Society

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent for Christians in the West. Many of us will give up sweets or video games or online shopping. Some intrepid souls will even give up coffee. I tried that last year, but my priest reminded me that my wife didn’t choose “dealing with a crabby husband” as her penance, so I found another penance. It’s a little different for our brothers in the East. Their season of fasting begins on Meatfare Sunday and ends on Pascha (Easter). They’ll give up meat… then dairy… then fish…then wine... then oil. They’ll go from eating three meals to two, and then from two to one — and their one meal is basically just a peanut butter sandwich and carrot sticks. The most devout won’t eat at all from Holy Thursday until Easter Sunday.

Christopher Hitchens, allergic to the idea that secular regimes might actually be more bloodthirsty than religious ones, infamously attempted to blame the atrocities of Stalin’s Soviet Union on the Russian Orthodox Church. It was an end run worthy of the NFL Hall of Fame, and no doubt Hitch would be attempting something similar if he’d lived to see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He would be wrong, but as Putin fights to reclaim territory once held by the Soviet and tsarist empires, the church appears to be conducting its own parallel campaign of spiritual imperialism. There’s little doubt Putin sees the church as politically useful.

Deep in the gloomy last days of winter, Ash Wednesday once again descends upon us. Dutiful Catholics worldwide, soaked with enough sugar and spirits from Mardi Gras to last forty days and forty nights, will drag themselves to church to have their hungover heads smudged with ashes and be reminded that “You are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” Ah, Lent. As a Catholic myself, this time of year always fills me with mixed emotions, sort of like going to the gym: I know it’s good for me, I know I’ll feel better afterward, but the Good Lord knows I’m no saint…let’s get on with it already! Lent is a season that bewilders a lot of non-Catholics. Fasting? Abstaining from meat? Almsgiving? It's 2022, guys.

Over New Year’s, I came down with the Omicron. Or as I put it to my wife, civilization as I knew it almost came crashing down around me. Why are men so bad at being sick? I ask that fully aware that even saying the word “men” is enough these days to get you tossed off a college campus by a mob of tots screaming about how they identify as Chevy Impalas. The fun and flirty battle of the sexes has given way to an assault on the very concept of sex itself. And patriarchal oppressors versus birthing people just doesn’t have that same snappy “Summer Nights” ring to it. Yet even allowing for the ongoing abolition of gender, the difference between how men and women get sick is one of the few sex distinctions we’re still allowed to notice.

The introduction of body cameras as a staple of the police uniform has been a transformative piece of tech. After just eight years of their use, it’s hard to argue against the impact of body cams in stemming police misconduct. According to a recent study by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing, civilian complaints about police misconduct are down 17 percent since the introduction of body cams. Physical encounters, whether fatal or non-fatal, are down 10 percent. It was a struggle to get here. Many cops said that complaint statistics did not justify the indignity of policing the police taping every interaction they have with the public. A vocal minority countered: “If everything is so cool, we will see it.

I live in a blue city in a blue state, meaning I can't so much as walk to the CVS without seeing a certain sign in half a dozen front yards. You know the one: "IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE: BLACK LIVES MATTER, SCIENCE IS REAL, WAR IS PEACE, MY LIFE FOR AIUR" and whatever the hell else they're on about these days. The sign has become so commonplace, so utterly oblivious to its own irony, that it feels less like a show of defiance than a profession of faith. Think of it as the left's very own Nicene Creed, the statement of belief that Catholics recite every time they go to mass. One imagines a congregation of the pink-haired standing in pews: "I believe in Science, and in xis only son Dr. Fauci, creator of BIPOCs and TERFs...

“Imagine taking a pill that makes you instantly feel relaxed, and then imagine that when you stop taking it, you feel worse than when you first started.” That's how one user describes benzodiazepines, a psychoactive drug prescribed to treat insomnia, anxiety and seizures. But while “benzos” can have some short-term benefits, habitual use can cause long-term damage. Another user writes that his benzodiazepine addiction was “harder to overcome than heroin.” A young professional I interviewed said she'd never had addiction issues before trying benzodiazepines, which were prescribed by her doctor.

I was five weeks pregnant when I found out. At that point, it’s nothing more than a little gestational sac of potential. My ob-gyn informed me it wasn’t technically viable and, given my age and history — I’d had an ectopic pregnancy in 2019—not to get my hopes up. “How do I make it stick?” I asked. “Honey, if I knew the answer to that I’d be a billionaire with a private island,” she said. “Yes, yes of course.” I felt stupid. It was seeing that sac for the first time that I felt the stirrings of a longing in my heart that terrified me. It still terrifies me. In fact, it has always terrified me. Still in shock and trying to guard my heart, I kept repeating psychotically, nervously, “Well, we’ll see!

It seems like we can’t help getting attached to robots. It also seems like the people making the robots are counting on that. In the 2015 video game Fallout 4, one of the factions with which the player can align him- or herself is “the Railroad,” an organization that helps seemingly sentient androids escape from the lab in which they’re created. A friend of mine mocked me mercilessly for aligning myself with the “SJWs” of the Railroad and insisted that the androids — who spoke eloquently of their emotions, friendships, and aspirations — actually had the same moral worth as a toaster. I laughed, but secretly still felt I’d made the right choice. Surely it was always better to err on the side of greater empathy.

Famed ant specialist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson passed away on December 26, age ninety-two. He came to national attention in 1975 with the publication Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which is one of those books that steamrolled into public consciousness. It may not have been as revolutionary as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but not for want of trying. Wilson had something new to say about how evolution works and it provoked responses every bit as harsh as those Darwin encountered a century earlier. He was especially reviled by his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin, one of the founders of molecular evolutionary theory, who saw no validity at all in Wilson’s interpretation of social structures as embodying evolutionary strategies.

Unless you happen to live under a rock, this week you became aware of Dr. Robert Malone. He’s a virologist and immunologist who has become a lightning rod of controversy — and for good reason. Alongside laying claim to the invention of mRNA vaccines, Dr. Malone has spoken about a hysteria that has swept the United States, something he refers to as mass formation psychosis. Although I agree with many points Dr. Malone has made, and I believe that many of the pieces written about him have been needlessly vicious, the idea of mass formation psychosis is plain wrong. Let me explain why. Psychosis, an abnormal condition of the mind, renders a person unable to differentiate between the real and the imaginary.

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the Covid pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if “wet” wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit. Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. “Nature is sending us a message.