Cultural panic attacks among public intellectuals

From The Politics of Dystopia by Ross Douthat. I like Douthat but my, he travels in fevered circles. Quite a mélange of ideas and issues reported from the intellectual salons of Washington.

Here is a media story from the week that was. In the Netherlands, a depressed teenager died after seeking euthanasia, and a number of outlets reported that she had been euthanized by a clinic that accedes to suicide requests from people suffering from mental illness.

This was false; in fact, the teenager committed suicide at home, starving herself while parents and doctors offered palliative care. And so the media narrative shifted, becoming about the problem of sensationalism and ideologically motivated fake news.

Dutch teenager Noa Pothoven, 17, died on Sunday in the Netherlands, according to her family.
The initial narrative was indeed bad reporting. However, contrary to the tone of some of the correctives, the underlying facts remain shocking even after the correction. It remains shocking that a young woman’s parents and doctors would give up on treating her at seventeen and let her kill herself. And it remains shocking that Western nations are normalizing euthanasia for mental illness among otherwise healthy adults.

But are you shocked, reader, or merely troubled? Since the Benelux countries began their experiments with euthanasia, there has been a lot of mainstream-media coverage (particularly a fine New Yorker piece by Rachel Aviv in 2015) that’s skeptical of the new system, critical, concerned. But concern is not the same as outrage, of the kind that reliably greets policies pursued by governments seen as populist. If Viktor Orban pushes a university out of Hungary, it’s the Crisis of the Liberal Order. If depressed people are euthanized in Belgium, it’s just … troubling, and the only overt outrage is on the religious right.

This difference is, in one sense, understandable, since the populists are seen as challenging the liberal order, while the Benelux thanatoriums are operating within the procedures of liberalism, following the rules and consulting the experts, pushing liberal premises to particularly consistent ends.

But suppose you believe a legal and medical system that colludes in the suicides of the depressed is as grave an evil as any populist policy to date. When such a system emerges as a seemingly organic feature of the liberal order, what then should be your attitude toward liberalism itself?

This problem, the possibility that liberalism could through the working of its own principles lead to something truly evil, connects to a somewhat-baffling argument among pundits this week about whether American conservatism is becoming “post-liberal,” whether the post-Trump right might leave liberal democracy itself behind.

Benelux thanatoriums. I like that.

I had read of the case and yes it was an instance of bad mainstream media reporting and yes it is a test case of the end point so heavily discussed a decade or two ago when the Netherlands made euthanasia a mainstream treatment. Everyone can see the logic for euthanasia. We can condemn the taking of life and at the same time acknowledge that there are circumstances where the continuation of life is effectively an imposed torture. It is one of those edge-cases where there are no good answers.

Conservatives concerned about government power shy away from the issue, concerned that there might be no effective stopping principle. Once euthanasia is allowed for extreme circumstances, what is to stop it from becoming mainstream. There are all sorts of institutional incentives to end life where care is expensive. What stops those financial incentives from superseding care for patient?

And indeed, euthanasia did, in some places, become mainstreamed relatively quickly and more for the convenience of the institution than based on the needs of the patient. The most notorious case was that of the Liverpool Care Pathway protocols in Britain. The government provides all healthcare in Britain, and with ever continuing deficits and budget overruns, its National Health Service is always seeking to reduce costs. The Liverpool Care Pathway became an expedient means of reducing costs though it was not designed for that purpose.

So the issues out of the Netherlands are real and of interest but the particular instance was badly misreported.

But how does that relate to a post-liberal debate among the 1% of the public intellectuals among the 1% of Mandarins among the 1% in the great Swamp Capital? And what exactly is that debate?

Based on what Douthat says, confused might be the best description.

But even if overstated, the post-liberal and socialist turns reflect a real change in our politics since the halcyon 1990s. On right and left, it has become easier to imagine ways the liberal order might deserve to fall, because of evils generated from within itself.

Halcyon 1990s? How quickly we forget the existential concerns about the deindustrialization of America and the rust bowl in particular. How quickly we forget the moral panic of a philandering and perjurious president. How quickly we forget the great Asia financial collapse.

But the second sentence in that paragraph might be the interesting one. Do we have a rise in millenarianism among our Mandarin Class? I wonder whether that might be what this all about.

We have had a generation where our education system has been teaching about the evils of the great American Experiment, about failings of the Founding Fathers, about the idols of primitivism. Have our public intellectuals lost an awareness of reality and just how dramatically has the world improved in the past fifty years as a consequence of the policies of the classical liberal order (i.e. conservative policies from the Age of Enlightenment)? Are our public intellectuals simply thinking themselves into a panic?

My first order guess is, yes.

Douthat summarizes the two nightmare scenarios of the more fevered thinkers on the left and right.

On the right, that imagining extrapolates from examples like the Low Countries’ euthanizers toward a future society that remains formally liberal but resembles Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” — dominated by virtual reality and eugenics and mood-stabilizing drugs, post-familial and post-religious and functionally post-human. Would such a society deserve the political loyalty of (let us say) a traditional Christian or Muslim, just because it still affords them some First Amendment protections? It is reasonable to say that it might not.

On the left that imagining takes the form of a dire ecological extrapolation — a fear that climate catastrophe isn’t inevitable despite liberalism but because of it, that the combination of governments with limited powers, publics with limited knowledge and corporations with capitalist incentives might be responsible for civilizational disaster. Does this scenario (or other equivalents involving A.I.) call liberal proceduralism into question? For some Carl Schmitts (or Ted Kaczynskis) of the left, it might.

Sure. Those are possible nightmare outcomes among innumerable others.

How to respond to such fevered panics among public intellectuals? Perhaps it is not polarization which is the threat but the unmoored panics of the intellectuals themselves. Maybe they need to get out and about a bit among normal people. Maybe they should do more and think less. Or maybe they should soldier on and regain some cultural confidence about the benefits of the Age of Enlightenment and the great American Experiment.