Rod Dreher's Blog, page 107

Living With The Body

Quillette is so invaluable. Where else would you be able to read this amazing warning tale by Scott Newgent, a female-to-male transsexual who is happy living as a male, but who says the overwhelming number of websites and media outlets selling trans to unhappy teenagers are lying to those kids and their families about what’s ahead. Excerpts:

Anyone going through this is in store for a brutal process. Yet we now have thousands of naïve parents walking their children into gender-treatment centers, often based on Internet-peddled narratives that present the transition experience through a gauzy rainbow lens. Many transition therapies are still in an experimental phase—as you will learn if you become sick during or after these treatments.

During my own transition, I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.

During these 17 months of agony, I couldn’t get a urologist to help me. They didn’t feel comfortable taking me on as a patient—since the phalloplasty, like much of the transition process, is experimental. “Could you go back to the original surgeon?” they suggested.

Whenever you question the maximalist activist line on trans affirmation, you are directed to The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (or WPATH) as a reference. But much of what you find there consists of vague phrases such as “up to doctor’s discretion.” Several lawyers suggested I had a slam-dunk medical-malpractice case—until they realized that trans health doesn’t really have a justiciable baseline. As a result, treatment often is subpar, as I have experienced first-hand.

Newgent believes that transition ought to be restricted to adults, who, unlike children and minors, have the capacity to make these decisions:

For parents, I would say this: It is simply not your right or duty to decide to medically transition your child. Remove that burden from your mind. Medical transition is for adults. The negatives associated with medical transition are vast, and you won’t be the one who lives with the consequences. It will be your child. If your child tells you they will kill themselves if you do not allow them to medically transition (perhaps following a script he or she is provided on Reddit or Tumblr), take them to the hospital so they can be treated for suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation and seeking transition are separate issues, so separate them.

We talk a lot about oppression and marginalization. Well, I’m one of the people who’s been oppressed and marginalized—more so now that I have outed myself so that I can try to help others. The least you can do is pay attention to my message.

Read it all. It’s very brave. Newgent will be set upon by trans activists.

Later today I will be participating in an online Zoom discussion alongside Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon and the New York Times‘s Ross Douthat, in which we discuss a new book by O. Carter Snead of Notre Dame: What It Means To Be Human: The Case For the Body in Public Ethics.

Details about the event can be found here. If you want to join the seminar (which is free and open to the public), the Zoom address is: notredame.zoom.us/j/95877407086 

I don’t want to give away here too much of what I’m going to say in my comments, but I’ll say this: Snead’s great new book really does illuminate how far we have gone down a dark road in our society. The three areas he focuses on are abortion, assisted reproduction, and end of life issues. Transgenderism never comes up, but it easily could have, as the thing all these phenomena have in common is a certain way of regarding the body. The word “God” never comes up in this book, and doesn’t need to for Snead to make his case. I finished the book with a greater understanding of the critiques I have been making for years about our social order. It might even be accurate to say that what is wrong with us is less about losing God than about losing Man — though I would say that having first lost God, we could not help but lose Man.

The core of the book is about the bioethics results from the anthropology nearly everyone has come to accept in the modern world. Snead says that our approach to bioethics depends on “an image of the human being that does not reflect the lived experience of embodied human reality in all its complexity.

Instead, it relies on a partial and incomplete vision of human identity that closely tracks what both sociologist Robert Bellah and philosopher Charles Taylor have identified as “expressive individualism,” in which persons are conceived merely as atomized individual wills whose highest flourishing consists in interrogating the interior depths of the self in order to express and freely follow the original truths discovered therein toward one’s self-invented destiny. Expressive individualism, understood in this sense, equates being fully human with finding the unique truth within ourselves and freely constructing our individual lives to reflect it.

More Snead:

People thus encounter one another as collaborative or contending wills, pursuing their own individual goals. Claims of unchosen obligations and unearned privileges are unintelligible within this framework. In this paradigm, the goods of autonomy and self-determination enjoy pride of place among ethical and legal principles. Law and government exist chiefly to create the conditions of freedom to pursue one’s invented future, unmolested by others and perhaps even unimpeded by natural limits.

Snead goes on to say

What is needed, and what this book offers, is an anthropological corrective, an augmentation to the foundations of American public bioethics. To govern ourselves wisely, justly, and humanely, we must begin by remembering the body and its meaning for the creation and implementation of law and policy.

Again, Snead’s arguments in the book are not based on religious claims. Rather, he talks about what it means to live as creatures with bodies. As it happens, I am deep into a terrific new novel, Alexandria, by the English writer Paul Kingsnorth, that is about the same thing. The novel is set a thousand years into a post-apocalyptic future. I won’t give away too much, but the philosophical question at the heart of the conflict is: what does it mean to be embodied? One character speaks of the glories of bodiless existence:

I have no sex, no prejudices, no mother, no father, no family, no home, no history. Thus, I am liberated.

If we use advanced technology to rid ourselves of our bodies, the conceit goes, then we can truly be free. We are free from suffering and death only when we shed our bodies. In the novel, there are a primitive people who resist this claim — but their resistance, interestingly, is based on what can only be described as religious belief. They are not Christians — Christianity seems to have disappeared from this world — but they hold the Earth and all that is in it to be sacred, and believe that those who preach bodiless liberation are demonic. I’m about three-quarters of the way through the novel (which comes out next week), and one thing that impresses me is how none of these simple people can make a philosophical argument against the sophisticated dualists. They rest on their pagan religious beliefs, and the deep intuitions they have from their bodies.

I didn’t plan to be reading Carter Snead and Paul Kingsnorth’s books at the same time, but doing so has been a revelation to me. Snead’s book revealed to me how the Story Of Which We Find Ourselves A Part (to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrase, quoted by Snead) is wholly one in which nearly every narrative is built to support expressive individualism, and its core idea that you are what you desire to be. Kingsnorth’s dystopian fiction is about where that philosophy takes us — specifically, about the violence that Man does to Nature, and ultimately to himself, by using his intelligence and his technology to force the natural world, and his body, to surrender to his unfettered will.

Snead quotes Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion, for the Supreme Court majority, in the 1992 Casey decision reaffirming Roe v. Wade:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Embedded in this statement is the anthropology of expressive individualism. It’s the water in which we all swim. It minimizes and ultimately denies the reality of our embodied existence. Reading Carter Snead, and Paul Kingsnorth, and Scott Newgent together brings about an epiphany that makes one shudder, given how unlikely our civilization is to surrender this, its central myth. As the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich explains in his wonderful new book The WEIRDest People In The World, this is not a belief that emerged in the 1960s, or even in the twentieth century. It has been building in the West for centuries.

But it’s a lie. The world is not like that. Seems to me that we need both critiques like Carter Snead’s and storytelling like Paul Kingsnorth’s, working together to help us remember who we are. We are embodied creatures. We are made to love and to suffer, together. This is the testimony not only of holy books, but of our bodies.

Anyway, I hope to see you on Zoom later this afternoon for the seminar.

The post Living With The Body appeared first on The American Conservative.

Deadly Sins Of Left & Right

American Compass runs a couple of interesting features from partisan thinkers criticizing their own side.

Here’s leftist academic Ruy Teixeira talking about the Five Deadly Sins of the Left. Even though the Left is probably going to win this next election, that’s a sign of Trump’s weakness, not the Left’s strength, says Teixera, because the truth is, “the public just isn’t interested in buying what the Left is selling.” Excerpts:

The Left has paid a considerable price for its increasingly strong linkage to militant identity politics, which brands it as focused on, or at least distracted by, issues of little relevance to most voters’ lives. Worse, the focus has led many working-class voters to believe that, unless they subscribe to this emerging worldview and are willing to speak its language, they will be condemned as reactionary, intolerant, and racist by those who purport to represent their interests. To some extent these voters are right: They really are looked down upon by elements of the Left—typically younger, well-educated, and metropolitan—who embrace identity politics and the intersectional approach. This has contributed to the well-documented rupture in the Democratic Party’s coalition along lines of education and region.

