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Ross Douthat Profile picture
@DouthatNYT
Sep 17, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Wherever you stand on Enlightenment rollback, this from @DamonLinker gives too much credence to a Whig-history interpretation of the relationship between modern liberalism and modern science.
theweek.com/articles/93761…
There is clearly some relationship between liberalism, science and secularism, but sustained Western technological progress starts in the Middle Ages, and the Scientific Revolution happens amid Reformation and Counter-Reformation; Lockean liberalism is more its child than father.
An alternative timeline: Catholic Christendom >> technological progress; tech progress >>> tech-driven break-up of Christendom (thanks a lot, Gutenberg); break-up >>> liberalism's promise of religious truce; liberalism takes credit for continuing progress to legitimize its rule.
The fact that so many proto-liberals see themselves as developing a "new science" of politics (kicking off centuries of science envy from philosophers and humanists) is just one indicator that scientific breakthroughs precede and shape liberal ambitions as much as the reverse.

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More from @DouthatNYT

Ross Douthat Profile picture
Feb 11
It’s publication day for “Believe,” so let’s answer an obvious question: Why write a book making a case for religious belief as a general matter, rather than just the specific religion that I practice and believe? /long thread
zondervan.com/p/believe/
Fergus McCullough, a Protestant annotating my conversation w/Tyler Cowen (link further down), suggests the degree of difficulty of “Believe” is unusually high, since I have to justify so many “different religious experiences and perspectives. Far easier … to focus on the case for Christianity, which I think is both unique and the most plausible of all religions.” Sensible! However …Image
… there are a few reasons it might make sense for someone convinced of Christianity’s truth to nonetheless start at a more general level, most of them having to do with ways our cultural moment differs from other eras in which Christians have made their case. Let me explain.
Read 28 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Jan 31
Okay I will bite: The moral duties of a Christian are as @JDVance describes them, but with duties to God first that can override the natural duties (one good reason why priests and nuns are celibate), and as with the Good Samaritan, immediate duties to people outside your normal circles who present themselves in serious need. The questions of how the latter cashes out in a globalized age and how it shapes the moral obligations of a superpower's government are not, I think, actually all that easy to answer.
Telescopic philanthropy a la Mrs Jellyby is not a Christian virtue, and the US sometimes behaves in a Jellyby-ish fashion. That said our current foreign aid budget (whatever bad ideas it contains) is not large enough to constitute a real Jellybyan dereliction of natural duties.
The Biden administration's immigration policy is much more vulnerable to a anti-Jellybyist critique, in the sense that it strained primary obligations to citizens (shelter, housing, medical, schools, public safety) for the sake of secondary obligations to non-citizens.
Read 4 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Jan 25
I wrote my Sunday column on key divisions within the Trump administration/imperial court, and the ending is a little peculiar and worth unpacking:
nytimes.com/2025/01/25/opi…Image
I've written before about a "tech-trad" convergence, an alignment on anti-wokeness or birthrate concerns or just basic optimism about the intelligibility of the universe; I think that description makes sense when you're talking about JD Vance + Elon Musk.
nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opi…
But when you're talking about the further-out transhumanists of Silicon Valley and the maximally trad or (like RFK Jr.) the maximally holistic/crunchy/anti-corporate, you're talking about constituencies that are deeply, deeply in tension with each other.
Read 7 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Dec 26, 2024
I don't think this is an accurate description of the American situation, the evolution of our educational system and cultural priorities, or our traditional strengths. (1/X)
American society and youth culture have become *much* friendlier to nerds and valedictorians since the 1990s (trust me on this one), and the American educational system expects and demands more extracurriculars and math tutoring and weekend science competitions than ever before.
Nobody hangs out at the mall anymore (because they're all on their phones); the gospel of STEM is preached from every major pulpit; it's the humanities that are hemorrhaging students not computer science or related fields.
Read 9 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Oct 3, 2024
Interesting thread on contemporary versus older fantasy from @Scholars_Stage, but if you divide fantasists between myth-makers and systematizers it's a mistake to place Tolkien fully on the myth-maker side; the reason he looms so large is that he's both:
Indeed a big part of the challenge for Tolkien's contemporary heirs is that some of his systematizing cannot possibly be equaled - no one is likely to match the philological substrate he builds for Middle-Earth.
So the most successful non-Tolkien fantasists, including some that @Scholars_Stage lists, often succeed by refusing the challenge, relying more on the style he calls "mythic" or "vibes based" so as not to compete with Tolkien's hard-to-equal depth of world-building.
Read 8 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Jul 30, 2024
Speaking as someone who's been a pro-natalist since I was assigned an "overpopulation" project in high school in 1997 and realized where we were actually heading, a problem for pro-natalism is that it is inherently quite weird.
It is quite weird that we seem to need some kind of ... movement? ... policy revolution? ... cultural revolution? ... to sustain something that seems natural to the human species, so natural in fact that it's conventionally associated with efforts at "control."
For that reason the population control movement, while at best hubristic and at worse brutal and cruel, never seemed WEIRD; the idea that there could be a crisis driven by people having too many babies just fit naturally with typical assumptions about human nature.
Read 7 tweets

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