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Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui

It was actually this sentence that initially got my attention in Ross Douthat's column today:

Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays.

Um, what?

44 thoughts on “Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui

  1. tigersharktoo

    Methinks the writer is projecting about a mythical past of his dreams. When men were men. If white, that is. And women were at home, and in the kitchen. And disease ran rampant, because vaccines were rare. And lead was in the air. And raw sewage in the water.

    His good old days.

  2. Brett

    Religious types like Douthat always think that secular liberals are depressed and in some type of existential crisis. They have to believe it, because they think that people without religion are "empty".

        1. KawSunflower

          Also old enough to remember it, but if my car hadn't been donated & it sported that as a bumper sticker, I'd hate to think what might happen to the car, while I'm iiving in this state. A slogan opposing the death penalty resulted in a man waiting for me to return to express a significantly different view - vehemently.

        2. caborwalking

          My favorite bumper stickers: I bet Jesus would have used his turn signal, and, Come the rapture, can I have your car?

    1. different_name

      Yep.

      Related and similar to Cat Lady Derangement Syndrome. If it were possible to be happy without children, they were chumps. And they can't be chumps, therefore the childless can't be happy, no matter what your lying eyes say.

      I've never found anything Douhat had to say particularly interesting, so I'm not sure why we should care that he's playing accusation-confessional.

    2. erick

      The other weird thing is they say because we don’t believe in an afterlife we don’t value life.

      Huh? Since I think this life is it and then we are gone I value life on earth more than they do.

  3. zic

    Ross is hopeless. If thinks pushback against his dogma is existential anxiety, and he thinks that tribes of people, claiming their own space (that was previously filled by the church) is civilizational ennui.

    But every day, his misogyny disguised as moral religiosity is unacceptable in polite society now; and Ross is having trouble abiding with this change. He knows he sounds like a neanderthal. Vance has the same problem.

    Today, Ross romps through religions-that-are-not-Christianity to make his case and veered into alternate universes and quantum mechanics. It's almost new age.

    Personally, I think he longs for the days when he had more hair, and women hadn't gotten outraged at his patriarchic religious beliefs.

  4. Amil Eoj

    My own "existential anxiety and civilizational ennui" were much more in evidence when Republicans were winning 5 out of 6 presidential elections, several of them by landslide margins.

    These days, not so much. Granted, a Trump victory could quickly turn that around!

  5. Adam Strange

    People who study "information" have estimated that there is approximately one irreducible bit of information per word in a sentence, but Douthat has managed to reduce that value to zero.

  6. D_Ohrk_E1

    I learned ennui to mean boredom in elementary school. By his usage, Douthat appears to think it means depression. Over the years, perhaps the meaning has changed?

    I was also taught, -ist makes what would otherwise be an adjective into a noun, making rationalist and humanist both nouns. So, I'm confused what rationalist optimism and humanist ambition are. Does he mean rationalist's optimism, rationalistic optimism, or optimistic rationalism? Is it humanist's ambition, humanistic ambition, or ambitious humanism?

    NYT, did you outsource your editors to the spirit of Jacques Derrida?

    1. dfhoughton

      Alright, linguist here. I'm going to have to say Douthat's "rationlist optimism" fits comfortably within the rules of English. In English you can use a noun to modify another noun as part of a noun compound: "cat carrier", "taco truck", etc. These differ from adjectives in various ways: they have no comparative or superlative forms -- "catter carrier", "tacoest truck" -- and you can't modify them with adverbs -- "a very taco truck", "a somewhat cat carrier". But it's perfectly cromulent to mash nouns together like this. In German they do it without spaces; in English, with spaces, or sometimes hyphens, or sometimes as in German -- "babysitter". It's different orthographical rules for the same thing.

      1. KenSchulz

        Thank you, linguist. I was pretty sure I remembered something from an English class about noun modifiers, but your explanation here is clear and concise.

      2. D_Ohrk_E1

        or sometimes hyphens

        That's how I was taught. But here, he could directly changed the word to an adjective. With your example of taco truck and cat carrier there is no choice to make such a change, and in that case, there is no greater clarity that can be achieved. Speech meant for communicating to a wide audience should not follow Derrida's example.