What makes this sin so strange, counterproductive, and perhaps unforgivable, is that popular views on basic issues of tolerance and equality have become much more liberal over the years. The very things the Left was originally fighting for have become less controversial and more accepted—from gay marriage to women’s and racial equality to opposition to discrimination. The Left won.

Of course, that argument was prosecuted in the familiar language of fairness and civil rights; universal principles that have wide appeal and a deep foundation in the nation’s discourse. The same cannot be said for the boutique, academic-derived ideas and language favored by the identity-politics Left, or for the distinctly illiberal attitudes displayed toward dissent from those ideas or use of dis-approved language. Indeed, such emphasis and behavior is antithetical to the universal political and moral principles that have typically animated the Left and underpinned broad coalitions for social change. So long as the Left appears more interested in finding new enemies than in seeking new friends, it will fail to advance its many important priorities.

Identity politics is only one of the deadly sins of the Left, according to Teixeira. Read it all to see his full list.

His point is that the Left really could speak to what most American voters want — but it will have to overcome its own elites and their preferences to do it. He says:

A Left that promotes universal values, a better model of capitalism, practical problem-solving on climate change, and an economy that delivers abundance for all has a great opportunity. But first the Left has to decide if it wants to be popular or Brahmin, only one of which is likely to succeed in a democracy. That is a debate not currently happening.

Meanwhile, conservative think-tanker Henry Olsen shares his Three Deadly Sins of the Right. He begins by asking why it is that for the last 90 years, more Americans have said they are Democrats than Republicans, even when Republicans when national elections? The first Deadly Sin is free-market fundamentalism. Excerpt:

A commitment to individual freedom cannot, however, transform into a dogmatism that blinds its followers to the misery that individual human beings can cause to one another, including misery delivered by private means. Human history teaches us that the vast majority of people do not aspire to greatness, are not entrepreneurial risk takers, and will submit to bad deals to avoid death or penury. The very virtues that lead to good in the hands of the talented and the virtuous can, and too often do, lead to exploitation at the hands of the callous and the corrupt. Human civilization does not present the simple binary choice between public and private action that ideologues Left and Right want, with all good on one side and all evil on the other.

Too often, the Republican Party falls prey to market dogma and exalts private action and choice as goods in and of themselves regardless of the circumstances or the effects. Thus, the poor are undeserving of help because they are to blame for their plight; those who see their livelihoods cast aside and their communities destroyed by globalization deserve no consideration; minorities who are subject to discrimination on the job just need to take their lumps and persevere, perhaps even content in the knowledge that such inefficient human-resources practices will surely lead to their employers’ demise. This attitude is what I label “free-market fundamentalism,” the notion that whatever happens in private affairs is good per se and that government action can never be countenanced to restore justice to our lives, nor will it succeed if tried.

That’s true — but it’s also easy, and obvious. Still, I’m glad he said it, as I think it is the biggest problem facing the Right. A more interesting Deadly Sin of Olsen’s is Hubris, which expresses itself, he says, in part through the GOP fetishizing two personality types: the Businessman and the Pious Man. Excerpt:

Mitt Romney exemplifies the first category; much of his support was attributable to his business success. One Republican activist told me in 2012 that he backed Romney because his background meant he could make the necessary tough decisions. “He’s fired his friends,” this person exclaimed, seemingly oblivious to the fact that friends want help, not dismissal. When I warned another GOP leader that Romney was losing because voters perceived him as the scheming Mr. Potter from the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, that person responded that the film’s hero George Bailey, was a simp, and that Mr. Potter was a praiseworthy “value creator.” It was this sense that led Romney and many others in the GOP to embrace the morally obscene “makers versus takers” argument, the exposure of which arguably sunk Romney already floundering campaign.

Many in the Republican camp likewise elevate the believing Christian, seeing all others as fallen not only theologically, but also politically. Increasingly, Republican presidential nominees courting Iowa’s dominant religious conservatives feel obligated to proclaim fealty to Jesus Christ before the caucuses. Ted Cruz said during his presidential campaign that, “any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this country.”

Read it all. 

What do you think? What do you believe are some deadly sins of your own side? Or if not deadly sins, then at least things that make the party less successful or appealing than it really ought to be?

One I would add to the Right side — and I don’t know if this is a Deadly Sin, or a sin at all; it might just be an annoyance — is how the Right deals with patriotism. The Left comes across as ashamed to be proud of this country and its history. That’s repulsive to ordinary people. But the opposite extreme in the Republican Party is pretty off-putting too. This is probably the voice of a middle-aged guy who grew up in a period in which American greatness and military might was a constant message in popular culture (read Andrew Bacevich’s 2013 book about American militarism for good insight into this era and its psychological consequences), and who watched America launch a disastrous war in Iraq and an inconclusive forever war in Afghanistan. I don’t suppose it really costs the GOP much to be superpatriotic, but in the aftermath of these wars, this conservative voter finds it really off-putting. I feel like they’re trying not only to sell me something, but to sell themselves something. It’s political kitsch. Milan Kundera, talking about communist kitsch, says:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

Kundera elsewhere defines kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” That’s pretty good. Republican kitsch absolutely denies that America is capable of shitty things. Democratic kitsch absolutely denies that American is capable of non-shitty things, except for when it admits its shittiness. I hate both forms of kitsch. They’re unreal, and they seem more about managing partisan emotions than saying anything true about our country and its people.

Again, I’m pretty sure that’s a boutique complaint. But as a conservative, I get so tired of the phony, manufactured emotionalism on my side. The first time I ever had a good thought about Donald Trump was the moment in the 2016 GOP candidates’ debate in South Carolina, when he said the Iraq War was a bad idea, breaking a taboo among major Republican candidates (Ron Paul had honorably said the same thing in his past runs, but he was always a fringe figure). Why was this taboo until Trump said it? The answer to that, however you define it, is a sin of the Right, possibly a deadly one.

Anyway, let’s hear it from you, about your own side: What are some deadly sins?

The post Deadly Sins Of Left & Right appeared first on The American Conservative.

Amazon Gives A Hand To Soft Totalitarianism

From Live Not By Lies:

Soft totalitarianism, as we will see in a later chapter, makes use of advanced surveillance technology not (yet) imposed by the state, but rather welcomed by consumers as aids to lifestyle convenience—and in the postpandemic environment, likely needed for public health. It is hard to get worked up over Big Brother when you have already grown accustomed to Big Data closely monitoring your private life via apps, credit cards, and smart devices, which make life so much easier and more pleasurable.

From an Amazon news release today:

We’re always looking for ways to make our customers’ lives better, and one area where we’ve spent time innovating is the customer shopping experience in stores. Today, our physical retail team is excited to introduce a new innovation called Amazon One. Amazon One is a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to make everyday activities like paying at a store, presenting a loyalty card, entering a location like a stadium, or badging into work more effortless. The service is designed to be highly secure and uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person’s unique palm signature.

They add, in a Covid-19 reference:

And it’s contactless, which we think customers will appreciate, especially in current times.

In our social credit future, this biometric system and the data attached to it will be used to keep Deplorables from going into stores and workplaces. It will be difficult for them to buy or sell if they do not conform. The  palmprint is the mark each of us will need to buy or sell — which we can do as long as the regime certifies that we are compliant, because there are no compromising data attached to our hands.

Let the reader understand.

You don’t think you need to read Live Not By Lies? Each day brings more birth pangs of the new world.

The post Amazon Gives A Hand To Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Covid Slaps Tony Green Hard

Tony Green’s story is as scary as hell. Tony, 43, was a Covid minimizer, until it hit him and his family. Read on:

When President Trump got sick, I had this moment of deja vu back to when I first woke up in the hospital. I know what it’s like to be humiliated by this virus. I used to call it the “scamdemic.” I thought it was an overblown media hoax. I made fun of people for wearing masks. I went all the way down the rabbit hole and fell hard on my own sword, so if you want to hate me or blame me, that’s fine. I’m doing plenty of that myself.

