There are two measures of a civilization. The first is the physical expanse of its possessions. The second is the vitality and robustness of its spirit. Sohrab Amari’s sense of desolation and depression in New York suggests a fragility at odds with the solid steel and stone.
The pandemic and the lockdowns are highly complex events and, as the social theorists might say, overdetermined. But one clear factor is the behavior of a laptop class that lives in fear of risk, with no transcendent horizon and “the consolations neither of Christ nor of Seneca,” as my friend Rusty Reno likes to say. That class seems prepared to desolate a place like New York City in service of safety-ism, to reorganize our way of life around its own neo-gnostic preferences, its horror of embodied relationships and inherited obligations—including obligations to place.
Sohrab Amari
It’s always disquieting to turn on the noise filter and find no signal. Perhaps it’s a passing mood. It may even be a blessing in disguise. Humanity has always fled from desolation. It may have taken a pandemic for a nihilistic West to gaze at last into the mirror and wonder if perhaps it had forgotten something very important.