Farhad Manjoo was born in South Africa to a family of Indian origin, but he is what you might call radically assimilated: He isn’t a lukewarm, run-of-the-mill, modern, multicultural American — he is a bona fide Puritan, right up there with Jonathan Edwards, and he has a sin to confess: He used to fly — a lot.
“I see now how I’ve sinned,” he writes in the New York Times.
Get that sinner a scarlet letter — or two: “FF” for “Frequent Flyer.”
Manjoo, who sheepishly (but not really sheepishly — the kids call it a “humblebrag,” I believe) admits to having jetted from San Francisco to London for a one-hour book talk and from San Francisco to Hong Kong to Singapore for two trivial lunch meetings, has had a change of heart, a come-to-carbon-neutral-substitute-Jesus moment, and he wants to build a world with less international jet-setting and more stay-at-home ass-sitting, more Zooming and less sonic-booming. (I know, but maybe they’ll bring back the Concorde.) Like its cousin misery, asceticism loves company, and so Manjoo proposes to begin his campaign of moral improvement with . . . you peons, of course.
“Do you really need to fly?” the headline asks. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you need to mind your own goddamned business.
But, why not play the game? Do you really need a tomato? You can live a perfectly happy life without one. The tomato, too, was once regarded as sinful: Europeans once thought of it as excessively voluptuous, associating it with the forbidden fruit of the Bible, believing alternately that it was poisonous or an aphrodisiac. Tomatoes apparently used to be sexy, which probably is why “tomato” used to be slang for an attractive woman.
. . .
The hypocrisy of John Kerry is not a very interesting subject. (John Kerry and Teresa Heinz are, to be sure, damned peculiar people: She’s his second heiress, and he’s her second senator.) Neither is Farhad Manjoo’s 40-something inclination to settle into a cozy place now that he has done his own adventuring. What is interesting is that when Manjoo describes his travel as “sin,” he means it.
We are in the midst of a great national moral panic. It is a secular moral panic, but one of the interesting things about American political culture is that our secular social movements almost always simply recapitulate old-fashioned Christian practice in some bizarre new way. The green cathedral has its own stations of the cross and liturgy, its sacrament of reconciliation (carbon offsets), its saints and martyrs (Greta Thunberg), its sacred scripture, its confession of faith and apostles’ creed.
(You’d better believe it has its own pissant inquisition, too, although it stinks more of Salem’s gallows than it does of Torquemada’s dungeons.)
And, because this is mostly an imitation of American Christianity we are talking about, it has its own style of competitive holiness.
The Wall Street Journal recently had an amusing article about the great actor Bryan Cranston, who went to great lengths to get an LEED-platinum certification (meaning a proclamation of extreme greenie-weenieness) on the multi-million-dollar beach house he built on the coast in Southern California. The house — and its furnishings — are now for sale, if you have $5 million burning a hole in your pocket. Do you know what is much, much more environmentally friendly than building a beach house with modern green innovations? Building nothing. Bryan Cranston does not need to live on the beach — he could live perfectly comfortably in a 600-square-foot apartment in Altadena and take the bus to work.
Whatever this is about, it isn’t about carbon-dioxide emissions.
What is it about? Remember what the pharisee says when he encounters the publican at the temple: “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are.”
I say the same thing when I watch those poor bastards tromping miserably back to seat 39B.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
