Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why? Well, first I should say, I have to agree because anyone who reads the book will find a number of quotations from Peter Thiel throughout. And I have, with some emendations, mostly accepted his analysis of the technological and economic component of our stagnation. So I am indebted to him. I think that he — in his own evolution — has followed, but in certain ways blazed a trail for other evolutions of younger conservative intellectuals who are, in certain ways, in search of a new fusionism — one way to put it. Modern conservatism begins with the fusionism of social conservatism and mid-century Hayekian — Hayek to Rand — that wide spectrum of libertarianism. There’s a general sense that that kind of fusion has broken down, and you have people who imagine a new conservatism that’s just social conservatism. Then you have libertarians who imagine a libertarianism that leaves conservatism behind. But there are a lot of people who want to put things back together again, but in a slightly different way, and to make an argument that’s maybe like the argument that I end up with in the book, that there is some interesting alchemy between a society that looks a little further back and a little further ahead. So what I was saying earlier about Scruton, right? The idea that looking back to the 19th century or the 17th century isn’t necessarily decadent because it also lets you, maybe, look a little further ahead. I think that’s, in certain ways, there in at least some of Thiel’s stuff where he’s simultaneously sympathetic to . . . He’s an eccentric Christian of some sort, maybe. He’s, at the very least, sympathetic to religious conservatives in a way that other Silicon Valley figures are not. At the same time, he is a dynamist in a way that the most Burkean version of social conservatism isn’t. You’ve written about the idea of state capacity libertarianism, right? I think that’s one example of ways in which people who are skeptical of wherever liberalism is right now are trying to forge something else. So some combination of a strong state, some kind of small-c conservative social renewal, and some sort of futurism offers some kind of alchemy. Thiel — he wrote Zero to One, which has an implicit political teaching, but there isn’t a Thielian manifesto at the moment. I think his influence is in the inchoateness of his combination of ideas, sort of speaking to the inchoateness of other people’s combinations of ideas. there isn’t a Thielian manifesto at the moment. I think his influence is in the inchoateness of his combination of ideas, sort of speaking to the inchoateness of other people’s combinations of ideas. He wrote an essay — there was a piece very critical of him, of course, I think in New York Magazine — but that looked at this essay he wrote for First Things a little while ago that had this very particular point aimed at Christian readers where he said, “Look, the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city.” I’d read that essay when he wrote it, and I think it actually did have some subconscious or conscious influence on me where I think there’s a strong religious, conservative draw towards pastoralism, towards the idea — my friend Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option, has this idea of the retreat into the monastery, the retreat into the Wendell Berry farming community, and so on. And I think that has to be — for Christianity to be a plausible faith for our civilization — that has to be balanced with a certain kind of the futurist optimism that has always been part of Christian cultures. And I think that —…

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