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.

The various ways that Mr. von Trier’s characters cope with this fact are psychologically revealing and philosophically profound. The lead character Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, is astounding—by turns tortured, cruel, crippled by despair, demonically resigned. The scenes in which her sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, scrambles, frantic and futile, to somehow protect her young son from the impending catastrophe are among the most powerful and draining I’ve ever seen in a film. I won’t attempt to adduce Mr. von Trier’s personal philosophy from Melancholia, at least not here and now, but I will whole-heartedly recommend that you go and see it, and if at all possible, on the big screen.

For those of us, like myself, who are prone to narratives of cultural decline, it is worth noting that this one little year has given us two great works of art that employ the full battery of modern cinematic technique to grapple, in very different ways, with some of the most enduring questions of human existence. If I were forced to choose, I would take Sophocles and Dostoevsky over Malick and von Trier. Happily, I am not, and neither are you. Vive la différence!

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.

But by the time they had children, the Berkeley radicals whom Czeslaw Milosz denounced as “spoiled children of the bourgeoisie” had finished their degrees, gotten respectable jobs, and enshrined themselves in McMansions. The much-maligned “system” remained largely unchanged, for both good and ill. And yet, the boomers’ exhilarating adolescence left them ill prepared for the labors of responsible adulthood. They slid into the seats of power – still clad in jeans – and borrowed their society into the most opulent destitution the world has ever known. Our parents have bequeathed us a staggering public debt, a crumbling infrastructure, and a deep-seated skepticism about our ability to change the world.

So what’s a radical movement to do? If my generation distrusts revolutionary ideals, and OWS can’t produce any practical demands, what will be its driving motivation? The answer, for now, is stenciled on a thousand poster boards: shared resentment. If the occupiers don’t know what they want, they’re pretty sure they know who’s preventing them from getting it – the wicked, omnipotent 1%. But such self-righteous finger pointing is too easy. Our actual problems are much more pervasive and entrenched.

In his landmark book “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”, the sociologist Daniel Bell argues that the old capitalist virtues of thrift, patience and self-sacrifice, already wobbling during the post-war consumer boom, were dealt a gradual coup de grace by the baby-boomers. Discipline and delayed gratification did not sit well with the former flower children.

This same group went on, with the kindest of intentions, to raise a generation enthralled with their own boundless potential, who experience personal limitation as an injustice. My generation has come of age believing that each of us is entitled to our choice of the material and spiritual fruits of Western Civilization. Advertisers, politicians, preachers and professors tell us how happy and successful we deserve to be, and lenders line up to finance our purchase of the good life. But for an increasing number of us, this life lies listless beneath a heap of frustration and debt – useless degrees, unaffordable mortgages, ballooning credit card balances. This is the product that was sold to us, we bought it, and now we’re paying for it. We in the 99% are right to be angry. But if we want to make things better, we must reject the myth of our own innocence. Predatory lending, insider trading and other crimes of “the 1%” are indeed vicious, but they bear a family resemblance to the vanity and greed of ordinary, over-grasping consumers. Hedge fund managers, car mechanics, and literature majors are all susceptible to a culture of reckless self-indulgence. Bernie Madoff merely manifests this culture in extremis.

The youthful occupiers of Wall Street may think that they want to repair what’s broken in our society, but few of them understand what needs fixing. What most of them want is merely to rein in the Madoff’s of the world. This is a worthy goal, and I hope they can produce some effective policy proposals. But such political pruning cannot by itself destroy the roots of our problems. It will leave us always hacking at the next, more ingenious, Bernie Madoff.

The truly valuable transformation would be more cultural than political, and also more personally demanding. It would involve a new embrace of old-fashioned virtues. It would require us to accept the fact that we are finite, that self-sacrifice and compromise are necessary parts of a good life. It would require a willingness to sometimes forego, or at least delay, the pleasures of the sexiest degrees, the hippest clothing or the latest iPods. But it would also help to solidify the ground that is necessary for a thriving society. We say we want a revolution, but is my generation ready to occupy this ground? Not yet, I fear. Might we be in ten or fifteen years’ time? We, and our children, had better hope so.

