Tag: Ezra Klein

The folly of destroying an inheritance

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

In the February issue of the Irish-based magazine,  Position Papers, a review of Vandalising Ireland by historian and writer Eoin Lenihan was published. It was a kind of ‘call to arms’ in defence of an authentic Irish identity and nationhood. We might wish him luck. As the reviewer, Dr Tim O’Sullivan, implied, the sometimes sneering reception of the book in the mainstream media spoke volumes about the kind of culture-war vandalism Lenihan was calling out.

Sadly, those who treasure Ireland’s 3,000+ years of history and identity are a very despondent lot in contemporary Ireland—nor is there anyone in the present political or cultural landscape who looks remotely like a serious influence to counter the abysmal and destructive drift our nation is experiencing.

But it is not just a local issue confined to one nation’s historical heritage. It is a question of one nation or people being subsumed in an identity whose skewed values are poisoning and are pervading the dominant elites of Western civilisation.

In this platform some years ago, the point of view was advanced, admittedly not very original, that the Irish State could be seen as the 51st State of the American Union. What was new in that designation is that it was described as a politically very deep-blue state. Matters have got much worse in terms of our allegiance to the decadent progressivism of deep-blue US polities since that particular essay was posted.

The deep moral vacuum we see in Ireland today does nothing else but mirror the vacuum alarmingly described by a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, in a recent essay on the prospects for his country. He is not the only worried NYT columnist. Even the more left-leaning Ezra Klein is worried about it in the context of the compulsive power now being wielded by the dubious actors driving the runaway technological revolution, unimpeded by any restraining democratic agency. He articulated those concerns in a recent podcast discussion with a law professor and a prominent science-fiction writer.

Klein and his interlocutors, in the light of the plague of “Ragebait, Sponcon” (short for sponsored content), “A.I. slop”, asked what happened to the internet of 2026 “which makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago”. What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly happened to make it go so badly wrong? They rather hopelessly scratched their heads wondering what kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives more meaningful again.

They did not really have an answer.

The liberal-progressivist Matthew Yglesias takes issue, of course, with both these men searching for a better way forward—or a way back from a cliff, as they see it—to a more contented society. Yglesias thinks their concerns are bogus.

He sums up his rubbishing of their concerns in this way:

On December 7, for example, Ezra Klein linked his growing concern with the amount of time people spend on compulsive online scrolling with Michael Sandel’s longstanding communitarian critique of liberalism.

Michael Sandel is a Harvard political philosophy professor, recognised as one of the most influential modern-day political philosophers who has railed against what he considers the poisoning of US politics.

Yglesias continued by attacking Ross Douthat for touting an old reactionary critique of liberalism—“that what’s gained in wealth and freedom might be lost in alienation and anomie”—(that view) has “garnered new force in the last two decades because of a very specific interaction between technological change and libertarian values”.

Douthat takes his worries to an even more fundamental level than Klein. He goes straight for the jugular in his analysis and tentatively suggests an escape route from what he essentially sees as an existential dead end.

His core concern is what he describes as “the triumph of vice in American life”. He is not just talking about the moral hell-hole which swallowed up Jeffrey Epstein and his knowing associates. Douthat is talking about something much more pervasive.

The triumph of vice in American life—the haze of marijuana in our cities, the gambling apps pulsing in so many young male pockets, the success of OnlyFans layered atop the ubiquity of online porn—happened gradually and suddenly. Gradually in the sense that there was no one Supreme Court decision that made all the difference, no single presidential election that turned on legal pot or legal porn. Suddenly in the sense that a convergence of forces, legal and cultural and technological, had a turbocharging effect over just the past 10 years.

The denial of this decadent progression by left liberals like Yglesias has resulted in conservatives declaring the end of meaningful liberalism and the emergence of a new embryonic post-liberal society. Douthat challenges attempts, like that of Yglesias, to justify the old liberal philosophy and its political outcomes. Douthat unpicks the fallacy of Yglesias’s philosophy. The fact that liberal governments are obliged to “treat citizens as if they are atomised individuals”, Yglesias wrote, does not mean “that people should, in fact, be atomised individuals”. The liberal order allows for myriad social cures for hyper-individualism, all kinds of private sources of morality and meaning. It just does not impose a single one-size-fits-all model, because that way lies tyranny.

All of which seems to sum up why liberal progressivism is nothing less than a formula for utter moral and social chaos. The tyranny he imagines coming from conservative values bears no comparison with the tyranny of the ‘woke’ culture which gave us wholesale cancellation of any who dared to question their conventional wisdom.

