Thanks, I'll have to re this book again, it's been a long time. Wonder how the warren would deal with climate chaos in today's world?
1
So the analogy is this: 'liberal' societies are massive battery farms in which oblivious sophisticates are fattened on a diet of relativism in order to be slaughtered and consumed by a cosmic predator. I presume this predator will be some kind of totalitarian movement that emerges out of the gentle caring and sharing society driven by an ideological programme of radical socialistic, sexual, environmental purification, a kind of western Khmer Rouge. A rabbit Pol Pot! What an interesting reading! Here's another question: are left wing dystopias more interesting than right wing dystopias?
3
A much loved book from my childhood that I neglected to read to my own children. A very thoughtful article. We should contemplate those things we knew as children and share them.
3
Thank you for reminding us all of the violence and cruelty (at least as inherent to survival as the insecure condescension of the would-be intellectuals whose droppings besmirch the comment sections of well-regarded media institutions) which you acknowledge or ignore at your peril in choosing how to move forward in creating a just society.
2
It’s all a bit hare-brained, isn’t it?
Think of Watership Downs and you can’t help but hear that song Bright Eyes, a dirge more poisonous than myxomatosis
Like Evangelicals -- the favorite form of bad faith for Trump and Republicans -- Douthat sees his divine elitism justified everywhere, even a modern day children's classic, which is the next best thing to the Bible itself. Who knew that Watership Down was part of the Apocrypha (essentially the 14 odd-flavored dishes that didn't make the final tasting menu at god's buffet but are listed in case you like to spice things up for your fabulous taste buds).
I always learn new and amazing things reading Douthat, mainly how flexible a conservative pundit's conscience must be to strike the pretzel poses demanded by Trump's yoga of promiscuous corruption and calumny. Down dog indeed.
I once had a student who thought Watership Down was a light-hearted allegory for the Chinese people who she regarded as possessing the fecundity of bunnies and dilemma of limited resources and burgeoning warrens. Certainly no less a plausible reading of Adams' Leporid tale than Douthat's withering contempt for the liberal straw men he populates his punditry with.
'Tis a pity, truly, that liberals prefer "a live possibility" that isn't a rigged existential nightmare of healthcare deprivation, menial dead-end jobs, addiction, broken families, religious terror, racism, inequality, misogyny, corruption.
Douthat is twisting the old Leftist saw that it's better to be part of a world being born than a world that's dying.
What he gets wrong is which side is dying and which side is rising.
15
“Watership Downs” is a wonderful story. I have always cherished it. For me, “Watership Downs” points to a discussion on the subtleties of life, how they interplay and what happens when a society goes to extremes. In what looks to be a benighted, ugly time, the ability as pointed out in "Watership Downs" to work together, to respect one another, to have a sense of decency and lovingkindness, are in short supply. For me the purpose of religion to teach these truths. It fascinates (and concerns) me that I can find - for example - deep, rich, complete dialogs on lovingkindness in the Hebrew and Buddist faiths (which are older faiths), but less so in Christianity (a younger faith which speaks to love, but not lovingkindness. And there is a difference). If there is one thing that I think in particular is missing in Western Liberalism and Christian cultures today, it is a sense of lovingkindness to help us bridge across our differences and to strive for a better, stronger union. We seem to have lost all humanity.
3
I'll read Ross's column when it has "crisis of conservatism" in the title.
8
I appreciate Douthat relating this classic to today. I remember reading it fondly many years ago.
1
Fascism and authoritarianism are once again at march in the world and this time with America as an ally and not a foe thanks to the efforts of America's conservative political party and its Republican president happily aligning us with tyrants and dictators while alienating us from our democratic friends. We just watched this president quite possibly instigate a genocide in a single day with all the thought one puts in to ordering a sandwich and Mr. Douthat is concerned with the crisis in liberalism? Seriously?
14
A. Leonard Cohen poem on the subject (from The Flame, 2018)
Lambchops
thinking of those lambchops
at Moishe's the other night
we all taste good to one another
most bodies are good to eat
even reptiles and insects
even the poisonous lutefisk of Norway
buried in the dirt a million years before serving
and the poisonous blowfish of Japan
can be prepared
to insure reasonable risks
at the table
if the crazy god did not want us to eat one another
why make our flesh so sweet
I heard it on the radio
a happy rabbit at the rabbit farm
saying to the animal psychic
don't be sad
it's lovely here
they're so good to us
we're not the only ones
said the rabbit
comforting her
everyone gets eaten
as the rabbit said
to the animal psychic
2006
1
The guy is reading an allegory to his kid and gets a tic to write a column from his lofty perch at the NY Times on the liberal order.
Clearly, as Trump sinks further and further down the rabbit hole, dragging the American conservative movement with him, it is becoming harder and harder for conservatives to find things to write about that bash the liberal order.
12
Ross, planet earth here. It's the conservatives who want totalitarianism. The liberals are fighting it.
14
My take on History and Its lessons -- those that we are constantly forgetting -- is that it is not a straight line moving upwards. After the Dark Ages of 1914 - 1945 we have had a pretty good run of progress -- without blowing ourselves up or anything like that, despite many opportunities.
There is something in our natures that wants to wreck things. Recall the rapture that Europe greeted the beginning of the Great War.
1
What Mr Douthat is against is generally clear: “modern liberalism” with all its ennui and “culture of death.” What he’s for is, however, never clear. I defy you to draw a clear picture of the political society in “Watership Down” that appeals to him. On the podcast “The Argument,” he did once (jokingly?) express a yearning for a Catholic Monarchy. How great that would be!
Maybe we ARE all insured zombies mired in post-modern, liberal, hedonistic ennui. But if the alternative is the Twelfth Century, when men were men etc., then give me good coffee, plane travel and anti-biotics every time.
6
I'm 58, and cannot remember a time that I did not love to read. Watership Down has been my very favorite novel for the last thirty years or so. I reread it every couple of years, and love it more every time.
I know that the animated film is highly regarded, but I wasn't able to finish it. The way they took the great character Kehaar and made him comic relief was something I couldn't abide.
If wishes were horses, rabbits would ride!
1
@NNI
Wascally wabbits you mean
1
This is a great analysis of Watership Down, a book my 4th grade teacher read to us, and that I, in turn, read to my children.
One detail I quibble with, though. Bigwig is a secularist. He doesn't hold with Fiver's "fits," and he consistently makes dismissive comments about the rabbit "pantheon" and any other flights of fancy. He fits in just fine, though, with the "best regime," as do secularists into the better version of ours, proving that there is room for religious skepticism in the best regime.
***Do you notice, in the photo of Adams, the animal cage in the background? I wonder if it's a pet rabbit...
4
Once again, Douthat shows himself to be the idiot (btw, I mean that in the Greek sense of things), which, again, is always unfortunate, as I was looking forward to some kernel or ingot or iota of wisdom, but alas. . . .
5
Ross is in need of a reading assignment to help him better understand his own party. I suggest he start with 1984 and work his way to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
8
Ross Douthat, as a conservative Republican you have no credibility in criticizing the Liberals in America. Trump, your Supreme Leader, is trashing the US Constitution and American values. Since you have neither the ethics not the courage to condemn Trump and his Republican sycophants, why not take savery, very long vacation from you column? You could take a college course in the United States Constitution.
6
Geez, and I thought Brooks needed a job in the real world!
8
A fine column, Mr. Douthat. I wonder that you (or your editor) picked the title as "...crisis of liberal...." Why? It seems to me that this title is not relevant at all. Not at all. Our crisis is a GOP-fueled crisis. It is fed by misrepresentations, lies, and deliberately misinformed citizens abused by a purchased faux press, as in Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh. The title confuses. You surely must know this. Why do it? It is a cheap trick, and your column does not deserve it.
6
Really, Mr. Douthat? Nice story about reading to your kids, but it must have been a very, very, very slow idea day for you.
5
I don't know any liberals who are worried that we are headed for Efafra - that's a propaganda chant on the right. The message that a well-ordered society is hard to find but worth seeking out - that *is* the liberal message. The message from the right is a cynical do-nothingism that says, let them fight it out in the trading pits and the job market. As usual, Douthat's thoughts arrive from outer space and glance off reality like a rubber-tipped arrow.
9
The Whiggish interpretation of rabbits. Sheesh.
2
Liberalism is alive and well in Canada.
1
It is amazing how green everything appears when you wear green lenses. Or rosy when wearing rose colored lenses. This op-ed manages to sneak in Douthat's ingrained bias against 'liberals' while assigning libertarianism to the antagonist group, the 'good' group.
I can list all of capitalism's faults and disadvantages as there are many. That doesn't make capitalism the worst system to thrive under. Just tell us why you disdain liberalism and admire libertarianism. Why talk of rabbits? Waste. of. time.
2
Well, Mr. Douthat, you not only apparently like to read to children, you also like to write to New York Times readers as if they're children, and you're the ever more wise adult.
Proceed, Mr. Douthat.
3
Read that book avidly many years ago as well. That idealistic society can only be a goal as the edges of humanity, depicted in the other societies, are always with us.
Taking a fictional work and interpreting it in a way that justifies your political ideology is not uncommon, though it's an exercise in intellectual dishonesty. However, doing so with a story for kids makes it even cheaper.
5
In what era has the past never seemed more enchanting than the present? In what era have we not mourned the good old days? Douthat needs to tell us how this tired trope helps us to live here in the present.
1
Another "Liberalism in Crisis" book report from a conservative huckster. Why even bother, Ross? It is conservatives and the ignorance and intolerance of ancient religions running rampant here and abroad that are making the world a far worse place. Look in your own back yard for ideologies in crisis. You conservatives have no shortage of society-destroying leaders and backwards policies. Leaders and policies you support without question. Time to start questioning yourself, your leaders, your ideals, your politics and your embrace of patriarchal old-time religion. Maybe when you see the ugly reality of conservatism in all its forms you can begin pointing out and working against its myriad flaws. I won't hold my breath.
8
Uhm, African americans have been living our own tale of "Watership Down" for at least 375 of the last 400 years, how is that working out now, I ask.
Still searching and working it out; poor leadership is a real problem, just saying.
Crisis of Greed an Fear.
Yes, you'll be a wreck when you finish this one, but it's nothing compared to how you'll feel at the end of "Shardik."
2
Ross always professes fake "concern" for the liberals. I suggest Ross gets his own far more corrupt Republican house in order. The corrupt Republicans never bother Ross, and their lies are fine with him. Ross' anger and attacks are reserved for people who aren't xenophobic and racist instead of those who are. What does that say about Ross?
And I suggest Ross owes his readers an apology for writing this before he read the end of the book and completely embarrassed himself.
I know Ross - like Trump - refuses to ever back down when he is wrong and likes too double down and destroy anyone who is calling him out when he is wrong. But it is far beyond time for the NY Times editors to require its columnist to be honest instead of treating Ross like the pampered and spoiled toddler he seems to be.
2
While the concepts of governance and citizenship are simultaneously complex and yet optimistic for many — most citizens are moderate and wiser than those further left and right, it is the most unsatisfied and angry who simultaneously want to fix what is "wrong" but choose to do so in ways that are worse. They elected the abhorrent human who is currently president.
Adams' book delivers this message using rabbits so that the content of societal complexity is not obscured by humans but rather seen for what it is. There is no utopian life — never has been, never will be. What we -can- have is peaceful coexistence and cooperation by simply treating others as we would want to be treated. Unfortunately, be it rabbit or human, this is not always possible or even likely...which -Watership Down- makes obvious.
The good thing about bad is that it offers a stark contrast. If we don't pursue what is good and right and fair, those who are the absolute opposite will gain power. The vast moderate electorate has now experienced why and how we can return to far better and then improve on it.
Eclectic Pragmatism — http://eclectic-pragmatist.tumblr.com/
Eclectic Pragmatist — https://medium.com/eclectic-pragmatism
1
This is one of my favorite books, my mother gave it to me for my 13th birthday. It's like comfort food for me. Back when we were dating I also read it out loud to my husband because I really wanted him to read it and I didn't think he would otherwise. I'm sure you and your daughters can hardly wait for the next chapter. Like you mention people can analyze this book in so many ways from many angles and as the comments section show they have strong opinions on this work. I love how even the first and last lines so simply express the Cycle of Life. First Line: “The primroses were over.” Last Lines: “He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom.”
One of my all-time favorite books. My dad read it to me when I was little and I've read it to both my boys, who are now in their teens. Thanks for helping me understand the novel in a refreshing new light.
Mr. Douthat, it seems you didn't read the book at all.
If you need to find a parable that equates to a supposed 'crisis of liberalism', why not choose the American Revolution?
Virtually every single country on the planet has, at one time or another, revered that story and its, remarkable outcome--all due to a 'crisis of liberalism' that morphed into a beacon of hope for billions.
2
Ross, you have meandered thru the briar patch and wound up at Erehwon -- nowhere. The choices that matter are Canada, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Germany, New Zealand, Malaysia, Japan vs. Trump's America, or today's Republicans' America. Not too difficult.
2
Read Adam Gopnik's book (as you probably already have).
I can't wait til your kids read 'On The Road' and realize they need to go out and see the real America, its marginalized and isloated and yet somehow poetic underclass that believe in a dream of equality and diversity and fratenity grounded in spiritual quests and community and not stiff, projected analyses of books not yet entirely read that twist literature to prop up outdated and self-serving self images of empire such as trickle-down economics, populism-coated racism and misogyny, and the Great Men Theory of History. You don't get it, Dad.
3
Watership down caused me intense resentment when I read it as a teenager. The ostensible protagonist, Hazel, has no clear vitrues. He's not smart, intuitive, or strong. His only wisdom is in choosing capable sidekicks and then trusting them.... but this is something shared by every other one of the rabbits who teams up with Fiver and Bigwig, the clear and obvious actual heroes of the story. Douthat is correct that it's important Bigwig doesn't seize power or otherwise abuse his strength, but it's not being 'statesman' Hazel but rather 'useless cipher' Hazel.
But this does point to something important about modern life, although I doubt the author would like it. Hazel establishes himself as The Leader and then proceeds to do nothing of note... and then he is rewarded with his own warren and, later, literal immorality. More talented colleagues just do their jobs, struggle against terrible odds to succeed, and get a fraction of Hazel's reward.
The lesson is: Once established, the hierarchy won't be infringed. Those at the top, however they got there and whatever they do, will be richly rewarded. Those lower down, no matter how talented, simply aren't deserving of much. I look around and see this very richly demonstrated in our society.
1
@karp
Projection.
Watership Down is my favorite book. I have read it many times over the years. Each time it is as moving and powerful and the first. Even more so as I age. It is certainly one of the greatest books every written.
I'll add that Douthat is also the most thoughtful columnist at the Times. The only one actually.
I wonder if in some parallel universe dominant rabbits or other "animals" are reading parables about humans that could provide them a lesson.
Hey, it's an infinite, inconceivable cosmos.
This is superb. Still have my typewritten copy of the last few paragraphs of this classic hanging in my upstairs hallway. Thank you for this.
For me, Douthat's achievement here is measured by the fact that I can scarcely recall when I read a book review that so thoroughly persuaded me not to read the book. The writer in me might add that it is dangerous for a novel to be read as political essay.
The argument is the cynic's: Our society (or one like it: in this case England) is good (only) because attempts to fix or improve it will make it so much worse. That's why we must have hierarchy--meaning, in England, monarchy and aristocracy as well as capitalism, or legitimated as well as de facto inequality. (Suggesting as ideal a society even more retrograde than ours, the only one that still assigns social and political roles to an aristocracy.)
Opinion essays like this show the temptation of arguing for the center, avoiding extremes as excesses, in the process denying that our society has great problems. (Some of which could end it and all life). A prose poem of moderation paints a portrait of virtue that sees problems in a glass darkly as images it can arrange for managerial moral balance.
Consider: Are there social ills that are bad and important enough that we should take risks to cure them? Politics involves such risks; if you think none of them worth taking, then you must want things to stay as they are. If Mr. Douthat thinks that, the Times notwithstanding, we are not living in the same world. Of mine, better allegories than this (indulgent, comforting, false) can be found.
I'm sorry, Mr. Douthat, but "a comfortable decadence in which virtue erodes and the reaper beckons" hardly describes my left-leaning-but-hardly-radical hopes for our country: where the dignity and value of each individual is recognized as self-evident, where workers' contributions to capital success are recognized and rewarded, where the ability to live a life true to one's self within the laws of society is possible, where tolerance of others doing the same is the benchmark, and a commitment to the greater good over the individual alone guides policy and governance. Come join me there. It sure beats your "variant on Efrafa’s totalitarian alternative."
8
I'm quite familiar with Watership Down, having read it several times. Reading the headline, I was wondering how Douthat would make the leap between the novel and a supposed "crisis of liberalism."
The answer is, he doesn't. He just voices his distaste for liberalism without either supporting his fears or a connection to the book. As long as Douthat is talking about the book directly, it's a reasonable enough column. It's just when he finally tries to connect it to his own personal politics that it goes so decisively off the rails.
8
Mr. Douthat is certainly entitled to his opinions on issues related to the current state and future of "Democratic Liberalism". What I find most disturbing in this and other related columns is his continuous, often subtle, criticisms of secularism, as opposed to his religious beliefs. ".... liberalism's dystopian destination : a sleek and fattened inhumanity, a terrible mix of comfort and cruelty, a loss of basic human good under the pressure of capitalism or secularism, or both". Surely, Mr. Douthat knows that capitalism and secularism , and organized religion for that matter, cannot be simply passed off as monolithic in the beliefs of its practitioners. As a humanist I greatly regret and resent Mr. Douthat's consistent attack on "secularism in such broad terms.
5
I'm glad that Mr. Douthat is so well read...he should continue.
The book reports can only get better. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow, Ross.
2
Ross
I read this book to my son many years ago. It became one of our favorites along with the Princess Bride.
Politics aside (and your analysis is very good); you are creating priceless memories for your family.
My son died young as a result of an automobile accident caused by another driver. Memories like our time reading Watership Down are pearls beyond price.
Thanks for sharing.
318
@Lincoln High When my son was in third grade, he was still unable to read on his own, so we read to him. I suggested Watership Down and he said, "a book about rabbits? no way!" I convinced him to let me begin and by chapter two he was so hooked that he decided to finish the book by himself rather than wait until I had time to do it for him. Watership Down was the first book he ever read, and he's never stopped.
Thank you for sharing your story.
38
@Lincoln High thinking of you and your memory of time shared I know he would say the same.
21
@Lincoln High Sorry for your loss :(
23
This one's a stretch even for Ross Douthat. If I want to argue that liberalism is in "crisis" maybe I'll turn to Joy of Cooking. Not a word in it about--oh wait.
"Season liberally".
Well, that's a crisis, sort of. Am I right?
2
And when will Mr. Douthat be reading "Atlas Shrugged" to his children?
5
hmmm. trump, et al are dismantling our republican institutions, and you review a nursery book about rabbits?
1
The reason why book metaphors don't apply so well to real life is because in real life, we are parts of communities where we don't know everybody. What conservatives often hark toward are small communities of people with shared values who take care of each other. But in most of the U.S., there are no longer small communities. (And in any case, small communities can be brutally cruel to outsiders and nonconformists.) When you apply conservative small-town policies to a large city, they don't really work. Individual groups can no longer be trusted to care for each other and hold each other accountable. They start to act clannish and defend their resources. They put up walls against the poor, because they don't know them personally.
What liberals are suggesting is that in a very large community, such as a city, resources should not be shared as a matter of kindness or kinship but as a matter of course. A white neighborhood may not feel a lot of kinship with the black neighborhood down the road or feel keen to share resources with it, so the government has to provide an overarching commitment to reasonable (but not total) equity of resources. The government doesn't replace the needs people have for family, meaning, and community. But it addresses a reality: people don't like to take care of people they don't know.
I love Watership Down's idealism. But I see a lot more idealism in the progressives than in the "I've got mine" conservatives, who simply put their own clan first.
5
What about "Animal Farm", in which the pigs run a populist campaign ("Four legs good, two legs bad")? Once they take over the farm house they start walking around on their hind legs. Reminds one of "Drain the swamp".
8
...something to strive for, but never more 'than just a myth'.
After all most of us are descendants of the corrupted European seed.
1
All politics aside, the book and the animated film give me immense joy.
Watership Down is one of my favorite books and I encourage everyone to read it and make up their own minds as to what it means to them.
As for Mr. Douthat's fears of liberalism, I'm not really willing to entertain or humor them at this moment with Donald Trump in office, the GOP utterly failing to govern and Republicans who "don't support Trump" unwilling to fight against the damage Trump is doing and unwilling to help fix it.
Really, if liberalism is bad, then what does that say for the current brand of corrupt and power-hungry conservatism the GOP represents and that, last I checked, around 90% of Republicans support and the other 10% ignore while wagging their finger about the dangers of liberalism?
4
With regard to Aeneidan dramaturgy: dramaturgy means the art and methods of dramatic construction. The Aeneid, an epic poem, thus, is neither an example of dramaturgy, nor does it, to my memory, have any particularly striking discussion of dramaturgy in it. I'm guessing Douthat means something like the dramatic force of the Aeneid, though why he chooses that epic rather than either of Homer's isn't clear to me either. This is right up their with George Will's hopeless forays into trying to sound literate.
1
@Andrew - FWIW, twenty years later, Adams published a sequel, "Tales of Watership Down," in which female rabbits are better represented. He was a man of his time, that time changed, and he apparently tried to change with it. His success is open to debate.
More problematic is the ahistoric "glaring flaw" in your comment. Yes, sooner or later, as a species we must confront the ridiculous over-representation of we men in art and literature across space and time. Not just in creators and their creations. It's cemented into those who evaluate and distribute and market.
We rightly celebrate the exceptions outside a so-called western canon. Yet the over-representation holds even for non-western producers. Does the Ramayana's prominent female character make Indian art and literature egalitarian?
But here we part company. Given that shrugging our shoulders is not an option, what are we to do? I would argue we need to place the lacunae of females - recall we began with rabbits - in real historical context. Talk about the time and place, about the implications. I'm sure Douthat - with whom I rarely agree - will do something like that with his daughters. Bedtime stories are not just read. We converse about them. Often we even prep to converse about them.
