Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Our mutual acquaintance, Roger Scruton, who died recently — he seemed to love fox hunting and the operas of Richard Wagner. Was that decadence, or is that innovation? I think there are forms of antiquarianism that are sufficiently antiquarian to cease to be decadent and to become almost innovative. So you could argue that we’ve reached a point where our culture — our mass culture, but also our elite culture — is sufficiently dominated by just repetitions of cultural forms and products from the baby boomer era. That to be an antiquarian, to reach back towards traditions and forms and aesthetic forms that were popular 150 years ago, is also an escape from decadence. So there we go. Kanye isn’t decadent; Roger Scruton isn’t decadent. We’re whittling away at my thesis one celebrity, or late celebrity, at a time. Are you decadent? You wrote a column about architecture, and in that column you say, “Making American architecture a little more traditional . . . certainly wouldn’t hurt.” Shouldn’t American architecture be more like Kanye West?…

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