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Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence

Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason)

17 Jan 2018 21 published claims 1 attributable person
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Speakers in the public record

Ross Douthat

Claim mix

belief 11evaluation 6preference 3prediction 1

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The useful parts, with receipts.

21 published records

01 / belief

The issue there, though, is just that the orthodox Christian believes that at a certain point the revelation is actually final, that God essentially doesn’t play tricks on you. And this is I think an important idea — that too much Hegelianism leads you to the point where you’re saying, “Well, what God is saying in one era just doesn’t hold true in another.

“The issue there, though, is just that the orthodox Christian believes that at a certain point the revelation is actually final, that God essentially doesn’t play tricks on you. And this is I think an important idea — that too much Hegelianism leads you to the point where you’re saying, “Well, what God is saying in one era just doesn’t hold true in another.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

02 / belief

I think the Hegelian insight can be true in the development of political forms and responses to problems that social changes create, problems that basic technological changes create, and you can hold that view while also holding the view that the Hegelian dialectic can’t be usefully applied to certain ideas and certain truths, and you can take extreme examples and say there isn’t a synthesis to be had with — to violate Godwin’s law early in our conversation — there isn’t a synthesis to be had with Nazi Germany.

“I think the Hegelian insight can be true in the development of political forms and responses to problems that social changes create, problems that basic technological changes create, and you can hold that view while also holding the view that the Hegelian dialectic can’t be usefully applied to certain ideas and certain truths, and you can take extreme examples and say there isn’t a synthesis to be had with — to violate Godwin’s law early in our conversation — there isn’t a synthesis to be had with Nazi Germany.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

03 / belief

All of which is to say I don’t have a brilliant answer for your question, but I think there would be a lot of very strange and different cross currents that the people most inclined to make the pro-life argument right now would be disinclined to immediately run with whatever political possibilities had presented, but also that the nature of the technology, its level of invasiveness and what making it work would mean, would in turn determine where liberalism went, and so on.

“All of which is to say I don’t have a brilliant answer for your question, but I think there would be a lot of very strange and different cross currents that the people most inclined to make the pro-life argument right now would be disinclined to immediately run with whatever political possibilities had presented, but also that the nature of the technology, its level of invasiveness and what making it work would mean, would in turn determine where liberalism went, and so on.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

04 / belief

In that way and various others that I could go on listing, I think the tensions between Mormonism and the dominant American culture still leaves it quintessentially American, just as .

“In that way and various others that I could go on listing, I think the tensions between Mormonism and the dominant American culture still leaves it quintessentially American, just as .”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

06 / belief

I think that we’re going to wake up in 20 or 30 years and be — well, we may not wake up, but I would like to think that we’ll wake up in 20 or 30 years and say — “Why were we putting all of our children in front of these screens for so much of their childhood and shouldn’t this be something that we had exerted actual control over instead of just leaving it to some combination of experiment and market forces and governments wanting to be hip and cool and buying a lot of Chromebooks that Microsoft wanted to unload,” and so on.

“I think that we’re going to wake up in 20 or 30 years and be — well, we may not wake up, but I would like to think that we’ll wake up in 20 or 30 years and say — “Why were we putting all of our children in front of these screens for so much of their childhood and shouldn’t this be something that we had exerted actual control over instead of just leaving it to some combination of experiment and market forces and governments wanting to be hip and cool and buying a lot of Chromebooks that Microsoft wanted to unload,” and so on.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

07 / belief

I think that there is a very natural story to tell about Western civilization, in which particular Christian ideas about the individual, the individual’s relationship to God, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and so on — that these sort of embedded ideas eventually develop into the constituent forms of modern liberal democracy.

“I think that there is a very natural story to tell about Western civilization, in which particular Christian ideas about the individual, the individual’s relationship to God, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and so on — that these sort of embedded ideas eventually develop into the constituent forms of modern liberal democracy.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

08 / belief

I think conservatism in America at its best is trying to preserve a kind of American exceptionalism that doesn’t sort of have applications really when you’re thinking about what a German conservatism would be, or a Russian conservatism, and so on.

“I think conservatism in America at its best is trying to preserve a kind of American exceptionalism that doesn’t sort of have applications really when you’re thinking about what a German conservatism would be, or a Russian conservatism, and so on.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

09 / belief

I think a therapeutic shift on divorce would have negative practical effects on the everyday lives of Catholics. But the reason the issue is particularly important to me, and the reason I’ve written about it so much, is that I think the church is risking betraying its connection to Jesus.