He and his partner and their families had been social distancing for a long time, and finally got fed up with it. They planned a long weekend get-together. More:

I have about 4,000 people in my personal network, and not one of them had gotten sick. Not one. You start to hear jokes about, you know, a skydiver jumps out of a plane without a parachute and dies of covid-19. You start to think: “Something’s really fishy here.” You start dismissing and denying.

I told my family: “Come on. Enough already. Let’s get together and enjoy life for once.”

So they did. At the end of the weekend, Tony got sick. Then his partner did. Then both sets of parents did. All six people at that weekend get-together came down with the virus. Here’s where it gets freaky:

I told myself it wouldn’t be that bad. “It’s the flu. It’s basically just the flu.” I didn’t have the horrible cough you keep hearing about. My breathing never got too terrible. My fever peaked for like one day at 100.5, which is nothing — barely worth mentioning. “All right. I got this. See? It was nothing.” But then some of the other symptoms started to get wild. I was sweating profusely. I would wake up in a pool of sweat. I had this tingling feeling all over my body, this radiating kind of pain. Do you remember those old space heaters that you’d plug in, and the red lines would light up and glow? I felt like that was happening inside my bones. I was burning from the inside out. I was buzzing. I was dizzy. I couldn’t even turn my head around to look at the TV. I felt like my eyeballs were in a fishbowl, just bopping around. I rubbed Icy Hot all over my head. It was nonstop headaches and sweating for probably about a week — and then it just went away. I got some of my energy back. I had a few really good days. I started working on projects around the house. I was thinking: “Okay. That’s it. Pretty bad, but not so terrible. I beat it. I managed it. Nothing worth shutting down the entire world over.” Then one day I was walking up the stairs, and all of the sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I screamed and fell flat on my face. I blacked out. I woke up a while later in the ER, and 10 doctors were standing around me in a circle. I was lying on the table after going through a CT scan. The doctors told me the virus had attacked my nervous system. They’d given me some medications that stopped me from having a massive stroke. They said I was minutes away.

That’s the crazy thing about this virus — it hits people in different ways. I found out over the weekend that a classmate of mine from high school has been fighting the virus and its effects since June. He is now hospitalized; somehow, the thing is in his bones.

Read it all to find out what happened to the rest of the people in Tony’s family.

Tony wrote about it too for the Dallas Voice, the city’s gay newspaper. In his column, he said:

You cannot imagine the guilt I feel, knowing that I hosted the gathering that led to so much suffering. You cannot imagine my guilt at having been a denier, carelessly shuffling through this pandemic, making fun of those wearing masks and social distancing. You cannot imagine my guilt at knowing that my actions convinced both our families it was safe when it wasn’t.

For those who deny the virus exists or who downplay its severity, let me assure you: The coronavirus is very real and extremely contagious. Before you even know you have it, you’ve passed it along to your friends, family, coworkers and neighbors.

And now, husbands, wives and children are being separated. The sick are taking care of the sick while those without symptoms are self-quarantining. I am aware of how my bias could discredit me with some, but trust me, you do not want this virus. And you do not want your loved ones suffering and dying from this because you are taking a “political stand” or protecting the economy over their lives.

We are all at the precipice of a common heartache.

The next time you’re put out because your favorite spots are closed or because they won’t let you enter without wearing a mask, and you decide to defy them rather than comply because you’re defending your rights and freedoms from being trampled, just remember: Your family and friends may be next.

Is that too harsh? Try imagining someone you care about on life support. Try being the one to pick the only 10 people allowed to attend a funeral for a loved one. But don’t fret; you’ve got time to ponder, because the mortuary is booked out for at least a week.

Now imagine one more thing: That pool party, the mixer or family reunion you’re pushing for resulting in you being cold and alone in a hospital bed, fighting for your life. Imagine the only human contact you feel is a stranger’s rubber glove giving you medication, checking your vitals and changing your diaper.

That is exactly what has happened to our family.

America, this is not going to go away without sacrifice. Either way, we are going to pay a price. Governments are faced with making difficult decisions, and they cannot appease and satisfy everyone.

I appreciate his testimony. I needed to hear it. We cannot get complacent. Today I’ve been sleeping because I’ve had something of a relapse of Epstein-Barr symptoms, after having a reprieve in midsummer. It always comes back when I’m under stress; maybe all the book publicity triggered something, I dunno. If — probably when — Covid hits me, God knows what it’s going to do to me. It’s so unpredictable in its effects that the whole thing seems like a lottery.

News from Politico that the nations of Central Europe are really feeling the strain right now. I was e-mailing with a friend in Hungary about this earlier today, who said that Hungary faces a Sophie’s choice: either shut down hard and tank the economy, or try to stay open and overwhelm the health care system. This is going to be a very hard fall and winter, isn’t it?

As I’ve said here often, I think Trump’s handling of the virus has been terrible, really terrible. But I don’t expect things to change with the virus should Joe Biden become president. Here was the scene outside the Staples Center last night when the Lakers won the NBA Championship:

Oh No

‘F— You, Fascist,’ Said Progressive Christian

I received a longish e-mail last night from a reader, aged 62, who described himself as a progressive Episcopalian. He wrote to tell me why he has quit reading this blog. Most of the letter is regret, then anger, that I have not adopted the mainstream liberal line on all things racial. But then, at the end, he reveals his hand:

You’ve shown yourself to be a cruel, warped little man, and I can only hope and pray that one day you finally come to your senses. In the meantime, I’m joining several other people in calling for your jurisdiction in the ROCOR to suspend you from the sacraments until you publicly repent, and I hope the day soon comes with all of the mainstream denominations drive you and your ilk out for good.

So with all that said, let me offer my parting words: f*ck you, fascist scum. And if progressives ever do actually get political power in the United States – which I almost certainly won’t live to see at my advanced age, but one can always hope – you can better believe we’re coming after white supremacist churches like yours, and we’re not going to stop until you all lose your tax exempt status.

Well, golly. Rebukes like that make me laugh. I wrote back to the poor soul to offer gentle mockery, which was probably unkind, but was kinder than he deserved after that outburst. Perhaps I’m a bit too in touch with my inner Uncle Chuckie, but it comes with over three decades of being an opinion journalist. What other reasonable response is there to a grown man — indeed, a man of mature years — upchucking such drivel onto a stranger? What gets in to people?

(Plus, I’m not in a ROCOR — Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia — parish, but if I were, the idea that the most conservative jurisdiction of Orthodoxy in America would take orders from a progressive Episcopalian on how to govern its people is genuinely comical. But you’d have to be Orthodox to appreciate the vanity of a progressive Episcopalian saying so.)

I’m sharing this here, though, because that final paragraph really is a warning to the rest of us. I believe that there is a significant element in progressive Christianity in America that in years to come will be leading the charge to punish traditional churches and individual believers, to prove their loyalty to the regime and its ideology. It won’t be out of fear of their own persecution. It will be because they really do believe it.

From Live Not By Lies:

It’s possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, precisely because we have a misunderstanding of how its power works. In 1951, poet and literary critic Czesław Miłosz, exiled to the West from his native Poland as an anti-communist dissident, wrote that Western people misunderstand the nature of communism because they think of it only in terms of “might and coercion.”

“That is wrong,” he wrote. “There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”

In The Captive Mind, Miłosz said that communist ideology filled a void that had opened in the lives of early twentieth-century intellectuals, most of whom had ceased to believe in religion.

Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” to bring about “social justice.”

The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors, (aka SJWs), who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cultural critic René Girard prophetically warned: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

Girard and Milosz describe my correspondent, though he remains a religious believer, albeit one anchored in a diminishing cult that substitutes left-wing politics for authentic Christian spirituality. (We have these on the Christian Right too, sadly.)

