YouSaid · the spoken record

Ross Douthat

lines on the record: 98
first: 2018-01-17
most recent: 2018-01-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Kind of female activism that comes through a revival of the female religious tradition in the church rather than a sort of attempt to do what Episcopalians and others have already attempted and sort of shift the understanding of the nature of what the priest is and trying to do the mass itself.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Priests who can stand in the person of Jesus Christ, and that it makes sense for them to be men. That doesn't mean that the church could not, and here I'll do the Hegelian synthesis thing, it doesn't mean that the church could not, in its governing structures and in sort of the way that the church functions in Rome and elsewhere, could not integrate women more fully into the actual governance of the church. I think it can and should. But my preference would be for that integration to happen through a revival of female religious orders. And nonsense, I would much rather have many more nuns in positions of power in Rome than laymen and women. And again, maybe that's some sort of strange sort of aesthetic preference as much as it is anything else. But I think that it would be a more certain path to renewal for the church to find a way to sort of have a kind of”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was only men for the priesthood, I think, is ultimately less powerful than the argument that God chose Jesus to be his son, and he chose to sort of perform the central liturgical predecessors of what became Catholic Christianity.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A point where it offers something that is the most contradictory to the dominant culture and giving up something that I think is in many ways one of its most valuable countercultural teachings, that a life can be lived well without having sex. So in that sense, while there isn't a sort of doctrinal and dogmatic barrier to it per se, there are some people argue that there is. But I think that it would be trading sort of trading the promise of renewal for the reality of sort of effective cultural surrender in certain ways, which is something I think the church has done on a number of fronts. On the question of female priests, I think that there it's a sort of simpler issue that the church and this probably could be read into my view of aesthetics and narratives as well as everything else. But the argument that Jesus chose”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with married men because that's easier. There is not, you know, in that case there is not any dogmatic prohibition or claim of a dogmatic prohibition the church ordains men who have been married and has in the past. At the same time, I mean, there are sort of structural impediments. The Catholic bureaucracy is not set up to support priests and their families, and that kind of structural impediment is actually incredibly important to thinking about how such a thing would work itself out. But there I tend to take the sort of sociological argument that I gestured at interviewing one of the earlier questions, that for the church to sort of give up on the elevation of celibacy in a way that large-scale married priests inevitably would be seen as doing, would not be a likely source of revitalization and revival in the long run. It would represent the church sort of surrendering on”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The alt right phenomenon sort of allow us to see some varied psychological reality among white Americans. Maybe it does. But it's just very hard to tell.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a question that is very hard for me to answer because the alt right is very real on the Internet. It doesn't seem to be particularly real in reality, but maybe social media is reality. This is sort of, or at some point it becomes reality, and then it doesn't even matter what's happening out in the real world. I'm not sure, but at the very least, we're at a point where there seems to be some huge disproportion between the importance of a phenomenon on social media and its ability to get any number of men like Richard Spencer has like the same 60 people showing up for all his events. And, you know, he can do something he and others can do something like Charlottesville, but there isn't a mass movement of the alt-right. And there are more profiles of alt-right leaders in liberal publications than there are avowed alt writers who will actually show up and carry a tiki torch. And so the question is, well, but does nonetheless”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the big challenges, and we were talking about this before the conversation is sort of figuring out what is real and what is just Twitter. And at what point does just Twitter become what's real? So much of what I do and what people in my profession do is we're watching a world that's happening online even as we're trying to describe a world that exists offline. often puzzled by the connection between the two. Like I can't tell how real is the alt-right.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like it's such a sort of journalist specific forum in certain ways. It's so geared towards journalistic culture and everyone's on there arguing with each other and sharing stories with each other and so on. And at its best, I think it gives people sort of a little more sense of the inner workings of journalism in certain ways, like to the extent that I don't want to be all doom and gloom. There is virtue in sort of being exposed to watching journalists sort of share stories and have those stories partially discredited and sort of walk back stories and argue over stories and so on. There's probably value in sort of demystifying some of the work that we do. But I assume that it can't help but have a kind of, you know, it furthers already existing groupthink among journalists and it has a deranging effect on us. And one of the big”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little hard for me to say because I wasn't really a journalist before. I was a little bit on Twitter probably until 2011. So I had some pre-Twitter understanding. But, you know, it's, I mean, Twitter's a forum.