Your stance, to damn everything from The Iliad to The Art of War to Native Son, as having a "glaring flaw," is no less problematic (and stereotypically male) than simply shrugging it all off as "that's the way it is/was."
2
Why do we let such immature and un-woke people command such a large pulpit as Douthat does?
The hidden message is that if we allow ourselves to take care of ourselves, we will be weak and effete humans. That we need the punishment of bankruptcy should we get sick or injured or should need a hand up. That what's good for humans is bad for humans.
Where does he get the idea that progressives want a police state? Why you give him his column inches escapes me weekly.
He thinks progressives are aiming for utopia. No, we are aiming for civility, morality, and enhanced humanity. Nothing mystical. It can all be achieved.
11
"My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here."
3
@The Shadow And up until then, General Woundwort thought that Bigwig was the Chief Rabbit; so the thought that there was someone bigger and badder and tougher...
I love this! (Maybe a little bit of the flavor of the Three Billy Goats Gruff.)
1
After reading the opinion and many of the comments and the comments to the comments the only thing left in my head was:
Much ado about nothing. Cheers
I have to ask, what is the danger of secularism? Every right-of-center, and some centrist, writers or pundits make it sound like the atheism of the Soviet Union resurrecting itself when, in actuality, it is most simply the separation of church and state. Something, I’ll add for those in the back, that is actually in the Constitution of the United States. As of yet, I have not found anyone willing to explain the disadvantages of secularism and how it might interfere with religious freedoms in an unfair way.
7
The analogy is a good one - I wonder if it is more of a representation of our past than future?
In the author's analogy, the seeking and founding of the new warren best mirrors our own country's founding, with a well-intentioned and complementary mix of leaders, heroes, and ideals.
The two other 2 warrens mentioned - the totalitarianism of Efrafa (current fear), and the decadence and death warren (future fear) are well established. Were they too founded on better principles, and veered hard when dealing with various challenges? Can an established warren unknot the barbed wire and restore former ideals? The answer will reveal a lot of what it means to be a rabbit, or human.
Wow, this is a real throwback. I did a book report about the political allegories of this book while I was in high school. I thought that the first burrow was a representation of communism, that Erfafa was a representation of authoritarianism, and that their final home was representative of some perfect alternative that has yet to be discovered.
I read the book recently. What struck me most about it is that when given a chance to forgive and forget some wrongdoing, they did. Hazel's group accepted Holly (an antagonist from the original warren), Strawberry (from Cowslip's warren), and Campion (and many others from General Woundwort's warren). There was no lingering anger or malice, just acceptance and an understanding that the rules were different in Hazel's / Bigwig's / Fiver's /... new warren.
I find myself wishing (wistfully) that we could lay down the swords in this country. I wish I could be more like these rabbits.
2
I haven't read the book but based on this column, it seems to me the foundation for the genuinely good society is simply treating each other decently. I wonder why it's so hard for us to do that.
3
@Dean We frequently do treat each other decently as individuals, even when we differ. It's as groups that we don't respect each other. 'blue team, blue team, rah, rah rah!
1
We, for the most part do treat each other kindly. There are exceptions, for example, comments on social media between opposing sides can be rude. However, I believe that the vast majority of Americans are decent and kind.
"liberalism’s dystopian destination"
One can live perfectly fine without the opioid of religion. I don't understand why not having some sort of ultimate meaning in life is so discomforting for people? The meaning of life is to get on with your life. I'm perfectly comfortable with their not being anything more.
6
This is ironic given that tolerance and cooperation are liberal virtues despised by the right. It's not surprising that this irony escapes the analysis, and that the chief virtue championed in the book, justice, escapes mention. Not surprising since a major characteristic of the political right is makin stuff up.
5
In Ross Douthat's fevered mind, liberalism is always in crisis.
It's not enough that liberals
-freed the slaves
-gave women and minorities the right to vote
-ended child labor
-instituted the 40 hour week
-ended the Vietnam War
-launched Social Security and Medicare
-gave us universal public education
-gave us the EPA, OSHA, NOAA, and the Consumer Protection Bureau
We liberals have created a crisis: Donald Trump is president. Mr. Douthat has little to say about the crisis of the so-called, but absolutely not, conservatives of our country who have succeeded in staying in the minority but retained political power, funneled money over and over out of the general economy and into the pockets of the 1%, lied us into the war in Iraq, and continue to do everything they can to undermine the democratically elected, representative government of, by, and for the People.
Resist.
15
@Lennerd
Ross finds those issues are meaningless to a privileged white guy like him. He is not at all concerned with the racism and xenophobia of his beloved Republican party. His concern is about the party who isn't racist and how dare they criticize his beloved Republicans.
Something is wrong with the NY Times that they keep publishing this dreck.
1
I read the estimable Watership Down when I was already an adult and - as an English major and seasoned reader - positioned, imho, to get its self-conscious positioning of itself in literature.
Like animated Disney movies, it will appeal to children and young adults on particular levels, and to grown-ups on others...
...though - like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein - I think it is ultimately geared towards an adult idea of an ideal childrens literature, human and encompassing in its mythic themes...
Which is to say Watership Down is "polysemous" and will have different meanings for different readers - not only young vs. older readers, but readers of different political persuasions.
For my money (ewww, that was socially crude of me, wasn't it?), Robert C. O'Brien's imaginative exploration of freedom, The Rats of Nimh...should, at the very least, be read alongside it.
3
Read the book, it's pretty long, but might well be shorter than this article (can't say for sure cuz I didn't manage to finish the latter).
2
I cringe when our rabbi bases his sermon on what is happening to his children. I feel the same about this column
4
Just wondering, Ross. Where in your fantasy re-telling of "Watership Down" as our current political landscape does the the "developer" come in? You know, the one who precipitates the need for the rabbits to leave their warren in the first place?
I'd say that is vulture capitalism and just as in the story, it is threatening all of us not enriched by its immorality. The real focus for humans should be how to rein in those "developers" aka fossil fuel companies, the Billionaire class, Wall Street, the 0.1%, CEO of multinational corporations, social media conglomerates, etc.
13
Left of the center-left is progressive and inclusive, not regressive and restrictive. Left of the center-left allows for personal choice, not fiat. Left of center-left does not worship a mystical past, nor does it fear the future.
4
Thank you so much for this article. A truly great book - timeless, relevant, entertaining, worthy for all ages.
1
I knew that chapter in "The Underground Railroad" felt familiar. You know the one I mean.
Much too complicated, complex, and convoluted.
I didn't have the interest to even finish reading the opinion piece,
much less figure out what alleged lesson we should learn from it.
hint for the Ross: "simplicity is the greatest sophistication"
You’re ignoring one key point, Ross: It was liberal order (not capitalism) that created the Western World in the first place—and especially the United Stated of America.
4
"Somewhere near the root of those discontents is a fear that the kind of balanced and virtuous society — simultaneously mystical and practical, orderly and free — that the rabbits build in “Watership Down” has slipped somehow from our grasp, or else was always just a myth. "
Actually what many of us fear is that the Woundworts of the world, with the help of a warren full of cowards and sycophants, are standing on a fair and just societies' neck so firmly we'll be unable to break free.
Love this book by the way and you're correct that it's every bit as a much a political statement as Orewell's Animal Farm.
7
Does Watership Down explain how the rabbits cope when 90% of the wealth is controlled by 0.001% of the rabbits?
That is essentially what has happened to the American common wealth & it was primarily the "conservative" party that drove us there.
It's not like this hasn't happened before. In late Roman Empire wealth was so concentrated that 6 senators owned half of North Africa. The wealthy & powerful used their influence to avoid paying taxes. The empire lacked the political will to raise enough resources to create a large enough army to control their borders. In the process they outsourced the job to barbarians whose cousins they were trying to keep out. (See Nobel laureate & econ historian Douglas North's "Structure & Change in Econ History" pp100-115).
The same thing happened to Ancient Egypt's New Kingdom, Byzantium 50 years before 1071, Medieval Japan, Hapsburg Spain, Bourbon France, Romanov Russia, Cooledge-Hoover America (triggering Great Depression, rise of Hitler, WWII & Holocost) & Bush II (triggering Great Recession, Rise of Putin, collapse of Middle East, instability in the EU, Trump & Bovo Johnson).
We know what & how to deal with this situation. FDR showed us. I'm not aware of anyone else that has succeeded in containing concentrated wealth in history. The Senate murdered Caesar not because he violated Rome's constitution (Sulla already had done that) but because he was about to distribute massive amounts of land to the poor masses that the senators coveted.
9
You had me at *Watership Down*
1
Am I the only one who hears Mr. Douthit describing a workable socialism in his description for the heroes' warren in the book? Now THAT's irony!
7
Douthat would have us understand that because some fantastically impossible world in which all agree to share power and resources harmoniously does not exist is why the well-meaning bunnies of the world are forced to vote against cheese-eating whining liberals.
It is not with disinterest that Douthat opposes meritocracy.
2
Don't worry, Ross. The large invisible dude up in the sky that you are hoping to convince your daughters to accept as real, along with the priestly hierarchy of such noble character and (usually) frustrated urges will surely save us from the secular enemies you fear. Someday soon perhaps you can relax and return to the pleasant work of wrecking the American experiment in liberal democracy, the society you and your fellow brainwashed ideologues have done so much to ruin.
Maybe being hounded by the Inquisition will be a nice change from Trumpism.
6
It's interesting how Ross sees both 'bad' warrens as just opposite liberal extremes, and implies that the final 'good' warren Hazel and the others are trying to build is - what - centrist-conservatism? I'd say both bad warrens have much more in common with the conservative spectrum, and the final Hazel-warren is closer to how a a liberal would describe a desired end state. The first warren (the rabbit farm) is non-political and can stand for any societal soul-selling - as the religious right has been doing for three years to gain their 'goals', and how even right-centrists have been doing re the actual Nazis in their midst. Efrafra is extremely right-wing, in fact doesn't show a shred of 'liberalism'. Ross, I hope you don't editorialize with your kids, as they'll be getting something very different than what Adams intended.
7
One of those self-deluded liberals here that Douthat shakes his head at. I'll suggest he try Ursula Le Guin's award-winning "The Dispossessed." It offers a somewhat more textured political comparison, this time between utopianism and anarchism on sister planets. As a bonus, it was written by an anthropologist, herself the daughter of an eminent anthropologist, so the cultural tics he appreciates are spot on.
On the other hand, I'm less sure Douthat isn't projecting a great deal onto Watership Down to find within it the perils of liberalism. Its archetypal structure encourages projection; critics at the time called it a rabbit Aeneid. (Although the conservative National Review thought it about as insightful as Dumbo.)
But Adams' daughter said it was just a story about rabbits, meant by her father to pass time on a family car trip. I'll go with her.
3
Ross, any books on hypocrites, liars or those that slander?
Less time spent looking for signs of failure, and more time spent solving real problems.
Remember, when you lie to yourself, it is easy to lie to others.
4
It is interesting that to make the liberal society seem bad, the author has to add a farmer who is going to skin and kill the rabbits. Of course, in the real world, there’s no such farmer. Without such a farmer, there is nothing wrong with liberal “decadence.”
1
If only we had a president with the leadership qualities of “Hazel” in the Oval Office, or even someone with the smarts of “Bugs Bunny.” But no, the GOP and the Electoral College landed us with “Elmer Fudd,” and if he get’s re-elected it’ll be “That’s All Folks!”
5
Wow. Now I understand the metaphor of "down the rabbit hole". I wish Mr. Douthat luck extricating himself from an analogy that he cannot possibly maintain. Look around, Mr. Douthat. It is the Alt-right, not Liberalism, that is the festering agar agar plate of dystopian inequitability.
Liberals try to give society options, upward mobility, and hope for success. In contrast, I believe it was the Times who recently interviewed Florida's Trump supporters who would rather go without their own health care, to prevent the people they despised from being helped.
6
I'm always mildly amused when RD attempts to describe liberalism. It is usually some combination of the Inquisition, Salem witch trials and the Hog Farm commune. I read Adams when Watership Down was published in the US, and I loved it. That said, read Tolkien to your children if you want to teach then the values of western liberalism. Good and evil are in much clearer contrast than in the rabbit warrens of Adams' fine book.
2
I really enjoyed this column, but I want to disagree with Ross Douthat's statement, "Which option you choose depends on which destination you fear most."
I don't see the necessity of choosing any of these alternatives, or any other. But rather, considering them can help us understand the correct standards.
So, if some people who want to rule us came at us, should each of us obey them, kill them, stay away while keeping our heads down, or actively help them?
Many are lured into picking sides, battling other teams in voting booths, comment sections, or, as some columnists now urge us, to "take to the streets."
But learning from the choices these rabbits considered is certainly more fun than studying ideas writers have bequeathed us this century or millennia ago.
On the subject of children's books, I recommend James Clavell's The Children's Story, not as a caution about communist indoctrination, but socialization.
3
Mr. Douthat - why don't you turn your considerable rhetorical skills to the 40 year mess YOUR PARTY has made in this country and the world, instead of figuring out new and innovative ways to malign Democrats, liberals and progressives with your intricate and increasingly strained justifications for Republican racism, bigotry, perfidy, criminality, sedition, and of late outright treason. Your insistence on carrying water for these liars, thieves, miscreants and traitors is getting increasingly tedious.
15
Here's another way out of your lefty-righty anxieties: read Steven Pinker, put your pet grievances aside for one minute and look around you. Chances are, its quite okay.
2
" the one about rabbits????" projection. douthat can't comprehend that even as tweens many of us understood metaphor. this man arrogant, ignorant, cowardly and unaware.
3
so we should put our necks under the heel of douthat's religion?
8
Wasn't it turn into a PBS series? Read Babar to your kids. When I did I realized it was a depiction of a socialist society.
Mr. Douthat should truly check his privilege.
Nobody's getting fat.
And it's the proto-fascism of conservatism that's truly in crisis right now.
That he misses that elephant in the room, it's unbelievable.
It's almost as though he the *real* occasion of why he wanted to right this had to do with something he'd rather we not see.
3
Rome is burning and you are talking about a second-rate rabbit story.
2
"...crisis of the liberal order"..."embattled liberal center"...quite a leap here (some might call it whistling past the graveyard) by a conservative notoriously committed to paving the way for the insanity now enveloping the nation.
2
So, its hard to figure out what all these "interpretations" are about but the bottom line is we have a rabbit space where 1% of the rabbits have 90% of everything. They choose a big ,fat, lying but very entertaining rabbit to make sure the rest do not realize whats going on. This rabbit gives them all the money and no oversight as he has great entertaining rallies and insults any rabbits who question him.
Meanwhile he builds himself a great big Den with lots of goodies and tells the poor rabbits its the rabbits questioning things that are causing their misery.
5
Ross, why don't you just take responsibility for helping to elect Trump. The only real conservatives are never-Trumpers like Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post
5
Reading between the lines, it sounds like Ross is endorsing Amy (Hazel) Klobuchar.
2
@Robert Bott, one can hope.
3
I don’t buy your overly dark and histrionic comparisons to liberalism, but I will agree on one aspect. Watership Down excels at the art of story-telling.
3
Best line in the book is by Fiver near the end when he speaks to Vervain: "I am sorry for you with all my heart. […] Believe me, I am sorry for your death" (47.71-3).
Might I also suggest "Animal Farm"?
2
@Passion for Peaches
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge about rabbits.
Ross, you are always a socially conservative Roman Catholic.
I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that your faith and dedication are real. That you really believe in Jesus Christ as Savior. So what do you do with the parable of the Good Samaritan? I see many Christians forgetting Christ and focusing on "The All Powerful God." God as a dictator who favors them and punishes every one else. It seems they want a religious police state where "Christians" are favored. Everyone else can go to H E double toothpicks.
5
Uhh... you know that the basis of the book is that man destroys everything and creates an ecological disaster, right?
8
So, what Mr. Douthat seems to be saying is that the battle with Efrafa is a modern instance of the biblical command to kill all the men and boys and take the women as sex slaves, albeit slaves with long ears and legs designed for hopping.
2
Get your own house in order before you come to my house and say : It's messy
5
Thanks for the reminder. I reread it during President Obama's second campaign and had it with me as I sat in a packed college arena waiting for his appearance.
An amazing reaction; in minutes everyone on the benches around me was talking about Watership Down; how it touched them, how it made them think about their lives and how they were going to have to read it again as well.
Oh, weren't those truly the good old days; hope and gentle language and sharing memories.
I'm looking through my piles for that book---I need to read it again so badly.
2
Umm. You better finish the book. In the end, Hazel tricks a dog to attack Efrafa to break the power of the rabbit warren. A metaphor for enlisting foreign interference in a domestic dispute.
207
@Jean Chai The dog doesn't attack Efrafa itself; it breaks the Efrafan siege of Hazel's warren. Still foreign aid, but clearly fits with the description of Hazel's statesmanship and strategy.
24
@Mark Reilly Yes, thanks. The dog wasn't brought into the strategy to boost a leader's chances in an election but to enable Hazel's warren to survive -- the kind of foreign aid we've provided to others and now, apparently, do not. At least not reliably.
34
Love. This. Post.
6
When readings these missives from Mr. Douthat (and sometimes David Brooks) I often think that they are totally missing the point. The societal dysfunction that they speak, with peoples atomization into tribes and the ascendancy of screens over human interactions is an outcome completely baked into modern economic liberalism. And the response to these pathologies has little to do with being Liberal or Conservative, or Sandleford or Cowslip or Efrafa, since all are largely reactions constrained by social systems defined by an economic model - in our case a market economy. Ultimately, the virtues living together in peace and harmony in Watership Down have to contend with that as well, although it is not clear how. The presumption is that the presence of a balanced mix of virtues automatically leads to a stable social structure that will tame the capitalistic demon. Maybe. But that degree of sustainability requires restraint and restraint is not part of the modern liberal economic model. Rather, capitalism's nihilistic core ultimately makes us all like Woundwort.
2
Surprise! Tribalism predates Trump. It even predates the US of A.
The comments for this article highlight one the big issues we have in our democracy - everyone is yelling and blaming the “other side”
Until the yelling stops and the listening starts, our democracy will not get better
3
Thing is that the majority of us are very alarmed by what we see as a steady march towards tyranny. Sometimes, sir, we must shout in order to sound the alarm!
4
Where would Mr. Douthat's opinions be on the political spectrum if he was absolutely neutral in the areas of religion, gender (patriarchy) and finance? I know that is impossible for anyone, but it is worth pondering.
3
The idea that universal healthcare, education, and social security are somehow an embrace of a meaningless culture of death is one of the most pathetically blatant lies of the American Right. Pundits like Ross have made a pretty penny spreading it around though. (The silver lining is that if he's been reduced to distorting a story about bunnies in order to peddle it, the act must be wearing thin.)
Remember kids: Fiver is NOT a Republican.
8
I have rarely read a more deceitful piece of work than this column. Moderate liberals, Douthat writes, want Gilead or a police state. They want tight borders; in the language of another novel, they want Engsoc.
Modern conservatives, on the other hand, are not mentioned in the column. It seems to me, however, that denying the rights of people based on their sexuality and denying women control of their reproductive systems are more like Gilead and an almost fanatical terror of illegal immigrants and a corresponding fanatical need for tight borders is more like current Republican policy than anything Joe Biden - the most moderate liberal alive - proposes.
I find it hard to believe that a literate or reasonable man could write such a corrupt piece of propaganda.
8
“..liberalism’s dystopian destination: a sleek and fattened inhumanity, a terrible mix of comfort and cruelty..”
Cruelty... like kids ripped from their parents and put in cages? Like denying even the possibility of asylum to families fleeing lethal gang violence? Like cutting food stamps? Ross, it’s conservatives who are cruel, in case you haven’t noticed. “Every person for himself, and some types of people matter more than others” is the cruel Conservative calculus.
And are calls for a living minimum wage and access to health care for all going to make us “sleek, fattened and comfortable”? That’s a cruel way to think, no?
5
I am not surprised that, whatever his explanations, Ross always manages to lip something like this into is argument: "a loss of basic human goods under the pressure of capitalism or secularism". Really? How were "basic human goods" promoted by the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the 30-Years War, to mention a few examples? And capitalism has produced economic depression, war, fascism and obscene levels of inequality (all the while cloaking itself in Christian hypocrisy and yet producing goods if not "good"). Doesn't secularism, at its most basic, inculcate humility in that it presumes that no one, not even the secularist, has all the answers? The rabbits seem to get it --- why don't we humans?
3
"A classic novel ... has a political teaching for today"? If that sentence encapsulates the style of the article, count me out.
1
Here is one rule for our current warren. No one gets to analyze our political situation, until they own their part in Trump becoming president. We need RD and all conservatives to see their part in letting things like truth and facts, be smashed either in a liberal or conservative soup. Why did conservatives let propaganda against Obama go unchecked? Why did they not stand up for character, facts, and truth? Yes, politics is not beanbag, but it is also not constant war. Where were the liberals when Progressives said, because of her Wall Street connections, Clinton was no different than Trump. NO DIFFERENT THAN TRUMP! Where are the liberals and conservatives who understand they need each other? So, nice cute piece RD, but it is time to stop taking shots at the other side, or all we will have, is strong men promising what can not be promised. We all long for the day when We the People can say to Trump, "You are fired!"
5
It's absolutely fascinating that the two "bad warrens" end up being the liberal alternatives? Does this imply that conservatism is the final "good warren"?
Because to me the end-of-history warren sounds more like today's conservatives, feeding you crumbs until the can skin you alive. And obviously trump wants a totalitarian state, were he can do as he pleases.
That's what's beautiful about fantasy. You can imagine more than what is written...
3
The book Watership Down as a political lesson for our time, and the prospects of the democratic liberal order, freedom of speech, equality of opportunity, etc. in today's world?
I have yet to read Watership Down but I suspect it suffers from all the dichotomous and unsatisfying forms of reasoning which plague any number of other books when it comes to politics, and I can guess at the center of the book is the problem we are squarely faced with today: We call a society bad the more it chooses between citizens, elevates a group of citizens over others, sets up a hierarchy or at worst rejects entirely, kills a set of the citizen body; and we call a society good the less there is the need to choose between citizens, which means goodness of society increases the more everybody is considered equal and interchangeable, as useful in any capacity as anybody else.