What interests me more — and concerns me more — is how Critical Race Theory and “antiracism” is racing through the more conservative churches. Let me remind you of some fundamental dogmas of antiracism (an Orwellian term designed to manipulate), as stated by its chief spokesman, Ibram X. Kendi:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one.
An antiracist is someone who is supporting an antiracist policy by their actions or expressing an antiracist idea. “Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment.

There you have it. The only way to achieve justice, according to Kendi, is to discriminate against white people. White people who believe that justice requires fighting discrimination are worse than white nationalists. And there is no such thing as neutrality: all of life is filled with racial politics; everything you do and everything you think is either racist or antiracist.

This is a totalitarian race ideology — totalitarian because it leaves no aspect of life untouched by its race radicalism. Note well that it explicitly calls for people — white people, in this case — to be treated unequally under law because of their race, and if you oppose this because you believe that racial discrimination of any kind is immoral (as Dr. King taught), then you are worse than Richard Spencer and David Duke.

Ibram Kendi and his poison are welcomed by the most powerful companies in America to spread the word within. He is invited onto national TV to offer his counsel. “Antiracism,” a left-wing illiberal ideology, is part of the successor ideology to liberalism. This is what the powerful increasingly believe in this country. A college professor who teaches at a major US university told me the other day that the “architecture” of suppressing academic freedom, free speech, and free thought is going up right now throughout American academia — all in the name of “antiracism.”

Let me be clear: racism is wrong. Racism is sin. But you do not fight one kind of racism by instituting a different kind of racism. That’s what Kendi and his followers believe. It’s toxic, it’s dividing our country, and it’s going to lead to something very, very ugly.

This ideology has made its way into the (online) pages of Christianity Today, for a long time the flagship journal of American Evangelicalism. From an essay CT published online last week, under the title, “The Shocking Necessity of Racial Violence.” The author is a black woman, Christina Barland Edmondson. She begins by recalling the horrific racist violence of the 1920s Tulsa massacre. She points out — rightly! — that the Christianity of the white people of Oklahoma did not keep them from killing and plundering black people, solely because of race. There can be no doubt that Edmondson is right on this point. But then:

The so-called shared faith of white Christians and black Christians does not guard against violence toward the Emmett Tills, Tamir Rices, or George Floyds of society.

White supremacy’s sinful dance, swaying back and forth between Klansmen’s sheets and clergy robes, pains and plagues Christian of color and lies to white Christians. Violence is not neutered or challenged. White Christianity’s very design exists to maintain false piety and sear the consciences of white people against the oppression and exploitation of blacks.

Whoa! Emmitt Till was murdered by whites in Mississippi in 1955, in what was unmistakably a racist crime. The child Tamir Rice was shot by police in a 2014 accident when he pointed a toy gun at officers. That was a tragedy — but how in the world is it a racist act comparable to the murder of Emmitt Till? And in the George Floyd case, it is by no means clear that his death at the hands of Minneapolis police was motivated by racism. For Edmondson, though, the fact that the victims in all these cases were black is the only fact that matters.

This, of course, is how the “antiracism” theorists reason: the only explanation for disparities in outcome among racial groups in which blacks are disadvantaged (not, say, the NBA), is racism.

Edmondson goes on:

Spiritual violence against black Americans in the political sphere means disparaging and minimizing the faith of black Christians. Appealing to the notion of a singular Christian worldview, Southern Baptist Seminary president Al Mohler stated in a room filled with white men that a vote for Trump in 2020 would be most in line with “Christian worldview.” Mohler’s statement went beyond the partisan and political. His statement was theological with significant implications for the unity of the church in America. As president of the flagship seminary for the largest Christian denomination in the United States, his religious endorsement of a highly controversial president known for racist and sexist rhetoric and actions mattered significantly.

Christians debate the appropriateness of religious leaders speaking so openly about their personal support of candidates and the necessity of other Christians to fall in line. My concern, while subtle, knocks at the door of spiritual violence. By saying one’s “Christian worldview” leads to reelecting Donald Trump in 2020, Mohler asserts that faithful Christian theology applied to politics must draw the same political conclusions as most white conservative Christian men in this country. This is the group that has voted and will likely vote for Trump in large numbers again.

This same assertion, proclaimed from pulpits, tweets, and faux confessional statements, put on trial the Christian integrity and witness of black Christians who have overwhelmingly voted against Donald Trump. Black women report some of the highest levels of Bible study, charitable giving, authoritative views on Scripture, amount of time praying, and church attendance. But because of their political and theological misalignment with Trump and Republican agendas, they are deemed by default biblically ignorant, and at worse, heretics, cultural Marxists, and whatever new term works to caricature and discredit those holding a differing view. Welcome to politically motivated spiritual violence.

This is appalling, and I cannot believe it was published by Christianity Today. Al Mohler may or may not be correct about the necessity for Christians to support Donald Trump. It is a prudential judgment. I know Christians who are completely unconflicted about voting for either Trump or Biden. But I also know Christians who are going to vote for Joe Biden, though they cannot abide the Democratic Party’s policies, because they believe that the continuing presence of Trump in office hurts the country. And I know Christians who are going to vote for Donald Trump, though they cannot stand him and think he has been a lousy president overall, because they believe that putting a Democrat in the White House would result in laws and policies that hurt the country more than having Trump does.

I don’t judge the quality of those people’s faith based on how they plan to vote, and I resent it when people do. Edmondson crosses some important lines in her denunciation of Al Mohler. She’s perfectly within her rights to criticize his judgment. But she goes farther. She accuses him of racism, simply for reaching a different political conclusion than black Christians — as if disagreeing with black Christians on political matters is necessarily racist. She puts words in Mohler’s mouth that he did not say. She accuses him of “politically motivated spiritual violence.” Coming right after a denunciation of the murderers of the Tulsa victims, and of Emmitt Till, as well as those who killed Tamir Rice and George Floyd, this is unconscionable. Christianity Today ought to be ashamed for publishing such slander.

Edmonson ends with this:

The humanity and its intrinsic resistance to oppression is so evident in the black believer in America, pushing, pressing, praying, and protesting against the violence of racism. Through humor, scholarship, and art, they mock the foolishness of the caste system that places the beloved of God on the bottom. The necessary violence of racism is combated by the nonviolent and steadfast resistance of black Christians, which reminds all of us who we are designed to be. White Christians, will your shared humanity and Christianity move you from violence and violence-denying to the nonviolence of empathy, solidarity, and repair?

Oh? What about all the rioting and looting, in which black Americans participated? Was that the fault of black Christianity? Of course it wasn’t. You cannot blame the black church for what those individual criminals did. You cannot plausibly blame all black people for what they did, any more than you blame all white people for racial violence perpetrated by individual whites. The sacrificial work of abolitionism by white Christians of the 19th century does not negate the evils done by white segregationist Christians, but it should at least remind people that the line between good and evil on racial matters does not run between the races.

Collective guilt is a monstrous idea. Racializing ordinary political and theological differences, and accusing one’s political opponents (if they are white) of being party to a long and brutal history of violence, including rape and murder, simply because of the color of their skin — that is scandalous.

And it is fundamentally anti-Christian. Every one of us is a sinner. Every one of us has it within our hearts to give ourselves over to all manner of sin, including violence. And, like the aboriginal sinner Adam, we want to point the finger at the Other, to externalize our shame by saying that the Other Person made us do it, or the Other Person bears the true guilt here, or the Other Person is more evil, and so forth. Resorting to a strategy of collective guilt (and its corollary, collective innocence), is dangerous and corrupting.

I don’t see anything wrong in principle with examining the history of how the church in America has handled, and mishandled, racial matters. But this interrogation has to be carried out in good faith, not as an empty exercise in asserting power. What I’m seeing today from too many places — including among white Christians — is exactly what Rene Girard saw twenty years ago:

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.

