I crawled into bed last night just before 12, shaken and very quiet. I had just returned from seeing Lars von Trier’s new film Melancholia. Many readers of First Things likely took David Bentley Hart’s advice to eschew Atlas Shrugged in favor of Terrence Malick’s masterpiece, Tree of Life. Those who did so know that Malick has produced a profound, brilliant exploration of the origins and character of life in our universe. When Tree of Life ended the first thing I thought of was Bach’s Mass in B Minor. The film seemed to me, as it still does, a work of comparable ambition, scope, and joy.

Well, I don’t know exactly what to compare Melancholia to (perhaps something by Wagner? Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy?), but I left the theater equally moved, albeit in a much different way. If the production of these two films had not been contemporaneous, I would strongly suspect von Trier of setting out to compose a riposte to Malick’s grand vision of hope. Melancholia is a dire, brave, terrifying exploration of the character of life in our universe, faced with its own annihilation. The Danish director has contrived an apocalyptic plot (the earth’s impending collision with the planet “Melancholia”) that makes death literally loom on the horizon, but viewers recognize Melancholia as a symbol of the way of all flesh.

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“I am an anarchist – don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.” So brayed Johnny Rotten, singer of the seminal punk band the SexPistols. Dear Mr. Rotten, punk may be dead, but have we got a new movement for you! It’s called Occupy Wall Street, and its members have spent the past couple of months playing drums, mugging for the cameras, disrupting traffic, yelling at rich people, and sporadically toying with the idea of figuring out what they want. One rightly doubts the prospects for a movement that can’t muster a manifesto; OWS seems determined to slide into the river of history without making a ripple. Of course, some are more sanguine about Occupy’s future. The radical anthropologist David Graeber argues that the lack of concrete demands is actually a virtue. OWS, he says, is no mere reform movement. It is about “creating a vision” of a new, radically different society. The occupation is a worldwide revolution, currently in fetal stage. But no, actually, it isn’t.

The occupation will certainly be televised, at least for awhile, but Graeber’s revolution will almost certainly not be realized. 1968 was a very, very long time ago. Revolution is a young generation’s game, and the vast majority of my peers, the children of the baby boomers, are not willing to play it. And why should we be? Our parents, the student radicals of the sixties, once seemed poised to create a brave new world. One based, they said, on generosity, equality and openness. They ended up changing a great deal, it’s true – sexual mores and attitudes towards authority, for instance.

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This will not be the first time that First Thoughts readers have heard from me on the virtues of Mr. Lionel Trilling, but readers interested in learning more about one of America’s greatest critics and intellectuals can check out my piece in today’s
Wall Street Journal.

The New Republic has a piece up today that, gulp, commends the higher-education reform agenda of one Mr. Rick Perry of Texas. Perry is, the writer avers, a visionary. The TNR commenters are, predictably, apoplectic. Their rage seems a bit hard to justify from where I’m sitting, but I’ll be the last one to decry the leavening effect that a touch of choking apoplexy can have on an otherwise dreary Thursday morning.

On, though, to Perry’s policy recommendations. I’m not terribly confident about his yen for super-cheap, mostly online education. Not at all. The super-cheap part is intriguing, of course, but I’ve never seen anyone approach an online course (they’re not so uncommon these days) with anything more inspiring than an “Oh shoot, I forgot I’m supposed to post something on that stupid message board” attitude. More promising, to me, are Perry’s various ideas about tying tenure and salary decisions to teaching outcomes, however those outcomes can best be measured (this is no simple matter). Over my five years of grad school, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the offices of big-shot professors kibitzing about, well, other big-shot professors. And I’ve seen the way that they grimace at their watches, snap their laptops shut, and mutter something to the effect of “Oh shoot, I forgot I’m supposed to teach that stupid class.” Watching them dawdle off to the lectern, one’s imagination does not swell with pictures of pedagogical virtuosity.

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The folks over at Commonweal are up to something. In case you don’t make it to that corner of the web very often, let me commend to your attention Verdicts, Commonweal’s new blog covering books and culture. So far, since its launch in July, Verdicts has featured fine short pieces on David Foster Wallace, A.S. Byatt, Yves Congar, Terrence Malick, and Ismail Kadare, among several others.

As of this writing, the latest piece on Verdicts is a reflection on the life and work of the French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel, penned by Santiago Ramos, my friend and colleague at Boston College. Ramos argues that Blondel’s existentially-inflected explorations could provide a welcome complement to natural law “ethics-talk” that  seems, at present, to be the only widely utilized product of the of Catholic intellectual tradition. Having run through a small list of influential Catholic philosophers of the 20^th century, Ramos gets pensive:

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Primary season is fully upon us, and now the Fourth of July is here. Seasoned political observers know what to expect from the candidates—a dozen or so very ambitious people, flag-pinned and furrow-browed, speaking earnestly about their love for America. Patriotic sentiment is a sine qua non for successful presidential bids, especially on the right—recall the overblown election-year dustup over candidate Obama’s inconsistent wearing of his lapel flag pin.

