The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat FTP: Encompassing Phrases vs. Clever Phrases

Talented cultural critics have a way to give you that “ah! that’s exactly what it is!” kind of phrase. They use a word or a phrase to define perfectly a group, concept, or cultural observation, and so on. You read it, and you know the writer nails it.

Douthat caught me with a few phrases that just nailed it. I’ll bold them below.

And it sits uneasily with the jargon of the time — both the breathless utopianism of TED Talks and the pop apocalypticism of prestige magazines.

…That pileup encourages a mood of constant anxiety about terrorism, ecocatasrophe, and war, and it compounds the experience of an actual disaster like coronavirus, which is experienced both directly and indirectly, as a real-life disease and also a permanent theatre of apocalypse on social media. And at the same time the digital theatre provides a perfect stage for all manner of techno-boosterism: the promise that artificial intelligence or large-scale genetic engineering or even immortality is just around the corner fe…