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There were armed protesters at the Michigan State House yesterday. This is not a heartening development. While there ought to be a robust conversation about 1) when and how to lift the lockdown, and 2) anti-democratic trends in our emergency responses to the crisis, in some states more pronounced than others . . . while, as I say, there should be a robust conversation about these things, robust conversation when one side is armed and threatening violence is not likely to happen.
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I mentioned my step-dad yesterday. I noted how he was skeptical about politics and politicians. In this way I suppose he was a conservative. But he had great confidence in science as an engine for progress. In his lifetime he'd seen technology revolutionize daily life. Machines lightened our daily workload, made life easier, solved our problems. When I worried about pollution or overpopulation he'd say, "The scientists will figure something out. They always do."
But Aldous Huxley clued us in that science could be just as much the hand-maiden of authoritarianism as anything else. Still, there is still plenty of science-ism around. That is, a religious confidence in science the problem-solver, science the savior of mankind.
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There is so much good stuff here, let me urge you to read every word. First, Douthat's definition of decadence.
I’m following a definition proposed 20 years ago by the late cultural historian Jacques Barzun, who argued that we should understand “decadence” as referring to periods when wealthy and dynamic societies enter into stalemate, stagnation, and decay—when they lose a clear sense of both purpose and future possibility. Which doesn’t exclude scenarios like rapid moral decline or fascist or communist takeover: a decadent society is vulnerable to both. But under decadence you’re often more likely to get a kind of moral or cultural mediocrity than either radical villainy or sainthood.
And this:
I think a lot about the way that September 11, which happened when I was in college, made a whole cohort of young people and intellectuals feel like this was the end of decadence that we’d been waiting for, that at last there would be some grand purpose to life, some civilizational struggle for our times. And what came of that? Not an American renewal, not a successful crusade for democracy and human rights: just a lot of dead people in the Middle East and a war that’s devolved into the droning of terrorists and the perpetual management of frozen conflicts. That’s an example of what in the book I call the perils of anti-decadence: we can and should be discontented with our situation, but we should recognize all the ways the revolutionary or crusading alternatives can end like the Iraq war, or for that matter World War I—in death and futility and grief.
I had the protesters in Michigan on my mind when I read this quote from Douthat, where he talks about whether decadence might lead to revolution, as it did in Russia in 1917, or in the Weimar Republic in the early 30s. He gives several reasons, including this:
Finally, we have the internet as a kind of safe playspace for revolutionaries—a zone where you can rebel against decadence by cosplaying 1917 or 1968, so that the impulses that lead to revolution in prior eras might end up channeled into virtual extremism instead. Occasionally online radicalism does leak into the real world, in terrible ways—as incel or white supremacist violence, or the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to murder Republican politicians. But those figures seem to me more like outliers than forerunners; so long as the internet keeps getting more immersive, I think we’re more likely to respond to institutional and cultural decay by play-acting the Russian Revolution rather than actually enacting it.
Read it all. Especially Douthat's answer to the final question, "Where do you find hope?"
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