We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.

I took that from the Stanford scholar Girard’s 2001 book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning. This further quote is useful:

I did not read Mohler’s defense of voting for Trump, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that the Democratic Party and contemporary progressivism favors precisely the things that Girard lists as the effects of radical contemporary victimology: abortion, euthanasia, and sexual undifferentiation. It is entirely possible that Trump is so bad that it is necessary for believing Christians to vote for the Democrats anyway. I don’t believe that personally, but I believe that it is possible for a Christian to believe that in good faith. But what must be firmly rejected is this idea that a Christian who votes against the party of abortion, euthanasia, and sexual undifferentiation is guilty of racialized “spiritual violence.”

This is a great deception. It is being used now to silence dissent: either get in line behind progressive politics, racial and otherwise, or stand denounced as a bigot. This is not about expanding the conversation and deepening our understanding of a complex phenomenon. It is about forcing dissenters to fall silent.

It will not stop there. Mark my words: it will not stop there. I began this post with a quote from a letter a self-described progressive Episcopalian sent to me to denounce me. I believe the vanguard leading the charge against individual traditional Christians, their churches, and their institutions — will be zealous progressive Christians. Ultra-Christians, as Girard might have called them. More Christian than Christ.

UPDATE: Reader Digory posts this comment:

Just so there is no confusion, Christina Edmondson appeared at an event hosted by the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in 2016. The Gospel Coalition was also a host (think Trevin Wax). So she’s not criticizing Al Mohler from the outside; this is internal warfare against religious conservatism.

Evangelical leaders made *huge* bets that Edmondson and friends would bring about racial reconciliation in our churches. Instead, there is huge pressure to join Kendi’s feel-good racism. Either the SBC and PCA will become a force for this new liberation theology, or else there will be new, woke-evangelical denominations.

About 15 years ago, we had a resurgence in Reformed Puritanism among evangelicals. It’s hard to believe it all amounted to the creation of a new PC(USA). But that seems to be the best possible outcome.

UPDATE.2: Sorry, a reader just pointed out that I forgot to link to the CT essay. I’ve repaired that in the above post; here’s the link again. 

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Queering The Elementary Classroom

A reader writes:

I was catching up on your blog today when I read “White Kids To Back Of School Bus” and saw that none other than Evanston, Illinois has finally made its inglorious AmCon debut.

As you’ve read, it is an incredibly Progressive area, with BLM and “In This House We Believe In…” screeds on every front lawn.

So I am not at all surprised to see that Superintendent Horton has made the blog. I used to work as a substitute teacher in an Evanston school district. Attached are a couple of pictures that I took [last year] of some of the posters which are tacked up on the bulletin boards in every classroom at an elementary school.

This is indoctrination for a secular religion. It is frightening.

You gotta see these.






The National Council of Teachers of English declares, “There is no apolitical classroom.” These teachers are preparing their students for a totalitarian society. How? From Live Not By Lies:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

This is how it’s done: immerse the children in left-wing cultural politics from the time they are tiny.

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The Story Of Which We Are A Part

I’ve always got several books going, and yesterday I added one more to the mix: Alexandria, the forthcoming novel from Paul Kingsnorth (will be published on October 20; pre-order here.) I love Kingsnorth’s essays — read some of them here — and have become e-mail friends with him since he wrote me earlier this year after commenting on this blog. He’s an Englishman who lives in rural Ireland. He arranged for his publisher to send me an advance copy of Alexandria; it arrived yesterday. I started reading it at once, and though it’s a little hard to get into, I’m hooked now.

It’s set far into the post-apocalyptic future, among a small community of people living in the fens of east England. They are primitive; we don’t know the nature of the apocalypse that befell the Earth in time out of mind. They have created a natural religion to help them make sense of their world — a story of which they are a part. What made this book a little difficult for me to get into was Kingsnorth’s experimental prose. He is imagining the way people living under those circumstances would talk, having only received the English language, and standard English spelling, in a fragmentary way after the apocalypse.The brokenness of their sentences and spelling is a sign of the severity of the collapse. Here’s an excerpt:

I was struggling with this style until I read it out loud, as an experiment — then everything clicked. Kingsnorth writes like a bard.

Here is the Fall of Man myth that the people of this community hold. Notice how it’s the same one from Genesis — a serpent seducing man — but they have no memory of the Bible.

Get that? The tempter comes as as one who will expose the Way as a lie, as a construct of power that prevents Man from realizing that He is actually a god. He is the bodiless exposer of the Way as a lie meant to keep Man down. Note that in this mythology, the fact that Sir Pent doesn’t have a body is indicative of his nature as a Deceiver. Somehow, I believe, as this book unfolds, we are going to learn that the mythology that these people live by derives from their experience living with bodies in the world.

These people have a prophet, an old man who dreams. They regard birds as sacred, and as carrying portents for them. Early in the book — I’m only 35 pages in — he foretells the return of swans, which no one alive has ever seen. These are the first glimpses the reader gets of the story that this isolated community of survivors lives by.

Anyway, the book is fascinating. Once you get used to its style, it’s like reading documents from an ancient world, though this one far into the future.

It brought to mind a famous line of Alasdair MacIntyre’s:

 

I’ve been thinking about this quote this weekend, actually. On Saturday, I participated in a small Zoom discussion of Live Not By Lies that an old friend organized. One of the participants mentioned that it’s a shame that so many people were so willing to abandon churchgoing in Covidtide. I told him that I disagree — and that my take on the topic was determined in part by realizing that the story of which I find myself a part is the story of Christian prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc. (I didn’t put it like that, but that’s what I was saying.)

I explained that I found myself less freaked out by the Covid restrictions on churchgoing than many of my Christian friends did. I couldn’t quite understand it, until I thought about it, and realized how deeply I had absorbed the accounts of Christians who survived communist prisons.

One of the best books I read in my Live Not By Lies research is the prison memoir of Silvester Krcmery (pronounced “kirch-MERRY”). I have an English translation published in Bratislava under the title This Saved Us: How To Survive Brainwashing. It was later published in the US under the more anodyne title Break Point. Whoever holds the copyright to this book, I beg you to bring it back into print now that Dr. Krcmery is a key figure in a new American bestseller. This book is absolute gold.

In it, Dr. Krcmery, who was thrown into a communist prison in Slovakia for his Christian faith, talks in detail about the things he did to withstand torture, interrogation, and imprisonment. Among his strategies: never feel sorry for yourself. Think of the time in prison as an opportunity to do penance. Think of yourself as “God’s probe” — there to learn spiritually and morally, so that you can help others. With the normal Christian life taken away from you, establish prayer disciplines within the confines of your new reality. Offer your suffering as a gift to God, for the sake of others who suffer. Meditate on your life and on all those you know and love. Think about Scripture. Pray. Pray. Pray.

How small our sacrifices seem when compared to what Christians like Dr. Krcmery, and countless others, had to endure at the hands of communist torturers and jailers! Nevertheless, they were and are real sacrifices. Krcmery teaches us how to approach this trial. I’m also reminded — and I’ll post on this tomorrow, in a separate context — of something a friend told me about recently: the Stockdale Paradox. It’s something that the heroic prisoner of war Admiral James Stockdale once said, about those who survived captivity in Vietnam, and those who didn’t. The optimists were the ones who died of heartbreak, Stockdale said — the ones who kept telling themselves things like, “We’ll be home by Christmas!” The ones who survived were those who held onto hope that they would eventually prevail, but who did not fortify themselves with the false promises of optimism.

So it is with us Christians during Covidtide. The story of which we find ourselves a part did not include suffering, not really. That’s why we have been so cold-cocked by the Covid plague: this kind of suffering has not been in our experience. We didn’t imagine that it could happen to us. But here it is. Now it is time for us to realize that what happened to Dr. Krcmery, and all the other prisoners of conscience, really is part of our own stories as Christians. And because these men and women learned first-hand what it means to suffer well, with sanctity and integrity, they share that with us, so we can make it a real part of our own chapter in the Christian story stretching around the world, and back two millennia.