Ian Marcus Corbin is a Ph.D candidate in philosophy at Boston College.

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.

It’s easy, and not wholly unvirtuous, to look down one’s nose at such examples of pampered professorial laziness, but having done a couple of semesters-worth of teaching myself, I can sympathize. For professors at research institutions like the ones I’ve attended, the incentive structure runs decisively away from teaching. Many, if not most of us, have chosen to attend graduate school because we really, really love to to read and think and talk and write about our disciplines in a serious, sustained, in-depth fashion. So that right there means that we will have a preference for the parts of the job that put us in conversation with others who share our interests, inclinations, and expertise. It’s just more fun to explore or spar with colleagues who can keep up. It’s also tremendously satisfying to write something that can win the respect of one’s best peers.

Contrast this with the classroom, which, if you’re teaching undergrads, and nevermind undergrad introductory courses, will be in some large part populated by people who are there because going to college is just what one does if one is ambitious, intelligent, middle class, directionless, etc. It can indeed be an electrifying experience to reach out to, and actually reach, a segment of one’s allotted undergraduate charges, but this is for many professors a rarer and harder-won pleasure than interacting with already interested colleagues. And when tenure, raises, and professional standing are tied disproportionately to one’s scholarly achievement, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the average professor in a large research institution will approach the classroom as much more than an afterthought.

I think there are serious questions to be asked about the unreflective manner in which whole (socioeconomic) classes of eighteen-year-olds are funneled into higher education, so I am prima facie skeptical about Perry’s goal of expanding college enrollment, but whether or not the current crop of college students are where they belong, they are there, and Perry is right that they are paying an outrageous amount of money for the privilege. So simple justice, among other things, would seem to dictate that we do something to maximize the probability that they will actually learn something during their college career. One reasonable step in this direction might be to convince professors that they have a stake—be it professional, financial, etc.—in seeing that their students learn. So whether or not he’s a visionary, as the TNR author would have it, Rick Perry’s educational program does indeed seem to deserve a careful hearing. And the New Republic deserves kudos for giving it something like that, much to the consternation, and cathartic relief, of its commenting readership.

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:

Today, we may wonder whether any of the above-named Catholic philosophers, or any other who worked during the very rich 20^th century, is ever exploited as a   resource by a public figure or commentator who is trying to make sense of the American scene. Not a theologian (not Fr. Gutierrez nor Cardinal Dulles), not an activist (not Dorothy Day nor the Berrigans), not a literary figure (Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, et al.), not a mystic (Merton or De Mello), not a politician (Sargeant Shriver or Konrad Adenauer), but a philosopher whose dialectics would aid reflection about the experience of our time.

I am willing to be corrected, but I can only think of two: G.E.M. Anscombe and John Finnis. Together these philosophers have supplied a new interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics and the Thomist natural law tradition which has allowed Robert P. George and like-minded writers to make a fruitful (in some aspects) and definitely noticeable moral critique of American politics and culture.

Mr. Ramos’ willingness to be corrected is admirable, and in this case, highly apropos. I’m all for the importance of philosophical reflection that traverses the boundaries of practical “ethics-talk”, but it’s difficult to understand why two of our day’s most prominent philosophers—Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre—don’t garner a mention in this connection.  MacIntyre’s reflections on tradition, and Taylor’s reflections on secularism, to name just a pair of their marquee contributions, have been widely influential in both the academy and beyond. They are both deeply insightful, widely read analysts of the “experience of our time,” and practicing Catholics. Granted, neither of these philosophers is likely to have their names dropped in a typical edition of the New York Times (is Anscombe or Finnis?) but I suspect that someone, say, like Ross Douthat, counts both MacIntyre and Taylor as influences.

Furthermore, this week’s New Yorker features a characteristically excellent piece by our best living literary critic, James Wood, much of which is taken up by an in-depth and very sympathetic engagement with the work of the aforementioned Professor Taylor, whose work is a sine qua non for anyone hoping to understand the place of religion in our contemporary context. Incidentally, the New Yorker piece, along with many others that Wood has penned, is an encouraging example of a serious atheist taking religiously informed thinking very very seriously. I heartily recommend it.

