Errol Morris’s 6-minute video exploration of a Man, a Protest, and the Strangeness of History. 

Peter H. passes along this statement from the pastor who accompanied the UC Davis chancellor along her walk past the silently protesting students. The pastor writes in part:

What was clear to me was that once again, the students’ willingness to show restraint kept us from spiraling into a cycle of violence upon violence.  There was no credible threat to the Chancellor, only a perceived one.  The situation was not hostile.  And what was also clear to me is that whether they admit it or not, the administrators that were inside the building are afraid.  And exhausted.  And human.  And the suffering that has been inflicted is real.  The pain present as the three of us watched the video of students being pepper sprayed was palpable.  A society is only truly free when all persons take responsibility for their actions; it is only upon taking responsibility that healing can come.

Why did I walk the Chancellor to her car?  Because I believe in the humanity of all persons.  Because I believe that people should be assisted when they are afraid.  Because I believe that in showing compassion we embrace a nonviolent way of life that emanates to those whom we refuse to see as enemies and in turn leads to the change that we all seek.  I am well aware that my actions were looked on with suspicion by some tonight, but I trust that those seeking a nonviolent solution will know that “just means lead to just ends” and my actions offered dignity not harm.

One of the great lessons of social history is that food, and the rituals surrounding it, both express and instruct in a society’s values. Food is not mere ballast; it carries with it, unavoidably, a society’s values. Which is why this news from USA Today is depressing:

 We eat what we want, when we want. No more of this breakfast, lunch and dinner stuff. We snack all day. We casually skip meals. And we want to customize everything we cram into our mouths.

It’s as if our social-media habits are going right to our stomachs.

A culture hungry to put its personal stamp on everything it touches is driving some foodmakers and restaurant operators bonkers. At the same time, it’s offering all kinds of opportunities to those willing to sprint ahead of the food curve. Nowhere is this trend more palpable than with Millennials.

“Eating weird is the new normal,” says Shawn LaPean, executive director of Cal Dining at the University of California- Berkeley, which serves students 30,000 times daily. “If students eat any square meals per day, it might be one. The rest is filled with snacks and food on the go.”

These may seem like quirky, student eating habits, but they’re evolving into lifetime traits. The numbers are mind-boggling. At least 35% of the meals eaten by Millennials aren’t meals at all, but snacks, reports consultancy The Kruse Company. Four in 10 Millennials snack more than once daily, reports research firm Technomic. And only 5% of all consumers eat three square meals a day, says Technomic.

… There are no traditional eating hours anymore, says Wade Thoma, vice president of U.S. menu innovation at McDonald’s. “People eat at all strange hours of the day.”

It’s hard to be traditional about food rituals these days. You would think that my family would be ordered along these lines, but it hasn’t worked out that way. For one thing, one of my children has sensory processing disorder, and can only eat a few things (fortunately, the same things, and easy to prepare). Another of my children appears to have the same problem. More importantly, though, until I took the job at Templeton, I was never able to be home at a predictable hour. My newspaper job sometimes got me home by six, sometimes by nine, but never on a predictable schedule. That was the nature of the work, but it made family dinners impossible to schedule. Now we can do that, given that I work from home, but it’s hard to break old habits — especially given that the kids usually don’t eat, and won’t eat, what their mother and I eat.

Still, the whole snacking between meals thing is something we resist in our household. So there’s that.Anyway, we are losing, and appear to have lost, food traditions. Food is not religion, of course, and besides, as Adam Gopnik points out in his book about France and food, when a food tradition ossifies into pure formalism, it loses its vitality. But the opposite — to thoroughly reject any formal tradition, is also imprudent, and not to be desired. To be in Louisiana and to decide that gumbo, jambalaya, and boiled crawfish are no better and no worse than Big Macs is to lose a sense of oneself and one’s culture. It’s to say that one’s culture has no claim on one, and no right to educate one’s culinary sensibilities. And, it’s the jettison the idea of taste itself.

Worse, to completely lose the idea of the family meal, or the meal as a social event, strikes me as a quite different and far worse thing than preferring to eat different foods. Here’s Leon Kass, in his terrific book “The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature”: 

Precisely because human beings usually eat together, the customs of eating govern not only what human beings eat but also where, when, with whom, and especially how. The manner(s) of eating, even more than what gets eaten, expresses the humanity of the eaters, at least as they have come to understand it. Though the specifics differ markedly from one society to the next, all cultures have explicit or tacit norms governing the “how” of eating — norms that serve to define the groups, ease interpersonal relations, and help civilize the human animal.