What if Covidtide has been a severe mercy from God, a gift given to prepare us for a much worse trial to come? In Live Not By Lies, I quote Dr. Krcmery (d. 2013) saying:

We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

Dr. Krcmery was ready for the harshness of communist prison because his spiritual father, the priest Tomislav Kolakovic, had prepared him and the others in their fellowship. Now Dr. Krcmery, Father Kolakovic, and the others are offering to us their stories, for the sake of our own preparation. If you have absorbed these stories as I have, you will not be rattled by this Covid trial of church closures, because you know that it can get much, much worse, and that we Christians absolutely need to prepare ourselves internally and communally for a time when we may not be able to go to church at all, and not because of a virus. Let the reader understand.

One more quote from the Krcmery part of Live Not By Lies:

“Memorizing texts from the New Testament proved to be an excellent preparation for critical times and imprisonment,” he writes. “The most beautiful and important texts which mankind has from God contain apriceless treasure which ‘moth and decay cannot destroy, and thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19).”

Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.

“Indeed, as one’s spiritual life intensifies, things become clearer and the essence of God is more easily understood,” he writes. “Sometimes one word, or a single sentence from Scripture is enough to fill a person with a special light. An insight or new meaning is revealed and penetrates one’s inner being and remains there for weeks or months at a time.”

Dr. Krcmery did not want to be in prison, heaven knows. But the communists didn’t give him a choice in he matter. His spiritual preparation ahead of time (including memorizing Scripture for a time when he could not have a Bible), and his fundamental attitude of there being nothing greater than the opportunity to lay down his life for God, made all the difference. It will for us too, under our much less harsh but still burdensome circumstances.

We will only know what we are to do when faced with trials if we first know the story of which we find ourselves a part. Our story as the Church on a pilgrimage through time is also the story of martyrs and confessors. They offer us priceless wisdom that we now need to understand how to be steadfast in the face of trials that we cannot escape, but only endure. Mere optimism will be the spiritual death of us. We need hope.

For most of us, our story as Americans and as American Christians, has been one of freedom, stability, and prosperity. Of course black Christians have a very different narrative (I hope a black Christian writes a Live Not By Lies or a Benedict Option based on the black church’s historical experience), and other religious believers (Catholics, Mormons, etc) have found themselves persecuted at times. For most of us, at most times, our story is one of peace and plenty. As Dr. Krcmery, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and other dissidents testify, this can all disappear faster than you think. If our story as Christians does not make a central place for suffering as a normative part of the Christian experience, then we are not going to make it through this coming trial. American believers who have only ever been taught that peace, plenty, and religious liberty are normal will experience the loss of these things as a falsification of the Christian story. Those who know better, they stand a better chance of coming through with their faith intact.

I’m going back to Alexandria now, to see how Kingsnorth’s fictional tribe finds the hope and meaning they need to endure their trials. Stories like this can sometimes become part of our story too. Kingsnorth’s terse retelling of the Fall of Man myth helps me understand the actual Fall better. The second part of the myth involves Man climbing into the crown of the World Tree, and the serpent binding him there in pain and terror for nine days, before letting him fall back to the ground. I am quite eager to see where Kingsnorth takes his characters, and me, his reader.

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White Kids To Back Of School Bus

Hello all, we made it through Hurricane Delta just fine — though that’s not the case for the poor folks to the west of us. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Two readers have sent in shocking stories that indicate where we are going as a country. The first one is from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) about an “antiracist” school system in Evanston, Illinois — that is, a school system whose superintendent, a black man, is proving that “antiracism” is in fact anti-white racism.

The reader who sent me the piece said:

The school superintendent in Evanston Illinois has stated that black, brown and LGBTQ students will be able to access in person learning during the pandemic (returning to the school campus) but no other students! So if your child is white, or Asian cisgendered and straight, they will be denied access.

One wonders if desperate parents will ask little Tommy to tell the school he is gay, if neither parent can work from home or so their child can have access to in person learning. And how might a desperate parent prove his/her child is gay or trans? Stick their sons in dresses so they can have access to an actual teacher?

The superintendent says this is a necessary step in the fight for equity. I think we have a very long and dark road ahead of us.

Excerpts:

This summer, school superintendent Devon Horton told the residents of this city north of Chicago that for “oppressed minorities,” the coronavirus was only the latest chapter in their long history of persecution—the pandemic of “inequity and racism and classism” had been holding them down for a lot longer.

In recognition of the impact of racism, Dr. Horton said, Evanston schools would give students from marginalized groups first priority for seats for in-person learning and all other students would be taught remotely. This is “about equity for Black and brown students, for special education students, for our LGBTQ students,” he said during a public meeting, held via Zoom.

The comment generated angry letters and death threats from both residents and nonresidents of Evanston, Dr. Horton said in subsequent interviews. He said he reported the threats to police and is considering getting a security detail for members of his staff. He also said that a disproportionate number of Black and Latino students are struggling in school and it is that struggle—not their race—which will get them priority.

Can you believe that? A separate and unequal public school system that privileges black and Latino students, solely because of the color of their skin. Look at this b.s. rationalization: “it is that struggle — not their race — which will get them priority.” This is how the Left manipulates language to justify embracing racism. He’s getting away with this in part because Evanston is a super-liberal town:

Evanston is a college town, home to many professors who work at Northwestern University, which hugs the shoreline of Lake Michigan. In 2016, voters supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump here by more than 10 to 1. Last year, the city created a first-in-the-nation reparations fund for Black residents.

More:

After the slew of angry letters aimed at Dr. Horton, the school board responded with an open letter to the community.

“When you challenge policies and protocols established to ensure an equitable experience for Black and brown students,” the board said in its letter, “you are part of a continuum of resistance to equity and desire to maintain white supremacy.”

Do you see what’s going on here? If you opposed this radical, racist ideology, and speak out about it, you are a white supremacist. Comrade Horton tells the Journal that he is going to frog-march all his teachers through antiracist training. For those teachers who disagree with any of this, they can either live by the “antiracism” lie, or go find a job elsewhere. If Comrade Horton has his way, nobody will be able to teach in Illinois unless they swear allegiance to the new ideology:

Dr. Horton said he wouldn’t hire a teacher who didn’t support the district’s antiracist agenda and said he doesn’t believe teachers should be licensed by the state if they aren’t trained in antiracism.

“If you’re not antiracist, we can’t have you in front of our students,” he said.

Read the whole thing (with a WSJ subscription). I thank the reader who passed the story on to me.

Whenever you see the word “antiracism,” know that we are talking about leftist-approved anti-white racism, straight up. Know too that this is a totalitarian movement: dissent will not be tolerated. If these people get their way, you will not be able to work unless you capitulate to the ideology. This is done, you see, to protect the “safety” of BIPOC students.

Somebody will file a lawsuit against this — at least I hope they do. And it will be thrown out. Right? Maybe now — not necessarily in the future. Not if the law schools embrace Critical Race Theory, and the next generation of lawyers marinate in this ideology. Look at this: deans at five California law schools defend Critical Race Theory against Trump’s criticism.  This is capturing and in many cases has captured the elites. In Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority.

This is happening here. It’s happening right under our noses. You wake up one day and find that the superintendent of a public school system is using policy to privilege people of a particular race, and the school board, standing behind him, says that anybody who objects to this is defending white supremacy. How many lawyers would be willing to stand accused of defending white supremacy to file suit against the school board?

The reader is right: we really do have a long, dark road ahead of us. Are you ready to walk it with your head held high, not bending the knee?

