Douthat sits in a hybrid spot. He isn\u2019t fully buffered in the Charles Taylor sense and he isn\u2019t romantic about porousness either. He\u2019s a modern Catholic intellectual who feels the costs of buffering but distrusts the na\u00efve return to enchantment. His whole project is about trying to live with a managed porousness inside a buffered age.<\/p>\n
He accepts the buffered frame as the default habitat. He writes as someone who knows he is formed by technocracy, analytic habits, elite-college secular culture, medicalization, and a meritocratic worldview. He treats the buffered self as the water he swims in.<\/p>\n
He feels the insufficiency of that mindset. Much of his work reads like a lament for a world where transcendence is harder to experience and harder to take seriously without feeling self-conscious. He sees the boredom, drift, and sterility of purely buffered life.<\/p>\n
He selectively valorizes porousness. Bad Religion and The Deep Places both circle the idea that spiritual experience, suffering, and the supernatural can break through modern insulation. But he never glamorizes full porousness. He sees it as dangerous if unmoored. He prefers porousness disciplined by tradition rather than porousness as free-floating mysticism.<\/p>\n
He tries to carve out a narrow middle lane that is emotionally porous but epistemically cautious. In The Deep Places his own chronic illness pushes him toward a more open posture to non-material explanations while his journalistic training keeps him wary of credulity. You can feel him negotiating between the buffered reflex to doubt and the porous reflex to receive.<\/p>\n
In political commentary he treats the decline of shared thick moral horizons as a buffered-world problem rather than a purely institutional one. He sees the loss of enchantment, ritual, and hierarchy as a key source of malaise. That\u2019s a porous diagnosis of a buffered society.<\/p>\n
He is deeply Taylorian even when he doesn\u2019t cite Taylor. He agrees we live in an \u201cimmanent frame\u201d that narrows spiritual possibility. But he thinks meaning leaks in anyway. So his entire vibe is: the frame is real, you are formed by it, but openings remain. Follow them carefully.<\/p>\n
Douthat is a buffered man who wishes he weren\u2019t quite so buffered and spends his writing life working out how to let a controlled amount of porousness back in without losing sanity, reason, or social footing. This is why he resonates with readers who feel the same tension. It\u2019s also why he annoys both hard secularists and hard mystics.<\/p>\n
The elite-journalist mindset is built inside institutions that reward detachment, verification norms, procedural rationality, and self-presentation as an autonomous chooser. All of that pushes them toward the buffered identity as the obvious, sane way to exist. They don\u2019t experience it as a theory. They experience it as adulthood.<\/p>\n
The buffered frame lets them do their job. It supports skepticism, emotional distance, and the sense that you can stand outside belief systems and evaluate them. It keeps them from being captured by movements and it protects their professional neutrality.<\/p>\n
But the costs show up too.<\/p>\n
They underestimate how much people are shaped by ritual, myth, sacred ideals, group enchantment, status ecologies, and spiritual hunger. They often misread charismatic movements because they assume a buffered psychology where people make discrete, rational choices instead of being swept into collective emotion. They miss the heat and stickiness of identity. They flatten everything into ideology when much of politics is really liturgy.<\/p>\n
They also don\u2019t see their own porousness. Their profession has its own sacreds and taboos but they treat them as neutrality. They have their own rituals and collective effervescence, only it happens in newsrooms, conferences, Slack channels, and social media echo chambers. Because they name it \u201creason\u201d they don\u2019t recognize it as enchantment.<\/p>\n
So yes, most elite journalists assume the buffered identity is just the water everyone should swim in. It gives them a sense of competence and control. It also blinds them to the deep forces moving the people they cover. This is why figures like Benz, Fuentes, Trump, or any other charismatic actor often disorient them. They don\u2019t have the conceptual tools to see how porous identity works in practice.<\/p>\n
The buffered identity shapes news in ways most reporters don\u2019t even notice.<\/p>\n
It narrows what counts as a real cause. Buffered identity assumes people are governed by incentives, interests, and rational calculations. So coverage leans heavily toward material explanations and treats emotion, ritual, myth, and spiritual longing as fringe or decorative. Reporters cover policy, not liturgy. They miss the fact that many conflicts are really battles over sacred meaning rather than cost-benefit logic.<\/p>\n
It sanitizes the texture of lived experience. Porous moments feel uncanny or charged. People describe being moved, seized, pulled, swept up. Buffered reporters translate all that into \u201cmotivated reasoning,\u201d \u201cidentity,\u201d or \u201cdisinformation.\u201d They flatten intensity into categories that feel safe inside the immanent frame. The mystical or the collective gets written out of the story.<\/p>\n
It builds a blind spot around charisma. Charismatic authority looks irrational from inside buffering. Journalists interpret it as manipulation or demagoguery because they can\u2019t feel its appeal from the inside. They handle it like a pathology. This creates constant misreads of movements that run on enchanted energy. They don\u2019t get how status, ritual, and shared ecstasy function.<\/p>\n
It produces tone policing. Buffered identity values emotional restraint. So anyone who speaks from visceral conviction gets labeled extreme or unserious. Passion reads as danger. Newsrooms reward the type of writer who watches life rather than participates in it. That shapes who gets hired and who shapes the narrative.<\/p>\n