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's sort of an obligation for journalists, it's often, I think, that obligation to sort of walk people back from the edge of panic in certain ways. But in terms of its effect on us,”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It creates a sort of a sense of permanent crisis and sort of permanent alarm and so on, where people have their Facebook feeds, where they and their friends are sort of sharing things that confirm their view that the world is coming to an end. And as a journalist, I feel like I'm often called upon by people in my non-journalistic social circle to sort of reassure them. And of course, they're no longer reassured because during the last election I kept telling them that Trump wasn't going to be the Republican nominee and that he probably wasn't going to be the president. So my level of reassurance has been limited by that. But I feel like I see a lot of people in my social orbit who aren't journalists who seem to be sort of, they're sort of pushed to the edge of panic constantly by what they see in the news and on social media. And then they'll sort of write to me and ask me to sort of explain what's really going on, which I may not always be able to do. But so to the extent that...”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, I mean, I don't want to having done my Butlerian jihad rant, I don't want to oversell the horrors of social media because I think if you look at a lot of the polarization in American life, it's being driven by an older technology, cable television, and that sort of the effect of cable news on older Americans probably goes a longer way to explaining some of our polarization right now than does social media. So that would be my caveat. With that being said, I mean, I think the effect of social media is Tyler had an interesting post about this today or yesterday. And you sort of worked out a kind of Hegelian dialectic of different people on Twitter that I wish I could summarize, but I can't quite. But at the very least, in my own experience, Twitter and social media generally, it has a deranging effect.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remarkable breakthrough, and I don't know what the nature of the breakthrough would be, but I think it would at least contribute something to theological debates about the mind's place in the cosmos.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Influence on theological debates. I mean, I think if you look at where some of the smartest non-Christian, non-theistic critics of eliminative materialism end up, someone like Thomas Nagel or something, they end up in this sort of pantheist or panpsychist kind of vision where mind is a kind of emergent property of the universe. I might be getting that slightly wrong, but that might be the idea. I mean, I think that there are versions of AI that you could imagine emerging that could be claimed as, well, I don't know, but they might, there's something about consciousness that we don't understand, obviously, and I'm very skeptical of the idea that we're just going to get through some Moore's law doubling. We're going to get to a recognizable consciousness sort of by accident that it's just going to Skynet's going to become self-aware or something. I think that there would have to be some.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that if human beings could actually create consciousness, it would sort of an actual conscious AI, it would tell us something about consciousness that we don't currently know that would have some unknowable.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should not be a place. I think that young human beings should be given a sustained encounter with actual physical and social reality before being placed in front of a screen. And I think that that should be educational common sense and that we've gone in the opposite direction is an unfortunate thing. I think you start with that and then we can talk about future steps. We can talk. I don't want to suggest any in case I'm quoted out of context, but you can imagine next steps will just stick with that educational step first.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would have to. Well, anyway, it's some sort of rebellion against the use of sort of computational replacements for human beings. And so you have this far distant space-faring culture that relies on mentats, these sort of these humans who have developed their intellect to sort of somewhat superhuman levels, perhaps through the use of CRISPR, thereby trying to unite all the themes of tonight, Tyler. But they don't use certain forms of computing power that we would assume people in the far future would. Anyway, that's the necessary background. My view for a short term, but Larry and Jihad is much more limited and boring. I think that people should limit or reduce or eliminate the use of computers and screens and digital devices for children and in schools up to a certain age, and I'm flexible and could argue about what that age should be. But I think that young childhood certainly”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't count. Thank you. No, I actually am a big Dune itself. I'm a huge fan of. I could never actually finish all of Herbert's novels, which makes me a Dune non-completist, which means I might be the wrong person to lead the Butlerian Jihad. But the Butlerian Jihad is this sort of rebellion against, I think it is, maybe you can correct me, but it's AI more, that it's a rebellion against rather than computers per se.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the Butlerian Jihad is an event that takes place in the universe of Dune, the science fiction novels by Frank Herbert, and it takes place in the distant past, although his son wrote some other novels that sort of try and lay out how it happened.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another of them is this sort of another thing I referenced earlier, this sort of persistence of priestly religious monastic vocations, this sort of idea of Christianity as a counterculture to the point where it is sort of actively turning its back on family life in certain ways and sort of retaining this kind of space for a radical core, a radical witness. And another of them is the teaching on marriage and divorce, which in the context of the New Testament is clearly presented as a kind of radicalization of Jewish law on marriage and divorce. And the church has maintained that radical perspective. And I think it's done so infidelity to the man that we think was the Son of God. And I would prefer that it continue to maintain that fidelity rather than sort of softly give it up.