I also recommend, almost as heartily, that you wend your way over to Verdicts, and see what you find. It will likely be a compact, thoughtful exposition of some artist, book, or film that is eminently worthy of discovery, or of renewed consideration.

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.

If this was true of Burke’s England, it is true of our America, a nation that is dizzyingly vast and scattered. Americans sometimes speak of September 12, 2001 with a hint of nostalgia. For a little while we felt like a single, unified nation. But lacking an immediate, existential threat, what do we have to tie us together? What common thread connects a New York stock trader, a Montana cattle rancher, a California migrant farmworker, a Beacon Hill Brahmin? Put more generally, what constitutes our shared American identity, the thing that we love when we love America?

The traditional markers of national identity struggle to find purchase in America. A common history? That’s a bit of a stretch. America is a nation of immigrants, constituted by waves upon waves of new arrivals from multiple, far-flung points of origin. If anything, we share an adopted history, which is considerably less powerful than a biological one. A common language? Perhaps, but English is not only borrowed from the British Isles, it is increasingly the lingua franca of the entire global economy. Speaking English is not much of an identity marker these days. A common geography? Unlikely. The American landscape contains craggy coastline, verdant hill country, deserts, plains and everglades. The bayou is a very long way from the badlands.

But if things like blood, soil, language and history cannot bind Americans together, perhaps we can point to a shared philosophy. It has been suggested that American-ness is a uniquely abstract identity, one built on a set of common values like liberty, equality and fraternity. There is some significant truth to this. But of course, there is wide divergence in the manner and degree to which Americans embrace these values. And even further, the rather American-sounding trio of liberty, fraternity and equality was the rallying cry of the French revolution. Our “American” values, with minor variations, are now very widely shared. All things considered, many honest Americans struggle to understand who, precisely, we are.

None of this means that a thoroughgoing American patriotism is impossible. But it can be particularly difficult. Most of us are more animated by our local loyalties, our affections for the people, places and customs that we know best, whether we are liberal Bostonians, conservative Oklahomans, or something else entirely. And that’s fine. Edmund Burke, for one—ever modest about the human potential for change—would probably nod forgivingly.

And yet, if all this is correct, the question still remains: have conservatives in general outstripped liberals along the long path to American patriotism? Let’s say perhaps. But perhaps not so much as the politicians suggest. If one listens closely enough to some of the throatiest patriotic rhetoric on the right, it can come to seem that the actual object of affection is not America, but a very particular, idealized version of it – what’s referred to as “the real America.” So we hear that America is fundamentally a religious nation, or a land of small towns, or a land of innovation, opportunity, optimism, individual liberty, hard work, or whatever.

In fact, America is all of these things, and a great deal more. And while there’s nothing wrong with preferring certain parts of American culture over others, to pretend that one’s favorite parts constitute the real America—in contrast, say, to Manhattan or Berkeley—allows for a facile, dishonest patriotism. America is, among other things, a deeply western—that is to say, European—satellite. Brie, chablis and Flaubert are a part of our American patrimony, and to love them is not to scorn America. It is to love a different, if less central, part of it. A really comprehensive, authentic patriotism would need to embrace America as it actually is, including the portions that make each of us uncomfortable. That, Edmund Burke would tell us, is precisely why patriotism is so difficult.

So, then, in the humble spirit of an 18th century European writer, statesman, orator and intellectual, let’s all raise our glasses, flutes, bottles and cans to America the vexing, vast and, still, somehow, beautiful.

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.

Where, and I ask this with all sincerity, would one see this on the American right? Which journals, which thinkers, would trot out an essay by Herbert Marcuse, Peter Singer or Paul Krugman, and say “Look – this person is right, and we conservatives are wrong. Let’s take a hard look at some of our most basic intellectual commitments.”? It’s hard, for me at least, to answer this question with any speed or certainty. It seems, rather, that conservative discourse is calibrated mainly towards the winning of elections. In this bolshevik reality, the purification of the tribe’s language and thought gets run under the wheels of the electoral train. Many readers of First Things have likely heard of Trilling’s statement that there were no conservative ideas in America, merely “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” If that was true at the time, which I doubt, it’s not true now. But when Trilling says that there is no conservative intellectual tradition in America, we might do well to hold the rebuttal for a moment, and ask ourselves how he might be right. Specifically, what role do authentic self-criticism and openness to ideas of far-flung provenance, the sorts of virtues Trilling demonstrates in his essay on Eliot, play in the constitution of an intellectual tradition? And where, when, how do contemporary conservative thinkers demonstrate these virtues?