Naturally we can see that even in the most open, democratic, free societies of today we live a hypocritical life. Even if we strive to keep from having to choose between citizens not to mention devolving to one or another form of totalitarianism and ruthless exclusion of a section of the citizen body, we never really believe everybody is equal even we sincerely believe everybody deserves a decent life; we choose every day, the beautiful over the ugly, the intelligent over the stupid, etc. which is to say are only so moral as to make intelligent choice. We might not want to do evil, but choose we must between people.
++ sigh ++ I get sooo tired of conservatives telling me about the "crisis" liberalism faces.
Liberalism is more like D on a sport-shift automatic transmission. Select D to go forward, then choose torque and speed. Our problem is that we have to make choices.
Conservatives are stuck in R. No crisis here - just single speed going backward.
5
Wonderful column, Mr Douhat.
This is an old story. Oh, that's right, I'm an old man now. Yes we already went over this book many years ago. And, yes, it was in the middle of the Cold War and yes the story warns of a perceived threat that having it too easy could bring to a society.
And, well, isn't it true? In America, the richest country in the world, where self-reliance is a strong virtue, where billionaires are created as well as millions of homeless. Here, in America, the majority can barely be coaxed to pay much attention at all to politics. Instead they use their "freedom" to shop in stores that are all essentially owned by American royalty - mostly oil barons and their families.
So no. It's not true. In fact the opposite is true. All young people want to achieve. They are constantly motivated to achieve. It is LACK OF OPPORTUNITY that drives the drive to achieve out of people. Whole black communities become antisocial wards of the state because they have learned their is little opportunity for them in whities world. Why try. Better to buy drugs to stifle the desire that beats in your breast. Or turn to angry gangs.
Republicanism has destroyed the American dream and is not be finished until all hope of equality is dashed.
For all the volumes of discussion on economics it is really so simple. Tax the rich, eliminate for profit medical care, and channel the collected wealth into infrastructure jobs that will truly "raise all boats".
6
Ross has time for this piffle while a TV entertainer and failed real estate mogul tramples on the Constitution and dissolves the capacity of the US to play a leading role in global affairs? You really have to be kidding me. The part about "liberals" desiring a kind of totalitarian state is a new low -- in the sense of the contortions required of conservative pundits as the bar for their world view sinks.
5
Why would you drop all that on such a wonderful book. I revisit Watership Down every two or three years and the pleasures only increase over time. I so hope you haven't turned off any potential readers !
3
I find little to argue with in Ross's column about Watership Down. Which is surprising in that I rarely find anything in Ross's writing to agree with. For those who haven't read Richard Adams work I commend this deeply meaningful and wonderfully written tale. Read it aloud to a child if you can (I have read this book and others to two generations now) but don't let the idea that it is a children's book dissuade from reading it by yourself. Perhaps by the end of the book Ross will give conservatism the baleful eye it deserves and embrace a more liberal philosophy. :) , just kidding.
1
We might have more room to choose which kind of warren We the People would like to live in if there wasn't one political party in our Nation that has vied for 50+ years to denigrate, dehumanize, and destroy everyone who doesn't think the way they do.
You know who I'm talking about, M. Douthat.
I have recently reread, for my own enjoyment, "The House at Pooh Corner" and "The Wind in the Willows". Lovely and superb writing in both, with lots of humanity to discover.
When I first became a step-dad I read to my new kids the entire adventures of the Hobbits and Gandalf and the Ring.
(My daughter once caught me in the wrong voice for Frodo.)
It seems to say something about current political debates that we never refer to the "Conservative World Order". It's known as the "Liberal World Order". Probably for a good reason.
2
Well I read Watership Down back in the 1970's when it was all the rage. I don't remember it being marketed for children, but maybe it was (that was a long time ago). I remember thinking all those years ago that the society that was most like our society was the first one. The one that failed to recognize the signs and warnings of it's imminent destruction. Only for us, the ones who do recognize those warnings, there will be no where to run
2
@PeterJ Not according to the author who obviously doesn't buy into your fatalism. He offers something, whereas you're throwing in the towel. So. Word. Lol
If I understand, Ross Douthat equates with being liberal two versions of a police state. True, startling compromises and jolting lapses exist in FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, and LBJ's advocacy for Civil Rights; but each exemplifies the "unfashionable optimism" of our democracy.
2
Up here in northern VT we have snowshoe hares and not rabbits. Surely that would make for a different mythology, not to mention brevity of life thanks to owls, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, humans with shotguns... No, I'm afraid they are a larder species difficult to mythologize.
One important breakdown in the analogy is that Fiver's mysticism offers concrete benefits to our heroes, widening their understanding of the world through clairvoyance. In contrast to American religious factions, which on balance have narrowed our worldview and stood in the way of rational decision-making.
2
@Gary And why is the psychic rabbit to represent "religion". Fiver's concern was never their equivalent of the Jesus bunny, the prince of a thousand enemies, some saintly folklore rabbit. His concern was more basic than that. Existential.
1
@Paul Kiefer Maybe I’m reading into things, but based on Ross’s usual line of argument, I’m interring that that’s how he sees it.
The Brits know how to write in metaphors!
This is a fascinating piece of literary criticism! I caught only glimpses of it when I read Watership down 40 years ago.
Alice in Wonderland is a montage of quirky characters; Watership Down a saga of social migration.
Anthropologists agree that migration from East Africa, and across Europe, as Neanderthal were disappearing, has been the natural order of human existence.
It would be interesting to learn how indigenous peoples (Native Americans) might record--metaphorically or historically--the successive European invasions of North and South America after the 15th century of the Common Era.
I applaud Douthat for reading to his children, so they don't go to sleep as the power runs down on their tablets.
3
So if anyone who should read WD, read it, which of the villains would they favor?
Right. The necessary audience won't get the bigger message. They never do, they just never do...
@Boregard I totally got the message when I read the book at the age of thirteen. It's about rabbits. Just ask a thirteen year old because people at that age get the most enjoyment out of this book.
This is the best thing I've ever read from Ross Douhat. Are his conclusions mine? Only in part, but I do agree and take hope from the idea that is very much present in Watership Down -- that it doesn't take superheroes to create a society we can all live in. It only requires us to see the possibility and to hold onto it in the face of all that would defeat us.
2
Once again the comments section exceeds the value of the column.
7
"The ecologically minded can come for the very English style of environmentalism, the lyrical depiction of the natural world, the evocation of nature’s harsh harmonies and the dissonant cruelty of humankind."
I'm "ecologically minded" and I could give two cents about anything you mention. My environmentalism is pragmatic, based on the fact that if we continue in our present course, and don't steer towards a more environmentally sustainable future with only clean energy sources, then we go extinct. Kaput. Done for. Toast.
My biggest wish, however, is for people to treat anthropogenic climate change with the seriousness it deserves. I suggest you get with the program, Douthat. I'm sure your daughters are wishing you'd put that silly book down and start thinking about THEIR futures, for once.
2
@TommyTuna Surely their future includes literature and critical thinking ok? How else do you expect them to face the challenges of the world?
No reason to read the book again now (unless you want to), though it was a fun read. The problem with liberalism is that it only works when we are all roughly of the same background, agreeing to the same rules, speaking the same language, with similar access to plentiful resources. With global population growth, and increasing fractionalism in liberal cultures, that's no longer the case. Virtually everyone wants to have the same human, as well as economic 'rights', (replete with galloping materialism) as developed democracies. Unfortunately, it would take 10 planet earths to provide that now, and another one in a decade at our current rate of population growth: 1B every 8 years. One big failure of liberalism is refusing to accept the mantle of enforcement of rules, something loathsomely evil totalitarians have long understood. Now we are faced with a moral decline on both the right and left which have both replaced Rule of Law for transactional wheeling and dealing. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Republican 'gift' of Citizens United, which keeps on giving to them, (and failed Communist, now influence peddling corrupt petro dollar states) selling out Rule of Law to the highest bidder. The antidote is not yet another failed ideology, like Socialism, but it is in an evenly applied application of the law, engendering the greatest of all human values: co-operation. With it, virtually all is possible, without it, not so much.
3
My take on this when I read it 30 years ago is a bit different:
Seemingly a political allegory about the virtues of freedom and the perils of totalitarianism, but ultimately a story about good management. The hero, Hazel, has no particular distinctive characteristics except the courage to make decisions and take actions, and the knack for encouraging others who have particular talents to use those talents at the right times. Bigwig is the champion; Fiver the seer; Blackberry the wit; Bluebell the brains; Dandelion the bard; others are good companions able to exceed their own capacities when put to the test. Their great adventure is the journey through the unknown to find home, the simple home where ordinary life can be lived peacefully, for which Odysseus also searched. The final great battle is inspirational, as the invaders are beaten psychologically when they learn that the great champion Bigwig, who had held his own against the brilliant but monstrous Captain Woundwort, recognizes an even greater Chief Rabbit as his leader.
3
I remember picking the book up right after it had been published and then putting it down quickly while thinking: I've just read this story in a Robert A. Heinlein novella from the 40s or 50s.
Now I've got to go back and try to remember which Heinlein novella it was, reread that and then see if that thought still holds.
1
While I'm hesitant to look to Ross Douthat for some literary analysis, I appreciate this column.
What he forgets, what most readers tend to overlook, is that the story ENDS with the rabbits happy on Watership Down. They have founded their society, gotten their does which will allow them to flourish, and they are happy.
For awhile.
The book ends.
What happens in real life however, (and in rabbit life I'd imagine) is that after awhile this "perfect" society will begin to stifle some of its members. It's "perfectness" will only be perfect for some. In the rabbit world those adventurous enough will set out to find a new society - one that's right for them. We here in the human world have run out of worlds to conquer.
The book is a parable. But the lesson ends before telling us what to do when we've exhausted our present place.
So, it's a great book. I'm not sure that it's got much to offer in our present situation whereby we find ourselves at the mercy of our own General Woundwart in the White House.
5
I read the book for the first time at aged 58 and found it marvelous. I've got an MBA, but nothing in the standard literature on management offers the same kind of lessons on leadership that this book does, and especially how different styles of leadership differ in their strength in different situations. This book is appropriate for our time.
1
"a loss of basic human goods under the pressure of capitalism or secularism"
There is no reason why secularism would lead to a "loss of basic human goods."
A rational, informed secularism is exactly what we need to create societies that do the hard work of trying to balance individual freedom and societal obligation.
8
One of the other lessons of the book which applies to our modern times is that you get what you allow. In both cases in the book, the rabbits who inhabited their warrens have chosen to sacrifice their souls to ensure their safety.
In our case, I would say that neither the utopian fantasies of the Progressives, nor the safety all all costs of the far right or left, are worth the price. We tried to change the narrative of an unsatisfactory society by electing an outsider who talked a good line, but it has turned into a nightmare. It is time to choose again, a good society requires the ability to adapt and change with conditions. We made a mistake, let us now be brave rabbits and correct that mistake.
5
Mr. Douthat reminded me of how much I loved this book when I read it back in 1977. I wish he had simply paid tribute to it rather than stuffing it into a contemporary political context.
I don't know why, but "Watership Down" had a profound effect on me, similar to that of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mocking Bird."
5
Listening to my dad read Watership Down is a treasured memory. I remember him (a fighter pilot with a long Air Force career) being close to tears when Bigwig stands his ground against the enemy rabbits in the warren:
"My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here."
As a 30-year-old woman, it does make me sad to realize that I would be a doe in that story. As a child I was able to identify with the male characters through pure imagination--I never doubted the story could be about me! As an adult, it does hurt. But reading those stories was a gift, and (paradoxically?) returning to them reminds me how lucky I am to have my family, who never saw the possibilities of my life in gendered terms. I'll read the same stories to my children someday. And we'll talk about it.
6
Watership Down is a great story. I do feel that the idea that freedom is what is best and natural, but that getting it and keeping it no easy thing, is a theme. The first society that the rabbits meet reminds me of the dangers of Socialism. Yes the state provides food, and protection, but at a great cost. Woundworts society feels more like a Communist society. In the end, I think these herioc bunnies are Libertarians at heart. But maybe that is a bit of a stretch.
2
@Dario Yes and Yes. I liked this summary "a dark bargain the warren has learned to live with by building a sophisticated system of denial, a culture of pleasure and of death."
I couldn't stand the book when I was 15 and this retelling does very little to entice me to give it another go. The characters are flat and the story arc presents a dystopian version of the little red riding hood. This warren is too soft and this warren is too hard. Never mind forcing all of the female does to subserve to the males running their lives. The third warren with Fiver as the leader does little to suggest these poor does will ever be allowed to live free and be seen as more than a vessel for procreation.
2
I think many commenters misunderstand Douthat's ues of the word "liberalism." I don't think he is referring to liberals a.k.a democrats. I think he is referring to liberalism as a political philosophy. In that sense, there does seem to be a crisis. People the world over appear to be rejecting it. I suspect this is not really a rejection of it as a philosophy because most people do not vote based on philosophy. They are rejecting it out of fear and loss. It's a poor choice but frightened people often make poor choices.
11
I agree with your comment. Too many of us seem to associate the term “liberalism” with being on the liberal side of the political realm. To me, and put simply, “liberalism” refers to freedom, e.g. we should all strive to live in a liberal society.
6
In her book "The Roosevelt I Knew," Frances Perkins indicated that FDR identified himself with widely different phenomena and people.
At the core of Roosevelt's character was viability, a capacity for living and growing that remained to his dying day He was a symbol of hope and social justice. He described a good democratic society as free, fair and decent. He believed
that if you treat people right they will treat you right, 90%
of the time.
4
Equating Watership Down with the crisis in liberalism is like criticizing the architecture of a house while the house next door is burning. At the NYM, Douthat and Stevens are thoughtfully articulating issues with liberalism that are real and need to be addressed. And they are confronting their distaste for Trump. However, by constantly coming back to focusing on the problems with liberalism they refuse to acknowledge the hate that is currently driving conservative movement. The mass murders, the excessive vitriol etc. are coming from the right. There are many issues with liberal thought , the academy and Democratic politicians. However, for the most part, they are not encouraging people to "hate their neighbor".
14
Hmm, so it sounds like the author is saying that it takes a village to create the common good.
7
What you really got there, Mr. Douthat, is utilitarian capitalism on one side, religious fascism on the other, and a diverse society of liberals in the middle.
It’s pretty much what you’d expect from Adams, who studied modern history before the War, served for six years in fhe Army, turned to the Civil Service and rose in the ranks of what’d be our HUD and EPA, became a writer, and focused mainly on animal welfare.
10
Mr. Douthat, I am so glad that you read aloud great books to your children. Those moments are special and priceless - I sure miss them. However, you magically pulled quite a tale from the wrong rabbit hole in your take about the book. While there is a crisis - that crisis is created by hare brained Conservatives who take more than needed and deny to those who are without. Very clever slipping all of those "warrens" in there. How would you comment on other works such as "Huckleberry Finn", or "The Wizard of Oz?"
5
"Fiver’s gift of prophecy, his religious genius, which is why the band escapes disaster in the first place (their original warren’s leader is a talented statesman, but fatally dismissive of the religious and mystical)"
Hmmm, curious proposal that religion will save the day. Reality predicts the opposite. Religion usually leads to war.
9
When I read Watership Down, as a “tween,’ I had been keeping and breeding rabbits for four years. I knew rabbits, at least the domestic variety. I remember enjoying the book immensely, and even at that age the allegorical aspect if the story was not lost on me. But I also remember thinking that the author did not understand the species.
Bigwig was the most memorable character. Straightforward, as a dominant male rabbit would be. I rooted for him. It bothers me that I cannot remember feeling angry that the does were left out of the decision making, left behind in the old warren, and thought of later only for breeding purposes. But that certainly speaks to my upbringing.
The rabbit mind is a basic thing. Rabbit mothers will eat their young, if they are stressed or if they feel something is not right with their babies. Male rabbits will sometimes kill baby bunnies, which causes the female to go into estrus even sooner than she would anyway. Rabbits all are about having things now (food, nesting material, a safe home) and breeding (males will fight viciously to breed the does, and that breeding hierarchy is foremost in a rabbit buck’s brain). A dominant doe will take the best nest, and breed with the dominant buck, if given a choice of partner. But mostly she will concentrate on making more bunnies. So, food, sex, procreation, power and protection from harm: these sum up a rabbit’s obsessions and aspirations. The similarity to your average American voter is obvious.
8
I should add that I spend a lot of time watching wild rabbits in the field. They do not behave cooperatively. They look out for their own, little cottontail behinds. They will often wait until the quail congregation has gathered, with the sentinel quail perched on on a high bench or promontory, protecting his flock. Like a preacher. Then the rabbits creep out of the bushes and position themselves in the center, enjoying the safety that the birds provide. One alarm call from the sentinel quail (“Heathens!”), and the rabbits run for cover, even letting their young fend for themselves. The quail, in contrast, do their best to herd any babies in the right direction. They aren’t very good at it. They panic easily.
Quail remind me of evangelical Christians. They do whatever the leader bird tells them to do. They wander around in packs of their own kind. They have vast numbers of children, which are homeschooled by mothers and aunties. They have fancy hair (well..head feathers). They are small minded, blinkered animals and perpetually nervous. Yet they carry themselves with the air of the saved. When three dozen quail cross the road in front if my car, I feel as though I should cross myself. I can easily imagine them carrying tiny Bibles, tucked under their wings. Off to picket the women’s health clinic, no doubt. If I ever see one in a MAGA hat I am going to take up drinking.
2
It is a book about rabbits, but at the same time it's not REALLY a book about rabbits.
It's a wonderful book, one of the best I have ever read, and I learn something new every time I read it (it is one of the few books in the world that a re-read regularly). I appreciate Ross' take on the book and I have discussed the book's political meaning with others. We don't all have to agree on the meaning and the fact that it can spark thoughtful discussion is one of the reasons the book is a great work.
2
The first part of this makes sense, as Douthat is reading the book "Watership Down" to his children. The second part, on how that book remarkably happens to be about the "crisis of the liberal order in the Western world", reflects Douthat's distorted world-view.
Moral decay is supposedly pervasive except in the actual inhumanity of Douthat's GOP. People can't afford decent healthcare and regressive taxation hurts average people while enriching the wealthiest. That's not the fault of liberal democracy but of those with total contempt for liberal democracy, meaning the theocrats Douthat defends.
In Douthat's recently piece, "The Abortion Mysticism of Pete Buttigieg. How the party of science decided that personhood begins at birth", Douthat actually argued that science was on the side of religious fundamentalists against not just Buttigieg, but against liberal democracy itself, when religious fundamentalists believe in neither science nor liberal democracy.
Just as that piece wasn't really about Buttegieg, this piece is not actually about "Watership Down". Both are about how religious fundamentalists refuse to accept the basic tenets of liberal democracy. There it was how women should not have power over their own bodies, but how science somehow proved that male theocrats should; here it is how liberal democracy is flawed because it is deliberately structured to prevent democracy from being destroyed by the supposed "values" which a Christian theocracy claims to uphold.
12
Sad to see that your takeaway is liberal positions lead to doom and failure, while remaining silent on where conservative positions would take us. Had you at least argued that far-left and far-right positions are false choices, I could have seen some merit in spending time with your column. Today's effort was a waste of time.
12
Also, isn’t it telling that in this writers view, the Police state is the end result of misguided liberalism, but it seems never to occur to him that authoritarian states can rise up just as easily (maybe even more easily) from conservatism when it is hijacked up by a guy like Trump) just as easily? Watch HBO’s Years and Years for the ultimate allegorical tale of where primitive instincts for self protection (ie Nationalism) take us.
3
Here is my suggestion if Ross is unclear what is wrong with America.
Take the average monthly social security check, and try to live in any major city.
Just that. Then tell me liberalism, the idea that we all belong and matter and that our culture exists for all its citizens, not just the top few, is a bad thing.
Liberalism gave us social security, and the minimum wage, and the New York Times.
Hugh
23
And just like people, rabbits are also an invasive species, whose presence nearly always ends in catastrophe.
Myxomatosis for the masses!
4
I read Watership Down as a child. I'm amazed that a columnist in the Times would publish this "analysis" of it as some kind of insight into the current political situation -- one where he can take a work of fiction and attempt to frame his argument that we need more fiction, in the form of religion, in our society.
9
Good literature excites the mind and uplifts the imagination even after the last page has been read.
Mr Douthat is excited to share what's on his mind, but the veneer of analysis sits uncomfortably upon the present time like a crown of dandelions upon a dog.
3
Well said. HIs column shows how a person can impose his ideas on an allegorical tale in order to fit a preconceived, rigid mindset. The assumptions behind his “analysis” show us us exactly how the religious right thinks.
1
The crisis of liberalism is that it allows illiberal ideas to entertained for fairness. Thus is born conservatism. A pseudo-intellectual mask for exploitation, bigotry and hatred.
9
I have never had a bunny for dinner. I am going to invite one, soon.
2
So, liberal initiatives to improve the common person’s standard of living to anything beyond a desperate Hobbesian scramble run the risk of shedding our “human-y virtues”? Sure thing, Ross
7
So you've decided to compare modern liberalism to a policy of government ordained cannibalism? The better lesson here seems to be 'Avoid hyperbole'.
4
I can think of one guy in American politics right now who is eroding the constitution and doing everything short of calling out the militia to maintain power, and he’s no liberal. As for “augmentation”, I have no clue of what you are talking about. Maybe his hair?
4
Whatever your vision of rabbit utopia, you can't get there from here if the concept of truth has been thrown out the window.
5
oh the terrible pressure of secularism!
1
In order to write this he had to write the word "warren" over and over........I love that.
8
More like the crisis of neoliberalism.
1
Forget left, right, center, etc and refer to Nietzsche's Last Man when it comes to ascertaining the true desires and impulses of human nature.
1
I eagerly await a Ross Douthat analysis of a work of literature that explains the crisis in American conservatism. "Lord of the Flies" would be a good one, or "Animal Farm."
Donald Trump poses a serious threat to a rational, stable, liberal world order. And Trump is a product of American conservatism; Christian conservatism, specifically. When will conservatives like Douthat admit that, and tell us how they plan to mitigate the damage he---and they---have wrought?