The second story is about a Washington state agency forbidding great-grandparents from fostering their own one-year-old granddaughter because the great-grandparents, as Seventh Day Adventists, oppose homosexuality and transgenderism. Their own flesh and blood! Fortunately, as Eugene Volokh reports, a federal judge (an Obama appointee) ruled in favor of the great-grandparents. But it is insane that the great-grands literally had to make a federal case of it. This is what Social Justice Warriors in positions of institutional authority can do to religious believers and social conservatives: attempt to separate us from our own families. As you know, in Oregon, the age of medical consent is 15. If you are 15 and want to start injecting yourself with cross-sex hormones, and get your breasts or testicles removed, and you can find the money for it and a doctor willing to do it, your parents are powerless to stop you. The state will defend you.

I look for an underground network to form to protect children and families from the totalitarian social-justice state. I can’t imagine how it would work, especially in a society like ours, increasingly saturated with data-mining surveillance, but I hope that smart people are trying to think through this right now, while we have time.

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Social Trust & Soft Totalitarianism

A little news: I have decided to make the glorious little Eighth Day Books in Wichita the exclusive online seller of signed (via bookplate — it’s a Covidtide thing) copies of all my books.

Eighth Day has sold a ton of bookplate-signed copies of Live Not By Lies. If you want to get the book at rocket speed, order from one of the big guys. But if you want to get a signed copy, and support a fantastic small business, order from Eighth Day — it’ll take a little longer, maybe, but I think it’s worth it. Wherever you order it from, I think this book is going to have a very long tail, as the truth of the situation in our society becomes clearer to Christians and others.

To that point, reader Jon F. put me on to David Brooks’s great new essay in The Atlantic about how the collapse of social trust bodes very ill for America. 

I was genuinely stunned by how close Brooks’s diagnosis tracks with what I write in Live Not By Lies. David’s a friend, so I sent him a note congratulating him on a terrific piece, and sending condolences over the apparent fact that he is finally as gloomy as I am. David wrote back to mention that he had just ordered my book, and was eagerly awaiting it. I was thrilled to hear that he’s going to read Live Not By Lies, and really interested to see that his own independent research and analysis confirms a key part of my diagnosis. Let me explain.

First, what is Brooks’s thesis? From the opening section of his essay:

This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this fateful moment. Its central focus is social trust. Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good. When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.

This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society. It is an account of how, under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still. We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.

When moral convulsions recede, the national consciousness is transformed. New norms and beliefs, new values for what is admired and disdained, arise. Power within institutions gets renegotiated. Shifts in the collective consciousness are no merry ride; they come amid fury and chaos, when the social order turns liquid and nobody has any idea where things will end. Afterward, people sit blinking, battered, and shocked: What kind of nation have we become?

We can already glimpse pieces of the world after the current cataclysm. The most important changes are moral and cultural. The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late 1960s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.

The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety. Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice. Once a generation forms its general viewpoint during its young adulthood, it generally tends to carry that mentality with it to the grave 60 years later. A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.

One question has haunted me while researching this essay: Are we living through a pivot or a decline? During past moral convulsions, Americans rose to the challenge. They built new cultures and institutions, initiated new reforms—and a renewed nation went on to its next stage of greatness. I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.

Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see. The problem goes beyond Donald Trump. The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

As regular readers of Brooks’s columns and books know, he always does a deep dive into social science research. He does the same in this essay. I won’t repost here the details, but I trust you will read the piece and see for yourself. Before he gets into the nitty-gritty, Brooks writes that we are living through the failure of the optimistic post-Christian dream of freedom that emerged from the 1960s. I wrote about this in The Benedict Option, in my discussion about Philip Rieff, the anti-culture, and the triumph of therapeutic culture over the moral culture (or rather, the displacement of moral culture by therapeutic culture. At the time, David was skeptical about my cultural pessimism. He seems to have come around:

For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations. Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.

When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If everybody chooses their own family style, then children will prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class; naive to think the internet would bring us together; naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony; naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn’t predict that oligarchs would steal entire nations, or that demagogues from Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn’t see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind.

I don’t think that we can blame all this on the Left. Yes, from a moral and cultural point of view, the Left has pushed for the destruction of all the norms. But the Right did the same thing in pushing for globalist economics. Both sides are culpable — not in the same way, but they are culpable.

Drawing on social science statistics, Brooks demonstrates that social trust, which is absolutely key to running a successful society, really has collapsed in this country. This is especially true among Millennials and Generation Z. It has collapsed on several fronts, as Brooks notes, but I found these points the most interesting:

First, financial insecurity: By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth. As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Just 3.2 percent! I had no idea it was that bad. Here’s another:

Then, identity insecurity. People today live in what the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called liquid modernity. All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.

Readers of The Benedict Option know that I make much of Bauman’s liquid modernity theory. Brooks’s invocation of it in this context brings to mind the things I’ve been reading and listening to about the epidemic of transgenderism among young teenage girls. As a society, in the name of freedom, and in rebellion against givenness, against reality, we have decided to allow our youth to go psychologically off the rails. What happens when the liquidity of modernity dissolves even maleness and femaleness? We are living through the answer.

Brooks writes powerfully about how all the guideposts have dissolved into thin air, and with it, trust in institutions. The Covid-19 crisis has been an apocalypse that has unveiled all the social rot within.

So what’s next? Brooks:

Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.

The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat. This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual. We’re seeing a few key shifts.

This is huge. Huge! Brooks takes note of the “key shifts” — again, you’ll need to read the essay to see them — then concludes:

The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously. The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do: it’s one of the most important things you can read right now. Brooks says that there’s no way to return to the nation we once were, and that the only plausible future for America is one of “decentralized pluralism.” Can we make that work? Judging from the essay, he doesn’t have a lot of hope. Join the club, friend.

Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function. This is a fundamental truth that Dante Alighieri knew back in the calamitous 14th century. This is why Dante put traitors at the bottom of Hell: because a society without trust becomes unlivable. Today, a reader e-mailed me to say how Covid has changed things for him in his daily life:

However, since March I’ve been pretty astonished at the reactions I’ve seen from neighbors and coworkers. We are very friendly with most of the neighbors on our street and our children frequently play outside with the other children who live on the street and we often chat with the other parents as we watch our children playing together. However, since March all of our neighbors except for one have stayed completely inside their houses and give us unfriendly looks when they drive by and see our family playing outside. I get the feeling that if we lived in one of the places where you can get in trouble for being outside your house that several of my neighbors — who we were previously (and hopefully are still) pretty good friends with — would absolutely report us to the authorities. I don’t know everything about my neighbors but I know that in general they are Christians and they aren’t leftists.

I’ve experienced the same thing at work. I work on [job description] and we were considered “essential” so we’ve never closed down our facility. We have specific situations where we have to follow certain protocols like wearing masks and washing hands and whatnot and I follow all of the rules the company has set, but in situations where we don’t have specific instructions I don’t wear a mask or anything. I have gotten quite a bit of (mostly passive-aggressive, but sometimes overtly confrontational) nasty comments from coworkers whom I either had friendly relationships with previously or don’t really know all that well. I have been astonished at how fast people around me have changed, at least in how they appear to me. Do you think these sorts of changes are unique to this situation and that things will revert back after the pandemic hysteria has calmed down or do you think this is a catalyst for a more overtly totalitarian society as you’ve described in your book? I’ve gone back and forth personally and think it will be somewhere in the middle of those two things but I’m curious how you think our current climate will dovetail into possible exacerbating the creeping totalitarianism we were already experiencing before covid ever happened.

I don’t see us going back. My wife was at the post office today, and said that an old woman was taking out her Covid anxiety on two college student girls who were not social distancing from each other. The girls tried to explain that they were roommates, but the old woman wasn’t having it. She tried to enlist my wife in her crusade to publicly shame these girls, but my wife (who takes making and social distancing rules seriously, and obeys them) told the old woman that the girls were doing the right thing. My wife said that it was clear this old woman is really freaked out by Covid, and was trying to displace that anxiety, at the expense of these girls who were doing nothing wrong.