The fact that it was the liberal candidate whose patriotism was under question is significant. It is widely assumed, at least among conservatives, that those on the right are more patriotic than those on the left. This narrative contrasts rooted, rural, America-loving conservatives with cosmopolitan urban liberals who look down their sophisticated noses at flag-waving sentimentality. Like many stereotypes, these bear an element of truth. The cultural habits of so-called liberal elites can tend to be more European than distinctively American—one suspects that the average Yale professor would feel more at home in Paris, France than Paris, Texas. More importantly, anti-flyover-country snobbishhness is not a mere figment of the conservative imagination. During two years of study at Yale, my head was not-infrequently sent spinning by the ignorant dismissal of all things non-coastal by supposedly urbane Ivy Leaguers.

Granting all of this, the left-right patriotism gap is still not so clear-cut as it is often assumed to be, in part because the relationship between tribalism in general, and patriotism in particular, is a complicated one. Particularly in America. Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman, critic of the French Revolution, and philosophical father of modern conservatism, defended tribalism in general by arguing that loyalty to our “little platoons”—things like family, region, religion, class—is in fact the “germ” of wider public affections, which ought gradually to grow to embrace our entire nation, and then all of mankind. According to Burke, these smaller loyalties come relatively easily. Love for things like nation and humanity do not. They must be cultivated over time.

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I have just finished reading Lionel Trilling’s 1940 Partisan Review essay “Elements That Are Wanted.” More than sixty years after its publication, it remains a galvanizing read, though perhaps now in a different way. For a thorough account of the piece, and its important impact at the time, see this fine essay by long time First Things friend and contributor, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Since Ms. Himmelfarb has done the hard work of summarizing and contextualizing Trilling’s essay, my account will be brief. Suffice it to say that in the piece, Trilling commends to his leftist readers certain central elements of T.S. Eliot’s (markedly conservative) political thought. Trilling expounds what he calls Eliot’s “moral Platonism” which recognizes a moral / social ideal, but contents itself with what is possible for actual, living men and women, here and now. By contrast, Trilling argues that the left is afflicted with a sickly case of contemptus mundi – hatred of the world. Its Utopian willingness to break actual eggs in the creation of an eschatalogical omelet is, he thinks, animated by a deep-seated “disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.”

Readers of First Things will, no doubt, find themselves in agreement with this little bit of Trilling’s analysis, and will feel encouraged that so eminent a liberal thinker has perceived the wisdom of Eliot’s conservative outlook. And rightly so. But there is also, in Trilling’s piece, a challenge that we on the right would do well to take up. No conservative needs to read Trilling to see that Eliot had something to teach mid-century high-brow leftists. But we could read Trilling in order to see what a genuine, honest, self-critical thinker can look like, even while maintaining a principled allegiance to one movement or another. Trilling was a man of the left, but he was honest enough, and he cared enough about the intellectual rectitude of his movement, to acknowledge when an infamously conservative thinker like Eliot supplied something his own tribe lacked. Liberals, he saw, were wrong about something, and conservatives were right. As an earnest liberal intellectual, Trilling publicized this embarrassing fact in the most prestigious organ of American liberal thought.

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As usual, the nineteenth century saw this coming. Tocqueville and Nietzsche, among many others, long ago predicted that an advanced democratic culture would entail a flattening of the spiritual landscape, discouraging the development of truly outstanding individuals who are willing and able to think and feel for themselves. Personal judgments, they saw, would increasingly be handed over to the masses. Neither thinker, of course, could have predicted precisely the forms that this flattening would take in the age of Facebook.

Jon Stewart is, let us say, neither the Nietzsche nor the Toqueville of the twenty-first century. He does, however, possess over those thinkers the advantage of contemporaneity. On February 28 he devoted a segment of The Daily Show to one more contemporary instance of democratic flattening, the recent dumbing down of CNN—or, one could say, its democratizing down. The wide mania for audience participation has apparently inspired the directors of CNN not just to pander to Joe and Jane Six Pack, but to give them a share of direct editorial control. Stewart played a painful montage of frivolous new CNN features, including two regular segments that amount to playing, and sort of commenting on, amusing YouTube videos.

The most damaging part of Stewart’s indictment, however, involved a feature CNN is calling “Choose the News” in which the network plays very brief teasers for three different news stories, and invites viewers to vote, via text message, on which stories CNN should cover later in the hour. The three stories on the voting block concerned, respectively, outrage over plans for a government takeover of womens’ shelters in Afghanistan (including photos of badly bruised female limbs and torsos), the significance of the Abu Dhabi arms bazaar (which is “the largest weapons show in the Middle East and Africa”) and a segment on homeless female veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Stewart pointed out, all three of these seem “kind of important.”

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