On Barbarization
There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of your mom. Also: Vance and the Pope
On Thursday, the employees of DOGE entered the federal government’s Institute of Library and Museum Services, a tiny agency in terms of employment but a consequential supporter of library, museum, and archival institutions around the country. They did this pursuant to an executive order to reduce the agency to its “minimum presence and function required by law.” This seems likely to mean a total or near-total zeroing of its grants to local libraries and museums, many of which rely on support beyond what is available through local taxation and philanthropy.
This kind of fiscal vandalism may well leave large, nationally-known institutions with legacy endowments relatively intact, but it could prove devastating to the little platoons of local institutions that preserve and advance whatever we might think of as “culture” in this country: a place to get a great or even a middling useful book for free; a place to see something that human hands made a thousand years ago; a place where the documentary evidence of our civilization may be preserved.
It’s not the greatest tragedy of the last eight weeks. Its consequences may well be dwarfed by (a partial list): gutting the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; gutting basic science research funding; closing Social Security Administration offices and ending phone support for claims; ending over four-fifths of international aid and development contracts; pulling grant funding from universities that drive our major industries and human capital formation; soft-pedaling the value of measles vaccination, even in the face of an outbreak; cancelling the process to update influenza vaccines, even amid a terrible flu season. But the attack on libraries and museums—not on specific artists, exhibitions or books, but as such, as repositories of culture—is in its small way perfectly exemplary of the campaign of barbarization unfolding in front of us.
It has been common to hear, from across the spectrum of opinion, that contemporary American culture has entered a period of “decadence.” I don’t know what everyone means by it, but I was persuaded by Ross Douthat’s definition in his (pretty good) book on the topic: “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” Left and right alike quoted Gramsci’s aperçu that in the “interregnum” between the old that is dying and the new that is unable to be born, a “variety of morbid symptoms” appear. People said these things for serious reasons and trivial. We were afflicted with crumbling infrastructure, ludicrous delays and costs in building anything, a thinning language of silly neologisms and dumb portmanteaus, retreads of old ideas, superheroes and sequels, our thoughts scattered in a thousand algorithmically-driven directions. I got in on this, too, obviously. As a topic, decadence offered the astringent verve that trails the perception of a mild, chronic bleakness.
But we’ve seen with a quickness that decadence was a good problem to have. We could know this when we contrasted it with catastrophe—the slow leak is better than the blow-out—but relatively few people, and certainly not I among them, contrasted decadence to deliberate barbarization: the willful refusal of the consolations of technological improvement and general prosperity. Slashing our own civilizational tires.
When I was a child, it was still fashionable in popular history writing to speak of a “Dark Age” of obscurantism and societal decline between the fall of Rome and the high Middle Ages, if not the Renaissance.1 Because economic history wasn’t interesting to these writers, they depicted this darkness as a sort of intellectual perversity, a willed and intentional turning from reason to superstition. Only later did I get the chance to learn that while the decline was real, it was hardly total—there was a lot of “civilization” happening during the “dark ages.” And more importantly, I learned that the decline was driven not by people adopting dumb ideas, but by a long-running collapse in the economy of the former Western empire. Trade networks fell apart, taxes couldn’t be gathered or deployed, cities declined or disappeared as a consequence, and almost everyone was just poorer and more isolated than they had been in 400 AD. The conditions for material and cultural flourishing just ceased to exist.
That wasn’t the first time civilization shifted into retrograde, and it won’t be the last. But what we’re experiencing today isn’t an economic retraction leading to the inevitable decline in learning, technology, and the rest of it. It’s an intentional trashing of the stuff of civilization in the midst of relative plenty, functional (if much less than perfect2) institutions, a reasonable attainment of public order, a professional civil service, and a high degree of technological development.
This didn’t start in 2025. The warning signs were, I suppose, there for all to see. Apple promised an iPad that would crush pretty much every cool thing humans do.3 The liberal arts have been under ideological and fiscal assault for years. The National Council of Teachers of English controversially claimed, in 2022, that the “time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education,” reframing the decline of literacy, traditionally understood, as a sort of improvement rather than a needless loss of something valuable. When a school system abandons eighth-grade algebra, thereby making learning disparities impossible to measure, we see the same mindset that will ultimately try to get rid of NOAA. If I’m not measuring it—an achievement gap, a hurricane—it isn’t there. And we had a whole cultural cycle of the (at that time) most unbalanced people on Twitter saying that libraries and museums are just artifacts of white supremacy and so forth. There were plenty of people who took Walter Benjamin’s observation that every “document of civilization” is also a “document of barbarism” to mean that civilization is merely fraudulent.
But even the radical center of “wokeness” circa 2020 was destructive in a narrower way with a different genealogy. Knocking down statues and removing names from buildings was an evolved variant of Christian (or even Old Testament) iconoclasm. Some ancient source, I think it was Bede, said that the Christians broke the idols in the pagan temples, aspersed the altars with holy water, and turned them into churches. That, more or less, is what the activists of the Great Awokening were trying to do, with whatever mixture of wisdom and folly—not to destroy the academy or public memory but to purify the ends to which they are put.
So what makes a society just go ahead and substitute potions for medicine, replace real learning with consulting digital oracles, invite brain drain, stop researching cancer, reject pasteurization and generally trash its best institutions? The alibi is the federal budget deficit, but all of these moves are trivial in the scheme of the actual fiscal imbalance the United States faces. In fact, many of the cuts will end up costing money, especially over time. Only slightly more plausible is the idea that bulldozing so much of our public infrastructure will inspire a “start-up culture” in what remains, as if every function of a polity that has evolved over a quarter of a millennium can be reduced to the processes by which we get new apps to order food. Not that all the people who say these things are lying; maybe next week Nate Silver will make the case that betting markets can predict hurricane trajectories as well as NOAA modeling. But even in sincerity, the impulse is so crude and undercooked that it’s hard to imagine it really being enough to fuel this Twitter-brained miniature Cultural Revolution. It’s too irrational, too counterproductive to the goods even otherwise sympathetic people claim to value, to coast on the basis of mathematical ignorance and bad analogies.