13
The crisis of liberalism? Dam, pretty obvious with Trump coalescing with Orbin and Poostain into a new Axuis Powers, that it’s the crisis of conservatism abetted by foolish and wicked nytimes columnists
3
Oh no!!!! Douthat is going to ruin this nice book for us. Noo!!
3
You know this is going to show up on someone's twitter account.
"Guess what folks... today the New York Times compared me to a dictatorial rabbit!"
1
Only someone in the exalted conservative columnist writer view of the world can believe there is any comparison between any of the fields the rabbits inhabit, and the capitalist hellhole 90% of us inhabit in the USA. Go read 1984. Read that book, out loud, to your child.
Neoliberals. Neoconservatives. Liberals. Conservatives. It's all nonsense. There is only one power in this country anymore. Capitalism.
There is one apt comparison between Watership Down and the capitalist hellhole we are in. The capitalists like to raise us, and skin us, for our pelts.
7
Right. Liberalism is in crisis....
Have you been looking at the news lately, Ross?
4
How do newspaper columnists justify writing about a novel? For Douthat it’s just another excuse to take a swipe at progressives.
His analysis of the book is perfectly fine, and it is wonderful that he is reading the novel to his daughters – although one would hope he is not editorializing as he does. One assumes that he is already programming their impressionable minds by raising them Catholic.
It’s when he stretches to interpret our political landscape through rabbit eyes that he gets into trouble. The great irony about conservatism is that it doesn’t appreciate irony. It insists, for example, on the openness of individual freedom, and then simultaneously on the close-mindedness of religion. The later cancels out the former, unless of course, the religion becomes just an exercise in hypocrisy – more irony.
It’s irony on top of irony. And when the irony is pointed out, the conservative response is: “get over it.” But then, it’s not hard to see how the conservative mind can absorb all of the irony without blinking an eye. After all it is a world view that has a blind faith in abstractions (individual freedom, religion, the free-market) rather than material reality, and that those abstract myths will magically save us.
So, interpreting the world through a fairy-tale is something a conservative can easily do. But what conservatives find impossible to do is to admit that all the myths became a cover for a lot of bad behavior that brought us to General Woundwort Trump.
7
Good old Ross. No matter the self-selected Topic, he can always find a way to completely blame Liberals. Politics, Education, Poverty, The current Pope, Weather, Invading “ aliens “.
It’s a Gift, and would be amusing but it’s been done to DEATH.
Seriously.
12
Escape into fiction at this point is no no virtue.
1
Lord of the flies, another bed time primer with real world analogies.
2
Okay, you made me want to read this book, one that I ducked in part because people hinted it was a bummer. So when I got to your spoilers warning, I stopped reading the column. Will be back later.
1
In considering rabbit society as an allegory for human systems of governance it is worth remembering the old expression “they (dance) like rabbits”. Judging by global populations, humans should have the right of place in this expression, and aren’t the problems facing the world today primarily a result of over-crowding? Even rabbits know to stop breeding when the population spikes. Solutions for humans include funding for family planning, birth control, and of course good schools. Hope everyone has a great week, let’s each do something nice for someone less fortunate. We The People have the power.
2
You are incorrect. Nothing novel about that.
1
The crisis of Liberalism? “And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye?” If liberalism is in trouble, how is conservatism doing? Allied with Putin, Trump is marching the entire Republican Party into ignominy like the Pied Piper marching rats and children to their deaths. “Atlas Shrugged” is the epic comic book that inspires the right, gives a false assurance to the right that justifies cruelty and greed. Trump is the John Galt of Conservatives. Cui bono?
10
You have your analogies in the wrong place. This is an allegory for the Trump State.
2
So the republic in peril because of what his kind are doing to the Republic
And on cue the right wing Roman Catholicsho like his kind is always shouting Crisis! Crisis! Crisis! Since he was in high school
talks about the crisis of liberalism.
Now. Really. Read it.
It is years since the Times has had any plausible excuse for being in on this.
Yet another day. Another stain.
3
Seems like Mr. Douthat has been reading from the gospel of Supplyside Jesus.
4
Dear Ross, I can’t wait for your daughters to reach the age of listening to your reading of Alice in Wonderland, with its moving description of the Weltanshaung of your Conservative warren.
2
So, per Ross's filter...the ideological one...liberals entice us with pleasure into a world where we are prey but don't know it. This is exactly backwards. Folks of Ross's ilk love to blame hedonism on pot and hippies and others (often of differing ethnicities and cultures), but this delivers the bill to the wrong address. Instead, I point the finger at commercial culture, marketing and advertising. Folks (and Ross), do you really think they'd spend all that money on marketing if it never produced results? And in Ross's recounting, who's in charge of the culture of pleasure and death? The guy at the top of the food chain, the guy in control. The farmer.
In this column about an excellent book, Ross chooses to carry out a political smear (against his distorted idea of generic liberals) and a simultaneous deflection of accountability so that those at the top can continue to run the show while convincing you that it's all the fault of those silly self-indulgent people over there who are not me.
6
Douthat proves once again that when you start with a rigid framework that restricts your ability to think, you can see in the world around you only the shape of that framework. Douthat’s rigid framework is built of right wing Catholicism and right wing Republicanism. His burrow of choice is one in which Republican talking points are reality and actual human history is ignored. Maybe he should stick to reading childrens’ books and skip the commentary.
6
Hey, thats what I wrote! His column says so much more about the way rigid mindsets interpret reality than what the book is about. Very telling.
1
You're not going to give Duerer any credit for their painting of a rabbit??? It's all about the money.
1
Thanks, Ross, for spinning one of my favorite works into a screed against liberalism.
I hope your daughters learn more from the book than you evidently did.
6
May I also recommend Philip Pullman's “His Dark Materials” to you and yours, Ross?
6
Douthait has done it again.
He thinks that we are rabbits looking for a new home.
We are human beings appalled at the horrific world that fools like Russ have doomed us to.
6
Ross is clearly in a chronic personal conservatism crisis. Liberalism has zero to do with his serious personal problems.
5
oh dear. all these comments turning liberalism, as in the liberal order, into Liberalism, as in Democrats. the piece is bigger than that. but just curious - which one of these rabbits is female? none you say? oh dear.
4
What a well written column. Well done Ross Douthat!
Who sneers at Watership Down? And how could anyone mistake it for a whimsical fairytale or anything other than political allegory?
Anyway, Douthat’s leftwing-decadence-versus-rightwing-fascism is a running theme but painfully simplistic. Conservatives blame liberals for a sexual revolution that set America down the path of moral decline. But who are the real degenerates?
In the counterculture’s aftermath, his ilk vengefully celebrated the “gay plague” as God’s plan to exterminate homosexuals, and their grip on the Reagan administration delayed AIDS intervention till their sick prophesy came true. Nearly 40 years later, they glorify the most morally bankrupt president in US history—thrice divorced, serial philanderer, sexual criminal, corrupt, compassionless, misogynist, narcissistic, vindictive, racist, stained by the blood of Kurds—as the second coming of Christ. Yet Ross wonders why Americans have turned away from religion.
It’s true that liberals overreach, but their hearts are in the right place. Instead of moderating the left’s more radical tendencies, conservatives seethe with resentment which festers like an open wound on the body politic.
9
Mr. Ross, you write clearly. You stimulate thought.You share a literary caveat with a divided US, who continue, by complacency as well as by complicity, to enable a daily, toxic WE-THEY violating culture.By words and deeds. To create, select, and target “the other(s).” Shamelessly. You allude to “diversities” inherent in metaphoric “rabbitness” challenged by efforts to live within achieved, sustainable “rabbitkeit” as a literary code for much needed “menschlichkeit.” Within and for OUR here and NOW.In an implied reality of disparate choice, chance and circumstances. The Comments of many of your readers “ suggest” that they don’t trust you. That THEY, diverse in many ways and beliefs, or not, do not respect your “tagged” conservative views; implications and outcomes.A critical issue.
Rabbits, whatever their actual meanings, identities and behaviors,may or may not NEED daily individual accountability for a “rabbitkeit” to be created and sustained; changing in hues, textures and other relevant dimensions as internal and external realities change.Humans, choosing to live in a civil, mutually trusting, respectful, compassionate, caring, society, empowered by mutual help, if and when needed,DO!
Analogies, metaphors, and other literary “tools” can satiate when one has the luxury of experiencing living in a safe haven. Stomach full.Body hydrated. Psyche not traumatized. Mantras not garbing meanings. Facts not altered.Free to pray to...Or choosing not to. Not being preyed upon by...
I wish people like Fiver and Hazel and Bigwig would help run this country.
64
@aimlowjoe
Who saw that sentiment coming?
3
@NorthernVirginia
Yes, indeed. Farmer Douthat set the trap.
2
@aimlowjoe - If I read that right, you mean Billy Graham Junior?
Ross Douthat who is an acknowledged Conservative Republican spends most of his time criticizing Liberals instead of the corrump Republicans in and out of the Trump Administration. Watership Down was really a book about the evils of the Political Conservatives but Ross likns it to the Liberals. Come on Ross, quit using your intellect to deflect us from the glaring americanism of the Republicans. You are beginning to sound like the bully who blames his victims for the beatings he give them.
4
UK lit is full of strange ideas about what goes on in the woods. Elves, hobbits, fairies and political rabbits.... but this is the polyglot land of Murka. We got Bugs Bunny, Wiley Coyote and Lobo King of the Currumpaw to represent our flippancy, invention and cruelty.
4
I switched off from considering the book when I heard of all the lightweights and frilly greenies who adopted its lingo ("sayfleet", "tharn") to narrate their sad lives.
1
Ideological commissars? The terror of political correctness? There’s a nice false equivalency for you. Fear of good manners. The horror of being considerate!
2
Once again we see Mr Douthat, or the Times editors who assign titles to articles, misrepresent the idea of "liberalism". Liberalism has at its roots "liberty". In that sense is is more like the current version of libertarian politics than left-leaning liberal politics. When we read articles like this one the otherwise good argument is obscured by poor word usage. Liberal is different from liberalism.
2
Thank you very much for the evocative reading of an excellent book. I agree: it's worthy of a wider readership than young adults - and certainly it should be read by them. One of the more fascinating features of its politics is how carefully and slowly Hazel's leadership is allowed to emerge and be recognized (and be tested) within his group. They follow, but they also observe and perhaps wonder that they follow; he doubts, but quietly leads. Another curious and lovely feature is that many of the other rabbit groups (and some non-rabbit others) observe that Hazel is the leader, or fail to recognize that he is, because they bring a wholly different model of politics to bear and fail to understand that they're looking at another.
Other comments single out other features of the novel for remark. I won't reply to these, but observe that the book's mythology is quite capacious, and Adams anticipates and replies (as it were) to some of these strands of thought. One may or may not like what he says, but it is a layered and knowing presentation, and one should assess it in its fulness and not in some simplified form.
1
Thanks for the revival, review of this book. I read it years ago and now, when cruising the library selections of audio books, have almost clicked on it several times. But I don’t, didn’t, and didn’t know why. Reading this, I think it must be distant memory of it’s sadness, conflict. Too much of that in reading the daily headlines, I suppose.
1
The important message from Watership Down is that the resistance crushes the fascists.
191
@Paul Jay They didn't crush the fascists. They merely escaped the fascists. The difference being you can't stamp out fear and aggression with more fear and aggression. I'll throw in the towel here and pretend this is a Buddhist story. You know seeing as we are reading political meaning into a it, which is not how I enjoyed the story the first time around as a child when I understood the story was about.... rabbits basically.
6
@Paul Jay Just what happened it 2016
1
@Jimd in what alternate reality?
1
Everything bad about Watership Down reflects Republican orthodoxy - unfettered capitalism and a ruthless violation of the rule of law that upholds freedom and democracy. There is no mysticism - but a clear understanding that greed kills everything and that the witnessing thereof engenders nightmares mistaken for hidden knowledge. Apparently, secular humanism is a rabbit hole Douthat cannot abide, yet it is exactly what is achieved in the end by this noble band of bunnies.
4
I don't think I can recall a writer more in need of someone to read his work in advance of publication who can tell him all the mistakes in it, to save him from the embarrassment that would come with unedited publication. It would also help Ross a lot if he actually left the house now and then, and met some of the real people about whom he's been so intentionally misled.
7
I stole my father's copy off his bookshelf as a child because I liked the rabbit on the cover. I thought it was a children's story. After several failed attempts, I finally finished the book. The spelling certainly didn't help. I eventually gave up sounding out words and just memorized their look. The book is difficult enough without adding complex phonetics to the mix. In hindsight, Watership was highly age inappropriate for me. That's why you don't ask permission when stealing books off your parent's bookshelf.
That said, I enjoyed the themes. I wouldn't interpret the conclusion as a recipe for political success though. I took each failed warren as an example of things to avoid. Each was an exercise in demonstrative hyperbole. In that sense, the book was indeed extremely childish. Oddly enough though, Douthat completely skips over what in my opinion is the most relevant warren. The fist one. The warren Fiver helps the others escape.
What if you don't assume Fiver is a mystic for a second? What if Fiver were a scientist sounding an alarm bell? What if the dismissive leader was the modernized world? The first warren begins to sound an awful lot like climate change and ecological collapse. The difference is we can't escape once the warren is destroyed. You have to survive the first warren before you can choose between the other extremes. Ponder that one for awhile the next time you read Watership to your kids.
3
Yes, I desire a "good" society. One free of extremism on the left and right. But, mostly, one free of Trump.
1
All I remember about this book was an oddly traumatizing and bloody cartoon adaptation of it sometime in the early '90s, when I was a bit too young for graphic cartoon rabbit blood. Might need to check it out of the library in sheer weirdness curiosity. That said, Ross, knowing your political predilections, did you ever stop to think how easily the Warren puns would write themselves?
If liberalism accepts that it's in crisis that must mean it has problems and is not succeeding by its own estimate. What then in our society is succeeding--how about capitalism? You know, that social structure liberals love to hate. Is capitalism a bad thing? No, it's the most productive wealth creating machine ever invented. Maybe liberals could spend more of their time and effort cleaning their own house and less time complaining about the neighbors.
What's with the headline? The book Douthat is describing portrays both supposedly cushy "liberalism' and the totalitarianism beloved of Trumpers as dead ends. Given a lawless president and a Senate eager to support his absolute power, it seems like the Crisis of Conservatism is the more salient problem we face at the moment.
2
I always read (or reread) whatever my high school age grandson reads for literature class. It makes for interesting conversation. Most recently we read (I reread) Watership Down. We were equally stunned we’d essentially taken notes on the same passages. The chapter ‘The Shining Wire’ particularly stood out to us as emblematic of our ‘just don’t think about it unless it directly affects me’ culture.
Mr. Douthat, however, appears to have read an entirely different book than us. I’m weary of his use of liberalism as a pejorative. He refuses to accept the extremes of capitalism (under the guise of conservatism) have driven us to this cliff whereupon the warrenless and warren-insecure are encouraged either to jump or submit to being pushed off. I assume he would regard a character of the sensitivity of Fiver to be a ‘snowflake’ in the parlance of the new conservative cruelty lexicon.
In a sequel to Watership Down, Hazel and his band of bucks and does would be stopped as they attempted to cross the border, detained in camps, and their kittens removed to separate camps. Desperate heroes, Mr. Douthat, or invaders?
Go back and reread and rewrite this assignment. I can’t even grade this.
[An earlier iteration of this piece did not credit Albrecht Durer for the illustration. Glad to see the NYT corrected that.]
5
Ross, this is very simple. Conservatism gave us Donald Trump. Conservatism is the thing in crisis.
3
Liberalism's crisis is that it subjects itself to healthy self-criticism - to reasoned discussion of depths of grey - unlike modern conservatism which sees things in black and white, winners and losers, absolute values and their (and only their) unrestricted rights: no abortion, Christianity in the schools, no limit on guns, no taxes, no dark skinned immigrants, no right to healthcare, no food stamps, no Obama smartphones etc. The sine qua non of liberalism's crisis, such as it is, lies in the the quest to find a "reasoned" way to deal with Republican absolutism, its utter disregard for the moral outrages perpetrated daily by its leader and its slavish and cowardly bowing and scraping as he converts the Presidency into a despotic role no longer subject to a "phony" constitution.
Watership Down appeals to Ross because he lives in a religious fantasy world, as his fascination with Marianne Williamson attests. He, like most conservatives and particularly Catholics, whose institution has been rife with crises and violations of basic human decency for centuries, whenever forced to confront reason, tends to drift off into obfuscatory allegories rather than question the tenets of his faith.
2
What Ross terms the "decadent" alternative - the U.S. under a mentally sane president is what I assume he means - has enough challenges to power a meaningful political life, without worrying about a regeneration of values. Climate change, racism, broken health care, Facebook and Google, crumbling infrastructure, sexual abuse, and other urgent problems provide an agenda for a humane and engaged citizenry. We have plenty on our plate and do not require the regeneration that spiritually minded op-ed writers always pine for. Just a fair election will do, thanks.
1
It appears to me that it is conservatism that is in crisis. It offers Trump, Brexit, piles of rotting soybeans sitting on the ground, layoffs in manufacturing, underemployed racists, the list goes on and on. When common sense returns, and it will take an economic calamity that is already obviously on the horizon to do it, the return to Liberalism will be the obvious choice.
We aren't rabbits. Reduce the population and other "choices" will reappear,
With all that's going on right now, it amazes me that the conservative columnist avoids the pressing issues of the day to declare a crisis of liberalism. Such avoidance seems downright clinical.
Finally. Something I can agree with David Brooks about.
Watership Down IS a great book!
1
Please pick a novel where a central character is female and not spoken of in terms of how many children she can birth. Please. For your daughters.
1
One thing I picked up from this allegory after Trump’s seriously deranged cabinet meeting ramble is that perhaps we need a Bigwig-type military officer to seize control of our democracy in order to save it.
"... the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility, a hard thing to find but one worth going out to seek."
Up here in Canada, where we have our share of partisan conflicts, it's called POGG (peace, order and good government). Not as stirring or lyrical as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but it's alright in a pinch.
2
I read this column because I liked reading this book years ago. I can see your point in comparing the novel to the tendency of liberals like me to get wound up with fears about the world devolving into dystopia, an idea frightening as the boogey man himself.
Then I look on the front page of your newspaper, and see a picture of President Trump shaking the fascist Hungarian leader Viktor Orban's hand like a couple of buddies, and read about Erdogan hanging out with Putin to celebrate the Stable Genius's last great idea in the Middle East, and read Trump's description of the impeachment hearings as a "lynching," always a real winner of an analogy for privileged white people to use to describe petty grievances.
And I think, come on, Ross! Who do you think you're kidding?
3
America has 600 billionaires and 550,000 homeless people. That is obscene. No thanks, I prefer to live in a "liberal dystopia" (as Ross puts it).
2
Some book. Is there anything in there about ending the forever Cultural War, aside of becoming Singapore?
I don’t know. Are we really afraid, both on the Right and the Left, that centrist Liberalism will produce a sort of falsely safe state? Or does each of the Right and the Left want its own form of totalitarian order, similar in every way except for who is in charge?
Uggghhh...couldn't get past the first few paragraphs. Something about "elitist liberals" using words I would have to lookup.
It's interesting when "writers" wish to portray a group they obviously have a disdain for, but for whatever odd reason wish to portray themselves as just like that group, or better than that group, because they can converse, just like that group, but just don't believe anything that group has to offer.
That's confusing, what I wrote, what Ross wrote.
I know of no liberals who speak this way. You are reaching.
2
I had to refresh my memory of the book, and I can see what Douthat is writing about, but like many such discussions it gets tainted by the viewpoint of the writer. When Douthat talks about the poles in the book, the dystopian, fat dumb and happy society vs the military dictatorship, he of course has to somehow sneak in blaming liberals and the like for the problems. In the dystopia (presumably a version of the socialist state the GOP claims the Democrats want), there is no drive to achieve, no 'real' art, people are all depressed, etc..and why? Because they have lost faith in religion, they have no reason to create because "everything is given to them" ie we don't have 'capitalist creativity'. On the other hand, in dismissing the totalitarian state, he leaves out that it very much resembles what conservatives drive towards, survival of the fittest, the Ayn Ran world, etc. The balance Douthat talks about is at the basis of what the US was supposed to be, but also that that balance is generally more threatened with what passes for conservatism, the religious right and its theocracy, the cult of the rich, the censorship of art, come from the right (and yes, liberals also are guilty of this, with things like speech codes and idiotic microagressions and other such things; but it is liberals who championed things like Miranda warning and opposed NSA snooping, whereas conservatives hate the first and like the second).
1
To me, Watership Down is all about how different societies deal with danger. Adams chooses to populate the book with rabbits, because rabbits are always under threat – by hunters, developers, and many, many predators.
The first warren our heroes encounter decides that a certain amount of death and injustice is acceptable. The rabbits there accept some predation; in return, they get to relax without thinking or worrying about danger...in other words, they're complacent. (This society always reminds me of Neville Chamberlain's plan to "appease" Hitler.)
The second warren deals with danger by treating anything foreign as a threat. In contrast to the first warren, which never thinks about danger, the rabbits in Efrafa are so blinded by the awareness of danger that everything unfamiliar becomes suspicious. Efrafa even treats its own citizens as potential threats.
Only the protagonists have a healthy approach to danger, fighting to create a better world while remaining open minded and curious.
3
Uh--- what???
I slog through a precis of this labored '70s fantasy in order to receive, at the end, an assurance that things will get better if we just modulate our political hopes? In the immortal words of Peggy Lee, is that all there is?
"The crisis of the liberal order" is not something brought to us by the curdled dreams of liberalism. It was brought to us by people who never accepted the liberal order in the first place. This is a politics of pure domination that has been festering inside Republican ranks since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Trump and his noxious familiars are just the contemporary avatars of the Blood & Soil vision of the old Confederacy.
Liberalism is the view that forms of power must be subjected to democratic control. The Trump GOP stands for the idea that power rightly belongs to those who check off certain racial, religious, and sexual boxes. Their power cannot be legitimately curtailed by anyone outside those boxes. They have the right to rule and rule they will--- so they see it, anyway.