Douthat continues: “I think that vice clarifies some ways in which this theory is naïve. In any society, politics is an arena for debates about the good life. The way the government taxes and spends and bans and regulates has a powerful effect on the behaviour of its citizens, and what the law allows or forbids has some effect—not decisive, but inevitably influential—on what ordinary people think and do. So if the law and the political theory underneath it treat people like atomised individuals, well, then people will inevitably behave more like atomised individuals, conceive of themselves more like atomised individuals and experience the ills of atomisation more acutely.”

He maintains that this is clearly part of what has happened with gambling and drugs and pornography. As our laws have become less moralistic and more libertarian, addictive behaviours have increased. An amoral understanding of liberalism has yielded, in a pretty direct way, to a more immoral society. . . .

He quotes Aaron Renn in a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal, who argues that in the US context it is fundamentally about the decline of Protestant Christianity as the core worldview in American life. That institutionalised generic Protestantism worked within and through liberal institutions before collapsing from the 1960s onward—which was when some kind of hell broke loose over a few generations, while complacent ‘boomers’ of the post-war generation complacently looked on.

Douthat feels that it is here that the stronger forms of religiously minded post-liberalism make their case, whether Catholic or Protestant. They argue that American liberalism was able to restrain vice only because of its religious inheritance; the secularising aspects of the liberal order have destroyed that inheritance; and so only an explicitly Christian politics that repudiates liberalism can restore the moral order.

But he is tentative about that. “If I had the answer,” he says, “I wouldn’t write so many open-ended newsletters on this subject (while urging my fellow Americans toward religion every chance I get).” That is a reference to his important recent bestseller, Believe.

So where does this leave Ireland? David Quinn’s (Irish Independent, 1 February 2026) unpicking of the cultural and religious travesty of the Irish State’s interpretation of the life and meaning of the country’s second patron, St Brigid, shows exactly where the country is going—straight into the abyss of post-Christian nothingness.

This is the legacy which Ireland’s pseudo-nationalist elite, installed firmly but hopefully not permanently in our political institutions and public service, is deliberately trying to bequeath to our country and people.

“Saint Brigid, we are informed,” Quinn wrote, was an “activist, healer and peacemaker”. We are shown images of suffragettes. We see pro-choice campaigner Ailbhe Smyth. We see activists holding up placards saying, “No banning family planning.” We see people celebrating in Dublin Castle the day the result of the same-sex marriage referendum was announced. We see a woman in a brightly coloured dress standing outside a church with a banner behind her opposing fracking. For some reason, the church is in Lagos, Nigeria. . . .

Far from the feminine being written out of history, what is happening now is that Christianity is being written out of Brigid’s story, and out of Ireland’s story, Quinn concluded.

Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor, attempted to reverse the decrees of his predecessor, Constantine, and restore the pagan gods as the moving spirits of the Empire. He failed miserably and died miserably on a battlefield somewhere in Asia. 

But we live in hope, indeed in Hope.  There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.

Endgame?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This is the way the world ends  

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Unless… Unless what? The problem is, we cannot give a coherent answer to that question. The truth is we seem not to know even how to begin to answer that question. That is, the agencies which try to govern our destinies on this planet, our governments, our academics, our experts, do not know, have not got the slightest idea of what to do to head off that “whimper”.

Ezra Klein, columnist with the New York Times, one of their best, and Jennifer Sciubba, distinguished demographer, began a heavyweight discussion on the columnist’s NYT based The Ezra Klein Show recently. They grappled with a frightening prospect for humanity – nothing less than what looks like the impending collapse of our civilisation.

Klein began, “So, tell me what ‘the total fertility rate’ is?”

Sciubba explained that the total fertility rate is — “let’s just say it’s the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime.” 

Klein then went on to say that when he listens to the conversation about total fertility rates, there are two conversations going on at the same time. One on the left is that it’s way too high. There are too many people. The other conversation is about how critically low it is and that we’re facing “a demographic bust. We’re going to see population collapse. We are a planet growing old, certainly a bunch of countries growing old.” 

They left aside the first conversation and focused on the second. They talked about the consequences of the fact that women have, on average, worldwide, about 2.2 children these days. Sciubba explained that basically, that is the replacement level. But then she said that in this century so far, we are in a global demographic divide. For example, the area in the world where it really is the highest is in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, over five children per woman on average.

But while there’s a divide, she said, the bottom line is that we’re all moving in the same direction. In the second part of the century, that’s really where we’re all going to start converging down at those lower levels. 

Klein then asked her how true the statement was that as countries get richer and more educated, their fertility rate drops. “Partially true” was her answer because there are “huge” examples where that has not been the case. “Huge” as in India. India is already really below replacement level for the whole country.