    2. Steve_OH

      Ennui is more than just boredom. Dissatisfaction is part of it, so it's more like "boredom as the result of dissatisfaction." Interestingly, I had a German friend who would say that something was boring when she meant that it was unsatisfying.

  7. erick

    One thing to remember about Douhat is he is an adult convert to ultra conservative Catholicism, so he grew up in a mainline Protestant church that said. “Of course most of this stuff couldn’t possibly have happened, it’s a bunch of stories that are meant to each us things not literal history” and he said, no I’m going with the it’s gotta be literally true option.

    1. emjayay

      Note: the metaphorical and "you have to understand the literary forms of the day and the culture at the time" etc. approach is also the mainstream Catholic appoach. I asked my third grade nun teacher in olde tyme full habit about the creation story in the Bible and she said something of that order. And that was even before Vatican II. And when I went to a Catholic college and had to take two semesters of Bible study that's how it was all approached as well.

      He could have found the same stuff in American Protestantism of course, but he's probably into ceremony and costumes.

      Today I get my Christian religion by watching Grantchester. There's even a sermon at the end of each episode.

  8. jeffreycmcmahon

    Everyone else is saying this but I'll just agree, this is an idiot with a large vocabulary but who is nonetheless writing at the same level as a bright middle-school kid.

  9. MikeTheMathGuy

    I get really, really, REALLY tired of conservatives explaining to me what I believe and why I believe it. (Even when I can understand what they are saying, which is mostly not the case here.)

    1. latts

      It’s especially ironic— and insulting— given their own lack of self-awareness. Sure, dude, you can’t even fully face or describe your own motivations, but let’s hear more about why everyone unlike you must be even worse off.

  10. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    Douthat continues to write terrible columns because the NYT hired him to do so.

    His attacks on secular liberalism always remind me that the Catholic Church is shot through with men who sexually assault children and other men who let them continue their predations. The LA diocese just paid out $800 million. The archbishop, I'm sure, expresses deep regret.

    I can't think of a secular liberal institution with anything like the kind of record that Catholic Church has for abusing its authority. Drag queens, forsooth.

  11. D_Ohrk_E1

    Some thoughts on his thesis:

    - He says "nones" (the non-religious) in America has flattened. But that's not what Gallup shows.

    - The beauty of secular liberalism is that individuals have the freedom to choose, or reject religion.

    - If Douthat were honest, he would acknowledge that the existential anxiety of "secular liberalism" comes from the rise and threat of theocratic, autocratic leanings and theocratic authoritarianism within the US. And what are these folks looking to do? Eliminate liberal democracy -- what underpins this "secular liberalism".

    - Perhaps New Atheism would not have led to an embrace of greater rationalism given that irrational fear and hate have been part of humanity from the start. But, one cannot deny that the Abrahamic religions, in particular, have used fear and hate to its advantage over the millennium. For that reason, returning to a church-going society is an illusory, romantic notion that is antithetical to the social fabric we have now. Imperfect as it is, our current social fabric is far better than it was 50 years ago -- unless you were a White male.

    - Contrary to Douthat's conclusion that a return to religiosity will cure social ills, we can look to Japan's limited religiosity to see that religion is not needed to make for a better, safer society. Rather, it is conformity to social norms and social pressure that makes for a better, safer society, not necessarily religion.

  12. ProgressOne

    "Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays."

    Existential anxiety -- well, yeah. You have AI coming on that may or may not replace humans. Also, the risk of nuclear war has been on the rise. Some of us worry for our children and grandchildren.

    Civilizational ennui -- well, yeah again. You have Trump and MAGA in the US truly threatening our democracy and rights. You have similar movements in the free countries of Europe. And we now have unpredictable dictators in both Russia and China who like nothing more than to wipe out democracies everywhere.

    Thing is, all the concerns above should concern religious people just as much as secular liberals. Because you are religious (assuming not an extremist), you don't somehow get to blissfully ignore these things. You should have the exact same concerns.

  13. Goosedat

    Rationalist pessimism is driven by the interminable crimes against humanity perpetrated by imperialist liberals and legitimized as a defense of American democracy.

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