, & not just this year. Romanians are poor, after all, without the benefits of moderation, which sometimes accrue to poor people… The collapse of the coalition gov’t, formed by parties we could charitably call centrist, is also of no interest to the population, since the crisis the gov’t should manage is itself not of interest. To the extent people are aware of these political machinations, they treat them with contempt & familiarity—politicians…

Liberals might prefer death to the dishonor of learning such a fact as public indifference in face of a public health crisis, but I think most of us, even when we cannot approve, do not find it difficult to understand. Enlightenment has failed in many places & that’s not always regrettable. Blaming Communism or Christianity is too stupid for words, but an understandable liberal instinct in face of a reality that transcends modern moralism. Were Romanians not Christian, it would make no difference; Romanians who aren’t churchgoers don’t care any more than the few practicing Orthodox do, even though they might not make a principled stand out of it; moreover, the Church is established in Romania as part of the state, the priests are employees of the gov’t, & if the state wanted to, it could get the support it needs for vaccination—after all, Easter was cancelled in 2020, same as with the Catholics, since Jesus doesn’t seem quite as urgently important as public health. (Read my report on Romanian Orthodoxy here.) As for Communism, that is, tyranny, it is not the problem, but the most obvious solution—the state could have mandated vaccines & enforced them without too much trouble, just like in other European countries where the state is expected to be despotic, for example, France. But nobody really bothered. As for blaming fake news or conspiracy theories—this is just liberals realizing that globalization tech like Facebook or Whatsapp can be used by anybody, including people they hate, without giving liberals the power of mind-control.

I don’t think it’s an accident that liberal hysteria & foolishness should be acute in a case like Romania. Precisely because nothing is at stake, liberalism reveals itself here. There are forms of corruption that are immune to moralism, a very important thing to know about politics. Consider the American examples of rich liberals enjoying luxuries, with or without masks or vaccines, while making mad demands on the rest of the country. That’s what I meant by suggesting Romania might be the libertarian utopia—everyone can act, or aspire to act, as rich liberals do in America. Surely, it’s corruption, but it’s largely live & let live; Americans are more vaccinated than Romanians—but Romanians are much less hysterical or hateful of each other. There is much to regret in the suffering of the Romanian people; much of it is self-inflicted or tolerated out of weakness; but there is nothing liberals can offer by way of analysis, to say nothing of solutions. Partly, this resourcelessness comes because they do not recognize that their hysteria comes from the way they see themselves in such examples (although this is an ordinary part of liberal storytelling, called psychoanalyzing); but the greater part comes because liberals no longer desire to govern, they want only the privileges of gov’t. Hysterical speeches cannot endlessly conceal weak deeds, but they are the kind of vice that does make that weakness worse. What the epidemic reveals is that the conquest of nature has failed; in America, it makes people mad, because their expectations were so high; in Romania, there are no expectations…