Tag: Ross Douthat

It’s been a down year for the movies, at the box office and otherwise, and there’s a certain desperate cheeriness to the Times‘ critics “best of the year” roundups. “Was this a good year for the movies or what?” Manohla Dargis asks, after reeling off about forty of her favorites, and then adds that “while industry reporters have been busy filing doom-and-gloom analyses . . . a lot of filmgoers have been enjoying an exceptional year of movies.”

Well, it depends on what you mean by “a lot.” Of her forty faves, only two – Batman Begins, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t very good, either, and The Forty-Year-Old Virgin – could be reasonably classified as “big hits,” i.e. movies that made upwards of a hundred million dollars. Two others – Wallace and Gromit and Red Eye, neither one a flick for the ages – broke fifty million; In Her Shoes and the overrated A History of Violence each broke thirty million (barely); and most of the rest didn’t even gross ten million. (There’s still time for Munich and Brokeback Mountain, though unlike Frank Rich I wouldn’t bet on the latter’s mass appeal . . .)

I don’t mean to suggest that a movie only counts as “good” if it passes a certain box-office threshold. And it was an excellent year for small-budget, small-grossing movies: I haven’t seen some of the holiday releases yet, but my provisional top ten would include Grizzly Man, Junebug, The Squid and the Whale and Capote, none of which were ever likely to attract a mass audience. But even so, it doesn’t speak well of the American film industry that nearly all the finest movies of the year – at least if you believe the Times critics – were art-house gems and foreign films, while most of the industry’s hits were sequels and remakes, riding built-in audiences to compensate for their mediocrity. This is true every year, to a certain extent, but 2005 seemed to particularly lack for a slate of really good films that aimed at, and found, a mass audience. Time and again, a movie would seem poised to hit that sweet spot, only to be exposed as a dud. Kingdom of Heaven could have been the next Gladiator; instead it was the next Alexander. Syriana aimed to do for the oil business what Traffic did for the drug trade – but it didn’t. Narnia found an audience, but it was no Lord of the Rings. And so on. (Nor, glancing over the year’s films, do I see many modest hits – or modest disappointments – that are likely candidates to become classics on DVD or cable, like Braveheart or L.A. Confidential or The Shawshank Redemption.)

Still, there is one bit of good news for movie-watchers – the Slate Movie Club, the highlight of the year for highly amateurish cinephiles like myself, has just kicked off. (Though alas, without the crazy/wonderful presence of Armond White . . .)

– posted by Ross

Julian wonders whether non-Beltway insiders understand that most prominent people have ghostwriters penning “their” op-eds, books, etc., and whether there should be more outrage over this quasi-dishonesty. For my part, it’s never bothered me that a Times op-ed by, say, a U.S. Senator or the Secretary of Health and Human Services probably wasn’t written by the eminence themself – but I was shocked to find myself, during my first year in D.C., being introduced to a guy who ghostwrote for a syndicated columnist. I’m not sure what the difference is, exactly – I suppose there’s just something about a regular byline that made me assume, foolishly, that the “author” was writing the thing by himself.

This has been a Gregg Easterbrook pet peeve for many years, incidentally – though he tends to focus on praising celebrities and pols who credit their ghostwriters (like John McCain), and pillorying those who don’t (like Hillary Clinton, on both It Takes a Village and Living History).

FOR UNTO US A CHILD IS GIVEN: Unless, that is, you’re in Japan:

Japan’s population declined this year for the first time since the country began keeping demographic records in 1899, according to preliminary figures released by the government this week.

The decrease, which specialists say signals the start of an era of shrinking population, occurred two years earlier than had been expected . . . The number of deaths outnumbered births by 10,000 this year, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Excluding wartime figures, the number of births, at 1.067 million, was the lowest since records have been kept; births dropped 44,000 from the previous year.

. . . Japan’s current population of 128 million is expected to fall to 100 million by 2050 and to 64 million by 2100 if current trends continue.

And on that cheery note, Merry Christmas!

– posted by Ross

Unfortunately, I think Matt Yglesias is right, and this Fred Barnes column – on why most Americans aren’t more optimistic about the state of the economy – doesn’t do the work it sets out to do. Maybe there’s plenty of micro-level data showing that things are getting better for the average worker, and the Bush Administration just isn’t talking up the right data, but Barnes’s examples don’t prove that point:

Yet there’s a strong case Bush and his aides can make for impressive economic gains at the individual level. True, rising healthcare costs have cut into the gains, but tax reductions have helped. By citing micro numbers or fleshing out macro numbers, the administration would convey this message: it’s not just you who’s doing well. Most Americans are. The country is.

