Thursday roundup

This first item actually goes back to mid-March, but I recently came across it, and it makes a great deal of sense to me. Plus, the two participants in the conversation bring up From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, one of my favorite books. Barzun's tome is a look at the 500 year period from 1500 to 2000, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Romantic period and the Industrial Revolution to - well, our present time of decadence.

It comes up in the course of this podcast interview by Richard Reinsch of Law & Liberty of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, which also is presented in print form. They're discussing Douthat's new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.

Douthat's central point is that American inventiveness has slowed down, a resulting ennui has settled in, and, well, you know what they say about idle hands.

A taste:

Ross Douthat:
So the Decadent Society is an attempt to, in a certain way, put a name on the weird anxiety that pervades the developed world, the Western world and the United States of America, where we have this combination of tremendous wealth and technological proficiency, which makes some people argue that these are the best times in the history of the world, but at the same time a lot of discontent, anxiety and ennui, which gets manifested in everything from the sort of populist and socialist rebellions in our politics, to rising rate of depression and suicide, and deaths of despair as they get called and so on. And so the argument I make in the book, is basically that we have entered a very particular kind of civilizational state that I’m calling “decadence” and I’m using that term to mean not chocolate dipped strawberries and weekends in Vegas, though those might be part of it, but a kind of stagnation, repetition, and decay at a high level of civilizational development.

Richard Reinsch:
One of the definitions, to talk about the definition of decadence you give in the book, you build on Jacques Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence, which I think came out in 2000. I remember reading it in 2001 and that book has stuck with me. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed reading your book because building on Barzun’s definition of decadence, Barzun talks about moving in fits and starts, but not really getting anywhere. The Decadent Society sees no path forward and it’s institutions function painfully. Maybe talk more about that because you also dismiss a definition of decadence that on my worst days, I find myself sort of glomming onto which is weak, sort of hedonistic luxuriating, weak and unable to defend ourselves. Unwilling to see the purpose in defending ourselves and so we’ll go into the good night, but maybe talk about that.

Ross Douthat:
Right. So yeah, I am very directly borrowing from Barzun and you could see this book, in part, as a sequel both to his book and in certain ways to Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History, which came out 10 years earlier. And the combination of those two arguments basically makes the case that Fukuyama was right, in a sense, not permanently and forever, but right that Western civilization has sort of passed beyond some of its great ideological debates and entered into a period of stability, that was also in danger of becoming a period of boredom and disappointment and sterility. And then Barzun, in a somewhat similar way, made the case that this is something that happens generally to civilizations at a certain point.

That they enter into periods where their once vigorous institutions become sclerotic, where their ambitious explorations hit frontiers that they can’t necessarily explore. And for us, I think that’s the most obvious in the demise of the space age basically, that we went from a period where people imagined that the frontier was going to open further into space. And now that’s sort of left to Silicon Valley billionaires to pursue and maybe they’re getting somewhere. But there’s no cultural imagination around space travel the way there was in the 1960s. So frontiers are closed. Institutions don’t work that well anymore. There’s sort of a loss of both pride in the past and confidence in the future and it doesn’t go all the way to the definition that you suggest only because I think that people sometimes underestimate how long a decadence period can last. So there’s an assumption that because you have institutions that don’t work as well anymore because you have a loss of civilizational confidence, there must be a kind of iron logic to history where the barbarians are waiting at the frontier and they’re going to come in and put the palaces to the torch.

And of course sometimes that happens. But you can also have empires and cultures go on a long time in periods that are essentially stagnant. The Roman empire goes 400 years from its Caligulan stage to the actual demise of the empire in the West. And in our case, we’re in this sort of unusual, not sort of, this entirely unusual position of being the first true world civilization, even more so than ancient Rome. And we also have a situation where a lot of empires and countries and cultures that might be seen as our rivals maybe are actually converging with us in decadence in different ways. That they aren’t poised to leap past us. And if that’s the case, then you could imagine what I call sustainable decadence as something that lasts if not centuries, at least some generations past our present moment where I’m writing.

Sheesh. Just about the time I consider that maybe alarm bells about mainstream media leftism are overblown, I run across something like this:

During a wildly offensive segment on Friday’s CBS This Morning, both the hosts and their left-wing guests repeatedly accused all white people of being born with racial “privilege” and taught to be racist as children. The discussion then turned to demanding white people “stop denying their racism” and admit to practicing discrimination.

The conversation occurred late in the 8:00 a.m. ET hour as part of CBS’s one-hour special, Race for Justice, examining race relations in the United States. It was particularly astonishing to watch wealthy co-host Gayle King – Oprah Winfrey’s best friend who once vacationed with the Obamas on a yacht – lead a segment lecturing others about their “privilege.”

“Nationwide protests against inequality are encouraging more people to have discussions not only about race but also white privilege,” King proclaimed. She then eagerly introduced two far-left authors to rant on the topic: “Robin DiAngelo is a sociologist and she’s author of this book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. I love this title. She joins us with the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, CBS News contributor Ibram X. Kendi.”

“I would like you to explain what white privilege is exactly and why white people have such a hard time seeing it. Because it’s so clear to most black people I know,” King scolded. DiAngelo not only delivered the predictable left-wing talking points on the subject, she made sure to declare that dissent would not be tolerated:

White privilege is the automatic taken-for-granted advantage bestowed upon white people as a result of living in a society based on the premise of white as the human ideal, and that from its founding, established white advantage as a matter of law and today as a matter of policy and practice. And it doesn’t matter if you agree with it, if you want it, if you even are aware of it, it’s 24/7/365. And one of the reasons why it’s so hard for white people to see it – well, there are many reasons – but one is that it serves us not to see it. We come to feel entitled to that advantage. We’re told that we deserve it and that we earned it. And we take great umbrage when that is challenged.

King followed up by matter-of-factly citing an outrageous claim in DiAngelo’s book: “You write, too, Robin, in the book, that kids from the age between 3 and 4 are intuitively taught that being white is better, that you are superior. I thought that that was an interesting thing.” The supposed “journalist” didn’t even question the disgusting claim.

On Monday, the broadcast turned to radical “experts” to insist that white Americans have been “taught” to have “contempt for black life.”Later in the discussion, fellow co-host Anthony Mason turned to Kendi and fretted: “Ibram, you’ve said that to get – to end white privilege you have to deal with racism first, right?” Kendi – who has excused the anti-Semitism of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and argued that common phrases like “blackmail” were racist – launched into a tirade convicting every white person in America of racism:

And I mean, as Robin, you know, talked about, it is critical for white people, for people in general, to stop denying their racist ideas, to stop denying the ways in which policies have benefited them, to stop denying their racism, and to realize that actually the heartbeat of racism itself is denial, and the sound of that heartbeat is “I’m not racist.” 

David Thornton at The Resurgent on how an agenda is driving the pronouncements of some public-heath officials:

There is a rumor going around on social media that the pandemic is over. That isn’t the case, but you’d never know it from public health officials around the country who seem to have tossed social distancing restrictions out in favor of the right to protest.

“A case in point is a recent article in Slate that details an open letter from infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, who write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.” The letter has been signed by more than 1,000 medical experts from around the country.

Wait. Isn’t there a pandemic on?

Former NFL player and current Congressional candidate Burgess Owens has written a compelling piece at Newsweek entitled "Drew Brees Was Right The First Time."

Another piece from a while back (2018) that is quite relevant at the moment. David French at National Review on why qualified immunity should be ended.

The snowflake/jackboots score another one: a UCLA professor is suspended for refusing to grant some kind of special leniency to black students on their final exams, because George Floyd.