Social rituals around eating are one thing that separates us from barbarians, and indeed from animals. More Kass:

To be at table means that one has removed oneself from business and motion and made a commitment to spend some time over one’s meal. One commits oneself not only to time but also to an implicit plan of eating: We sit to eat and not just to feed, and to do so both according to a plan and with others. A decisions to have a sit-down meal must precede its preparation, and the preparation is in turn guided by the particular plan that is the menu. Further, to be at table means, whether we know it or not, to make a commitment to form and formality. We agree, tacitly to be sure, to a code of conduct that does not apply when we privately raised the refrigetrator or eat on the run or in our cars, or even when we munch sandwiches in front of the television with our buddies who have gathered to watch the Super Bowl. There we eat (or, more accurately, feed) side by side, as at a trough; in contrast, at table we all face not our food but one another. Thus we silently acknowledge our mutual commitment to share nto only some food but also commensurate forms of commensal behavior. To be sure, the forms will vary depending on the occasion; the dinner table at home with family, the dinner table at home with guests, a banquet table at a testimonial dinner, adn a picnic table in the park have different degrees and (in part) different kinds of formality, as do the family breakfast and the family dinner. But in all cases there are forms that operate, regulate, and inform our behaivor and that signify our peculiarly human way of meeting necessity.

A table, all by itself, silently conveys the beginning of this meaning. … The set table in the home is in fact an embodiment of the community that is the family.

What USA Today reports is, frankly, the advance of barbarism. The fact that it is chosen, and it is convenient, doesn’t make it any less barbaric. And yes, you’re right that my title here links the collapse of food culture and ritual to the collapse of religious orthodoxy into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Consumerist individualism has dissolved all these formal structures. People now don’t understand why they ever did these things, or why they were thought necessary.

UPDATE: Thought experiment: Would it still be Thanksgiving if everybody got together this Thursday and ate hamburgers from McDonalds and sat around the living room watching TV? If the food you eat and the manner in which you do it are unimportant, why would it matter at all? If it does matter, then ask yourself: why? And is there something in that recognition that should guide our everyday lives?

Mary Riddell, writing in the Telegraph, says yes, it is. She points to the yawning gap between the Davos-world international class of ultra-rich and everybody else, and says this crisis is turning rather quickly into a question of the legitimacy of democratic capitalism:

Despite a pay gap that is widening to Victorian levels, this is not simply another parable of rich and poor, of cupidity and envy, of us and them. Nor, as the Resolution Foundation warns of long wage stagnation for the middle classes and the English bishops rise up against government welfare reforms, is it just a story of social injustice. Excessive pay has become the most potent symbol and proof of market failure. The capitalist model promoted by Milton Friedman and others in the 1970s has imploded, and, for all the pain, the consequences have not yet registered.

Eurozone economies are poised to live or die according to the dictates of the bond markets. Democracy has been over-ridden in Greece and Italy, now run by unelected technocrats already proving to have little traction on the predatory forces unleashed by leaders who thought they could control the monster they had created and nurtured.

The myth persists that the market can be as easily subjugated as it was once let rip. If only, causists suggest, we could repatriate powers from Brussels/ cut red tape/ keep foreigners out, all might yet be well (as Matt Cavanagh of the Institute for Public Policy Research has written, and as leading economists argued yesterday, plans to curb immigration would actually be deeply damaging to competitiveness and growth).

No doubt the Romans, the Habsburgs and the Bourbons also seized on straws to stave off nemesis. That is the manner in which empires fall.

More:

Politicians, terrified of conceding that they risk losing control, are unlikely to admit that, in one respect, Karl Marx was right. Capitalism has been shown to contain the seeds of its destruction. As the Croesus class cash in and the markets dine off democracy, no one dares point out that, from Tottenham to Tennessee, the world may be staring at the end of politics.

In Greek legend, King Croesus was placed on a pyre to be burnt alive. His pleas for salvation were answered by divine forces who ordained a storm so fierce that the fire was extinguished, sparing him to become a wise, if much less rich, adviser. This time round, with the flames licking at democracy’s roots, there may be no such happy ending.

Historian William Anthony Hay examines the case of Italy, a nationwhose politics and political traditions cannot handle global capitalism. Hay asks if it’s possible for a country to be rich and modern but still a failed state:

Italy suggests the answer is yes. Despite its many advantages, including world-class industries and an enviable standard of living, Italy has failed as an organized political community able to exercise authority by mobilizing the consent and allegiance of its citizens. The resignation of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi—and his long persistence in office despite cringe-worthy antics—highlights a pattern that merits recognition. Public institutions lack credibility in a world of tax evasion and lawless enterprises, and Europe’s growing fiscal crisis has brought into the open structural weaknesses glimpsed only occasionally before. The problem lays not so much with the Italian economy as in the Italian state’s inability to get the public behind a reform program to raise productivity, cut expenditures and levy taxes effectively. In short, the government cannot govern.

The crisis of capitalism, then, is a crisis of democratic legitimacy in Italy. I believe we’ve been here before, in the 1930s.

Matt James is the author of that genius image.

But seriously, folks … the reader who sent me this said that the cop in Davis who did the pepper-spraying is now probably going to have to move his family. His name and address are all over the Internet, and his life is probably in danger. If you think that this is just desserts, you should think about what it would be like if you did what your boss told you to do, and drew the ire of the Internet mob. Have you ever had your family threatened in your home for things you’ve done or written? I have, and my newspaper had to buy my family 24-hour police protection days. It’s not fun. This is what I hated about the gay-rights groups publicizing the names and addresses of people who supported Prop 8 in California. What did they hope to gain by this? There is no conceivable outcome other than that they wanted those people to fear the wrath of their opponents by fearing an attack in their own homes. I loathe pro-life extremists who demonstrate outside the homes of abortionists. For me, there is a bright line between holding people accountable in public for their actions, and violating the sanctity of their homes. Once we cross it, in our righteous anger, we’re in very, very bad trouble as a society. Nobody is safe, except those who can afford to hide behind high walls.