She cited Paul Ehrlich’s opening to his 1968 book, Population Bomb. He recalled a trip to India. There were people everywhere, people on the streets, people eating, people drinking, people sleeping, people, people, people. “And now, those people have a total fertility rate below replacement level. And India is not a wealthy country.” 

But they agreed that in general if a country has gotten richer, and that country is highly educated, highly literate, it is wealthy, that generally allows you to predict with a high level of certainty that this country is probably going to have a low fertility rate, probably below replacement level.

They were baffled by this “slightly mysterious” (Klein’s phrase) thing at the heart of their conversation. Why is it a demographic fact that when you look around the world, rich countries, more educated countries have fewer children? Why does wealth lead to fewer children?

They then moved from the focus on material well-being and began to talk about human values and the tremendous shift in values and norms across western societies. Sciubba then got personal and almost went to confession:

“And so, I think about my own life. So I have two children. And I have values beyond just wanting those children. Sorry to them if they listen to this. Thank goodness, they probably won’t, till they’re older. I do value my free time. I do value a nice meal at a restaurant. I value time with friends, time with my spouse, et cetera, et cetera. I value my career. And I value time with them the most. But you know what? It does compete for time.” 

Klein agreed but put it a little differently. “As countries become richer and more educated, they become more individualistic. And when you’re more individualistic, and people are making decisions more about their life, their self-expression, their set of choices,… then, children are one choice competing among many.”

They didn’t say this but it comes down to “freedom” of choice, “freedom” for choice. Ultimately it is about how we understand freedom.

So, on a personal level it all seems to come down to the choices people are offered by our society and our economic circumstances. As a society we expect to be able to make our choices freely and at the end of the day it is our personal value system which will guide us – or be a moral imperative for us – in making those choices. That, however, offers no solution to the demographic winter which our world faces.

They then considered the powerful impact of societal cultural values on all this – clearly implying that while people might feel they are acting freely in all the decisions they make, their freedom is much more limited than they think, limited by the norms prevailing in their communities.

They then nuanced their view of how much real freedom they might actually be enjoying.

Klein reflected that if he had told his parents that he was going to have kids at 24, they would wonder what went wrong with birth control. “We’d have been the only ones in our friend group with kids at that point. And so, there is this way in which, yes, there’s a lot of individualism, but the individualism also has very potent cultural grooves, right? You’re supposed to go and get education, and then more education and then more education, and then establish yourself in your career and be financially in a good spot, and of course, be married.

“And by the time you’ve done all that, you might be 30. You might be 32. You might be 36. And even if you wanted to have three or four kids at that point, you do end up running, particularly for women, into a biological clock problem.”

Sciubba drew from this observation the consequence that the total fertility rate for the U.S., writ large, is about 1.6 to 1.7 children per woman. Below replacement level. For the more education the lower it is on average. However she also pointed out that the gap with highly educated and less highly educated is not that big anymore.

They then moved to look at what we might call the global picture and how state policy – or any other agency’s policy – might shift us from a path which many see as a path of self-annihilation.

Is this really something that is amenable to policy change, though? Klein asked. “One of the things that is most striking to me about the data here…is that across many different kinds of societies, including some that have seen this as a crisis for their country for some time — I think here of Japan, I think here of South Korea — the ability to shift this through policy — and people have tried a lot of different things and a lot of different kinds of messaging and tax incentives and this and that — it doesn’t really seem like anything has worked.”

“And in the most extreme cases — again, I think here of South Korea, which I believe is now below total fertility rate of one, so I mean, you’re entering geometric decline — they’ve not been able to turn that around…Some of the extreme cases, like some of these East Asian countries” now see this as a genuine threat?

Klein and Sciubba then go on a virtual tour of the world to find a country which has tackled its demographic decline successfully. Depressingly, nothing seems to work. 

Sweden, which I visited last summer and where I was impressed by the evidence I saw of young families – and was told that Sweden is the best country in Europe in which to have children because of all the benefits offered. But all this is to no avail in bringing their fertility rate to or above replacement level.

The demographic “engineers” are trying to raise fertility rates to replacement level and trying to create what Sciubba describes as this nice stovepipe age structure. In this you get a steady number of people being born, aging into the workforce and aging out, without any scramble to build kindergartens or scramble to pay for Social Security.

Dream on.

The conclusion of their virtual tour is that we really don’t have societies that hang out there at replacement level. Once they tend to fall below it, they tend to stay there. 