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the sociological stuff is important, but it's secondary. I mean, to me, one of I sort of referenced the radicalism of the essential radicalism of Christianity. And obviously Catholicism has not been a sort of political practice, a radical force at every moment in human history. But one of the great things about the Catholic Church and one of the things that sort of makes me think in the kind of probabilistic game that Tyler somehow induced me to play online, one reason I give it a high probability of being the one true church is that there are these core sort of very strange and radical things that Jesus says and does that are sustained in the life of the church in ways that they haven't been in other Christian denominations and churches. And one of those is the Eucharist and the idea of transubstantiation, the idea that you are literally consuming the body and blood of Christ.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's the proposal itself. There's a sort of sociology of religion argument that conservative Christians tend to get into that you're referencing on these questions where you say stricter churches do better at sort of weathering the storms of modernity than more lax churches and sort of, you know, there's value in having a church that is sort of explicitly pushing back against cultural trends and so on. And I think all of those arguments are in some cases plausible. I think they would be plausible in this case, I think, a sort of therapeutic shift on divorce would have negative practical effects on the everyday lives of Catholics. to me, I guess, and the reason I've written about it so much is that I think the church is risking betraying its connection to Jesus.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be there waiting for the Butlerian jihad of the future, the people who laughed are dune readers and everyone else is not. It's important at some point in every public event to separate the dune readers from the non-dune readers. But until the moment arrives when we sort of get a handle on our technological problems and achieve some sort of cultural shift. But anyway, yes, the long story short, at least on the roster of plausible policies, that would be the policy that I would offer. And I think the goal is to, it probably wouldn't have that much influence in its existing form, but the goal would be to get to a form where it did have a chance of having influence.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direction that I would like American society to take, which would take us towards something that wasn't a 2000 per child tax credit, but a $5,000 per child tax credit, and so on even upward from there. So those are sort of my maximalist ambitions. Now, it is also true that cultural forms and assumptions and so on play a much more important shaping role in all this. And it might be the case that even if you got to my ideal number, that it wouldn't move the dial that much. But in that case, I would still favor it in part as a means of sort of, I think there's value in building the foundations and political economy for the cultural changes that you wish to see, even if those changes haven't arrived yet. So it might be that the child tax credits effect would be counteracted by the deranging influence of screens on people's romantic lives or something. That might be the case. But then the child tax credit would still”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of being social engineering, it is social engineering, and I'm happy to admit it. And maybe there'll be a Wall Street journal editorial about this tomorrow. But I think that in the same way that the Wall Street Journal's preferred economic policies, which they hope will spur entrepreneurship and new hiring and business formation and all these things, are also social engineering in a certain way. I don't think that you can sort of believe in some pristine separation of the economic sphere, which isn't social engineering and your tax policies aren't social engineering from the family. So the baseline is I'm in favor of giving people money to help them have the babies that they want to have. Now, would the child tax credit have accomplished that to the extent that it would have much effect? I would say it was a bare and very minimal effect. I think if you look at the literature, you need something much, much larger to have any hope of moving the needle. But I wouldn't say it's symbolic. I think it's a step in the”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those of us who are involved in the selling of the child tax credit to Republican politicians tended to make an argument that wasn't per se about the fertility rate. There was an argument that this was a matter of sort of distributional justice, that the tax code was penalizing parents in various ways because of their kids' contributions to Social Security and so on through a rather elaborate schema that I think was true and correct. I don't I mean, that argument had some flaws, but I think by and large it was a reasonable argument. But it was also an argument sort of geared to satisfy the slightly sclerotic ideological preconceptions of the Republican Party. And, you know, sitting before here before you find people tonight, I'll just say, you know, the goal of the child tax credit is to help people have more babies. That should be the actual goal. And when the Wall Street Journal accuses it,”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer. Mormonism is sort of an attempt to do that not with three religious traditions, but with the Americas. How do you integrate the Americas into what seems like the sort of old world-dominated story of Judaism and Christianity? And that is sort of to the extent that Mormonism is sort of out to solve a problem. It's to solve the problem of, well, what about the Americas? What about all this world over here? In that way, and various others that I could go on listing, I think the tensions between Mormonism and the dominant American culture still make it quintessentially, it still leaves it quintessentially American, just as like, you know, I mean, let's say the drug culture of the late 1960s was intention with sort of bourgeois American society at that point. But Woodstock, there's nothing more American than Woodstock, right? In the same way, even when its intention with whatever else is going on in the culture, there's nothing more American lesson.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quintessentially American, surely. I mean, I think that it's interesting in that Mormon sexual ethics have sort of repeatedly brought them into conflict with the dominant American culture. That fact and that reality is a sign that there exists some interesting tension between Mormonism and America as a whole. But nonetheless Mormonism is both in sort of its actual lived experience and its theology is unimaginable without it has an American essence. There's no more American figure in certain ways than Joseph Smith. The entire Mormon theology is built around an attempt. We were talking earlier about how do you integrate Islam, Judaism, and Christianity into one story. And I was failing to give Tyler a good answer.