Do You Really Need a Tomato?

On the theology of Farhad Manjoo

F arhad 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.

Nobody needs a tomato.

Nobody needs fine Au Lit sheets or a Tesla. Nobody needs to go to the moon. Nobody needs more than one pair of shoes. Nobody needs another self-righteous New York Times columnist.

How about another book? How about an Internet connection? Do you really need . . . to be a blue-nosed busybody?

Manjoo has been to a lot of the same places I have, and no doubt he has seen what real poverty looks like around the world, and therefore must appreciate how silly the question “Do you really need . . .?” really is. The answer is pretty much always “No.” You’d be shocked by what people can get by on — and scandalized by what they do get by on.

I have not had Farhad Manjoo’s life, but I’ve earned my airline status. I recently was obliged to compile a list of all my foreign travel over the past few years for the Department of Homeland Security (immigration proceedings; I’m not about to get shipped off to Gitmo or some other oubliette — as far as I know!), and it really adds up when you put it all down in a sworn statement. Some of that has been work, but a lot of it has been fun.

And it is fun. I do not intend to put on a cilice in response to my air travel — I intend to get an upgrade. I’m glad that the world is there and I live in a time when people like me get to enjoy it.

Ingratitude is a sin, too, so spare me your first-class sanctimony. If I want to do penance, I’ll fly coach.

I have missed traveling in the year lost to the plague. Not the actual flying so much: I was an adult before I ever set foot on an airplane, and flying has always been tedious to me, even with the nicest amenities. (Though I was at the time something pretty close to literally penniless, one of my first flights was a first-class trip to New York City on Walt Disney’s dime, for a film junket back when those were still a thing. That might have been the first time I ever thought seriously about earning more money.) Commercial air travel is the worst: Never mind yachts or big houses or McLarens or all that beautiful stuff made by A. Lange & Söhne, flying private is how my disposable income would be disposed of if I had J. K. Rowling’s money.

Or John Kerry’s expense account. The former secretary of state and current climate-change czar was roundly denounced as a sinner for taking a private jet to various greenie-weenie events around the world, including a trip to Iceland to pick up a medal he was being awarded. Channeling the spirit of a million apparatchiks before him, Kerry insisted that private jets are “the only choice for someone like me.” I have felt exactly the same way on the few occasions when I have been on one! It’s the only way to fly.

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.