For instance, there’s the growth in per capita disposable personal income from $26,424 in 2003 to $27,001 in 2004 and $27,365 in 2005. That’s not all. In November, hourly wages were up 3.2 percent. And people are able to spend more. Real personal consumption spending has risen nearly 3 percent in the past year. True, these last two numbers are macro, but they’re ones people can understand.

But if the last two numbers are macro, then we’re left with only the growth in per capita disposable personal income to prove the micro-point – and any “per capita” number is easily skewed by large gains in the upper brackets that don’t necessarily extend to the median worker. Which is exactly what’s been happening of late, so far as I can tell – the well-off are getting better-off, and the median American income is stagnating. This isn’t disastrous news – as Matt notes, we’re a pretty rich country, and even with some stagnation our median income is the envy of most of the world. And the rich-getting-richer phenomenon isn’t necessarily the fault of George W. Bush or the GOP in general, as even Paul Krugman was obliged to admit recently. But it’s still something that Republicans need to grapple with more seriously than they have – because the trend is likely to continue, as globalization drive down wages for blue-collar workers while the premium for a college diploma goes up and up; and because a lot of those median-income Americans with stagnating incomes belong to the GOP’s base.

– posted by Ross

Julian raises an interesting point – is it even meaningful to talk about a “culture war” in the internet age, when the idea of a common mass culture seems as dead as Betamax? This was Terry Teachout’s point, too, in a recent Commentary essay that’s unfortunately in their for-pay archives (bastards!), but that I tried to summarize and respond to here. Essentially, Teachout’s thesis is that “the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists,” and that instead “we now have a ‘balkanized’ group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways.”

I think this is true, up a point – nobody who’s wandered through Comcast’s 300-odd channels or wasted a day online would deny that American culture is in certain ways more fragmented than ever before. But I think there’s still something of a common culture, broadly construed – or more accurately, I think there are two cultures, one highbrow and one lowbrow, which interact in various ways but which are increasingly distinct from one another. These two common cultures aren’t necessarily defined in terms of a single television show that everyone watches, but each one has a set of shared values, assumptions, interests and habits – all of which may manifest themselves in a wide variety of shows and books and movies and websites, but which are held in “common” nonetheless. So for instance, one set of highbrow types might spend their spare time reading literary bloggers, while another set spends theirs downloading Arcade Fire or British Sea Power from iTunes. But both of these sets probably consider the New Yorker the last word in highbrow journalism, read the Sunday Times regularly, aspire to send their kids to elite universities, laugh along with Jon Stewart (even if they don’t watch The Daily Show every night) and so on and so forth. They don’t share all the same tastes, in other words, but they speak the same cultural language.

And this is even more true in the lowbrow realm, where people are more likely to have their tastes in music, film and books – and their attitudes and mores – shaped by an increasingly homogenized and consolidated culture industry. The front table at Barnes and Noble narrows the options for readers; the book tables at Wal-Mart even more so. Local radio stations are owned by national behemoths; the movie industry is dependent for its profits on 15 or 20 blockbuster movies every year; and there are 300 channels, sure – but the fact that one person watches “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” while another watches “Trading Spaces” and a third favors “Live with Regis and Kelly” doesn’t mean that they aren’t partaking of a common culture.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, REINHOLD NIEBUHR?: So, returning to the original question, what does this mean for Christianity? Simply, this: that America has a lowbrow culture that’s still pretty religious, but whose religiosity tends to be, well, lowbrow – a lowest-common-denominator mix of self-help spirituality and New Age mush. And the highbrow culture, meanwhile, isn’t religious at all: it’s not anti-religion, exactly, but it definitely considers religious belief an oddity and an anachronism, and orthodox Christian belief dangerously close to fanaticism. Which is one of the reasons that most religiosity in America is so lowbrow – because the highly intelligent people who might elevate the level of religious discourse have their faith leeched out of them by their immersion in the highbrow, in its assumptions and its prejudices. And the people who complain about this – about how we don’t have any more Reinhold Niebuhrs, and isn’t it a tragedy? – tend to be exactly the people who in an earlier era would have been the Niebuhrs, but who now partake of what Richard John Neuhaus once called “the pleasures of regretful unbelief.”

