Recent stories of note:
“The Lost Generation”
Jacob Savage, Compact
Jacob Savage’s recent exposé may be the most important, and certainly the most viral, piece of cultural commentary this year, with everyone from J. D. Vance to Elon Musk reacting to the article. The reason? Savage has laid out, with one shocking statistic after another, the true, staggering scale of the wave of systematic discrimination that was unleashed on white men from 2014 onwards. From the media to academia and television, Savage chronicles how quickly American meritocracy was gutted, as the moral panic about systemic racism and sexism spread, and major American institutions gave up the pretense of evaluating candidates on the basis of their qualifications and instead hired exclusively based on demographic and ideological considerations. Savage emphasizes how generational this disenfranchisement was, mostly affecting younger men who were just starting out in their careers. One might, however, criticize an aspect of his diagnosis: he somewhat unfairly blames “the older generation of white men who pulled up the ladder behind them,” perhaps underestimating the degree to which these more established men were themselves powerless in the face of bureaucracy and institutional drift. Still Savage’s piece is definitive proof that the American “White Scare” of the last decade far surpassed the excesses of its infamous red predecessor of the 1950s.
“Have Americans lost their sense of humor?”
Nicholas Lynch, The Spectator World
Ever since ancient Athens, where not coincidentally the genre of comedy was born, democratic societies have been characterized by a particularly free sense of humor. As Nicholas Lynch observes, the United States developed its own brand of humor in the form of the tall tale, which is distinct from British satire and French wit in being “funny without a point.” Lynch writes that “only here was humor let off the leash, divorced from the polite understanding that jokes ought to leave the order intact,” but one might object that this freedom of laughter is also characteristic of democratic Athens: Aristophanes was as indiscriminate in his lampooning of politicians, philosophers, and gods as the best American humorists. Lynch ends by warning that Americans are now slipping back into old, European forms of polite, safe, and predictable humor, which he views as a symptom of democratic decline. That may be so, but given that the White House is currently occupied by America’s greatest living comedian, perhaps our republic still has some life in it yet.
“‘The Tower and Ruin’ Review: Seeking Tolkien’s Past”
Konstantin Kakaes, The Wall Street Journal
It is easy to forget that long before he became a universally beloved novelist, J. R. R. Tolkien was a brilliant and pioneering scholar: in his seminal lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien revolutionized the study of the epic by treating Beowulf not as a simple fantasy or historical curiosity but as a literary masterpiece in its own right. Scholars are now increasingly, and somewhat belatedly, approaching Tolkien’s own works in the same rigorous and analytical way that he approached Beowulf. A fine example of this trend is Michael D. C. Drout’s recently published The Tower and the Ruin, reviewed by Konstantin Kakaes for The Wall Street Journal. Drout argues that if Tolkien’s world is so compelling, it is because Tolkien, like a diligent painter working on a canvas, was constantly retouching his creation over several decades, making, it must be said, some very sensible alterations: Bingo really doesn’t have the same “ring” as Frodo. Although the composition history of The Lord of the Rings is fascinating, equally worthy of study are Tolkien’s influences, and here too Drout delivers. Drawing an analogy with Beowulf, he observes that Tolkien’s works are permeated with a “longing for the unrecoverable past.” Like the best Romantic paintings, Tolkien’s works transport us to a lost, glorious world that we all seek to regain.
