The Future of News, and The Gospel According to Ross

After much deliberation, the New York Times has announced that they plan to begin charging for online content. Whether doing so will be enough to cope with the challenges posed by free online sources of news and analysis remains to be seen.

The Times’ decision has widespread implications. It is the most important newspaper to begin charging over the web, and eyes all over the industry will be closely monitoring the effects of this approach. In an experiment that will, in significant ways, determine the very future of media consumption, the biggest name in print has publicly recognized that their traditional business model can no longer compete.

Dismissing the claim that the breakneck pace of the online media effectively closes the newspaper niche, chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. suggested in an internal memo that loyal readers “know that The Times brings them the most authoritative news and opinion to be found anywhere,” and will pay for continued access.

Is he correct? Does The Times provide a service that can’t be had elsewhere for free? After all, any story worth reporting, regardless of who gets there first, does not stay exclusive for more than a few minutes.

The Times seems to be banking on its reporting being so excellent that readers will pay for its take on the same stories everyone is writing about.

For major news, this seems unlikely. Beyond sentiment, it is hard to imagine why someone would pay a monthly fee for a slightly different perspective.

It stands to reason, then, that what The Times assumes will keep readers coming back, pockets open, for more is its superlative analysis and opinion. If it is going to satisfy a paying readership its columns and special features must be truly worth the price.

Whether they are is beyond my qualifications to say. Surely The Times understand what sets it apart, in the eyes of its audience, from other news outlets.

All I’ll do here is present my take on an opinion piece written by a regular Times columnist, as a preliminary evaluation of the quality of their exclusive content. The subject of the column, or at least its impetus, is James Cameron’s “Avatar,” the most talked about movie in recent memory.

Admittedly, I did not choose this piece strictly for its quality. It may be the lowest common denominator; I don’t know. Either way, it got my attention, and if the reaction is more important than the assessment, perhaps Sulzberger knows what he’s doing.

Ladies and gentlemen, Ross Douthat in:

"The Gospel According to Ross"

Ross Douthat’s New York Times editorial entitled "Heaven and Nature" is his response to James Cameron’s holiday-season blockbuster, Avatar. He makes no bones about his evaluation of the holiday flick in calling it “a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message.” Ostensibly, he seeks to critique Cameron’s “long apologia for pantheism,” which, by his definition, “calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”

Douthat is not wrong to point to the film’s pantheistic element. Much is indeed made of the interconnectedness of all of nature and of the real individual potential to merge with Consciousness itself.

But what he overlooks – or perhaps ignores – are the important ways in which it enhances the story. It adds to the fantasy and surrealism, and it strengthens the moral and political message: that greed and imperialism "tend to destroy the environment.” I won't deny that the allegory is simplistic and heavy handed in certain ways. But the deification of nature, as a poetic device, is compelling both aesthetically and conceptually.

For someone so well acquainted with hyperbole, Douthat’s interpretation is surprisingly obtuse. Does he genuinely read such ideological intention, such religious significance into the storyline? Is it really possible that, in the same breath that he excludes himself from “the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions,” he proves guilty of such an egregious failure of imagination? Even Will Heaven of The UK Telegraph, who goes so far as to chide Cameron for outright racism, has the sense to chalk up the offense to carelessness – or even ignorance – rather than conviction.

Literal-minded indeed.

To state the question more clearly: is Douthat truly so threatened by Hollywood’s science fiction that he feels compelled to break from his mostly politically oriented commentary to refute it? Or is there something else, more self-interest than self-defense, that he is driving at?

Given his cursory treatment of the film which is supposedly his subject, our answer appears to be the latter. It seems Douthat’s aim is not a measured response to Avatar or even to the cultural phenomenon – “Hollywood’s religion of choice” – he claims it represents. Rather, what he presents as a reaction to devolution in religious thought wrought by increasingly popular but ever pernicious pantheistic values is really a thinly disguised panegyric for his own adopted faith – Catholicism.

That he chose to use a holiday-season blockbuster as a pretense for this kind of polemic – aside from giving James Cameron too much credit – is frankly rather absurd. But this is precisely what Douthat did, and it begs some kind of response.

He makes several basic assumptions about pantheism. The first, for which he draws support from fundamentalist-in-disguise Richard Dawkins, is that pantheism is just atheism all “sexed-up.” This suggestion is not unreasonable, but I'm not sure I agree. Jewish mysticism, for example, makes a distinction between the immanent God, encompassing all of existence, and the transcendent God, which finds no direct parallel in human experience but is conscious and interacts with the "natural" world. This kind of conception might consider pantheism to be an important, if incomplete, part of the picture.

But let’s grant Douthat his premise and see how his argument holds up. Giving that pantheism is a guilty (or lonely) man’s atheism, he seems to feel that it arises out of a uniquely American combination of car-window-romanticization of nature and intellectual laziness. By this logic, neither the American's hyper-individualistic ego nor his pop-culture eroded intellect has the fortitude to handle theism.

It is true that faith is difficult, and admirable in those who come to it humbly and without dogma. This is not, however, because it requires more effort than the alternative, and not because only believers are tough-minded enough to “wrestle with the problem of evil,” but because its conclusions are uncertain and its demands all-consuming. Rejection of The Gospel According to Ross is not lazy. It is a defensible theological and intellectual position.

Douthat futher assumes that such a perspective is inherently amoral. “..the human societies which hew closest to the natural order,” he writes, are “places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish, and short.”

But this is a misrepresentation. Neither pantheism as a theology or as atheology suggests that people look to nature as a model for action. Humanitarian ethics are no less sophisticated - or effective - than religious ethics. If Douthat means to suggest that God is a prerequisite to morality, well, I Dou’ that. History - not to mention research - shows that religious societies and individuals are no more (or less) likely to act morally than those who reject faith.

What Douthat attempts here is to frame pantheism – and atheism – as low-brow, pop-cultural, unworthy of thinking people. Further, he suggests that it runs contrary to the very essence of civilization even as he acknowledges it as a natural outgrowth of democracy.

By placing the burden of proof on those who reject his God he invites it in equal proportion upon himself. This is a mistake, of course, as proof exists for neither position. Which makes the core of his argument – ‘Boo-hoo! The human condition without God is just so “deeply tragic”!’ – somewhat understandable but no more persuasive.