The Choice
In the late-1960s, Americans learned that the Soviet Union had embarked on a program to build more intercontinental ballistic missiles — ICBMs — to reach military parity with the United States. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson gave the American public a new piece of context to go with that information, warning that the Soviets were building a ring of anti-ballistic missile defenses around Moscow. The implication was that people building more long-range nuclear missiles while improving their own defenses against the same kind of weapon were preparing for a first strike, developing an integrated system that allowed them to launch their missiles but shield themselves against our return volley. In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, and in the depths of the Vietnam War, the world appeared to be a bleak and dangerous place, though the question of the bleakness always depended to a considerable degree on personal choice.
Sitting on a boat off the coast of Florida in 1968, three musicians — David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner — seized on the image they saw around them, and wrote a song about fleeing a land ruined by nuclear war.
”Wooden Ships” was an escape fantasy with gorgeous harmonies, a story frightened people told themselves about getting away: “We are leaving, you don't need us.”
Neil Young, not yet a giant piece of shit who responded to disagreement by demanding that other people be silenced, wrote a song describing “Wooden Ships” as a “hippie dream.” But more powerfully and directly, Jackson Browne expressed disgust at the fantasy of leaving the world to die:
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go I understand
Jackson Browne thought the thing to do, if you believed the world was destroying itself, was to try to prevent the world from destroying itself: to stand and fight, not to dream about fleeing. It’s fair to think that the SALT talks were more meaningful, in practical terms, than musicians trading songs about a social theory, but he made an argument for the rejection of fantasy, for a refusal to indulge the desire to escape a dilemma by abandoning other people to it. Leave if you want, but I’ll be right here with the others who stay.
In our own moment, people are again arguing for flight, and I’ve mostly felt considerable sympathy for their argument. The current desire for withdrawal from crushingly obvious mass hysteria has much deeper roots, especially on the cultural right; see for example, Paul Weyrich’s 1999 open letter to other conservatives, arguing that the right had lost the culture war and needed to pursue “some sort of quarantine.” Comparably, though he insisted he wasn’t arguing for a retreat from the world, Rod Dreher was writing before the pandemic about the Benedict Option — about a cultural withdrawal into “monastic wisdom to build intentional communities of counter-cultural witness in a post-Christian culture.” And Gab founder Andrew Torba is talking often and length, in an idea I find useful but in terms I’m not at all inclined to embrace, about “building a parallel society.” That last example, if you’d like to click on the link, is a particularly useful bridge linking ideas of cultural contamination to more recent ideas about resisting medical tyranny.
So the idea of leaving has a past, it has an origin, and it has a seductiveness. We have people talking about quarantining against quarantine, about withdrawal into normal life in normal-feeling places to escape from endless medical hysteria, and some of them are making that argument at the tail end of a decades-older discussion about a more general withdrawal from a broken society. My suspicion is that the obvious flight from blue states over pandemic measures has a bunch of other meanings.
I wake up with a different attitude on different days, but today my guess is that the Canadian truckers have the right answer: We’re going to sit right here and have this argument with you. They persist in this choice even in the face of an undiluted stream of Justintrudeauness, a force of stupidity and evil that could melt diamonds with the density of its banality.
It’s miserable to argue with lunatics, and to go on arguing with them. We probably still have to do it. We may fantasize about a choice, but we may not actually have one.