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That emerged out of some combination of technologies, all of which is to say I don't have a brilliant answer for your question, but I think there would be a lot of very strange and different cross-currents that the people most inclined to make the pro-life argument right now would be disinclined to sort of run with, immediately run with whatever political possibilities it presented, but also that the nature of the technology, its level of invasiveness, and what sort of making it work would mean would in turn determine sort of where liberalism went and so on.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How would that resistance to it interact with this sort of possibility that here you have a technocratic solution to the abortion debate? But I'll say I'm a little skeptical that, I mean, if you imagine, again, it depends, you know, how do you get to the artificial womb point? Is it something where are you imagining a world where a woman gets pregnant and somehow the embryo is removed from her body and placed into the womb? That seems sort of requiring a sort of level of technological intervention that would raise a host of the same sort of privacy concerns and so on that motivate the more certain portions of the pro-choice side. Or are you envisioning a world where you have artificial wombs and everyone is sort of provisionally sterilized at age 14? This becomes the state policy and so on. So you could imagine a sort of pro-life totalitarianism.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it'll be interesting if we do actually develop artificial wombs, which I'm not 100% sure that we will, but supposing that we do, my expectation Would be that it would be a sort of weird cultural crisis for the kind of people who currently are pro-life while also creating substantial political pressure in favor of the pro-life cause. And I'm not entirely sure how those two things would interact with one another. But you would clearly have a sort of deep religious resistance to the technology, to the practice, to that sort of severing. And you would have strong cultural resistance to it, I think, independent of religion. I think there would be a sort of strong anti-artific, as in the sort of crunchy bookstores of my childhood. There would be a sort of left-wing hippie.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sitting around with my unfinished novels, I never would have produced anything interesting. And so it's better to be a kind of tradesman. And that's at least part of how I think about my job”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Toilet. The column has to be written. So you write the column. And getting lost, I mean, there's another version of myself that was going to write novels. Fantasy novels, fantasy novels, but that was going to sort of follow these aesthetic and narrative ambitions that you rightly, I think, discern lurking below the surface of my analysis of the Republican tax plan or whatever. And maybe that version of myself would have produced the great American novel, some great work. And certainly I like to imagine that, or at least something that's sold as well as George R. Martin. But it's also might be the case that if I had spent my life sort of”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is obviously a sort of intellectual component, and we wouldn't have been able to sit here and have this conversation with me babbling at you if I didn't have intellectual pretensions. But the work of journalism is less true in the age of the Internet, but it is linked to a very physical thing that comes out every week or every month or every day. And it comes out and it has to be filled. There is a place on the New York Times, on the printed New York Times that would be blank or have an ad stuck on it if I didn't write my column. And so you write the column, you write the column. And that, I think it's useful for journalists to think about it this way. It's useful for anyone inclined to sort of over romanticize or overadmire journalists to think about this way. But there is a sense in which writing a column is, you know, it's like you're a plumber. The toilet has to be fixed. So you fix the toilet.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go to events with wonderful hosts and audiences and so on. And people sometimes introduce you as a public intellectual. Sometimes they even say thought leader, and that's the worst. When I run my totalitarian state, but journalism is a trait.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Undertaking family obligations certainly helps as a motivating force, I think. I think that, I mean, I think that male productivity is, you know, I don't want to say this isn't true of female productivity too, but I only have the male experience to go by. I think male productivity is often closely linked to being bound to and linked to other people and sort of having a sort of, you know, having kids and family and so on. I think that that's a not uncommon root of greater productivity, and I'm certain it's true in my own case. I wasn't married that young, but I was married younger than many people in my cohort. I don't know. You know, you also, like, journalism”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Russia is a very cold country. I do think There's absolutely no question that people who have lived experience of totalitarianism, which I do not, thankfully, tend to fear anything that smacks of totalitarian impulses. And so to the extent that there's, I'm not sure about the Geraldo case, because his seemed more like a self-justification for a life badly lived. But to the extent that there is actually something there, then yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of a normal reaction to being sort of. Traumatized by authoritarianism.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And essentially, as you climb the pretension ladder in America, the duties mispronunciation becomes more prevalent. Whereas when I was in middle school and fourth grade, they do that mispronunciation was more prevalent. But you can always tell whether someone's gone to graduate school or not by whether they try and mispronounce it as a French last name.