It is this absolutist conception of political power, one soaked in ethnic and cultural hatred, that is driving our politics right now--- not any unreasonable expectations on the part of dreamy liberal utopians. Naivete does not put kids in cages, deny them medical care, or label them an "infestation." It does not labor mightily to transform women into breeding stock. It does not ignore facts in favor of paranoid fantasies. Hate brought to power does that.
1
In the mythical city of Babel, as the Bible tells it, all different sorts of people came together to build a beautiful city. Then god destroyed it.
I refuse to take seriously any book that invents the word "hrududu" to describe an automobile. I am aware that "Watership Down" remains a favorite book for many, but I found it twee and draggy. I read it once and cannot imagine trying to stagger through it again. Nor do I see in it the epic parallels Mr. Douthat claims to find, nor the metaphorical/allegorical lessons for our society he draws from its narrative. If kindness, justice, and an expanded awareness of what matters in a good life is what he's seeking to communicate to his children, I'd suggest that "Charlotte's Web" would be a much better choice.
its a mistake to give us an analysis without reading the end -- a happy, healthy Warren that takes the best of both of the two extreme ones and incorporates them into their new structure. Gives your take a different spin, doesn't it?
106
@Alec He has read the whole thing - previous columns etc have referenced it - his mention of 'And with a hundred pages to go I can already tell that when I get to...' is in reference to *this reading*, as in, aloud to kids, emotion at denouement, etc. As for your suggested addition he basically says that in final two paragraphs:
"...No reader of “Watership Down,” and few readers of the literary and political traditions on which its narrative depends, would accept that totalitarianism and decadence exhaust the available political alternatives. Indeed the novel is compelling ***precisely because its new-founded warren, its good regime***, is remarkable yet also homely, its founders heroic and also ordinary, with nothing utopian or superhuman or impossible about them.
The ultimate political teaching of Adams’s deeply political epic, then, is an unfashionable optimism about the ends of politics — in which the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility, a hard thing to find but one worth going out to seek. Which is a timeless message, but for our era a timely one, for those with ears — long or short — to hear."
11
@Alec I saw what you did there. A Warren indeed.
5
@Alec I see what you did there. An Hegelian synthesis, indeed
1
"which the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility, a hard thing to find but one worth going out to seek."
A Future To Believe In
President Sanders 2020
2
One of the triumphs of Watership Down is that it works beautifully both as a pure story of rabbits we can believe in and as a quasi-allegorical tale of the cultural and political, sorry, rabbit holes that humans are prone to fall into. In that second regard, I think it is flexible enough to offer support to both "liberal" and "conservative" points of view, and cautions about the excesses of either.
Unfortunately, in the half-century since Adams wrote, a world that had already swelled beyond the rabbit-warren model he presents has exploded to proportions that would challenge the most enlightened Hazels, Blackberrys, Fivers, Hollys, Thethutinnangs, and Bigwigs to cope with.
If we look around us, we see a lot of Efrafa and the Warren of the Shining Wires already in place. And Hazel and his band had the luxury of finding a new space, Watership Down, for their new warren, where their lessons-of-experience could be applied and virtues flourish. Where is our Watership Down - Greenland? Antarctica? Mars?
On an unrelated (perhaps) note, has anyone noticed that - unlike in, say, Lord of the Rings, where hobbits, wizards, kings, elves, dwarves, and orcs all remarkably manage to march on for months without using the facilities, in Watership Down our rabbits regularly "stop to pass hraka" and chew pellets? A small but remarkable detail, part of Adams' genius in bringing his readers, young and old, into identification with his protagonists.
2
I agree, more or less, with Mr. Douthat's interpretation of Watership Down's theme, but disagree with aspects of his application of it to our particular political circumstances, for many of the reasons laid out in the typically insightful comments the essay has inspired.
But, as usual, I find myself appreciating Mr. Douthat's thoughtful column even as I disagree, and this one especially reinforces my fondness for him. Politics is as important as it is dangerous. It is more important that we do a better job of understanding than agreeing. I Mr. Douthat helps in that regard. Thanks to him and to the Times, and to the many thoughtful comments.
1
“Somewhere near the root of those discontents is a fear that the kind of balanced and virtuous society — simultaneously mystical and practical, orderly and free — that the rabbits build in “Watership Down” has slipped somehow from our grasp, or else was always just a myth.”
I’ve noticed that words like “mystical” tend to appear in conservative writings whenever conservatism has willfully and deliberately followed a path leading us all to the edge of the abyss. Like now. Instead of owning up to the failure of the conservative project, they turn on liberals and accuse them of being soulless and indifferent to the suffering of others. There’s no small amount of irony in this when one considers the hoax of trickle down economics, the consequences of Citizens United, and the marginally legal packing of the Supreme Court in order to curry the favor of the religious right. Well, I guess we could concede that trickle down economics was mystical since it sprung from the imaginations of those who should have known better and very likely did.
It seems to me Russ glosses over the fact that liberalism’s project from its very beginnings has been to create a society that is more balanced and virtuous than the one we live in. Aren’t those ideas inherent in constitutional democracy and the rule of law? No mysticism required.
I do confess I always enjoy Russ’ meticulously constructed arguments and critiques and eagerly look forward to his column on The Wind in the Willows.
5
"The ultimate political teaching of Adams’s deeply political epic, then, is an unfashionable optimism about the ends of politics — in which the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility, a hard thing to find but one worth going out to seek"
Look North...."Peace, Order and Good Government" its called CANADA!
1
This is rich. Our society is in danger from decadence induced by supposed liberal largess. This, in a society with the highest infant mortality, lowest educational achievements, worst health outcomes, etc. of any western nation. This at a time when seas are rising, forests are burning, and glaciers are melting. This at time when democratic norms have been driven into the dithc by the determined navigation of conservative philosophy.
What country does Mr. Douthant see when he looks out the window from his first class airplane seat flying between the coasts.
16
I'm an uneducated country boy from the Florida(old Florida) outback, and I really do not understand the point of this article.
I want what my father and grandfathers fought for since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, and it's really simple: freedom, a home, food and security. I will and should work for that dream and take responsibility for my own success or failure, and not look to the government or whatever exists at the time to provide for me and my family.
Once we get to the point of picking the right politic or philosophy then it is already over.
2
Do you really believe you are as self-sufficient as you think? Who built the roads on which you drive, provides for a coherent digital communications system that enabled you to comment on this article and for me to see it, provides the water and sewage facilities on which you depend? And so on and on. The debate has never been about these questions because you have never renounced them. The debate is always about who benefits by what choices the society makes and the investments that result therefrom.
@Michael Fishbein Michael, working to build infrastructure is honest work. It takes responsibility to do those jobs as I stated above, "I will and should work for that dream and take responsibility for my own success or failure..."
This is really rich when, of course, many so called Christians have shed all the Jesus virtues, and as for conservatism: what exactly is conservative about it at this point?
Our system of government was set up to be inherently conservative. Mr. Douthat is terrified of Elizabeth Warren, as if, all by herself she could wave a magic wand and forgive all the college loans and give us all free health care.
Meanwhile his party is working hard to make lying a conservative value.
6
@Wanda
Our government was set up to be deliberate, as opposed to Conservative. The Preamble of the Constitution calls for a steady improvement of the government and the society.
"We the People, ... form a more perfect Union... promote general Welfare... secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."
@gratis I have nothing to argue with here. You say deliberate; I see "steady" improvement as one definition of conservative. The President is not supposed to automatically get her way because we the people do not always see eye to eye.
I’ve reread Watership several times, and agree that it’s both a wonderful story in its own right, and a telling parable for our times. It’s also a telling parable for many past eras, and will be a telling parable in the future. The issues we’re dealing with today have been a recurring theme throughout human history, and will continue to be so in the future. The conservatism of today is a reaction to the liberalism of the 60’s and 70’s. The liberalism of the 60’s was a reaction to the conservatism that preceded it, which was a reaction to the hedonism of the roaring 20’s, etc., etc., etc. This is a somewhat simplistic analysis, but I think it’s accurate at its core. On a related note, I’m struck by a repeated theme in many of the comments. It’s runs along the lines of: “I understand your point, but you don’t pay enough attention to (enter MY particular, all important, political or social hot button here)”.
5
People don't like Ross because he doesn't tell them that they're right. As for your observation on conservatism and liberalism, I agree.
"liberalism" is the hope for a more equal standing in the world, no more no less. Especially in this Country which, as the beginning of the Declaration of Independence tells us, "All Men are Created Equal". This is what we have all missed in this Country, even though Thomas Jefferson wrote those words a long time ago. Which, when I think of it, is pure irony. All men weren't even equal then. Jefferson was a slave holder, as were most of our Founding Fathers.
And although we have made some progress we have a long way to go.
Conservatives would have us go back to being not as equal as they are, thwart our freedom by gerrymandering and throwing voters off voting lists, tell women they have no right to decide what they can choose to do with their bodies, allow Citizens United to stand, not honor Separation of Church and State, do not believe in Health care for all, etc. Moderates and Liberals do not want these things.
What we really should aim for is an Egalitarian Society. Until then,
the fight will continue.
6
Worth noting-- the vision of the necessity of a fellowship among excellences for a free and creative society is at the center of Tolkien's epic fantasy as well. Though sadly, most assuredly not in the superficially seductive, narratively Disney-fied, gore-ridden, and score-saturated sentimental reduction of the original as it passed through Peter Jackson's hands.
And I'm with Andrew, in his caveat and in his wish that adult readers integrate a loving challenge to the gender politics implicit in both narratives. That part of the tradition, too long conditioning both the lived and imaginal narratives of the West, needs to be recognized, understood, and transmuted by narratives that focus on character revealed in action regardless of sex, gender-- or species.
Thanks for reminding me -- from a distinct perspective that I don't agree with -- what the book was about. I read it in 1972, a very different time for me, although the US was under a similar authoritarian threat.
One thought that comes to mind: the rabbits didn't have to cope with global climate change.
3
@maryea
No, but modernization was quite disrupting.
"One anxiety in the Western world right now, palpable on both the right and the left, is that the plush, end-of-rabbit-history warren is liberalism’s dystopian destination: a sleek and fattened inhumanity, a terrible mix of comfort and cruelty, a loss of basic human goods under the pressure of capitalism or secularism or both."
I have no idea what you're talking about. Say what you mean, please.
3
@Charles Whittlesley - I think he is referring to classic economic liberalism with its free markets and disdain for regulation, which can culminate in unsustainable income and wealth disparities, not political liberalism with its values of political and social freedoms, mutuality, and care for those in need.
I have a suggestion for another book, Russ, how about "Animal Farm"? Ostensibly a critique of a Soviet like state, Douthat of course ignores the many parallels with the GOP these days (and Napolean the Pig is quite an interesting symbol for Donald Trump, don't you think?). In the book, what is supposed to turn into a worker's paradise turns into a totalitarian state where not only are not all equal, by the end the leaders of the farm are indistinguishable from the human farmers they overthrew, and in fact it is worse under the Animal rule then it was under the farmer.
Hmm, so let's see? The GOP base rants and rails against banks and Wall Street, yet the GOP continually has given them huge tax breaks and the like, but the base keeps believing. The GOP's answer to the plight of the working class has been, in effect "Comrades, do you deny that the hard work of our leaders should be denied reward? Are you that jealous" (paraphrased, but still). The GOP tells workers they care, but promote the very system that hurts them, and worse, one that benefits themselves, and the base loyally follows along, like old Boxer in the book, who truly believes. In Animal Farm, when you question the excess of the leaders, it gets turned around into questioning the very nature of their society, the way criticizing the wealth inequality in this country is called socialism, an attack on capitalism, private property and 'class war'.
10
Perhaps Mr. Douthat is reading too much through an adult, conservative lens a book written to appeal to children. I do not recall reading this book as I child and thinking, yeah, that’s the problem with liberalism. Nevertheless, I appreciate his efforts.
3
Mr. Douthat, I, too, read the entire book aloud to our oldest daughter when she was quite young (and precocious). It took us more than a year, but it is an experience we both still treasure, more than thirty years later. I defy you to read the last pages of the book aloud without crying.
2
Douthat's column and the comments on it need to be read together, as the overall message of 'Watership Down' is made all the clearer and Adams' thesis confirmed. Spontaneous order and the will to avoid catastrophe by the best means possible versus all the mechanistic approaches sought by short-termed thinkers and utopians of all stripes.
I second the call by another commenter for Ross to define the “liberalism “ he is critiquing. Here and elsewhere it feels more like a straw man gathered from a small selection of writers and politicians, and perhaps some inside-the-beltway pundits. And what specifically about his “liberalism “ is dystopian? Universal healthcare? Taking steps to minimize or stop climate change? Protecting the environment?
17
I think I was about ten or eleven when I read “Watership Down”. I remember, as if it were yesterday, crying and not being able to turn the next page because I was too frightened to find out what happened next, but the story was so all-engrossing that you just had to go on reading.
Fiver was my favourite character because he was weaker and less charismatic than the others, and I think I identified with him. I imagined the events unfolding in the fields that backed onto our house, and I’m pleased to find out (just now) that it was actually set in Hampshire, the neighbouring county to Sussex where I grew up.
I was far too young to be aware of any political subtext in the book, so it would be interesting to re-read it as an adult and find out what I’ve missed. Hopefully, it isn’t as harrowing as I remember, although I suspect it is.
6
Reading these comments, especially the ones about Christianity: I don't think Douthat's reference to mysticism was meant as an allegorical allusion to Christianity. Fiver's mysticism is, if anything, distinctly pagan; there is no organized church around it, no formal practice, no claim to hegemonic truth, only one rabbit's visions and foggy ideas of a rabbit-creator entity associated with the sun. The kind of visions that Fiver has in Watership Down would even send a lot of fundamentalist Christians into the heeby-jeebies.
What is interesting about Douthat's contemplating Fiver and his role in the rabbits' epic journey is the suggestion that a purely rational-bureaucratic government can miss things vital to any society. It's nothing original to protest the suffocating clamp that organized Christianity aspires to have in our society. A more subtle question is what the mission to sideline organized religion leaves for us if it extends to disdain and rejection of any sense of spiritual wonder and connection with the world around us. Wide-scale alienation pervades our society. Christianity definitely isn't the answer, but neither is raw, harsh positivism.
It is valid to ask whether a healthy, content society needs some modest element of spirituality to ensure that we live in harmony with our environment and with a sense of meaning, beyond the daily rituals of sleep, silflay (nibbling the vegetation) and raising baby rabbits.
4
I try to shy from thinking a sci fi story as explanation on how we live. Otherwise I'd be saying thing like; Schiff, Nadler and Schumer would be perfectly cast as the Senators in a remake of Battlestar Galactica. No one want's to hear it.
Wow, reading a book like Watership Down to children assuming they can't on their own. That puts them way ahead of me when I was 5 years old and most working class and poor people today. Up until now I didn't understand how people could want children to vote. I always thought of it as a book for adults.
What warren would we find ourselves in if we read Das Kapital and Silent Spring to our children. Where Adams left the story, a place in the county, with a small circle of friends and family with a position in the community? Nowhere close.
Several of the Democratic candidates are essentially running a campaign based on the premise that voters have tired of the idea of America. Perhaps not coincidentally, was also at the "heart" of Trump's heartless campaign.
If we instead commit to keep growing the legal economy, the future will be better and people will believe the future will be better. When we delegitimize or completely stifle growth, the economy becomes a zero-sum game. People who feel they are in a zero-sum game act ruthlessly and purely selfishly. Of course some people behave that way in all circumstances, but a zero-sum game will condition most people to adopt such a mindset. The assumption of a dominance the zero-sum world view is what creates the false limpression of a choice between vacuous decadence and authoritarianism.
There are many social problems and policy remedies worth debating, but the need for economic growth to sustain our social political order is not one of them.
The CRISIS of liberalism? yes, the childrens book does, if you look closely, relate to the world we live in today, as the bad guy is the new person under power. the difference is, this book was probably not made to be analyzed. do you really think that the 11 year olds reading this are going to think, "Wow. This really relates to what is happening in politics today." i think that, yes, it is being analyzed in a way that i didn't really think about when I read the book, but, this doesn't just related to liberalism, i think that is going a little bit too far.
3
This conservative Republican dares to speak of an orderly society while under the constant chaos and criminality of his party's leadership. How sickening. Yes, I read the book and recently for my children as well. And I fear for my children because the loss of ecology and democracy in favor of your cult of trump and the doomsday religious sects that make up your party. Your party is dangerous and wrong. Fiver was right, terrible things were imminent, just as they are now and our sham of a democracy and our economic system which is rigged to benefit the rich and our almost complete lack of criminal justice makes me anxious for a Warren that will finally deliver us from the chaos and shame your party wrought.
14
Ross:
When liberal minds lead, society flourishes, and people are generally happier, because there is inclusion and a sense of interdependence built into the belief system.
When conservative minds lead, society is stymied, growth is stunted, and all but the enfranchised are unhappy, because there is exclusion and a sense of fear of the other built into the belief system.
It doesn’t matter if your parable is rabbits or Republicans, the best thing to can teach your child is to care for their fellow citizen, and always be wary of anyone who says the know the “truth”.
Love,
The Union of Concerned Rabbits
21
Douthat ruminating about the 'crisis of Liberalism'?
What irony.
6
While I loved the book when I read it in my twenties (and intend someday to read it again), and while I was intrigued by the political comparisons that Douthat makes, I was even more struck by the photograph of Richard Adams. What in heck does the man have on top of his hand? Look closely. Is it a mouse? Is it real or ceramic?
1
I read Watership Down soon after it was first published. It was a marvel. I knew then that it was a novel political commentary as well as a wonderful story that would also appeal to children. Thank you for articulating what has been bouncing around in my old mind since 1972.
All the best.
RGK
2
I read this book recently to see WHAT THE DEAL WAS, and I find it telling that the columnist, totally willing to analyze the political structures of each warren excludes the status of does, female rabbits, that is basically uniform between all four alternatives. The hero rabbits go to fascist efrafa to “get dem does,” because they realize their warren will die unless they can make babies. That is, when they escaped their doomed warren, they didn’t take any does with them. The women have almost no agency or identity within their communities or the overall plot. Adams wrote the story for his daughters, and now the columnist is reading it to his. I hope he has more to say to them about this glaring flaw in the book than he has said to us.
318
@Andrew Especially given that the biggest "issues" in politics nowadays (which frankly should not be contested issues at all) are how people who were previously voiceless can claim their voices and get society to listen to what they have to say.
Women and other groups who have been disenfranchised historically aren't going to have entirely different traits than men. You'll get diplomats and poets and other types among us too. But if we're not included, and if anyone is still trying to hold us down, the social order is not complete.
30
@Andrew, good observation. The sexism in the book was very much of that time, though. I don’t know how old you are, but I was on the cusp of my teens in 1972 — the year this was published, the year I read it, and the year the Equal Rights Amendment was passed in the US. I do not recall being outraged that the female characters were sidelined. That was normal then. Par for the course. But it certainly should be a point of discussion now. Mr. Douthat’s daughters should be asking why. Maybe they shouldn’t be hearing it at all.
19
@Andrew Except that the book specifically has strong does (thinking particularly of Hyzenthlay here) who make the escape from Efrafa work and go on to become highly respected in the new warren. And it's not that Hazel's group took no does with them from the original Sandleford warren; there were a few, but they were taken out by predators early in the travels. Was this a plot contrivance to give the group additional tension after reaching the Down? Sure, but it's not beyond the pale here. And the fact that Efrafa controls the does' ability to choose their mates and prevents them from moving freely is considered shocking to the other rabbits, not normal.
41
In some column some day, Ross, you should define what you mean by liberalism. Like most "isms" that are thrown about by pundits, its meaning is queasy to say the least. And open to a wide array of interpretations.
5
@HPower I'd recommend Adam Gopnik's "A Thousand Small Sanities" for a good rendition of liberalism.
Thanks, Ross. I've never read Watership Down. I will now!
2
"The keenest intellect, for instance, neither aspires to nor is vested with the greatest power; note well, meritocrats," says Douthat, as if that very statement doesn't apply to himself.
4
Terrific column. References to “Watership Down” can improve any article.
3
Ross, Watch out for that ending! I never read it without sobbing.
So universal health care will turn us all into livestock?
2
Thank you, Douthat. These rabbits can teach us. Glad you read to your daughter.
2
The parallels are good, but I really suspect it is the current conservatives in power who will bring about Efrara.
2
A complete world posing as a book. Writing doesn't get much better.
1
Us versus them. Depending on which 'side' you are on things look very different. If only those liberals weren't so....if only those conservatives weren't so...go ahead and insert invectives or dense allegories of your choice. But, we create these categories in our minds then fight each other over them. Who would we be without the fight against each other, cruel Nature, or insert bad actor of your choice? The other side is always wrong and the cause of our problems. Unfortunately, our problems originate in our minds. Can we see that we are all one people struggling to survive in a world we have incorrectly defined and truly do not understand? https://medium.com/@teresadlonghawkes/emm-and-imm-ways-of-being-640c685dae7a
One interesting tidbit about Watership Down is that females play no role. A sign that it was written at a time when no woman was expected to take any political initiative.
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@Serban maybe the author was just acknowledging an uncomfortable reality about the world. I don't think he approved when that doe got eaten and one of the escaped Ephrata males said, what is one doe more or less? And Bigwig admires the levelheaded way one of the does helps him plan the breakout from Ephrata. He also suggests that the Ephrata does lack sexual agency and clearly does not approve of that. Then you forget about Lucy, the human girl whose farmer dad is very keen about her smarts and interest in nature and the doings of the local country doctor. She actually delivers Hazel back to the warren at the end through her mercy and kindness. A stereotypically feminine role, perhaps, but not entirely negative. This is a male centered bildungsroman to be sure, but I would not say women are disappeared entirely or made to look like children or fools.
@Serban maybe the author was just acknowledging an uncomfortable reality about the world. I don't think he approved when that doe got eaten and one of the escaped Ephrata males said, what is one doe more or less? And Bigwig admires the levelheaded way one of the does helps him plan the breakout from Ephrata. He also suggests that the Ephrata does lack sexual agency and clearly does not approve of that. Then you forget about Lucy, the human girl whose farmer dad is very keen about her smarts and interest in nature and the doings of the local country doctor. She actually delivers Hazel back to the warrant at the end through her mercy and kindness. A stereotypically feminine role, perhaps, but not entirely negative. This is a male centered bildungsroman to be sure, but I would not say women are disappeared entirely or made to look like children or fools.
