“There is a lot of wailing about the decline of American community among the commentariat, but precious little time is spent figuring out how to go about building new communities with healthier norms.”
or, “Quick Question, Well, More of a Comment than a Question”
Last week Mr. Douthat published a piece entitled “Decadence and the Intellectuals” which I missed because I was getting my first COVID vaccine and also because I haven’t ever read any of his substack posts.
But then one of its subjects, Mr. Greer at Scholar’s Stage, responded to the piece — and as I was not being vaccinated this morning, and as I do follow his blog, I went back and read it.
It’s a good piece and I recommend it, though a bit niche — a discussion of the strength of the literary tradition. It’s all couched in Mr. Douthat’s eternal quest against “decadence”.
For a while I have become increasingly discomforted by … something. The type of things that folks like Mr. Douthat try to fit under the label “decadence” (and I do think his model produces some good observations!). As he himself notes, a lot of these things also worry leftists (ie, people more likely to be my meatspace peers #humblebrag), seen as symptoms of “late capitalism”. I don’t really know what I’d call my concern. I guess I think of it as a sort of ossification, a decline in societal vitality.
I am not under any illusion that I would have preferred to live in any time other than this one. We (as a country) are wealthy, at the height of military strength, and closer to realizing government founded on respect for the equal worth of every person than ever before. We (as a species) are less stricken by poverty, disease, or hunger than ever before.
But everyone’s freaking out about losing the hegemonic moment, or entrenched inequality, or increasingly sclerotic government, or race relations balkanizing, or democracy ending … and they all seem sorta right, despite all the progress. Our society has made incredible gains, but it feels like it has lost some things in the process, and in any case feels like it is losing steam.
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In Mr. Greer’s old post on responding to criticisms of Title IX, he identifies these specific debates as part of a larger historical trend towards increased bureaucratization, in a very specific sense — over the course of the 20th century, more and more was handled by impersonal bureaucracies, and the rate of participation in organizations in which one would be expected to have a say and a vote declined.
In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?”
This seems to me to be both obviously true and obviously not great, even if (as I think is the case) those impersonal bureaucracies were involved in realizing many of the above-lauded societal gains.
It is from this piece of his that this piece of mine takes its title — a quote from lower down. It is embedded in a suggestion that changing the way we police children at play, and trying to encourage more relaxed norms in our neighborhoods, could be one constructive response to these trends. This seems to me like a decent enough idea, as far as it goes. I don’t know, I’m not a parent, but these sorts of thoughts appeal to me. I have a hard time seeing how they could significantly alter the results of a century of history. Helicopter parenting is a result, not cause of, those changes. (I recognize Mr. Greer does not suggest otherwise, but forget it, I’m rolling).
We’re talking about really vast shifts which are the cumulative results of massive material and cultural changes. As touched on in “On Laws and Gods”, a more recent product of Mr. Greer, these changes — and this sort of alienation from political practice — occurred over a period of the nation becoming more industrialized, urbanized, and unified in media and cultural concerns. It strikes me that we can no more fix our estranged relationship from political power by raising our children to end their own fights than we can by attending more town hall meetings (even though I approve of both activities as good in and of themselves). We’re just… past that point.
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A lot of this is very abstract in a way that is unhelpful. Because these are all very broad concerns, there’s obviously a lot of different stuff at work. “Kludgeocracy in America” is a great piece when it comes to a handful of concrete issues with our system of government, where the issue is not a long captivity in boomer culture. There are a lot of sources of stagnation in our society today which might only be related in that they appear superficially to be. Still, there is something in me that yearns for a unified theory of revitalization, and a banner under which to fight.
To finally return to the piece which kicked off this thought process — Mr. Douthat, like all good op-ed writers, produces work defined by a couple of recurring obsessions. One is his belief that
[C]ultural golden ages hold traditional and novel forces in creative tension: The problem, as I see it, is that this tension snapped during the revolutions of the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers … were too culturally triumphant and their elders put up too little resistance, such that the fruitful tension between innovation and tradition gave way to confusion, mediocrity, sterility.
We can quibble over whether or not he is correct about this grand theory of stagnation. I am not sure I agree with it. I do value Mr. Douthat for his identification of what seem to me obvious symptoms of this stagnation — one of which strikes me as particularly troubling this morning.
I think this frame applies more widely, to various intellectual worlds beyond theology, where certain forms of creative deconstruction went so far as to make it difficult to find one’s way back to the foundations required for new forms of creativity. Certainly that seems the point of a figure like Jordan Peterson: It’s not as a systematizer or the prophet of a new philosophy that he’s earned his fame, but as popularizer of old ideas, telling and explicating stories (the Bible! Shakespeare!) and drawing moral lessons from the before-times that would have been foundational to educated people not so long ago. Likewise with the Catholic post-liberals, or the Marx reclamation project on the left. It’s a reaching-backward to the world before the 1960s revolution, a recovery that isn’t on its own sufficient to make the escape from repetition but might be the necessary first step.
I am feeling very attacked right now! This “back to first principles” approach has been dominating my thinking for some time — precisely, since the 2016 election, which made it pretty clear to me that my rosy thinking regarding the dominance of liberalism was not correct. In much the same way as Peterson, or Marx stans, or twitter trads, I’ve spent a lot of time reading old shit — though in my case, this means Revolutionary- and Civil War-era American history. Everything from “We used to value Industry and Progress!” to “If you read what the Founders said on impeachment…” — if only we could remember the things we forget, retrieve the baby thrown out with the bathwater...
I think there is some value to this way of thinking — I mean, it first just makes one realize that not everything is great right now and that our undeniable progress does not cancel those losses out. It’s also probably a first step to any course correction, as Mr. Douthat notes. It’s also valuable when the “we” who did the forgetting really just means “people on twitter”, and when the values you’d like to reclaim still sound pretty good to most normies.
But it strikes me this morning that this is all just another round of telling ourselves to parent slightly differently, or to attend more local town halls. Things did not change because we simply forgot to not change them. They changed because the world has changed, and all the niche solutions I really wish could be brought about by turning back the clock a bit are just as unlikely to happen as small-town democracy in a nationalized, and increasingly globalized, political context.
It’s all well and good to yearn for a time when we didn’t face the problems we do, but to solve them we need to think creatively about how the material and cultural realities of our moment could be used to create a better world. We have to be grounded in the values we hold dear, but actually build something with them.
I dunno how to do that, though. I don’t remember the essay, but there was someone who wrote something about how artistic modernism and mass production could be used to impose a sort of uniformity — but could also be used to liberate artistic potential in all directions. I guess it’s a similar sort of thing. Maybe we need to be looking for the potential for revitalization in the seeming restraints holding it back. I dunno.
