Redescending

I can’t quite believe I’m doing this. Again.

A month ago I was putting the finishing touches on our latest Renaissance Masterpieces Series film about Sofonisba Anguissola’s Chess Game, which we’d scheduled for release in late July. The only thing left to do was produce a series of identical “native” versions in four other languages (French, German, Italian and Spanish) as per our current policy.

But suddenly, possessed by some mysterious, long-buried sentiment, I found myself driven to completely switch gears and make something that chronicles the USA’s recent fall into its woeful state of profound moral and intellectual turpitude.

The result, Descent: How America lost its mind, soul & moral compass, is being released today – July 4th seemed like an appropriate occasion too good to miss, resonating strongly as it does with our deep love of irony (Below is the trailer, while paid subscribers can now access the full film).

Given the context, I feel compelled to begin with a candid admission or two.

First, I am not American. I was born and raised in Toronto; and while I appreciate that this might seem to “explain” some sort of “anti-American” orientation, it turns out that nothing could be further from the case. I’ve long been convinced that, for all its faults, the United States has been one of the most impressive and inspiring places in human history. Which makes its current, sudden descent so much more painful.

And while it’s certainly true that there has long been a strong vein of anti-American prejudice rippling through the Canadian psyche (well, the English Canadian psyche at least—French Canadians, in my experience, tend to be much more well-balanced on this point), I’ve always found that to be both tediously parochial and not a little hypocritical.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard Canadians repeatedly trumpet how their society is considerably more humane than that of their southern neighbours (note the “u”), given that it offers a spectrum of measures, such as gun control and universal health care, that strongly enhance the quality (and quantity) of its citizens’ lives.

All of which is certainly true.

But it is also true that Canada is hardly the only country that enshrines such vital protections of its people—virtually every modern liberal democracy does so too. This is not to take anything away from Canada’s accomplishment here, of course, but only to make the obvious point that, when it comes to enlightened social policies—or lack thereof—it is America that is the clear exception, not Canada. Where else do millions of self-proclaimed “Christians” unhesitatingly support a political party consistently focused on providing tax breaks for the super rich while eliminating social programs? Where else is there such a staggeringly depressing correlation between incarceration rates and skin colour? Where else, indeed, does one find “for-profit prisons”?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, there is this conspicuous little fact consistently overlooked by prideful Canadians (if this strikes you as veritably oxymoronic, you’ve been duped by the constant stream of Canadian propaganda being emitted on this very point: the truth is that Canadians are positively riddled with pride—so much so that one of their favourite activities is to loudly lament how unproud they are, how the only thing wrong with them is how they aren’t as annoyingly in-your-face patriotic as the Americans are; in short, a key aspect of Canadian pride seems to be how they, inexplicably, are not nearly as proud as they obviously should be): America, for all its faults, leads the world in pretty well everything.

And by everything, I mean, well, everything.

Pick a topic—any topic. Ancient Greek philosophy. Inorganic chemistry. Music theory. Byzantine art. Genetic engineering.

And then ask yourself where the universally acknowledged experts of this subject are located. And you will find, in almost every instance, that the majority of those experts are to be found somewhere in the United States of America, and sometimes in pretty unlikely corners of it.

That is a simply staggering fact, which straightforwardly leads to a very ominous conclusion: if the United States were to somehow disappear or collapse, we’d all be in serious, serious trouble.

And it was precisely the spectre of such a hitherto unimaginable scenario that motivated me to write my little book, Exceptionally Upsetting: How Americans are increasingly confusing knowledge with opinion & what can be done about it, four years ago. I tried to gently make the argument that America, which had long liked to think of itself as an exceptional country, actually was such a place, but ironically not in the way that most people thought, fixated as they were on largely incoherent and historically inaccurate notions of capitalism, freedom or democracy—none of which are particularly American, or even, most of the time, best instantiated in the United States.

And while the argument allowed me to indulge myself in numerous enjoyable flights of pedantry, the main, all-too-serious point was this: if America continued to stubbornly fail to recognize the truly invaluable gifts that it offers the world, it risked losing them altogether as it tore itself apart in its current hateful, mindless, and entirely superfluous fury. To all of our profound detriment.

Of course I hardly imagined that my warning would have any impact, and it most assuredly didn’t (having the longest subtitle in the history of book publishing likely didn’t help, but it’s hard to seriously conclude that that was the deciding factor). But that’s not why I did it. For the billions of “non-influencers” like me, if you genuinely think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you only have two choices: stand by and idly watch it descend into the mire, or try, in your own quiet way, to push back a little, to perhaps slow things down a picosecond or two.

But of course even that didn’t happen, as what even I in my most pessimistic moments couldn’t imagine back in 2021 turned out to be the case: that America not only didn’t learn any of the lessons from its first dalliance with irrational authoritarian demagoguery, but instead wilfully elected to plunge the knife in considerably deeper.

So, masochist that I am, once more I find myself back on my little soapbox, but now with a documentary film rather than a book. This time around I’m not even pretending that the ship can be righted, but simply coolly documenting what happened so that any future historically-minded people can see for themselves how precarious genuine excellence is.

Happy July 4th.

Howard Burton

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