I'm not sure Mr. Douthat is sufficiently panicked about our current state of affairs. We are currently being ruled by a man who admires dictators and dreams of absolute monarchy, no doubt thinking he will pass his kingdom to his children, assuming he does not believe in his own immortality. That 53 senators only nod and smile as the lunatic emperor fulminates and incites his rabble to mob violence against his alleged adversaries makes this as frightening as any moment since the Civil War...
9
Ross, your more veteran readers appear to be left waiting for your children's storybook version of Doctor Faustus to complete the cycle.
This column would have been well-timed before mid-2016, but the transactional watership that brought you here truly is down, and caught in the thicket... for good.
1
Ross, your next read aloud book should be The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.
In it, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is changed by Merlin to various animals and learns the societal lessons of each one.
It helps him enormously when he founds the Round Table.
But - spoiler alert - in the end, he fails and dies.
His illegitimate son, Donald Trump, kills him.
1
“liberalism’s dystopian destination: a sleek and fattened inhumanity, a terrible mix of comfort and cruelty, a loss of basic human goods under the pressure of capitalism or secularism or both”
Oh, please. Just stop.
4
Is anyone else out there tired of listening to religious conservatives telling us that the is a crisis in being liberal and in liberal intellectualism? I know that I am. This is just Ross Douthat once again how wrong we are because we do not believe in his archaic world views. Ross, the numbers of the nonreligious and atheists like myself are growing rapidly and those of the religious, especially adherents to a religious conservative view point are declining just as fast. Clearly it is only your religious conservative world view is in crisis and you are only trying to deflect that fact via articles like this one.
5
I read “Watership Down” as a precocious child, returning to it throughout my life. Now in my 50’s, the lesson is the same one I realized in my 20’s: balance and reasonableness are the keys to a thriving self, and a thriving society. The problem with the cultures in Watership Down is that they are extreme and therefore very human. Human’s want the ultimate answer, existential questions bother us, make us anxious, even terrifies some of us. We want simple rules that we can follow all of the time.
But life is complex and muddy and we do better striving for the middle ground. Successful lives and societies live in the gray. We need educated Intelligentsia and we need worker bees (or rabbits). We need soldiers and we need researchers. We need teachers and we need cops and firefighters. It takes a healthy mix of different people and different personalities to make a healthy community. We need leaders and we need followers.
But our leaders do require accountability, because not all have wisdom (such as our current lunatic/idiot in Chief), nobility or empathy, qualities required for successful leadership.
Watership Down teaches us that to live in the extremes is to court madness and disaster….
5
What an excellent book report Mr. Douthat! Very insightful and it seems to have inspire a great deal of insight and good will on the part of your readers as well. One area, though, where Adams's allegory parts from our own history is that the rabbits have not passed through a scientific revolution or Enlightenment which in our own world is the source of so much turmoil over the last 300 years. Enlightenment values -- rationality, reason, and evidence over magic, superstition, and tradition -- have never meshed very well with the human brain stem. Humans mostly can't help being selfish, greedy, status-seeking, short-term, magical thinkers. Our cognitive biases overwhelm our attempts at rationalism unless guided by something with rigor -- like the scientific method. Unfortunately our present circumstance resembles that of the warren from which our heroes flee -- i.e., threatened by forces they could not foresee or cope with. Only our global civilization has no where to flee to.
1
Too much down, not enough ship.
Mr. Douthat appears to have it all backwards. We are already rabbits immersed oblivious diversion, being culled by the farmer; and the farmer is the 0.1%. Only in the up-is-down world of modern conservatism are reliable affordable healthcare and a fair taxation system the road to dystopia. The Democratic Party is already emblematic of the more egalitarian of the rabbit warrens, fighting against an authoritarian party whose leader famously painted a dark sinister vision of America before declaring "...I alone can fix it,"
856
If I could, I would ‘like’ this comment 1,000 times!
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@Jim We've had two two-term Democratic Presidents in the last 25 years and our slide into decadence continued unabated. The problem is our economic system, not which political party is in charge. Our culture has been steadily debased because of income inequality and consumerism--music and the other arts have been all but destroyed. Young people spend most of their time publishing pictures of themselves rather than reading books, attending movies, or listening to anything that could reasonably be called music. People walk around with earbuds and refuse to talk to each other. Young women and even teen and tween girls desperately try to emulate porn actresses by shaving and performing sex acts girls of my generation didn't know anything about, and women's fashion is just skin tight and paper thin rags sold as "clothing." We are far down the road toward total social collapse.
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@Anne
Are you blaming societal change on Dem presidents? It only goes bad during the Dems and vastly improves with GOP presidents?
Our culture is changing, to be sure, but culture always changes. As for what the young do, only the most autocratic forms of government ever really had any control over the young.
BTW, our economic system is defined by the political parties. They make and enforce the rules, or not, and businesses follow them (more or less). One could fairly say that the political systems of USA and Denmark are not so different, but Denmark gets much better societal results with different rules.
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So, what you’re saying is, you’re officially endorsing Elizabeth “Warren”?
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@Alejandro F. Endorsing perhaps but not electing - as we can't afford her thinking...
@Cathy
Funny, because nations a lot "poorer" than the richest country in the world do a lot more with a lot less.
3
What a beautiful mess we're in! I prefer ostrich tales. My head is burried in the sand, protected against both liberal and conservative idealogues. They'll never find me - ha,ha,ha!!
1
Gee, Mr Douthat, we liberals should really get our act together, and it's helpful that you're showing us how. Thank you. Now....having helped us with the mote in our eyes, how about the beam in yours?
For the love of Pete and other epithets unpublishable here, would you please turn your discerning eye and conscience at your much beloved conservatism? You know, the upright and principled beliefs and action of those on the right, who are trashing the democratic institutions of America, destroying the economic vitality and participation of the poor and would-be middle class.
From the high-flown pundits like you and Brook to the agitprop of Fox News and the Internet Right, all are busily unraveling the sinews, flesh and bone of America, busily blaming everyone left of Genghis Khan and boring holes in the comity that holds us together. It's Them, It's the Others
you proclaim....while shredding We the People.
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I found it funny that both the fears that you attribute to the liberal community - the end state of a dystopian destination or the construction of a police state - are exactly what the liberals accuse the conservatives of harboring.
In some sense, we feel that the conservative community is paranoid, antiquated, dysfunctional and bigoted. In other words - more than just a bit Jurassic in its outlook.
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@Plato, What is the crisis that the author is talking about? Let's stop a moment and see what the Wikipedia definition of liberalism is, and then read conservativism.
I think that most people in America have given themselves the label of one or the other, without having first understood the definitions of the words.
I believe that our crisis is that our old warren is gone, and that we need to re-establish ourselves. Nobody wants either of the dystopian societies represented in Watership Down, and at some level, most so-called "Conservatives" really want to live in a society that is more "Liberal." Part of our crisis is that many people on either side have stopped thinking critically about the situation we are in, and have already chosen the "blue" side or the "red." In some sense, both are represented by the two bad choices in the book, and we need to forge a new path to find something that actually works.
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@Plato A man I work with lives among a lot of conservatives on Long Island and he concisely said, "conservatives don't want things to change and progressives understand that things are indeed going to change."
3
@gratis What gets me is that those values pass as "conservative." They are neither conservative nor liberal, to my mind, or only tangentially so (since it is true that, with the long view of history, voter suppression certainly fits better with a world view that vests power in fewer, or even one, person). They are gangster/tribal values based on disgust of the "other."
Putting them in an acceptable political box, "conservative," assists some people with seeing them as acceptable.
4
And liberalism (your term, not mine) fits into your analysis exactly... where? I'm supposed to believe that the fattened, bored, and darkly cared-for rabbits are today's liberals? That by definition any liberal aspirations lead inexorably to a false utopia where we forfeit any of the qualities that make us godly, loving, human, and humane?
Let me congratulate you on driving yet another wedge into the us-or-them malaise that has so totally gripped our discourse. Hiding behind a bit of literature and patting yourself on the back for your own (obviously greater than that of any liberals) erudition doesn't really mitigate. If you don't want to be part of the solution, I do wish you would get out of the way.
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Criticizing liberals may be deflection from introspection.
Perhaps we should view the farmer as the 1%, giving out benefit but keeping most for themselves. Sure people die from lack of medical care and social services but don’t tax the rich, that might impact me.
Perhaps the militarized society should make us reconsider border walls, mass incarceration, the denial of rights to people based on difference, reliance on force in foreign policy, these are right of center positions.
In the time of Trump, the threat to established orders isn’t coming from the left.
5
Great idea Ross. Surely, a few Liberals will this provocative, some an interesting meditation on today's political climate, others a conservative trick, and most a pie in the sky fantasy cooked up to distract us from the hard realities of our time.
As a conservative I consider it the basic idea behind our Constitution which is being slowly eroded by Liberal do-gooders who consider all Conservatives ideas as power maintenance or augmentation.
Mr Douthat, don't overthink it.
I am always remembered of a sign outside a butchers shop in England in the 70's
You've read the book.
You've seen the film.
Now eat the cast.
So Mr Douthat, "tell me about the rabbits"
4
I'm sure Douthat knows where the flaw in his reasoning is, because he tries to deflect it by mentioning that Efrafa denies "any agency" to its female rabbits.
But Hazel's warren is little better: the book contains no important female characters, nor does the supposedly ideal political order Douthat praises involve any female leadership at all. The only "agency" the female rabbits have is to fulfill their function as mothers and caretakers to children. True, nobody forces them to do it, but only because their agency is subsumed by a narrative that says that this is their "natural" role. Apparently none of them want to be leaders or inventors or soldiers or storytellers or prophets.
What the females have in Hazel's warren isn't agency, it's a small measure of "respect": respect as long as they never lead, never think, never fight back, never speak, and never dream, but just reproduce. Generations of women have experienced just how suffocating that kind of respect is. Knowing Douthat's conservative views on women, it's clearly the kind of suffocation he endorses.
5
I have read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Homeric Greek, a whole lot of Shakespeare, Vasily Grossman's books and am the public library's best customer.
In addition I read Watership Down but must be dull for to me it was just another interesting story.
But then I am one of those secular progressives that AG Barr claims is ruining the USA so it is little wonder that Douthat who believes the myths of religion got more out of the book than I did.
3
This otherwise keen observation of the political parallels of "Watership Down" to our modern world would have been more palatable had Mr. Douthat not spent his opening lines insulting his readers. The beauty of literature is its timelessness, its potential for freshness to ongoing generations, and as one who read this breathtaking book at least a dozen times before Mr Douthat was born, I'm hopeful his children will receive its joys and pass them down with finer grace.
2
Accommodation between our different fears & goals will not be found through argument & reason, because politics & the means for mediating it get too rich from deepening our fears & preventing communication.
Watership Down! A novel about the perils of immigration! Those rabbits must find a new home because their old home is being destroyed. Yes, of course, the GOP under this president seems to be taking a wrecking ball to our Constitution and the Rule of Law, and to cheat and lie and project and deflect instead of bringing bills to the floor (McConnell), or represent the entire citizenry regardless of political affiliation (Barr), or respect the right of Congress to do its mandated job (Trump.) The GOP has decided to pretend it has the right to raze our mutually held lands and extract the wealth for personal gain like any crass developer. That’s where your analogy starts. But we don’t need to leave in order to create a great society. We just need to vote the craven, greed bound imposters out of office and RECLAIM the land with our glorious Constitution. We need to enshrine our freedom as a goal for all our citizens. Not simply the wealthiest. Is the GOP planning some diabolical permanent usurpation of power simply by cheating and lying? Sometimes I think they must be, because surely the model of haphazard destruction they now present is not one to be embraced by any partisan group, right or left. We don’t need to find a new home, a new regime; we need to take our country back and breathe the air of the future into its laws. Liberalism is not just an idea. It’s a belief in equality and diversity, justice and freedom. Our Constitution covers those topics. VOTE VOTE VOTE.
4
Once again, and at the hands of another relativistic self-identified conservative, we find the bunny is a better alternative to Trump.
Joe
2
Perfect 10 on my card!
Umm.... you do know the book is fiction, don't you? It's OK to look for lessons in works of fiction, but declaring that Watership Down (a childhood favorite of mine) presents some sort of roadmap to good governance - an "ultimate teaching" that illustrates a "live possibility"? Too far, Mr. Douthat.
2
“the kind of balanced and virtuous society — simultaneously mystical and practical, orderly and free — “
Amy Hazel Klobuchar—pursued by grace.
1
Liberals are opposed to a good balance of virtues? Opposed to recognizing the ability of different talents and personalities to contribute to the common good? Really? Really?
1
"an unfashionable optimism about the ends of politics — in which the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility, a hard thing to find but one worth going out to seek. "
A social era perhaps? And which party would we all agree is most anti-social, nay, sociopathic, now? Which one is cozying up to dictators like Orban, Erdogan, Jung. So why -exactly- is Liberalism in crisis, Republican pundit? Could it be the GOP president and his enablers who disregard the legitimacy of the political opponents. Calling them enemies of America?
2
has a political teaching? Why not say lesson?
Mr. Douthat's whines about liberalism's denizens being complacent, fat and happy, lacking motivation, lacking a will to work, and (heaven forbid) lacking spiritual purity.
He should turn that coin over to view the illiberal world that we currently live in - and by his silence he promotes. It's owners have built a system that favors themselves. It's tax code enriches the very few during life and for generations beyond. No need to sweat through any serious exertions - the gift of privilege insures an outcome that only an Ivy-League legacy can provide. As for moral purity - look no further than Kraft, Trump, Giuliani, Weinstein, Gingrich, or your nearest Catholic priest for guidance on charity, honesty, marital fidelity, divorce, and the finer points of engaging in intimate relations with minors.
To really abuse his literal analogies, Douthat should realize that he tilts at the windmill of "liberal" inconvenience while his "conservative" Rome burns.
1
Perhaps a clear definition of the word "liberalism" as you use it in the title would be apropos.
Otherwise, an excellent read here, Ross.
An opening chapter that terrified a generation of children who explored their parents' bookshelves.
We don't need a fairy tale about rabbits to figure out what is wrong and what needs doing, Mr. Douthat.
1
Not to distract from the book you’re reading aloud, Ross, but I am reminded of the impact of “Charlotte’s Web” on my preschool age son (decades ago), but the bigger impact of the entire “Chronicles of Narnia” - which I read aloud twice, first when he was in Kindergarten and again when he was in First Grade. Once he learned to read, he read that seven books again and again.
He’s currently 50 and reads 2 or 3 books a week. He’s also a wonderful human being, responsible, sensitive and caring.
Reading aloud, spending that type of quality time with a child, and choosing books that are literary masterpieces, full of sensitivity and honesty and values for living, we pass along qualities and habits which are incalculable.
1
I fear a future where either the far right or far left win the battle for the hearts and souls of this nation. We are all those things, a bit of left or right in everyone, yet the only way forward, the middle way, seems to be today a utopia we have seen but will never see again.
1
Perhaps someone could write a sequel with ten different Fiver characters, each with their own mystic prophecy that eventually devolves into brutal sectarian violence. As a a staunch secularist, it is comforting to know that the best argument for looking to religious figures for leadership is "what if they had magic powers?"
1
Interesting that you consistently refer to the new warren and the rabbits' new society as a new "regime."
Regime is defined as a government, especially an authoritarian one; a system or planned way of doing things, especially one imposed from above.
It seems to me that the rabbits' new society is ideal because it is free of "regime."
2
I think "Dr. Strangelove" is a closer parable to our political situation today: A madman with the capability of destroying civilization with few checks on his power.
9
“Watership Down” is a very great book. Let me humbly recommend another fantasy that involves similar themes (authority and freedom, adventure, heroism and villainy, the yearning for a new and peaceful world): Gene Wolfe’s masterly “The Book of the New Sun.”
Ross, Watership Down still sits upon a shelf in my home library. It was a wonderful book, and your retelling was enjoyable for me to read. But your analysis to liberalism is not only a stretch of the imagination, but it is also a bit cruel. For every word you wrote to impugn an ideology which you reject, I can just as easily equate them with a suffocating conservatism which I reject. You see, our national paradigm with the ascendency of nativism and bigotry, with an aim to wed the State to the Church, with greed, with a power-hungry an unhinged Donald Trump is destructive of a democracy and its people. Next November you may be left with a choice, i.e., the Republican’s Trump or the Democrat’s “liberal.” If you choose Trump, what story will you be reading your children then?
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@Kathy Lollock I don't think he's using "liberal" in the American sense of "left of center." I think he's using it in the more European sense of the combination of democratic governance, individual liberty, and social order separate from government that comes out of the Enlightenment. He sees it as threatened from both right and left.
18
@Maria Yes, if you are referring to the author. My comment was askance of Ross D, for whom I do have a lot of respect.
5
Brilliantly stated.
13
Even anthropoid rabbits struggle to find a way to work collectively toward a common goal. It's not difficult to understand why humans have so much difficulty in agreeing on Medicare for All.
1
Ross - I often disagree with much of your thinking/writing. Not here. Loved the book (long ago read), and loved your analysis. I regret that somehow I forgot to include this wonderful book in the stack I read to my kids. Glad you didn't :)
Wow! That was an excellent piece!
I read 'Watership Down' in High School to satisfy a summer reading list requirement. I thought of it as an excellent adventure, and remembered it as a great book.
I was too young, and too ignorant, to see it the way you described it here.
Thanks!
1
I seldom get your "point", Mr. Douthat, and if I do I always disagree.
4
Fabulous article. Somewhere along the line I never read "Watership Down" Wow, am I sorry! have a father teaching them values in this way. A lesson in seeing many sides to every issue can only help them with all that life will deal to them.
2
Most of the other first world countries seem to be doing better than the US.
Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden.
The problem is not liberalism.
The problem is the billionaire class, the Republican Party, and Fox News.
19
@Independent Europe is slipping into recession as we speak. Growth, taxation, and reproduction rates are too low to both sustain their generous benefits, and to provide for their defense. The US is the engine of the western world. The "utopia" liberals like to point to in Europe is merely an illusion.
@Steve
I'll let you know what I find when I retire to Denmark.
They do have universal health care, 2 years of trade or college.
They don't have the poverty we have.
We are the richest country on the planet GDP / capita.
Yet we have parts of the US with infant mortality rates of a second world country.
We have black urban poverty and white rural poverty they don't have.
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
But it is much easier to buy a big SUV or pickup truck here.
I don't mind driving a smaller car and paying a little more taxes to help people less fortunate.
Kind of sounds like a Christian but I don't go to church on Sunday.
And I have met lots of Christians who go to church on Sunday and say buyer beware Monday through Friday.
2
Talk about ivory tower babble. I got it. Give the billionaires a sovereign island in the Pacific where the only books are this one and Ayn Rand. They'll be happy for at least a few days.
6
On the other hand, there are optimists like ourselves who believe the current administration and tenor of the country is just a temporary aberration that has an expiration date and at some point, the majority of the people from both parties will come to their senses and retake control of government and get the fringe element driving the division out of power. Without optimism that "this too shall pass", we are surrendering.
3
I'm pretty that's a European hare in the picture. Not a rabbit.
4
@Ross ...Albrecht Duerer's hare , 1502 .
@Ross Bad on the NYT for printing a rather famous painting with the mere attribution to "Getty Images." I hope Douthat is also making sure his kids get quality time with Albrecht Dürer. But also that he remembers that other informal columnist rule and resists writing about them. (Also, yes it's a hare.)
1
Perhaps Ross could do an analysis of "The Emperor's New Clothes" as it relates to contemporary politics on the Right?
295
@Joshua Forman
I often thought of "the Emperor's New Clothes" when GWBush was leading Americans into an incredibly stupid, expensive and unwinnable War against Iraq based on CIA lies that were so incredibly obvious lies, but people refused to acknowledge them as lies...
7
@Joshua Forman I've been mentally referencing the emperor's new clothes for about three years now. Weird how 30% of the population believe he's wearing them yeah.
5
@Joshua Forman
You are misunderstanding Ross' use of the term "liberalism." He's talking about the founding Western liberal democratic ideas, which include left ("liberal") and right "conservative") expressions within the larger whole. He is not talking about people who are left of center in their politics, per se.
1
The idea of literature--specifically including fiction--affecting, mirroring or predicting politics has a long history: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/books/review/does-fiction-have-the-power-to-sway-politics.html AND https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/news/a52679/best-political-books/ .
No doubt--looking back at the history of Western Europe and elsewhere--that list could be expanded a good bit.
This cultural completist has no problem loving a book about rabbits. Any more than I had trouble loving a book about an Animal Farm. Only snobs think otherwise.
2
The drag in liberalism is existential and based on the role of stories in everything we do.
Practical life is coping with everything that come to us and realizing that what we have is as malignant as a cancer and will eventually destroy us.
20
@Mario Marsan
Dear Mario,
Eloquently said. I read Watership Down and enjoyed it, but at the end it is a fantasy that will never be realized through human effort. Rabbits maybe? No, not really.
A favorite trope of conservative pundits is the slippery slope to a nightmare liberal future.
And what time to trot it out. At the end of a 30 slide down a rabbit hole of conservative mendacity. Our conservative political movement has been built on greed pretending to be pious. Waving the cross, the flag, and the good ole down home values with the goal of lowering taxes on the rich. And now getting in bed with the worst political actors on the planet to keep the ball rolling. And you want to talk about crisis of liberalism. You can see my eye roll from space.
I do see a value in a real conservatism ideology. There is good in it. But today? It's flag waving, giving the rich what they want, placing bigots, and protecting it all onto liberal boogie men (or women). It's a sticker on a box that says "Now with More Liberty!". But inside the box is the same garbage food that's making us all sick.
The slippery slope is here folks.
15
Mr. Douthhat,
How about telling us your solution for the Republican Party and their billionaire donor class.
And also the voters who are misinformed by Fox News and who then give us Republicans and their tax cuts for the rich.
13
Tell your subs not to illustrate an article about rabbits with a very famous picture of a hare.