Klein asks how do you get a population, if you’re a state, to have fertility rates that go back up above replacement level? “Well, you can strip away individual rights.” He hastens to add that he is not advocating this. Some totalitarian regimes tried and one succeeded monstrously – that of Nicolai Ceausescu in communist Romania. “So, no,” he concludes, “we do not really have examples where a society goes way below and then comes back up to above replacement level and hangs out there, and everyone is happy.”

No one thinks that the Ceausescu road is the one we will be travelling! But what road will we be traveling? Neither Klein nor Sciubba, with the best will in the world, really have any suggestions.  It appears that the modern world, in its modernity or postmodernity incarnations, as regards this impending threat is just stumped? 

In Part II of this article, next week, we will look at Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue, which traces false ideas which have colonised our culture and are conceivably at the root of this predicament.

Parts I and II will appear in the print and online summer editions (May and June/July) of Position Papers Review.

A Christian future for liberalism?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

x

The current geo-political turmoil, with Ukraine in the eye of the storm, is upsetting all kinds of certainties and semi-certainties. Many of these we may have been priding ourselves of possessing. One is the semi-certainty, held by perhaps a majority of Christians, that on the political spectrum their values were going to be better protected by the right as opposed to the left. This was so much so that in current discourse “the Christian right” itself became a political category.

Now, however, a great deal of rethinking has been forced on the lazy-minded categorizers. This has been forced on all who place value on religion itself, of any denomination or creed. A genuine orthodox Christian has no choice but to flee from the murderous political regime which until very recently was being seen as a defender of the faith. That title has now become as unworthy of Vladimir V. Putin as the title defensor fidei bestowed on Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 became. In the Islamic world the brutalities of Iran and Saudi Arabia, so-called defenders of the muslim faith, can only be an affront to its genuine adherents. The growing extremism of Narenda Modi’s regime must pain any peace-loving Hindu.

But the cleansing process does not end with the potential  it has for the purification of religions. It also shows signs of bringing the secular world back to its senses. Ezra Klein, a young liberal-minded columnist in the New York Times suggests that the exposure of the excesses of the right now gives liberalism itself an opportunity to bring itself back from the brink of disaster, a scenario outlined a few years ago by Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame in his book on the failure of liberalism. Its intolerances and narrow minded bigotry has been for years threatening what Klein sees as its true universal spirit.

In Klein’s reading, the anti-liberal right – where it was identifying itself as Christian – was never true to the Christian faith. In fact, in its true form it was something that they feared – as Vladimir V. Putin must now do. The liberal left, on the other hand, for the recent decades in which it has not adhered to universal principles has suffered by its separation from the belief of genuine Christians.

Klein explores all this in a recent long article in his newspaper. He does so partly in the context of what he describes as a moving and beautiful collection  of essays by Ukrainian writers on the country’s history and its troubled relationship with both Russia and the West.

In his article he echoes the famous opening epigram of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-between – “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” He suggests that the trap which liberalism fell into was to marginalize all those who valued elements of tradition, their histories and their nations. To do so for him was a fatal flaw, betraying the universal spirit which should imbue true liberals.

“Liberalism”, he writes, “needs a healthier relationship to time. Can the past become a foreign country without those who still live there being turned into foreigners in their own land? If the future is to be unmapped, then how do we persuade those who fear it, or mistrust us, to agree to venture into its wilds?

“I suspect another way of asking the same question is this: Can the constant confrontation with our failures and deficiencies produce a culture that is generous and forgiving? Can it be concerned with those who feel not just left behind, as many in America do, but left out, as so many Ukrainians were for so long?”

Then he moves to suggest this daring answer.

“The answer to that — if there is an answer to that — may lie in the Christianity the anti-liberals feared, which too few in politics practice. What I, as an outsider to Christianity, (he is Jewish) have always found most beautiful about it is how strange it is. Here is a worldview built on a foundation of universal sin and insufficiency, an equality that bleeds out of the recognition that we are all broken, rather than that we must all be great. I’ve always envied the practice of confession, not least for its recognition that there will always be more to confess and so there must always be more opportunities to be forgiven.”

Some of this spirit, in secular form, can, he writes, be seen in the Ukrainian essays. “The tone is anything but triumphalist, with Russia having taken Crimea and the rest of Europe and the United States shrugging it off. The perspective is largely tragic, clear-eyed about the work that may go undone and the distance left to travel. But the writing is generous, too: suffused with love for country, honesty about an often bloody history, determination despite a disappointing present and, above all, a commitment to one another.”

He concludes by saying that there is much to learn from that merger of self-criticism and deep solidarity. Put in Christian terms he might have said that with humility and Charity, the world might well be saved. It would. It will.