If the answer is nowhere, or practically nowhere, then conservatives are making the same mistake that Trilling ascribed to his leftist comrades, for whom, he argued, “immediate ends have become more important than ultimate ends.” A strategy of short-term victory that precludes or damages the building of an authentic, durable, vital tradition is ultimately, in the long view, suicidal. An ossified, closed tradition, as both Eliot and Alasdair MacIntyre have pointed out, is not merely a weak tradition, it is no tradition at all. The best it can manage is a bleating swan song. Or to put it otherwise, it can stand athwart history yelling “stop!”

Yes, I know, by the standards of Trilling, the contemporary left is little better than the right.  The universities, mainstream magazines, and yes, my beloved NPR, usually fail to take conservative ideas seriously, if they are even aware that conservatives have ideas at all. They are poor stewards of their own intellectual tradition, and conservatives never tire of pointing this out. Alas, partisan blindness and an ethos of intellectual trench warfare have become the order of the day on most corners. But if you’re reading this, you are likely not a leftist, so I’ll spare you a sermon about the failings of of The Nation or Fresh Air. Besides, whatever their failings, Trilling was right that the dominant intellectual patrimony for us Americans is a progressive one. My native Boston is, for good and ill, the cardinal birthplace of the American mind,  and it is still occupied, for good and ill, by the shades of progressives like Emerson, Thoreau and T.S. Eliot’s Harvard-ruling kin. Theirs is the most august and ingrained tradition in American thought and culture, and as long as the right is content to mark its gains and losses in congressional seats, the overwhelming prestige and momentum of this tradition can only be mitigated, and not even by very much.

If conservative intellectuals hope to make a significant, long-term dent in this hegemony, they will need to employ every tool at the disposal of a serious, honest thinker. Including those wielded by Trilling in the aforementioned essay. His are, incidentally, tools that should fit comfortably in the conservative hand. Russell Kirk famously said that conservativism is the negation of ideology. We who find something compelling about this negation ought to be, if such a description is in any way accurate, the most willing and able to think generously, honestly, openly. Are we? Or, as I’m obviously suggesting, does the liberal Trilling demonstrate some elements that are badly wanted in the conservative mind?

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.”

It doesn’t require an overweening respect for the news editors at CNN to think that a trained, experienced journalist, who has seen the stories in question, might be better qualified than me to decide which of these stories deserves airtime (as if airtime is so scarce in our 24 hour news cycle). This is simply a new level of pandering. CNN is, of course, no stranger to giving the people what they want. “Choose the News” is a tacit, and astute, recognition that what the people want now is to believe that they are the experts. So that is precisely what CNN—“The Most Trusted Name in News”—is willing to telling them. In the process the journalists at CNN abdicate their responsibility to furrow their brows and make hard, smart editorial judgments. Neither Nietzsche nor Tocqueville would be surprised. This is the trajectory that they mapped out, in imprecise terms, more than a century ago.

I’ll try to take a deep breath. Charmed (and convinced) as I am by jeremiads about the spiritual vapidity of contemporary America, it’s important to acknowledge now and then that contemporary America, with all the “Choose the News” silliness that we continually foist on ourselves, is not exactly a Huxleyan dystopia. At least not yet. And pace extreme anti-capitalists like Ward Churchill, the custodians of corporate America are not “little Eichmanns.” That’s going too far. But the imperatives to “keep the shareholders happy”, and to “give the people what they want” (so often indistinguishable) are indeed the free society’s version of “just following orders”, releasing powerful individuals from the heavy burdens of judgment. Those few individuals who do take it upon themselves to help the curious citizen think well about his world – intellectuals, writers, journalists, say—will have to spend an ever-increasing amount of energy resisting the centripetal force of an ever more democratized culture.