Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…If you see Israel as relatively nondecadent, do you then infer that being under military threat all of the time is what keeps decadence away? Certainly that is one thing, yeah, Israel — there seems to be some sort of existential issue involved in how people think about the future, and part of the book is suggesting that there is a loss of optimism in the Western world, a sense that frontiers are closed. We’re not going to go to the stars. We’re stuck here with ourselves. We’re bored. What do we do now? But there’s also a sense in which extreme pessimism or extreme concern about the future can be a spur against decadence. And what’s so striking about Israel in demographic terms is that Israel is the one country at its level of income that has a birth rate, not just at replacement, but way above replacement. It’s dipped a little in the last couple of years. And people hear that statistic and say, “Well, it’s just the Ultra-Orthodox having big families.” But in fact, secular Israelis have much larger than American average families as well, again, in a landscape where their children are in more geopolitical peril than children in the US, in a country that is built out of a desert on a narrow strip of land up against the Mediterranean. Now politically — we’re recording this in the midst of the interregnum between Israeli elections, of which we’re on track to have 17 in the next year or so — I think that you can see elements of the same political decadence on display in other countries on display in Israel too. So I don’t want to suggest that they’re exempt from the trends I’m describing, but they are — like the Mormons — exceptional relative to the rich society norm. To get back to the theme of your own decadence — you’ve written columns skeptical of the internet. You mentioned pornography a moment ago, which is usually now consumed over the internet. Presumably when it comes to CRISPR babies and transhumanism and genetic engineering, you’re at least partly skeptical, maybe very skeptical. But if you think those are the areas right now where we’re seeing the major advances, isn’t it the case that, to overcome decadence, you have to actually embrace the innovations that you yourself are not comfortable with? The printing press in its early days led to religious wars. The Catholic Church —…

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