6
It is worth noting that your use of the phrase "existentialist poetry" marks the first correct employment of the root "existential" that I have seen in a long time.
Half a century ago, the word referred to the dazzling and obscure hot philosophy, Existentialism. Something about existence preceding essence. Or not.
Hot word. So its fate has been to be degraded into a look-at-me affectation.
Ordinary people say "lethal threat".
Breathless people say "existential threat".
You know. Existence and essence and all that stuff.
Orderly and free is an abstract thing. More of one means less of the other. The center is constantly changing, being pushed from one end to the other.
1
Sadly, there is no Borrow B.
Often have I seen a rabbit use the strategy of doing nothing, freezing in place and hoping not to be noticed. Given the climate crisis and environmental collapse, that won't work for us.
Hawks and other predators have sharp eyesight, which is why another lagomorphous strategy is making lots of baby rabbits. In a world of over 7 billion people, on the way to 10 billion, that's very counterproductive.
We have our own predators, rich and powerful people, who see the rest of us as factors of production, much as the farmer in the story sees the rabbits. And if some of us die because of lack of medical care, well, you really can't expect the farmer to spend a lot on vet bills, and rabbits produce their own replacements.
Once upon a time a conservative strategy of gradual improvement – incrementalism – was defensible. Except of course that conservatives rarely saw any kind of social progress is desirable unless it was a path to increased profits. But between climate change and the rapid erosion of the world's top soil, we face a real possibility of the end of history within the next hundred years. By which I mean an horrific population crash. The vindication of Thomas Malthus.
So we had better get out of our borrows and get to work making the economic and social changes we are going to need to survive. By the time we accomplish enough incrementally, we, the human species may not be around to discuss 18th century philosophers or rabbits.
8
Thanks to Mr. Douthat for the memories of reading this wonderful, imaginative novel--one that can be appreciated at any age. I'm sure, when I read it, I wasn't aware of its allegorical elements, but I'm also sure that those lessons still took root and helped to color my view of those societies and forms of government when I did become aware of them.
All in all, then, how fortunate are the Douthat children who are getting this read to them. They're learning about the flawed world of mankind, and they're also enjoying a crackling good yarn.
6
I suppose it is quite comforting for Mr. Douthat and others to create a fantasy world in which liberalism is in retreat and turmoil. It shields them from the realities of the utter collapse of the small government, community centered conservatism they long for. That has, of course, by shambling corporatism, ruled over by the most venal, corrupt, and authoritarian administration in our history.
9
@Neal I think you missed Douthat's point entirely. It's mysterious how you drew this interpretation from his thoughtful essay. Perhaps you should read the book.
1
"the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility, a hard thing to find but one worth going out to seek."
Yes, it is a live possibility, one that Douthat's demonized secularists actually see as springing from sound public policy and a solid social safety net, while the vast contingent of Christians in America want the levers of power used to destroy that live possibility.
People do indeed hunger for a belief in something larger than themselves and an opportunity to seek, build and help others to seek/build that genuinely good society. But if a belief in something larger includes entry through the doors of Christianity as it is currently constituted? No way. I, and many others are repelled by the embrace of cruelty, clearly evidenced by Christian support for trump(among other transgressions).
So long as conservatives and Christians hold the views they currently hold, those views will force young people and old alike to reject that wolf in sheep's clothing. The crisis is rooted not in liberalism but in the ugliness of way too much organized religion. Build a better religion and they will come.
19
@Judith Krieger
Not all Christian's support Trump. I certainly do not.
Thank you. When the book came out, I was in the busiest, most stressful time of my life. It's long past time I read it.
Born in the Year of The Chinese Rabbit and showing signs of this symbol, this reader has never forgotten Richard Adams's most political novel. True, we hear later from 'Traveller', Robert E. Lee's horse, his loyalty and his words 'we never got to the country called war'.
'Word has it that Trump is going to be re-elected' from Versailles recently. Silence. I do not know, but it does appear from my garden warren, that America is bent on a path to self-destruction. We do not have many friends, but are being treated like Adams's 'Plague Dogs', where a fox makes a show.
It was never about Trump in the end, but whether placed to the test, America could withstand the worse of times and soar the thunderous skies.
I have faith in my country that it will do the right thing, and in the quiet of the lingering autumn season, one hears at night the calling of hunting horns, the soul of the great Emperor Charlemagne rises in the midst of misfortune, and he fears that his people have been betrayed.
His nephew Roland, the great warrior before dying, reminds him not to surrender. We will never surrender. This era of Trump cannot keep us down, but perhaps we will learn and understand that 'Pride' is the greatest evil of all.
12
The bibliophile and philosopher in me appreciates the book report, but my penchant for economizing has me shaking my head. The problem is that inequality has warped our political and economic institutions, allowing the wealthy to bid up the price of housing, health care, education, and political representation, until even those who were once solidly middle class have begun to feel the squeeze, and to feel that the whole system is irredeemable. But the solution is as easy to see as the problem: tax the wealthy and use the proceeds to provide the minimum level of economic security to every citizen necessary to secure their acquiescence in the legitimacy of the system.
41
Successful societies, as opposed to dominant regimes, find a proper, that is to say, generally accepted ethical balance between rights, duties and responsibilities, the jurisprudential trinity. The middle way. Venality, as the Founding Fathers feared, would be politically exploitable by demagogues. The imposition of religion, was to an Epicurean like Jefferson and the well read observers of history responsible for drafting the constitution, a primary danger, a proven route to tyranny. They believed in a nation based on reason and science, notwithstanding the deep religiosity of the population that retained a Lockeian insistence that the benefits of this "Utopia" should require a belief in God.
So where is that balance? And in what way is the current Republican party a manifestation of it? Yes, there may be a crisis in liberalism, a dangerous tendency towards shutting off the free speech of their oppressors, but this analysis is ultimately just another form of whataboutery, a deflection from the far deeper crisis of modern Republicanism. It's a case of motes and beams. Get your own house in order first and perhaps we will have a chance.
20
I’m also reading Watership Down to my daughter right now! And without any spoilers, would further proffer the diplomacy Hazel extends towards foreign animals... These outreach efforts at Hazel’s urging seem tangential and even dangerous, to rabbit interests at first but are what ultimately secure the rabbits’ future...
Yark! for the hedgerow mouse and of course for the seagull Kehaar, an all-time great character!
And one more observation: Hazel’s outreach to these other animals even exceeds the religious mysticism of the rabbits’ instructive stories, where other animals are made pawns (hedgehog; pheasant) and not partners to the rabbits. Hazel is informed by the values of his mythology and religion without being dogmatic about them. He exceeds his instruction...
Fun column! And of course simply fantastic book.
16
It is interesting that the *blended* Capitalist/Socialist economies have the highest quality pension systems.
16
@James
The highest taxed countries, where tax is equally applied across the citizenship, are the Happiest Countries in the World. And the most Socialist of these, Norway, has a huge Sovereign Wealth Fund (National Surplus).
5
Human nature is so paradoxical. China is a totalitarian society that controls information and individual expression to a degree that would appear to be unacceptable in America. However, if you ask millions of Chinese people, they would express a great deal of pride in China's accomplishments since Mao's Long March set the whole wheel of social and political upheaval turning.
In America we put a high value on the freedom of the individual. Our myth is the about the possibility of opportunity and accomplishment if you are willing to work hard to get it. So, if that's our North Star, why are we so unhappy, angry, and filled with discontent. Chinese people shouldn't be happy, we believe. We should be happy, yet we are filled with discontent in a society that supposedly maximizes personal freedom and opportunity.
Maybe it all hinges on the word 'supposedly'. Maybe our central myth is just a feel-good cover story to mask the real levers of power and who is pulling them. At least in China, everybody knows who is pulling the levers.
10
In creating the Republic the Americans retained one critical European legal concept, inheritable individual real property rights, the abuse of which, through various forms of political disenfranchisement , sets the stage for the next revolution.
Terrific column! Ross, you might want to give a further shoutout to two other sources of your argument beyond the novel: Plato's Republic and Christine Korsgaard's 2009 book Self-Constitution. Plato argues that justice, both of the state and the individual, consists in precisely the integration you describe; Korsgaard argues that a thusly integrated personality is what constitutes the good and moral and effective human being. This is quite useful for understanding current events. For instance, it explains Trump's peculiar badness as an instance of a wildly unintegrated personality, a "mere heap of impulses" in Korsgaard's phrase (citing Aristotle), and thus a "badly constituted" human being who is simultaneously morally bad and bad at being human, the two being in Korsgaard's view one and the same. Korsgaard's striking innovation is her argument that the principle that constitutes the good, well-integrated personality (and state, though she talks less about that) is Kant's Categorical Imperative. I think her book is both brilliant and extremely timely, and I'd love to see your take on it.
6
I find it revealing that Mr. Douthat and his conservative peers can't stop talking about the crisis of liberalism, when it is the conservative party that has led our country to the brink of constitutional crisis. Everyone loves to wring their hands about whether progressives are going too far, when in fact it was the conservative party that handed the reins over to their most repellent factions in order to maintain power. Progressives squabble about medicare for all vs. medicare for some, while conservatives manipulate their base through fear mongering and lies. But it's liberalism that's in crisis?
Let's see what happens to the GOP once we all - God-willing - wake up from the nightmare that is President Trump and recall who traded away our national dignity in exchange for tax cuts for the rich.
166
@RCP
Being right about the conservative crisis doesn't equate to being right about the lack of a progressive one. If we hold that conservatives have, initially via the ascendance of the Tea Party, and now through Trump, led us to the brink of a social and political crisis, it does not mean that the sharp turn left toward socialism within the Democratic party shouldn't inspire just as much concern.
It sounds silly, but the old adage, Two Wrong Don't Make a Right, holds true here. Just because Trump is terrible and the GOP has gone rogue from their core conservative principals doesn't mean that Democrats should be unscathed for pushing way to the left of where most Americans are comfortable. The pendulum is due for a correction, certainly, but the Democrats, if unchecked, may find their platform just as maligned when all those new taxes and government spending gets mismanaged, as it always does.
6
@John what goes around comes around. If the pendulum doesn’t swing, we are dead in the water
9
@RCP When Mr. Douthat refers to 'liberalism', he means it in the traditional sense -- as a philosophy which recognizes the moral value of the individual and of individual striving -- not in the modern usage, as meaning somehow ineluctably intertwined either with "progressivism", per se, or with the Democratic party. There are 'liberals' -- and, alas, 'illiberals' -- on both sides of our current political divide. It is that division -- liberal vs. illiberal, not 'conservative' vs. 'progressive' or 'Republican' vs. 'Democrat', that concerns him.
-apl
3
In response to this piece, I would write a brief essay titled: "The Titanic and the sinking of conservatism." Yes, liberalism can venture too far into utopian ideals and cultural cul-de-sacs, but, in the words of Richard Rorty--it has been a steady voice against cruelty and humiliation. The same cannot be said of conservatism, where cruelty and humiliation are on daily display in our nation's conservative oval office.
83
Whatever it’s social or political implications, Watership Down is a great, great book. As others do, I remember the book reviewer from a UK newspaper that said, “I announce with trembling pleasure, the appearance of a great story.” Trembling pleasure says it all.
19
I remember reading 'Watership Down' in high school, and also found the book deeply moving, especially the final fight (if I remember correctly).
It seems Mr. Douthat is mostly arguing against pessimism. Certainly we should do our best to believe in a vital, fully-human, and free civilization. Certainly there are threats to such a vision.
To the extent that modern liberal democracies (not just 'the left,' as implied by the title of this column) can learn from 'Watership Down', they should learn that 'it takes all sorts' (as my grandmother would say) to run the world well. The aspect of Trumpism that I find most disturbing in relation to this lesson is the way Trumpism strips challenges of their true complexity in search of simple solutions. Too much illegal immigration: build a wall (simple). America being taken advantage of: withdraw from the world (simple), etc. etc. Such reduction is only possible when the world is seen through a very limited set of eyes (not 'all sorts'). As Mr. Douthat is finding with 'Watership Down,' it takes many individuals deferring to and respecting each other in order for a society to truly thrive, and such a society will be better able to arrive at nuanced and truly equitable solutions to the challenges it faces.
35
@James best comment of the day.
I notice that Ross does not mention one of the aspects of Efrafa--that the does re-absorb kits back into their bodies, rather than give birth. This is one way that the female characters can strike back against the authoritarian regime, as well as escaping to a warren where they are respected.
Hyzenthlay is one of my favorite characters, and she is the one who quietly works to foment rebellion among the does of her Mark in Efrafa.
I first read Watership Down in sixth grade, and it is a regular re-read for me.
27
Rabbit societies don't have to deal with modern inconveniences like mortgages, health insurance, college tuition, or retirement. There's a reason that the Founding Fathers studied Thucydides rather than Aesop before writing the Constitution.
That said, reading all of Watership Down aloud is an impressive feat in itself. And, I suspect, not a few of us have fantasies of moving to rural England for a better, greener, and gentler life.
14
Another interesting column from Mr. Douthat that works well except where he makes the assumption that “socialists, or populists or integralists” are just interested in building a literal police state. While I can see where enforcing political correctness leads to self-destructive censorship and the right-wing's fear of the controlling instincts of liberals can cause one to question liberal idealism, I think the establishment of a police state will ultimately be the province of those on the far right, if for no other reason than they seem more comfortable with the use of lethal weapons. This is brought home by Mr. Adams choice of anthropomorphizing rabbits. Rabbits by nature are vegan pacifists whose ability to escape from being food for non-vegans relies on moderate speed and agility, neither of which are particularly effective. This lack of self-defense mechanisms makes them particularly vulnerable to those animals that have evolved into eating other animals and therefore have the physical and emotional strength to kill as needed. Rabbits are the perfect embodiment of the liberal nice guys and gals who don’t want to eat other animals, who don’t want to upset the ecological balance of nature, and who hope the meek shall inherit the earth. The question then becomes - is human nature just animal nature, eat or be eaten, or is it something else where “the genuinely good society, the well-ordered regime, is not a utopia but a live possibility?”
28
"And what makes the regime the rabbits are founding good — and successful, but first and foremost good — is the integration of the different virtues, the cooperation of their different embodiments, their willing subordination to one another as circumstances require."
How, in any way, shape, or form could you ascribe this to a 'conservative' mindset?
And no, liberals have not abandoned 'the religious and the mystical' from society. Life still holds plenty of mystery, and we fortunately have people that will attend universities to study, explore, and resolve those mysteries using science, in the unfolding of time. Religion we can use as a cautionary tale of how primitive man explained the unexplained to fearful and gullible people.
40
Crisis? What crisis? The only Crisis of Liberalism in America today is that Conservatives have abandoned all their supposed principles in embrace and fear of Trump, leaving Liberals alone in defense of democracy and the Constitution. Somehow, I think that's more properly a Crisis of Conservatism.
247
I think the more important novel would be Animal Farm.
"All animals are equal
But some animals are more equal than others"
Members of congress (both sides) are the pigs, in case you weren't sure. They are set for life the day they are sworn in. Call it welfare for the wealthy. They may start out righteous, but quickly succumb to the powers of the office.
We have reached a point in our Republic where our elected representatives seem little interested in compromise. They only care about soundbites and tweets.
This is what has to change.
25
@New Milford No. They are not all corrupted, not both sides. You smear people who truly are public servants. For example, in your own state, Rosa DeLauro has been fighting the good fight for years. To say that all politicians are corrupted is to deny the legitimacy of democracy. That just feeds the extremists. If we don’t have elected gov’t, then what do we have? The options go from bad to worse, right on down to chaos. Civilization is a consensus. Democracy takes work. Vote responsibly. Support those you have elected and keep them responsible. To dismiss them all as corrupt is worse than lazy, it is a form of corruption itself.
4
The problem with your analysis is that is rests on a bad premise.
The world has evolved to so many people, requiring so much resources that it is not possible to have different holes in the ground.
The better analogy is that of a couple with irreconcilable differences that want a divorce but have to stay living in the same and small house.
The lesson is how does one do that and not kill each other in the process. Once you can tell me that, then you have something to say.
13
@JD The other bad premise to me is that too many people disdain "the book about... the rabbits" as he writes, and I read with disbelief. I would think anyone who has heard of it at all knows better: the [fascinating] book about the [sometimes violent and terrifying] rabbits [that obviously serves as mirror to our own social possibilities].
1
Readers intrigued by the seeming benevolence of religion in Douthat's portrayal might be interested in Mr. Adams' other books - Maia and Shardik, in which religion is shown to be much less appealing, and more closely linked to authoritarianism. Indeed, I don't read Fiver's powers as religion so much as creativity - not something the right is usually quite so fond of.
Adams' The Plague Dogs - in which two dogs escape from an animal testing facility, is probably a more apt indictment of today's culture.
55
Other countries seem to be able to provide their citizens with dependable and affordable health care coverage without descending into decadence.
Fantasies about liberalism aren't reality.
112
I am tired of the 50 years or more of conservatives seeing the collapse of the liberal value system because the lose touch with the way they used to be. But newsflash, we also lose touch with our roots. I was raised in a family of seven who went to church together on Sundays. We can't go back.
The big idea is change. What has changed is the existence of alternate media who craft lies that are accepted by the gullible.
32
@Terry McKenna
I too am tired. But unlike you I am tired of the liberal narrative that "change" is undeniable good and those who a reluctant to embrace it, or god forbid, oppose it are gullible, misguided or evil. That line of thinking has helped produce the current environment in which both sides see the other as "morally wrong" and "out of touch" rather than accepting that our collective strength is born out of a spectrum of ideas and values in which compromise produces reasonable outcomes over time.
Perhaps the lesson from this well written op-ed is that neither a "literal police state" nor a "police state of ideology and thought" are good for us. I for one find that I embrace some, but certainly not all, of the current social and political ideological change afoot, and I am completely comfortable with that. Hopefully you can find a way to embrace that as an acceptable outcome.
8
@John I don’t like change either, but we simply can restore the past.
3
@John Change good or bad is unavoidable. You pretend, incorrectly, that entropy can be avoided. By clutching your pearls hard enough, the big bad new world wont come and get you. Good luck with that.
1
Unfortunately, the ambiguities of language coupled with the power of new media have made reading for deep comprehension a lost art. Today, the ideal community for many lies in an imagined past where their social status was superior and assumed without question. It is a community that never really existed, but its tantalizing reconstruction is promised in Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan. Trump's followers fill in the meaning of "Great" with little to no regard for history or the present, enabled to pursue the fiction of their dreams by a sideshow barker whose empty promises are a prologue to disaster. The only issue now is how long the president's supporters will continue letting him pursue his theater of distraction before the ruin around them brings them to their senses.
23
Readers intrigued by Adams’ tale of seeking and attainment might want to delve into The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett. In this hugely comprehensive look at societies Moffett draws meaningful comparisons between societies in many species, from ants to humans, and by so doing shines a light into the dark corners of our current world — and possible paths to a better one.
3
I suppose this column is valuable as a window into the sensitive conservative's soul.
We certainly hear a lot now about "the crisis of liberalism" from frail, would-be "Benedictine" conservatives who can't quite retire from their cushy posts in law schools, think tanks, and op-ed pages into some hazily imagined community.
The problem for them is that the retort from the left is all too easy.
Since when is health care for all people, respect and political inclusion for people of all "races" and backgrounds, a tax structure that mends instead of tears the social fabric, a political system that reins in the manipulations, subtle and overt, of the billionaire class...in what worldview, I say, is this "decadence"?
The "sensitive" right turn to allegories about rabbits because they have nothing to say in response to this question. Maybe they mutter something about abortion and not liking LBGTQ people.
For them, health care = tyranny, and respect for all people = decadence.
Maybe it's time to pick up 1984 again.
281
@Jim
Agreed. Those who are well fed and comfortable alternate between blame and guilt. Both of which are the offspring of self righteousness.
None of us deserve anything per se. That is the best reason to see ourselves in our neighbor.
When did conservatives discard their source document that mandated the that the poor, the meek, the grieving, those who suffer and the pure in heart will be the real winners?
When did the Good Samaritan become their villain and thorn in the flesh?
Maybe it’s time to reread the New Testament as well.
36
@Matt way too many christanists never read the New Testament
8
@Jim
Yes. Go Jim!
5
Regression to the Mean. That is the lesson, no? Monarchy prevailed a mere 300 years ago and now we have Republics. The Aristocracy of the past is replaced with the Oligarchs of today. We hope for return to the perfect world where the citizenry is content, free and productive but we are drifting backwards to a citizenry that is being fooled and exploited. The major political division is not between the "liberals" (not sure what meaning you used that term for) and the "fascists"; rather it is between the wealthy oligarchic, neo-Aristocracy and the worker, who is now falling behind in social benefits. We will need a dialectic to address the issues raised by Thomas Pickety, but we are hampered by powerful Oligarchs separating themselves and cheating for their advantage, not the Utopia imagined in the novel.
9
Henry Adams — 'Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.'
The whiplash of the Obama-Trump years is emblematic of our struggle to overcome struggle. Conservatives do not oppose universal health care because it costs money. They oppose it because it assures all of society a more comfortable and longer life, and that includes for dullards, layabouts, and liberals. And they anticipate that next, those good-for-nothings will want a place to live too.
Universal health care is an acknowledgment that everyone has a place in society, which conservatives do not believe.
Conservatives believe that some people must be kept out, forced out, or as a last resort be imprisoned, undergo conversion therapy, or be otherwise made to conform, to preserve the society they want.
Watership Down indeed.
41
@Revoltingallday
Isn't it ironic that the very people who the conservatives see as dullards and layabouts comprise the core of the Republican party! The progressive, educated, and prosperous Blue states subsidize the retrogressive, uneducated, and impoverished Red states, while the latter are exhorted to vote for a party whose basic policies challenge their existence. Sigh!
2
I’m thinking that a short form of this piece could be ‘Don’t let the (illusion of the)
Perfect be the enemy of the Good.
5
Of course, such countries already exist, but the Republican party of which Mr. Douthat is a prime promoter, along with its corporate allies, can't bear to hear it: market discipline in these places isn't sufficiently brutal to satisfy this crowd.
"Comfortable decadence" may also strike some readers as an odd term to use in a country with child poverty rates which never fall much below 20%, and where relatively few parents enjoy either the leisure or the education to read a novel to their children.