What we need, then – and by “we” I mean Christians, though I obviously think there would be benefits to non-Christians as well – is a more highbrow Christianity, and one that doesn’t prostrate itself on the altar of political correctness, as token highbrow Catholics like Garry Wills are wont to do. Perhaps “culture war” is the wrong word to use in this context, since we don’t necessarily need more Christians making the case against same-sex marriage, or pushing all their chips into the battle over courthouse displays in Alabama. We need more Christians writing good novels and essays and doctoral theses, and television shows and movies and music – all of which might inter alia make the case for a Christian understanding of, say, sexuality, but which would be primarily works of art and intellect and not polemics, creating a cultural space rather than just a political movement.

We can’t expect any favors: The doors of highbrow American culture have been closed against that sort of thing for decades now, and you can’t expect the New Yorker or the New York Times to just throw them open – why should they? They’re content with the world they’ve made, in which Philip Pullman is a hero, C.S. Lewis is a sad “prisoner” of his religious belief, science is always under assault from fundamentalism and monotheism is an easy whipping boy for all of history’s ills. Christians keep insisting that this world has it all wrong, of course, but it’s not enough to say it – we need to show them.

But there’s no reason to be discouraged – after all, we’ve done it before . . .

– posted by Ross

Since Julian and I probably don’t see eye to eye about . . . well, a lot of things, Matt Yglesias asks us for more brutal, no-holds-barred debating on the great issues of the day. Unfortunately, my co-blogger hasn’t said anything I radically disagree with (I’m agnostic on the great wiretapping debate), so I’m reduced to nitpicking. But I’ll take a stab at it. Here’s something Julian wrote, on Monday:

Let me suggest as a final point, though, that there may be a connection between “the real de-Christianization of Christmas” via “the frenetic pace of modern life, and the crassifying tendencies of commerce,” which bothers Ross, and an insistence on a faith-saturated public sphere. It is utterly mysterious to me when people of faith exult that some sectarian symbol-a Ten Commandments momument or an invocation of “one nation under God” in a schoolchild’s morning fealty oath-survives judicial scrutiny as mere “ceremonial deism.” Isn’t that precisely an acknowledgement that, by a kind of inverted transubstantiation, those symbols have been stripped of their meaning? The problem with pushing to embed your favored symbols in the mass culture is that you cede control of them to the mass culture-which I rather doubt is what the activists would want, on reflection.

I think the thing to recognize here is that serious Christians who worry about the naked public square don’t rejoice when a Ten Commandments display or the Pledge passes muster as “ceremonial deism.” Ceremonial deism is the last refuge of the lukewarm – the theory that lets Supreme Court Justices square their “wall of separation” notions with the pervasiveness of religious language and symbolism in American history, public architecture and public rhetoric. It’s what Stephen Breyer will sign on to, not what Antonin Scalia wants.

More generally, Julian’s certainly right that when Christians cede control of their symbols to the mass culture, it’s only a short jog to ceding control of Christianity itself to what you might call the American heresy – the gospel of success that’s made Joel Osteen the country’s bestselling “Christian” theologian, and threatens to make religious devotion just another cog in the commercial machine. This could be an argument for withdrawal and quietism – for Christians to abandon the public square entirely, and focus on cultivating an orthodox subculture in a more materialist sea. But that’s the counsel of despair. If the mass culture is really so bad for Christianity, maybe Christians ought to be doing more to change it, instead of letting it change them – which is what that whole “salt of the earth” thing was supposed to be about, I think.

Changing the culture is hard to do, of course – a lot harder than winning Pledge of Allegiance battles, or even elections. But people (right or left, but the left has understood this better for some time) who think that culture wars are mainly about politics are kidding themselves. I’ve argued this before, and Mark Helprin – one of the rare, rare American artists who leans right – made a similar point in NR’s fiftieth anniversary issue:

Conservatives have yet to approach culture as William F. Buckley approached political philosophy half a century ago. The theses of our culture are almost universally propounded by the Left – in education at all levels; publishing of all types; film and television; what used to be the fine arts; music; and in the libraries and museums, where history can be altered with an unnoticed deaccession or the flick of a caption. Looking upon all this as if silent upon a peak in Darien, Connecticut, are armies of conservatives who mainly react. There below them, stretching to the horizon, is the Pacific, and because they hesitate to swim in it, they are reduced to criticizing it. What will prevail in man’s life or imagination, the ocean or those who – even if rightly – take exception to it?