The NYT reports that the failure of the supercommittee process has increased already debilitating cynicism about Washington. Excerpts:

The idea of the committee was, in part, to save Congress from itself: let a dozen members forge a compromise to cut the deficit, and then put it to the whole Congress for an up-or-down vote. It was Congress lashing itself to the mast, like Odysseus, to resist the siren calls of lobbyists and special interest groups. But in the end, the ship went nowhere.

People were not just annoyed: they were worried. Neil Elkins, 52, who works on boats on the Seattle waterfront, said that the failure was “endangering my confidence in our system of checks and balances.” Khalfani Lawson, a 23-year-old student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, said that the lack of progress was breeding apathy among the young. “If it was a constructive process, people would be more inclined to be involved.” And Ernest Wong, a 44-year-old from Los Angeles who works in marketing, put it bluntly: “This makes me scared.”

I don’t know if it makes me scared, but it does make me worried. I do blame members of Congress, obviously, but I think Frum might be onto something when he says that on the right, at least, this is as much a failure of followership as it is a failure of leadership. I imagine it’s also true on the left, but I don’t know that world as well as I do my own. We rage at Congress for not getting its act together and working out something for the greater good, but if Our Team compromised, we would hold them responsible for being weaklings who capitulated in the Great Battle of Good Vs. Evil. And they would pay at the ballot box. When we say we want them to Do Something, what we mean, or what the loudest and most committed of us mean, is that we want the other side to give up and give our side its way. But that’s not how politics works, at least not in a country as divided as our own is, and divided over issues in substantive ways.

If you yourself can’t think of something you would give up to get a workable compromise, isn’t that part of the problem? Me, I would accept higher taxes and fewer benefits (e.g., means-testing Social Security, and raising the retirement age), for the sake of stabilizing the system. How about you?

I would have more confidence in our leaders if they would actually lead — that is, tell the people what needs to happen, even if the people don’t want to hear it — and be prepared to accept the consequences. What else is there?

UPDATE:Ezra Klein today:

Frankly, it’s hard to find even one area in which supercommittee Republicans offered a substantially new compromise — or even matched what Boehner offered Obama. Which perhaps makes sense. A Pew poll (pdf) earlier this month asked whether, “on the federal deficit, lawmakers who share your views should stand by principles, even if no progress is made,” or “be willing to compromise, even if it means a deal you disagree with.” Among Democrats, 74 percent chose compromise. Among independents, 67 percent chose compromise. Among Republicans, only 52 percent chose compromise. And the 38 percent who chose principles amassed a pretty good record in 2010 of primarying politicians who betrayed them.

Now that he’s turned 80, the Vatican yesterday accepted Cardinal Bernard Law’s resignation as archpriest of the St. Mary Major basilica in Rome, the cushy position to which he golden-parachuted his way out of Boston, just ahead of the howling mob. Wonder where he’s off to now? A monastery, one hopes, but one doubts. Privilege and humility do not go hand in hand. And you cannot shame the shameless.

We live in a time in which institutional elites fail to suffer meaningful consequences for their massive, damaging failures of leadership, thus bringing the authority of the institutions they led into question. It’s true across our society, particularly in the financial sector. Cardinal Law was and is the poster boy for the unaccountable elite. But he is by no means the only one of his kind, as we see every time we open the newspaper. Perhaps Angelo Mozilo and his friends need a personal chaplain.

Jonathan Chait has written a good companion piece  to David Frum’s complaining about liberal Democrats being too demanding and whiny. Excerpts:

For almost all of the past 60 years, liberals have been in a near-constant emotional state of despair, punctuated only by brief moments of euphoria and occasional rage. When they’re not in charge, things are so bleak they threaten to move to Canada; it’s almost more excruciating when they do win elections, and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace. (Except for Johnson, who was a bloodthirsty warmonger.)

Is it really likely that all these presidents have suffered from the same character flaws? Suppose you’re trying to find dates online, and everybody you meet turns out to be too ugly. Might it be possible that the problem isn’t the attractiveness of the single people in your town but rather your standards?

Of course, the mere fact that the same people make the same complaints all the time does not render all those complaints false. All presidents screw up at least some of the time, and some of them, like Carter, screw things up almost all the time. What’s more, constructive criticism serves a vital role in democracy, and even unreasonable criticism can helpfully push the boundaries of the possible. Yet none of this justifies or explains liberals’ constant depression.

More:

David Frum has a meaty, beaty, big and bouncy essay about why the Republican Party went nutso. I’m not with Frum on social issues, but there’s a lot in this thing I agree with. Excerpts:

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

More:

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

And:

It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

Read the whole thing. If you comment on this, please spare us the ad hominem attacks on Frum. We know, we know. Address his arguments and claims, please.