Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Religion aside, learning to tie your shoelaces aside, what did you learn from your mother? [laughs] I suppose I learned . . . This folds in religion, so I apologize; it’s cheating a little bit. But we spent 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 healing services that she went to because she was ill or because she had friends who recommended them. But there was a wider orbit to that where we ate health food long before health food was cool. We ate tofu, and you could only get tofu by going to the back of a weird health-food store, and it would be in these 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. And so I would say that between the religious element and the strange world of health food . . . You’d go to a health-food store 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 books. You’d have the Utne Reader and all those kinds of magazines. But at the same time I was having in certain ways a conventional upper-middle-class, southern-Connecticut background. And I think I had that weird combination of normalcy in certain ways, religious experiments over here, dietary experiments that blended into weird cultural experiments over there. It gave me generally an appreciation for 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 that are not available through the experience of expert consensus and so on. 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 onto and think were true, that’s had a fairly powerful effect on my thinking. Not always — like with the anti-vaccine debates, for instance. 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 wants to stick up for the anti-vaccine side, which I don’t do in the pages of the New York Times because there is no compelling argument I can see, and it does a disservice to millions of children to make an argument that people shouldn’t vaccinate their kids. That’s all true, and well, and good. But something like the anti-vaccine crusade 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. Three more quick questions before I turn it over to all of your questions. How people pronounce your last name: What does it tell you about their class backgrounds or otherwise? [laughter]…

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