That the antitheses are usually just is irrelevant to the outcome, for here as almost everywhere the initiative rules. Consider the relative impacts of film and of film criticism; music and music criticism; education and criticism of educational fashion. Cultural abominations thrive not because they are insufficiently criticized but for lack of adequately supported competition.

Although not a few conservatives with a self-sacrificial bent are at work in the belles lettres and beaux arts, the conservative masses (what a delightful phrase) have largely ceded these fields or have been frozen in or out of them in the reactive position from which conservatives must be freed if their enterprise is to succeed and their principles are to thrive.

Conservatives and Christians are by no means perfectly overlapping categories, but Helprin’s point applies equally well to both. Julian’s right that religious believers risk a great deal when they take on the mass culture – but they risk even more when they don’t.

– posted by Ross

And this time, he’s shot the whole film in . . . Mayan.

– posted by Ross

It’s been easy to miss amid all the commotion over illegal wiretaps, transit strikes, and courts taking the trouble to define what is and is not science, but Bolivia just overwhelmingly elected an Indian-nationalist president who might just be Hugo Chavez’s new best friend in the region. How should we react? I don’t have a clue, but Noah Millman offers some characteristically interesting thoughts.

– posted by Ross

Just in time for the Intelligent Design decision to be handed down, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn – who penned a New York Times op-ed earlier this year that was widely criticized (by Andrew, for instance, and by Stephen Barr in this First Things essay) as an unwarranted attack on evolutionary science, and possibly a brief for ID – has a longer piece in First Things clarifying his take on Darwinism. It turns out, as far as I can tell, to be roughly the same take that the Church has held for the last century or so – namely, that that “a metaphysically modest version of neo-Darwinism could potentially be compatible” with Catholicism, but that there is “a difference between a modest science of Darwinism and the broader metaphysical claims frequently made on its behalf,” and that the Church must necessarily reject a Darwinism that insists, as Schonborn quotes an American scientist putting it, that “the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance” and that “there are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature.”

It seems as though much of the confusion resulted from Schonborn using the term “neo-Darwinism” in his original op-ed to characterize the militant philosophical atheism of – well, of nearly every prominent defender of Darwinism, from Dawkins and Dennett to Wilson and Watson, all of whom insist that reasoning about nature, biology, and so forth leads inexorably to a disbelief in divine design. This was interpreted to mean that Schonborn was attacking the science of “neo-Darwinism” – the mainstream consensus among biologists concerning evolution through natural selection and how it works. In fact, Schonborn says in his FT essay, the original op-ed was about our “philosophical knowledge of reality,” not our scientific knowledge of the same. The Cardinal wasn’t critiquing evolutionary biology’s ability to explain how homo sapiens evolved from an australopithicene ancestor; he was critiquing modern science’s claim to be an all-encompassing explanation of existence:

Let us return to the heart of the problem: positivism. Modern science first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material causes), and then turns around to claim both final and formal causes are obviously unreal, and also that its mode of knowing the corporeal world takes priority over all other forms of human knowledge. Being mechanistic, modern science is also historicist: It argues that a complete description of the efficient and material causal history of an entity is a complete explanation of the entity itself-in other words, that an understanding of how something came to be is the same as understanding what it is. But Catholic thinking rejects the genetic fallacy applied to the natural world and contains instead a holistic understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all the causes evident in nature-including the “vertical” causation of formality and finality.

This is obviously not a way of approaching the study of the world, and man’s place in it, that many evolutionary biologists would be inclined to accept – but neither does it represent a significant change in the Catholic approach to evolution, or to science generally. Indeed, it’s hard to see how Catholicism could approach science in any way other than this – that is, treating it as a valid approach to knowledge that goes a long way toward explaining the world, without going nearly far enough.

– posted by Ross

While more legally-minded types bicker over the legitimacy of the Bush wiretapping, it’s worth pointing out that the odds of this fracas redounding to the Democrats’ long-term benefit are somewhere between slim and none. Let’s suppose, for the sake or argument, that John Dean is right, and Bush just became “the first President to admit to an impeachable offense.” The Democrats aren’t going to try impeaching him for it – they aren’t that stupid, are they? – so all that the offense does, in the public mind, is add to the existing perception of the GOP as the party that sometimes goes too far and skirts the law in the pursuit of national security objectives. And it’s almost always better to be tagged as “the party that might go too far” than as “the party that won’t go far enough” – which is how the Democrats are perceived these days. This explains why the GOP can weather controversy after controversy, from Iran-Contra down through Iraq War intelligence and the secret prisons and CIA waterboarding, and still hang on to the public trust on foreign affairs – because in each case, they’re perceived as having gone too far with good intentions, 24-style, and in an arena that most Americans perceive as being slightly outside the law anyway.