“I think a therapeutic shift on divorce would have negative practical effects on the everyday lives of Catholics. But the reason the issue is particularly important to me, and the reason I’ve written about it so much, is that I think the church is risking betraying its connection to Jesus.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

10 / belief

I don’t want to, having done my Butlerian Jihad rant, I don’t want to oversell the horrors of social media, because I think if you look at a lot of the polarization in American life, it’s being driven by an older technology: cable television.

“I don’t want to, having done my Butlerian Jihad rant, I don’t want to oversell the horrors of social media, because I think if you look at a lot of the polarization in American life, it’s being driven by an older technology: cable television.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

11 / belief

I think if I were playing the optimist, I would say that there is a Euro-African future for the church where African forces, African migration, African ideas, African leaders help renew and enrich and return European Catholics to their faith.

“I think if I were playing the optimist, I would say that there is a Euro-African future for the church where African forces, African migration, African ideas, African leaders help renew and enrich and return European Catholics to their faith.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

12 / preference

There are a lot of people who wanted to like The Wire more than The Sopranos because The Wire was sort of sociological and political in a way that Sopranos wasn’t.

“There are a lot of people who wanted to like The Wire more than The Sopranos because The Wire was sort of sociological and political in a way that Sopranos wasn’t.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

13 / evaluation

I think for the synthesis, I guess when I think about the synthesis in that case, I gave it quite a low probability because it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity make — and, again, this comes back to the storytelling issue maybe — but I think there’s a more organic and obvious unity in that story than there is in the combined story.

“I think for the synthesis, I guess when I think about the synthesis in that case, I gave it quite a low probability because it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity make — and, again, this comes back to the storytelling issue maybe — but I think there’s a more organic and obvious unity in that story than there is in the combined story.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

14 / evaluation

There was an argument that this was a matter of distributional justice, that the tax code was penalizing parents in various ways because of their kids’ contributions to Social Security, and so on, through a rather elaborate schema — that I think was true and correct.

“There was an argument that this was a matter of distributional justice, that the tax code was penalizing parents in various ways because of their kids’ contributions to Social Security, and so on, through a rather elaborate schema — that I think was true and correct.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

15 / evaluation

Well, anyway, it’s some sort of rebellion against the use of computational replacements for human beings. And so you have this far-distant spacefaring culture that relies on Mentats, these humans who have developed their intellect to somewhat superhuman levels — perhaps through the use of CRISPR — thereby I’m trying to unite all the themes of tonight, Tyler — But they don’t use certain forms of computing power that we would assume people in the far future would.

“Well, anyway, it’s some sort of rebellion against the use of computational replacements for human beings. And so you have this far-distant spacefaring culture that relies on Mentats, these humans who have developed their intellect to somewhat superhuman levels — perhaps through the use of CRISPR — thereby I’m trying to unite all the themes of tonight, Tyler — But they don’t use certain forms of computing power that we would assume people in the far future would.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

16 / preference

I could never actually finish all of Herbert’s novels, which makes me a Dune noncompletist, which means I might be the wrong person to lead the Butlerian Jihad.

“I could never actually finish all of Herbert’s novels, which makes me a Dune noncompletist, which means I might be the wrong person to lead the Butlerian Jihad.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

17 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

18 / evaluation

I think that the situation in Europe is a very challenging one for anyone to think through, but particularly for a Catholic, because you have this sort of — it’s the ancestral homeland of my faith.

“I think that the situation in Europe is a very challenging one for anyone to think through, but particularly for a Catholic, because you have this sort of — it’s the ancestral homeland of my faith.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

19 / prediction

I think that there is a sort of sincere limit to human imagination when it comes to contemplating the idea of the beatific vision and so on, and that comes across.

“I think that there is a sort of sincere limit to human imagination when it comes to contemplating the idea of the beatific vision and so on, and that comes across.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

20 / evaluation

She started the book shortly after we started having children and one of the interesting things that she realized was how much of her reaction to cats was a displaced child reaction; that cats have these faces that look like infants’ faces and have the eyes and the wide faces, and they meow in this way that approximates an infant’s cry, and they essentially hijack the maternal instinct.

“She started the book shortly after we started having children and one of the interesting things that she realized was how much of her reaction to cats was a displaced child reaction; that cats have these faces that look like infants’ faces and have the eyes and the wide faces, and they meow in this way that approximates an infant’s cry, and they essentially hijack the maternal instinct.”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

21 / preference

I think that male productivity is — I don’t want to say this isn’t true of female productivity too, but I only have the male experience to go by — I think male productivity is often .

“I think that male productivity is — I don’t want to say this isn’t true of female productivity too, but I only have the male experience to go by — I think male productivity is often .”
Speaker
Ross Douthat
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler
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