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will be proven correct. There are weird ideas out there right now that are actually true. And I think the strangeness of my childhood, that's something that I carry with me as an assumption.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are not available through the experience of sort of expert consensus and so on. And these, we were very much outside the mainstream during my childhood. And the fact that there was a lot of lies and nonsense and BS outside the mainstream, but there were also things that I've held on to and think are true that's had a fairly powerful effect on my thinking. For instance, I have a Like with the anti-vaccine debates, for instance, right? I mean, the anti-vaccine side seems to me to be pretty much just wrong and obviously dangerous in certain ways and so on, but there is always a small part of my mind and experience that is not entirely, that wants to stick up for the end.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'd have the health food restaurant here, and you'd have the New Age bookstore next to it, they'd always be attached. And you would always have the same sort of books. You'd have the Utni reader and all those kinds of magazines. But at the same time, I was having a sort of, in certain ways, conventional upper middle class Southern Connecticut background. And I think I had that sort of weird combination of normalcy in certain ways, religious experiments over here, sort of dietary experiments that blended into weird cultural experiments over there. It gave me generally an appreciation for sort of the weird diversity of America that I think I wouldn't have gotten if my mother hadn't been ill and sought out strange cures and so on. And it also gave me an appreciation for the fact that there can be things that are true about the universe.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose I learned. This folds in religion. So I apologize. It's cheating a little bit. But we spend a lot of time, my mother had health issues when I was young, and we ended up as religious as we were in part because of sort of healing services that she went to because she was ill or because she had friends who recommended them. But there was a sort of wider orbit to that where we ate health food long before health food was cool. We ate tofu when you could only get tofu by going to the back of a sort of weird health food store and it would be in these sort of vats of water and you'd pick up these huge blocks of tofu with tongs like people pulling icebergs out of 19th century ponds in Vermont. So I would say that between the religious element and the sort of strange world of health food, you know, you'd go to a health food store.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do. I think that it is an example, I suppose, to go back to the very beginning of our conversation of where this sort of liberal view of rights has so far escaped its Christian origins as to become a kind of a vision of self-ownership that I think is not actually true to human existence, true to human experience. And yeah, I mean, I think that the case against suicide is quite similar to the case against murder. And I think our drift away from recognizing that is sort of a case study in the working out of certain liberal ideas that have gotten far enough from the truth as to just be false.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's bad for human imagination, for normal relationships, for appreciating reality as it actually exists. I think the reason we may not see costs is that it has a sort of numbing effect in certain ways on human behavior, that it doesn't necessarily lead to sort of egregious acting out of the kind that leads to crime waves or political tumult or anything like that. So the costs, I think the costs are likely to be felt in, as I think they're already to some extent being felt in sort of increased mental disturbance on the margins, difficulty forming marriages, families, normal human relationships sort of, and more cultural despair, I think.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bringing technology under control so that sort of the more radical genetic experiments are limited and happening at the margins, basically, that should actually be the goal. I think it doesn't mean that we could actually succeed. But I think it's a reasonable goal to set.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And shouldn't this be something that we had exerted actual control over instead of just sort of leaving it to some combination of experiment and market forces and governments wanting to be hip and cool and buying a lot of Chromebooks that Microsoft wanted to unload and so on? So I could see something similar happening with genetic technology. But I think bringing”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm skeptical of its utopian side. I don't think it has to be a nightmare, but I think that there has to be a deep aversion, particularly in the United States, but elsewhere as well, to exercising political control over technologies. And I think the challenge of the next hundred to 500 years of human history is getting better at exerting political control over technologies and sort of preventing actual nightmare scenarios. And I mean, I feel this in certain ways with computers, the internet virtual reality, and so on. I think that to me is a more immediate sort of source of anxiety than genetic engineering. I think that we're going to wake up in 20 or 30 years and be, well, we may not wake up, but I would like to think that we'll wake up in 20 or 30 years and say, why were we putting all of our children in front of these screens for so much of their child?”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that you can't escape in a democratic society. You can't escape the demos. And so attempts to sort of maintain elite control over politics that don't address deep, profound systemic social problems are doomed to eventually produce things like the Trump phenomenon. And so it didn't, of course, in sort of a narrow moment-by-moment way during the campaign, if you followed my mostly wrong commentary during Trump's march to the nomination, I was all for sort of elite.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I won't challenge the premise. I think that there is a sort of sincere limit to human imagination when it comes to contemplating the idea of the beatific vision and so on, and that that comes across. We don't know how to tell stories about the story outside our story in quite the same way. And the inferno is telling a story about the world that we're all familiar with, and that's easier.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source