Perhaps the real "timeless message" here is that persons who find themselves living in extraordinary comfort are oblivious to the lives of others.
In politics, this can lead to horror.
28
Whatever allegorical or political analyses that Ross and others bring to the table here, it's worth remembering that Watership Down can be read as the tale of a quest or journey--in fact, its title is a place name.
And it is fundamentally this story of journey (initiated for whatever reason) that makes it such a wonderful addition to that literary tradition.
For a somewhat different emphasis--but still a book of journey and quest--I recommend also Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs.
3
@Glenn Ribotsky The animated film adaptation of The Plague Dogs was a startlingly disturbing indictment of animal research practices. I couldn’t watch it all the way through.
I have read the novel many times to different groups of teens that I have mentored since retiring in'89. My focus has been on the Leadership characteristics of Hazel. He is the leader because he places the interest of the group above his own interest. Service to others is the foundation of effective leadership!
30
A wonderful book. Hazel has always been my model of an ideal leader. He recognizes and values each individuals talent and deploys that talent for the good of the group. We could use some of that.
15
It's a book everyone should read.
I find myself more and more without a political home. There are many types of Republicans I have never liked and never will.
But there are increasingly groups of Democrats--my home territory--I also find repellent.
The ones who seem to rejoice at suffering by those in red states. The ones who have no sympathy for poor white people struggling to hold on to their towns. Who make fun of the "deaths of despair"--suicide or drugs--that have, for the first time, reversed our lifespan. The ones who sneer at those who haven't jumped aboard the globalization bandwagon.
What I find particularly galling is the self-congratulatory tone taken, as if making fun of or dismissing others in need is a moral--and appropriate--stance.
43
@Talbot
Thanks for articulating that. I am having a similar experience, starting back in 2016. I suspect Russia has something to do with bringing out the worst in us.
5
@Talbot
Abandon social media and you'll find that this problem largely disappears. Dealing directly with real people doing real jobs and really helping other real people live in the real world is far more rewarding - really!
19
@Talbot
Well said!
Interesting, I read this book in high school and tried to re-read it years later. I found the language stiff and some of the plot elements off putting (males run the show etc.). Decided it was dated and put it down. Of course I respect other readers who enjoy it and would never try to force my preference on them; mutual toleration is a very important value to me. As long as pluralism and tolerance are shared by most of us I think liberalism will be ok. Douthat thinks this is too flabby and thin to form the basis of a virtuous and efficacious society. I think he’s wrong but I strongly defend his right to think it. As long as he and others think likewise peace and prosperity are within our grasp.
7
As an avid child reader who became a reading-aloud mother who became a school librarian, I am thrilled to see this masterpiece of children/adult literature explored so seriously in the NYT.
Lovers of Watership Down may also enjoy The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban or Amy's Eyes by Richard Kennedy--each one completely different from the others, but all concerned with the human journey, myth, mysticism, society, and the individual.
10
@Thea thanks for the recommendations! just ordered The Mouse and Amy's Eyes. As a reader and mom and lit prof, I find "children's" books a source of delight and inspiration - The Phantom Tollbooth, The Wreckers, The Rats of NIMH...
3
Yes, well humans have had thousands of years to achieve a just and orderly society, and haven't succeeded yet.
Even here in America, the world's "last, best hope" because of our democratic system, we have slid back toward our worst instincts just when we seemed to be on a path toward acting on our best ones.
To be clear, regardless of what conservative Douthat thinks of Obama, even Ross can't deny that he was elected by appealing to our best instincts, whereas Trump has appealed to our worst.
136
@Charley Darwin Just because our society is not perfect doesn't mean that human beings have not been gradually (but not linearly) improving society. I would hope it's obvious that our society is far more just and orderly than that of the pharaohs. But you don't even have to go back that far. Go back to the 1950s with the McCarthy witch hunts, virtually no civil rights for African Americans, homosexuality a crime, horrible pollution and so on. While I completely deplore our current president (whose sheer incompetence mitigates his malignance) I don't think I'd want to go back to the 1950s much less earlier historical times.
We must keep fighting to improve our society. Eventually, we *will* have national health insurance (it just makes too much sense) and we *will* have sensible gun control and we *will* have a more sensible tax structure. But to get these all of us must do our part. We are not rabbits.
3
I read Watership Down for an English Literature class in high school and quickly forgot it until now. I think I should read it again.
1
It's a great novel. I don't think you understand it. We are not caged.
7
My teen daughter plays soccer and often the practices and games involve rather long drives. I read Watership Down many times through the years and was always struck by how easily I went from forgetting that the tale involved rabbits, to seeing it as a much deeper fiction. My daughter picked it up off my bookshelf last year and decided to read it out loud to me as we travel for her games. It is slow progress as it is the only time she reads it, but I will have these memories of her giving voice to the characters I have loved all these years. Richard Adams has indeed created an epic tale and I am so glad that it is still enjoyed by a new generation.
8
In all seriousness, I believe that Trump’s ‘base’ have about as much desire and willingness to read and contemplate Douthat’s piece here (as well as the book he references) as they would read and understand essays on topics such as evolution, climate change and feminism.
And I suspect Russ knows this.
Actually, though, I’m not certain who actually wrote this column—there were no gratuitous shots at Presidents Carter and Obama...
30
Thanks, Ross. You remind me why I loved the novel when it came out so long ago. I’ll do a re-read.
1
The genuinely good society can exist only when the talents of every member of the society are recognized, developed, nurtured, and utilized for the common good. That was the message of the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth.
It seems to me the difference between the liberal and conservative extremes described by Mr. Douthat is simply the extent to which every member of the society is valuable, and to whom.
22
@Kevin Brock this is why neither Christ nor Christians should be completely discounted. Occasionally they produce wisdom like Paul's.
I read Adams' novel when it was first published. A newly-fledged BA in English Literature beginning as a graduate student business and economics, I read it mostly for simple enjoyment but couldn't help but cast a critical eye on it and take away many of the lessons Mr. Douthat finds in the text. It's odd, don't you think, that a conservative, unfettered free-market capitalist like Ross and a liberal with a mix of socialist-distributivist sympathies like myself could find many of the same things to like about a children's novel.
14
Watership Down plays a both daily and mythical role in my family’s lore. My father reads it every spring, no need to say why. “Silflay”, “hrair”, and “elil” are incorporated in our day-to-day language. WD is truly one of the greatest masterpieces of our time. Thank you for your wonderful piece.
13
What is more "totalitarian and decadent" than religion? What other form of human creativity is more totalizing and dangerous to live possibility? Say, science or understandings that don't conform to one's religion? Christianity demands belief, adherence, and behavior at your peril: not only with threats of eternal damnation or worldly persecution but that one might be ostracized from family and community. Believe or else. Do this but not that human possibility or else. But sometimes rabbits come along who recognize that they can self-govern, create rules and norms that live out possibilities that religions, for the most part, mean to deny us. Think about that too, Ross. when you read this book to your daughters.
159
@Rover Demonizing religion is about as reasonable as demonizing politics, artists, or business without qualification. "Religion" is an extremely diverse cultural phenomenon, and making sweeping generalizations about it is typically unhelpful (just as it would typically be unhelpful to make sweeping generalizations about "artists" or "business"). The same goes for Christianity: there is great diversity in how it is understood and practiced, in the values and virtues that are emphasized in a given Christian community, in the nature of authority that is or isn't ascribed to scripture or particular passages of scripture, and so on.
17
@JP I’m not demonizing all religion just those particularly given to the ordinary forms of dogmatism and oppression, like the Catholic Church that Ross favors.
16
@Rover
Agree. Douthat can never resist taking a potshot at "secularism", as if it is to blame for the problems of the modern world. Let's remember that it's the white evangelicals who have given us Donald Trump. If you needed any more proof that religion is a bad influence on society (other than all of history, that is), the support that Trump gets from religious conservatives should clinch the argument.
21
"What makes the regime the rabbits are founding good ... is the integration of the different virtues, the cooperation of their different embodiments, their willing subordination to one another as circumstances require."
My observation is that this behavior doesn't inherently scale well. Beyond the small group with its intimate knowledge of every member and the informal constraints of practical cooperation, we look to various systems of "rules" (in the widest, game-theory sense) to achieve this integration. This is a work in progress -- to take the half-full view.
11
Russ is consistently critical of the more progressive wing of the democratic party. Which is interesting because i feel it is unlikely that today's op-ed piece would be welcomed in the NY Post or Washington Times. Only a liberal publication would publish a piece about a whimsical children's book (and adult as it can be read on more than one level).
Long live progressive politics an thinking.
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If I remember correctly, Adams was a senior civil servant who created this story for his children and used it as a way to let off steam caused by his day job. So, obviously a critique of Britain's government in the years of Wilson and Heath.
I think he commuted from 'Watership Down' in Hampshire to the Department of Housing in London.
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An unforgettable novel I discovered some forty+ years ago at age 18. Fiver, Bigwig, et.al. Have all remained with me ever since. I’m sure it will remain for a lifetime with your daughter’s as well, especially as you are reading to them.
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Mr. Douthat, I too admire this wonderful book. But I think has power not because it is political but precisely because it is not.
Epics may show beings in conflict but they enchant and teach because they show us how to wrestle with intangibles--the supernatural, the sacred, ourselves--and not because they offer lessons that we shoehorn to fit circumstances as we deem them to be. We belong to these stories, not the other way around.
JRR Tolkien once wrote that he had always disliked allegory. I think he had political allegories in mind.
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@Mitchell Hammond Joseph Campbell said, "Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same." Just as a personal dream may have significance for an individual- parables, allegories, and fables speak a trans-temporal truths as a kind of DNA of a particular society. The problem is that those truths are too primal for application in specific situations in time any more than DNA or a previous night's dream should be applied in a direct way in a specific situation in the life of a human the following day at work. Mythic stories are as wonderful as Jung's concepts of psychological Archetypes but they are very poor blueprints for a specific historical political situation. They may as the Buddhist's say be but fingers pointing to the moon of the total reality. Such stories like great signs point us to the fact that life's mystery, political and otherwise, is not captured in a one on one way even by our our best poetry, literature, math or science. In our age quantum physicists give this rebuke to science and people like James Joyce, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault give a like rebuke to those who trade in words. There are "dreams" in every direction , in every discipline and no objective dreamer is in sight. It is, beautiful and bottomless "turtles all the way down."
@Mitchell Hammond But the best way to write good allegory is to pretend or (better still) believe you aren't. Adams's is more transparent and heavier-handed, but allegories they both are (this book and Tolkien's).
It has been quite a few years since I read “Watership Down” more than once to my children, but the lesson I took away was of the qualities of leadership. Hazel, the chief rabbit, is not the strongest rabbit, nor the brightest, nor the most forward thinking. His talent lies in surrounding himself with his most talented cohorts and making the best use of their strengths. My children and I cried together when General Woundwort learned Bigwig was not the chief rabbit and wilted in fear at the thought of the existence of a rabbit yet larger and more fierce. We recognized Hazel’s quiet power.
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@Emily Wilson-Orzechowski Well said.
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For all the typical criticism of progressives seeking a utopia via government programs and control, conservatives never seem to acknowledge their quest for there own stark utopia of free markets and unconstrained greed (which, we are told, automatically leads to the greatest good for the greatest number). The "night watchman" state of which conservatives are so enamored has left our society in tatters. Given that, and having pushed a poisonous conservative view forever, Mr. Douthat now urges us to pivot toward a "genuinely good society." A little late for that, no? Perhaps our "new-found warren" should be Elizabeth Warren. Why don't you start pushing that idea, Ross?
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@Incredible Ross could never muster the guts to own up to the extreme and inhumane greed of the conservative mantra nor to accept common sense alternatives that might be "labeled" in ways that all he hears are nails scrathcing blackboards.
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@Incredible
Ross as usual make zero sense to me...no liberal I know is seeking utopia, only fairness, more equality, and giving all our citizens some semblance of a dignified life..you know...decent shelter, healthcare, food, education
its not a McMansion, Cadillac, face lifts, flat screens and i phones for all!
maybe he should read 1984 and animal farm, they are way closer to his blessed Evangelical GOP party!
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@Incredible
Elizabeth WARREN is the best Warren of all LOL!
Best comment of all.
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I loved Watership Down too, but (like a lot of the best literature) it resists being squeezed into a political box. Even the Aeneid, patriotic in its way, is full of ambiguity about Rome and Augustus. If you want a political novel about animals, one that is more congenial to Douthat's politics, stick with Animal Farm.
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"Watership Down" is one of the great epics of World War II, a portrait of the English at their best at war. Richard Adams was a lieutenant with 250 Light Company, Royal Army Service Corps, 1st Airborne Division, behind the lines in the 1944 Battle of Arnhem in which the British tried to win the war by Christmas via Operation Market Garden in which paratroopers seized eight bridges behind German lines. But the last one, over the Rhine, proved "A Bridge Too Far." When the British armor thrust was stopped short of the Rhine, the paratroopers on the far side had to swim the Rhine and then traverse, like terrified bunnies, 100 miles of enemy territory to get to safety.
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I see conservatives and religious people as much more pessimistic and distrusting of our nature when it comes to creating a genuinely good society. I am a secular humanist who sees that we create our problems, our solutions, and perhaps most importantly, our narratives to explain them.
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@ly1228
You only have to look to William Barr's recent speech at Notre Dame to understand that atheism, and by extension secular humanism, is still considered by the religious - as it was by Locke and More - an absolute disqualification for participation in the fruits of their God's glory. The religious reject Jefferson's "moral atheist" concept, because in their view, without God, the vengeful judge of the prelife, life and the afterlife, there can be no basis for ethical behavior. They cannot however see their faith to its logical conclusion, that their version of morality is driven eschatologically by fear, rather than reason. They abandon reason wherever it conflicts with the tenets of their faith. And if it leads us to the promised final battle, the second coming, then all the better. Praise the Lord.
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@Roger C
They were willing to elevate to the presidency the Anti-Christ to bring about the Second Coming. The only problem is that they now worship the Anti-Christ by approving all the things he does.
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Amen.
Watership Down also teaches us that every position should be valued and celebrated. The educated Intelligentsia shouldn’t look down on the Plumber, nor visa versa. The solider deserves our support but so do teachers who perform just as vital of function in our society.
“Heroes” are individuals who go beyond, access their empathy and put others before their own needs. But even that too can become a problem when someone is - always - putting others before their needs.
Again, successful living is one of balance, reasonableness, wisdom. It’s a hard target, one that is always moving. What worked yesterday may requires a completely different approach today. But keep flexible, adaptable, ask for advice and be self-critical while realizing that sometimes standing your ethical ground is what is called for. Being a good human (or rabbit) can be tough…. “Here, have a carrot and lets figure it out together….”
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Durer's wonderful accompanying artwork is of a hare, not a rabbit, which throws the argument, as hares don't "do" society
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@MaryF
True, but it is still a wonderful work of art and the thing which attracted me to the article. Being something of a hare myself, I didn't quite get Watership Down when I first read it as a child. Time for a revisit.
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Douthat, as usual, displays a keen mind and well-wielded pen.
Disclaimer: The following is *not* intended as some sort of intersectional, social-justice argument. It's an observation about "Watership Down."
I love Adams' first book, and was fortunate as a boy to meet him and have him sign my first-edition hardcover. That said, the late, great Ursula K. Le Guin (if you want thoughtful fantasy, check out her "Earthsea" books, based non-explicitly on a Taoist view of existence) and others have pointed out many limitations in Adams' fantasy world.
Adams wrote rabbits as rabbits, behaving as rabbits would, interacting as rabbits would, and so on, except that they speak, have a complex mythology (i.e. religion), and so on.
Thus, in the book bucks are protagonists and does are almost entirely passive, mere vessels for offspring. The rabbits behave much like educated, middle-class people for whom religion (i.e. the mythology that includes a creator-sun figure, Lord Frith and the trickster, El-Ahrairah) is present, but not intrusive. I won't go into more detail, but you get the idea.
Douthat is right that Nuthanger Farm and Efrafa are frightening lapine dystopias. But I would like to note note that the baseline for this excellent story is fundamentally old-school conservative, in precisely the way that appeals to Catholic-convert Douthat.
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Excellent comment. It's also worth noting that although Adams based his rabbits on the best available research at the time, much of that research was premised on the misogynistic assumption that females of whatever species were docile, marginal members of their societies, interested only in child-reading, instead of core participants. Later studies have demonstrated how untrue that is.
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@CB Evans Also lots of sexism which I hope his daughters realize.
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This analysis explicates needed education for the isolationist Capitalist that is Douthat, but is old news for those who support democratic social values.
The author's fascination with this parable highlights the lack of thought that his fellow travelers have ever investigated in concepts of social responsibility and the need for shared striving for a common good, which are the basics of a "liberal" order.
Social justice is not necessary when there is abundance and lack of creativity, or where there where is inequality and authoritarianism, the structural bases for the two found warrens, and the two versions of the ideal social structure envisioned by Douthat and his fellow "conservatives". Of course, these situations engender "liberal" anxiety. The new-founded warren is in fact the social democracy with all its warts, where good government is essential to curbing personal greed, both financial and for power, not the bogeyman that Douthat and his philosophical kin have denigrated for years.
Hopefully, his children were able to understand the story more clearly than their lector.
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@TVCritic As is often the case with parents and children.
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Mr. Douthat: I read the Richard Adams classic when it was first published. I have re-read it and cherish it; have it on my iPod as well.
Rather than get into contemporary politics, I should briefly say that I admire you for putting this book before your children. I'm of the opinion that too many parents neglect their children's formative years by immersing them in the delights of the human condition through story-telling. The complexities and dangers will come later. And they are there, in "Watership Down," as well.
One of the lasting memories of the long tale is the ending, where Fiver finally meets his reward. It is gentle and long-awaited. It is not political. It is essentially human. Thanks for this column.
I might add, as a postscript, that "A Girl In A Swing," a later book by Mr. Adams, is very much worth a serious read.
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thank you for the book recommendation in your postscript. i look forward to reading it.
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@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18
"..... many parents neglect their children's formative years by immersing them in...story-telling."
So story-telling is a form of neglect, and the victim of the neglect is certain years?
If there is an idea lurking somewhere in this sentence, it eludes me.
@David M. Fishlow I think there is a missing "not" in there, since the comment seems to indicate approval of immersing children in story telling.
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How much better off would we all be if we realized there are no simple answers to our problems?
No one politician or idea will fix everything. The road is long and the slog is real.
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For another view of the book (and the film) see Taylor Antrim in Vogue (which I admit I read at the same frequency as Watership Down):
https://www.vogue.com/article/watership-down-review-netflix-series
"Watership Down is a bit of a conundrum. The classic children’s novel by Richard Adams, about a band of rabbits trying to establish a safe home in the English countryside, is a little too subtle and complex for (young) children. And the 1978 animated film is definitely too violent and terrifying for them."
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The thing about novels is that they can pose a false dichotomy as the structure of the novel, for the precise reason to build a theme.
In reality we don't have to choose between poetry slams and warfare, or a bargain in which we sacrifice a few of our own for the comfort of many, or live in a police state.
If we educate ourselves, and think, and try to find our common values, we can live together just fine, even if we don't agree on marriage equality, gun control, government's role in safety nets and healthcare.
We know we can do this, because we have done this.
The total breakdown in civility and civics - the idea that somehow our lives are like a football game in which one side must decimate the other as we all wave big foam fingers showing ourselves to be number one - is a more recent invention.
An invention meant to make life more secure for a politician, who only has to spend money to convince the few who haven't take a side. Reject that central idea, and we have a shot.
Watershipdown is an allegory, a demonstration not of the weakness of liberal ideals, but of how, if we all behave like sheep - or rabbits - we defeat them to our detriment.
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@Cathy
Nicely put, thank you, the biggest issue is this idea that somehow we have a world of 'black and white', and where the real concept is 'win at all cost'. The GOP just saying no, that started back in the 90's, is emblematic of this, as is the refusal of some on the more left side of things who demand their way or no way. Someone asked me what the biggest tragedy of the Trump era is going to be, with Trump being enabled by GOP politicians who secretly despise him, and I said it was the loss of something very important, some might call it rule of law, but it was more like a shared vision of the give and take of politics and society. The founders basically expected this, they guarded against demagogues like Trump out of that fear, and they created a framework for government that expected this. The religious and political fundamentalism of the right these days would have be anathema to them, this literal reading of the constitution (federalist society, ironically); they also would have been horrified at the rigid attitudes of some on the left.
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@music observer
Sorry, but as a "rigid attitude" lefty, the right to marry the person I love is not up for you or someone else to debate!
Thanks for your reminder of this wonderful book. My parents had it around the house, and my college roommate, a literature student, covered it in a seminar on epics - along with The Iliad, The Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Not sure how fully I agree with your analogies -- somewhat -- but I share your love for the book, and its characters, and its society.
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Ross Douthat writes about "the crisis of the liberal order". This is not the first time.
More than five years ago, on 21 December 2013, he wrote about the "crack up" of "the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism".
The word "crisis" normally refers to something that happens over a short span of time ("Cuban missile crisis"). Whatever you may think about Mr. Douthat's repeated, and repeatedly put-off, prediction of imminent "crack up", it is not in this sense a crisis.
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@Dan Styer
Not necessarily. "Crisis" can refer to any period of stress or danger, pretty much regardless of duration. The Cuban Missile Crisis counts, but so does the Crisis of the Third Century, which went on for a good fifty years.
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I'm shocked I don't know this book! But it must be about wild rabbits, because that picture you have there is a wild rabbit. Wild rabbits and domesticated rabbits are so different they can't even produce offspring together. Domestic rabbits can be litter trained. I'm litter trained. I like Yesterday's News.
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American wild rabbits are in the hare family. Wild rabbits in the British Isles are much more closely related to domestic rabbits and can interbreed with them (as they do in Watership Down).
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@Sammy the Rabbit
It's not a wild rabbit. It's a hare, one of Durer's most famous works.
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@Katherine Collett You just added knowledge to my bunny brain. Have to make my way to the British Isles. I think Bob Dylan wrote a song about the British Isles. Or some Isles. I'm 'bout to hop on over there.
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