So maybe there’s something deeper and darker being expressed. Most of us, I would guess, have a place inside our hearts that welcomes, even yearns for the spectacle of pointless destruction. And perhaps the inhibitions fencing in this demented part of the human soul have decayed to the point of breakthrough. Or maybe people are lashing out at their Mom.
I mean this (and I am indebted to Dorothy Fortenberry’s appearance on Know Your Enemy last year for making me think about this a lot, and also this post which I only read to the paywall). Who, if anyone, makes people take their medicine, do their homework, not call other people “retards,” go the basement in bad weather, wear a bicycle helmet, be quiet at the library and show some interest at the museum? I mean, I do all those things in my household, too, so don’t take this overly literally, but I think of all these things as more or less “motherly.” Manosphere4 influencers and reactionary editors can talk about how creative and innovative masculinity is and how men historically write the books and fight the wars for the sake of “civilization” and “history.” But who keeps all the copies in an accordion binder? Mom does. Noah’s wife (Scripture’s second universal Mom), according to a midrash5, was given the task of collecting the seeds and plants before the Flood, without which the refounding of life on earth wouldn’t have gotten very far.
I don’t think you need to be a gender essentialist or hardcore Freudian to see things this way. It’s hardly a novel observation that attacking public-sector, non-profit, and university employment will disproportionately affect women, and I’m sure I’ve seen it suggested that this is directed toward a larger goal of making women more economically dependent on men again (the men will, I guess, be working in all the re-shored toaster factories created by the tariffs). It’s hard to see a punitive expedition by a coalition of incels and aspiring polygamists working out very well, even on its own terms. But it’s easy to take Mom down a peg or two. Her works are harder to preserve, and much harder to build up, than they are to burn down. Finally that resentment can be etched into the bare earth where all the dumb rules and know-it-all experts and tedious procedures and sensible warnings and wearying disciplines of gradual improvement once stood.
This is all, of course, speculation. What I can say with more confidence is that I find myself more devoted to the tasks of preserving things than I was before. It’s easy to be loss-averse when you’re in your forties, have three kids, and live in a place where reliable weather alerts come in handy. But I think it’s more than that. I didn’t know much about these background structures that have contributed greatly but invisibly to not just the prosperity but the humanity of my society. And while I don’t know what I can do about weather forecasting or basic scientific research, I have to accept that I have a small role to play in preserving what we quaintly call the Humanities for whoever might be interested in them later. This does not come naturally to me. In my role as a pastor, I’ve always said that the time scales that matter to faith are right now and eternity, not anything in between, the present moment being the point where the sphere of time and the plane of eternity intersect. But while I would still say that’s true, perhaps it’s my own stubborn adolescent rejection of responsibility, too. Someone has to pocket the seeds, keep the files, hoard the books, and stash the artwork. Someone did it for us, after all.
J.D. Vance, Pope Francis, and the Ordo Amoris
On Sunday, the Dallas Morning News ran a column I wrote last month (when it was a tad more timely) about the Vice President’s claims about Christian social ethics and rather direct response from the Pope:
The problem with Jesus’ answer to the question of what human beings owe to each other is that it is very hard. I myself am very bad at following these commands. But that, so to say, is my problem.
This has not stopped Christians from looking for answers outside of Jesus’ own words. Recently, in a television interview, Vice President JD Vance explained that a “very Christian concept” called “the order of love” offers a compelling alternative to Jesus’ answer to the question of what we owe each other.
The rest is mostly a paraphrase of Pope Francis’s brief and quite moving letter to the U.S. bishops, which I heartily recommend. He’s a good theologian. And the News found a good image to go with the piece.
I also wrote about the stress an era of rule by decree will put on American political theology for the Christian Century:
American Christianity has to some extent reflected the democratic-republican character of the constitution. Our political theology is mostly one of active, responsible citizenship within the give-and-take of changing electoral outcomes, hedged about with the procedural protections of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law. When we articulate calls for peace and justice, or even just for good and orderly government, we tend to do so within the terms set for us by a long history of democratic citizenship and the theoretically impartial application of the laws. Even our institutions have their own little constitutions, including the separation of powers and the procedures for making and executing decisions.
This is an admirable thing; it is better to have a Christianity appropriate to citizens rather than to subjects. But it is in historical terms a relatively new and fragile thing.
I am old enough to have read A World Lit Only by Fire when it was new, and to have caught some of the Carl Sagan myth-making when it was still relatively fresh. It took a long time—maybe the task is ongoing still—to get this fundamentally misleading picture of the world between 476 and, like, Ferdinand Magellan out of my head.
It’s a topic for another day, but I’m inclined to believe that we really have experienced a lot of institutional failure or at least mediocrity, and that anyone who wants to push back on the present campaign of spoliation should, as soon as possible, make some plans for how to have better institutions in the future.
From the linked article: “Even the companies themselves often seem at a loss for something to say about new products. For all its lavishly detailed smashes and splatters, “Crush!” contains not one representation of something a human might use an iPad for; it contains no humans, full stop.”
See: ugly dumb portmanteau.
I have only had this verbally described to me. I don’t think I’ve ever read the source for this story.