It makes \u201cbalance\u201d and \u201cobjectivity\u201d feel like moral goods instead of professional techniques. Buffered identity treats distance as virtue. You become suspicious of anything that smells like commitment. This influences what stories get framed as \u201cimportant,\u201d which voices get credibility, and which experiences are dismissed as subjective.<\/p>\n
It drives a preference for elite sources. The buffered self identifies with technocratic competence. So reporters instinctively trust institutions, experts, and credentialed authority. They assume these people see clearly and everyone else is clouded by passion or myth. That produces coverage that leans managerial and treats grassroots sentiment as noise rather than signal.<\/p>\n
It creates an allergy to sacred language. Any talk of good, evil, sin, redemption, vocation, or destiny makes elite reporters recoil. They translate everything into psychology or politics. They don\u2019t know how to report on meaning except through the buffer\u2019s filters. This makes huge parts of human experience feel invisible in mainstream coverage.<\/p>\n
The result is a news ecosystem that is excellent at tracking facts inside the immanent frame and often terrible at understanding the forces that actually move people. It\u2019s why populism keeps surprising them. It\u2019s why they misinterpret religious reactions, culture wars, online subcultures, and charismatic influencers.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re reporting a world that\u2019s half real. The half they can measure and verify. The half that fits the buffered template. The other half leaks out through the cracks but never quite gets named.<\/p>\n
In the news business, the differences in buffered vs porous identity track along role, format, status, and generational cohort. The news business isn\u2019t a single cognitive style. It\u2019s a hierarchy of bufferedness.<\/p>\n
National prestige reporters are the most buffered. Think NYT, WaPo, FT, NPR, and similar outlets. Their training, peer environment, and professional survival incentives all reward analytic distance. Their identity depends on being the person who is not swayed. They police porousness in themselves and each other. This is the zone where the buffered self feels like the only legitimate self.<\/p>\n
Magazine feature writers and essayists sit one notch less buffered. They\u2019re still formed by elite norms, but they\u2019re allowed some emotional and existential range. You see more willingness to describe awe, fear, enchantment, trauma, liminal moments. They still translate it into secular terms, but there\u2019s more space for porous energy to leak in. Douthat is an example, though he\u2019s a columnist not a magazine writer. The Atlantic often lives here.<\/p>\n
Investigative reporters vary. The national-security and corruption-oriented investigators skew buffered because they need suspicion and institutional distance. But the on-the-ground human condition investigators sometimes absorb more porousness because they\u2019re immersed in people\u2019s intense experiences. They still report through a rational frame, but their antennae pick up what the buffered elite often miss.<\/p>\n
Local reporters tend to be more porous. They cover communities where ritual, religion, collective identity, and local mythology play a visible role. They feel the weight of family networks, churches, fraternal orders, booster clubs, sports cultures, and civic rituals. The coverage still uses a buffered style, but the sensibility is closer to the porous world because they\u2019re embedded in it.<\/p>\n
Tabloid and sensational outlets are performatively porous even if the writers themselves are often buffered. Sensationalism runs on intensity, transgression, moral panic, and mythic conflict. It\u2019s not reflective porousness but it mimics it. This is why porous audiences gravitate to tabloids even though tabloids are manufactured by cynical professionals.<\/p>\n
Opinion commentators sit all over the map. Some treat buffered identity as sacred. Others lean fully into a porous style, drawing on mythic narratives, visceral emotion, or spiritual categories. The right populist ecosystem is more porous. The centrist or establishment punditry is extremely buffered. The left has both: traditional liberal commentators are buffered while some more spiritual or identity-driven factions operate porous.<\/p>\n
Longform audio (podcasts) has opened the door to a more porous register. Because conversations run for hours, people speak less guardedly. Reporters trained in the buffered style drift into porous states without noticing. They tell personal stories, admit uncertainty, express awe, wrestle with meaning. The medium itself weakens the buffer.<\/p>\n
Generational differences matter. Older Boomers came up under a Walter-Cronkite ideal of buffered professionalism. Younger reporters often still inherit the frame from their institutions but are less secure in it. Some Gen Z reporters are surprisingly porous in private but write in a buffered voice because the job demands it. Others bring activist tastes, which are a type of secular porousness re-entering the newsroom.<\/p>\n
The higher the prestige and the closer the role is to adjudicating public reality, the more buffered the identity. The closer the role is to lived experience, subculture, or longform narrative, the more porous energy seeps in. This is part of why news often feels thin to readers who sense the porous world. The people closest to the commanding heights have the strongest buffers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Douthat sits in a hybrid spot. He isn\u2019t fully buffered in the Charles Taylor sense and he isn\u2019t romantic about porousness either. He\u2019s a modern Catholic intellectual who feels the costs of buffering but distrusts the na\u00efve return to enchantment. … Continue reading