One way for the Dems to change this landscape, I suppose, would be to find a Watergate-style case where Republicans go too far and break the law for obvious personal or political advantage and nothing else. In this sense, the Michael Moore crowd is on to something with their Halliburton conspiracy-mongering: If you want to turn Americans against the GOP, you don’t want to convince them that Bush manipulated intelligence to oversell the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; you want to convince them that he manipulated intelligence to make Dick Cheney or some Texas oil companies richer. But absent convincing evidence of that level of chicanery – and no, the script of Syriana doesn’t count – the Democrats have to find a non-scandal-related way to capture the label of “the party that does too much,” ideally by finding a place where the GOP is doing way too little and hammering away at it.

This is what John Kerry tried to do during the campaign, of course, but I think his arguments – that we need to spend more money on defense, that the Iraq War is making terrorism more likely – were way too general to gain traction. The Dems need something specific, something easy to understand, something that captures the imagination of the public – something like JFK’s “missile gap.” (As the JFK experience shows, it doesn’t even have to be real.)

And then, once there’s a Democratic President in the White House, his first act should be to have his trusted aides break several laws in the pursuit of al-Qaeda – just to show he means business. Either that, or make Jack Bauer his Secretary of Defense.

-posted by Ross

This week’s Weekly Standard contains, by happy coincidence, an essay by one of my favorite writers, Chris Caldwell, about one of my favorite novelists, Anthony Powell. The author of the multi-volume tragicomedy of manners, A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell is sometimes called the English Proust – a claim I’m in no position to judge, never having made my way through Remembrance of Things Past. What I can say, however, is that Powell’s series of novels, which tracks the fortunes and misfortunes of the British upper crust from the First World War through the 1960s, is unquestionably one of the great (and underappreciated) literary achievements of the century. As Caldwell puts it, the sprawling series is “dedicated to answering the big question that draws people to novels, as surely as it draws them to high school reunions: What becomes of people?” And it has as its anti-hero one of the most delightfully odious literary creations of all time – Kenneth Widmerpool, a sweating, bumbling man on the make, embodying the triumph of the will-to-power over all obstacles.

Powell’s concerns, like Proust’s (and Evelyn Waugh’s, to whom he’s also often compared) are almost entirely confined to a single social class: his work “spans the socioeconomic ladder of midcentury Britain from its 99th percentile to its 98th,” as Caldwell wryly puts it. Which is perhaps why there have been so few recent American novelists like him: Our writers are often obsessed with class, but they tend to either zero in on the anxieties of a single character (a Gatsby or a Swede Levov) or region (Faulkner’s South, Wharton’s New York), or else pan outward, as in Twain and Tom Wolfe, to offer a panorama of society entire, from top to bottom. This makes sense, in a way, since class is so much more fluid in this country than in Europe, and people move relatively easily from level to level, rank to rank – or at least they’re encouraged to try. And the overall bigness of America, too, threatens to overwhelm the pointillism of the novel-of-manners.

But even so, it would nice to see someone attempt to do for the contemporary American elite, fluid and hard-to-pin-down thought it may be, what Powell did for the British upper class, and pen A Dance to the Music of Time that follows, say, the Ivy Leaguers of the 1960s down to the present day – or my own generation out to 2040 or so. Caldwell notes that Powell’s books, like many English novels, satisfy a voyeuristic American appetite for brighter lines of class and conduct than we possess – and indeed, they may even inspire us to “envy the intricacy and elaboration of a social system that can create such beautiful patterns of charm and power.” But our voyeurism and envy – and our self-satisfaction at having left many of the cruelties of class behind – shouldn’t blind us to the intricacies and elaborations that American society, too, affords its artists, particularly as our meritocracy becomes less permeable and more inherited. Caldwell writes that Americans “tend to look at social systems as annoying impediments to the poetry of life,” and that “Powell may have been the last novelist to realize that the system is the poetry, under certain circumstances.” But there are systems here as well, and no less deserving of their poets.

– posted by Ross