As I have been writing, within large companies, executives are introducing an ethic of constant suspicion, under the guise of “antiracism.” Almost every day somebody writes me to tell me about how afraid they are in their workplace that they’re going to say the wrong thing, or inadvertently offend the wrong person, and lose their job. I have written here before about how in my newspaper past, I was once accused of “creating a hostile work environment” by something I wrote that had nothing to do with race. It was a completely groundless, bizarre allegation. But the accuser was a black person, and I had absolutely zero trust that the Human Resources department would treat me fairly. If I stood up for myself, and HR ruled for me, the false accuser would suffer no penalty. But if they ruled against me, as I reasoned that they would, I would have lost my job, and maybe even my career (as the guy who was fired for being a racist). I chose to stand down and withdraw what I had written, and thereafter to stay as far away from that black colleague as I could. It was a shame, because previously we had been quite friendly. After that, there was too much at stake. He had my entire career in his hands.

As it later turned out, he was suffering from an undiagnosed illness that probably accounted for his strange behavior. Nevertheless, he crossed a line, and I could not unsee what I had seen: that he was willing to attack me on racial grounds, and the entire system in the workplace was set up to make it easy for people like him to do that, and hard for people like me to defend ourselves. After that incident, there was poison in the air in our workplace, at least as far as I was concerned. I never again felt safe there.

I think about that a lot, because it’s the only time I have felt truly unsafe in the workplace. Again, I had been working happily alongside my accuser since I was at the company, so this was totally out of the blue. If he had come to me and said, “Hey, can we have a word? I know you probably didn’t mean it, but that thing you wrote bothered me. Here’s why.” I would have assured him that I meant no offense, and changed the thing I wrote (which was online), simply out of respect for him. I could have said the same thing using different verbiage, and problem solved. But he didn’t do that. He accelerated it straight to corporate, using legally threatening language. The whole mechanism of heightened racial consciousness in the workplace as the result of these corporate diversity initiatives turned the office carpet into eggshells.

When I think about how that incident damaged the trust within my little part of the organization, at least for me, I think it is simply insane for corporations to bring even more of this toxic woke culture into their organizations. These idiot CEOs love to talk about how they’re going to build a place of “dialogue” about race and so forth, but what they’re actually doing is building spaces where ordinary human dialogue is totally impossible. I saw today where Microsoft is going to allow a large number of its employees work from home permanently. I would take that option in a heartbeat, just so I didn’t have to run the risk of offending some wokester who might try to get me fired. A lot of people will do that, I bet — with resulting isolation and loss of social trust.

And we grow further apart, alienated from each other, and fearful of each other. I was talking recently with an academic friend, who said that within the universities, the “architecture” of Critical Race Theory and its offshoots is now being constructed, and its going to be hell on academic freedom and freedom of thought and discourse. A black editor and writer at the Harvard Crimson has made utterly disgraceful accusations against two white Harvard professors, calling for their firing. My academic correspondent tells me that he has no faith at all that administrators will defend faculty when the woke mobs come for them. Over and over I hear this from friends in academia.

It’s not just academia, either. What English conservative journalist Ed West wrote recently about the coming decline of the Tories in the UK applies to Republicans in the US too:

Young people are just far more liberal than their elders were at the same age, a shift linked to social changes beyond any party control, in particular the long decline of the cultural memory of Christianity. In the long term, these wider cultural trends will probably change back; for one thing, conservatives consistently have more children than liberals, and a political philosophy based on super-sub-replacement fertility won’t last forever — but that is way in the future.

Even more worrying for Conservatives is the fact that whole professions and high-status institutions are moving to the Left, not just in more obviously liberal sectors like academia or journalism but among doctors, scientists and the civil service, not especially Left-leaning areas until recently. Conservatism has become associated with low social status — see a St George’s avatar on someone’s Twitter bio and you can guess their income and education levels — and historically people follow the belief systems of those higher up the social scale.

And:

But the wider anti-conservative cultural moment goes beyond this, and the most aggressive form of activism is now driven by big business — Woke Capital — which stood solidly behind the summer protests, as it now does with all radical movements (except those few that harm the bottom line). Leftism is not something limply subsidised by the state, it is the culturally dominant power, intimately tied in with the very individualism and consumerism previous Conservative policies have helped to promote. It is the politics of the individual who finds meaning with group identity politics because their prospects of a home and a family are slipping away.

Do I really have to spell out for you that the same thing is happening in the US? West says Brexit accelerates the hatred for the Tories among the young, who heavily favored remaining in the EU. In the US, it’s the election of Donald Trump that has alienated the young.

So, look for militant wokeness to continue growing among all the middle-class professions, and in business. This is very far beyond the ability of politics to control. I was listening earlier today to Chris Buskirk’s podcast interview with the neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug). Yarvin talks about how many people really don’t grasp that POTUS doesn’t have much actual power. The Ivy League universities are more powerful than Trump or any president. So is The New York Times. On paper, this makes no sense, but when you examine how power is actually distributed and exercised in American society, as opposed to how it is theoretically distributed and exercises, you understand what he means. This has been a theme of mine for years. The social justice, identity-politics left controls all the high ground in our culture. If a lot of people who don’t share the values of the Left distrust institutions, well, they have reason.

Those conservatives who believe that institutions are fair-minded, classically liberal, and operating in their own bottom-line best interests — those conservatives are deluded. A better model for thinking about how our society works, and is going to work in this brave new world, can be found in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. Nobody in the Soviet Union could tell the truth about the problems that led to the reactor meltdown, and the resulting catastrophe, because everything in the system incentivized lying to protect the ideology. I have seen this same principle at work in professional journalism — in managers hiring to satisfy ideological criteria, not basic competence, with the result that those who saw the incompetence had to keep their mouths shut to protect their own jobs; they knew that if they questioned the ruling ideology, they would be fired.

In Live Not By Lies , I write in the chapter about Hannah Arendt’s list of factors leading to totalitarianism:

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt.

All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”

Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. Loyalty to an ideology over expertise is no less disturbing than loyalty to a personality. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

True story: a lower-level manager I know in a major company went to his senior manager and said that in order to meet diversity goals in his department, he was having to reduce the quality of his department’s output. The work was suffering a measurable falloff because of the lack of qualified, competent personnel who also fit the diversity goals. The senior manager replied that “diversity is one aspect of quality,” and told him to stick with the program. That company’s business has declined precipitously over the years since I became aware of that story. Is it the fault of diversity? Probably not, or at least diversity is not the major reason (the market in that company’s field has changed a lot). But facing an increasingly tumultuous outlook in that industry, that particular company was not prepared to deal with the immense challenges facing it, because it was more devoted to loyalty to diversity ideology than it was to figuring out how to remain competitive.

In Live Not By Lies , I predict that the US is going to embrace some form of China’s social credit system, in which individuals’ ability to participate fully in society and the economy is governed by their “social credit score” — a rating given by the government based on whether or not each citizen can be trusted to be a good citizen. The state uses the massive data it collects from citizens (via direct surveillance and through data harvested from smartphones and online activity) to figure out what they believe, and to judge all their deeds according to the ruling ideology. This sort of thing appalls most Westerners, but we don’t grasp that many Chinese people actually like it. Why? Read this short piece by a scholar who studied this. Excerpt:

The people I spoke to seemed less concerned about giving up some privacy if it meant a significantly higher degree of security and certainty. Many perceived the new social credit system as a national project to boost public morality through fighting fraud and crime and combatting what is currently seen as a nationwide crisis of trust.

Indeed, Maoism destroyed social trust in China, rendering it a nation where nobody knows who is trustworthy. The social credit system gives anxious individuals an objective way of determining that.

Many Americans think that kind of thing would never take hold in America, because we are too individualistic for it. Really? Read David Brooks’s essay. Remember that he said:

The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat. This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.

This new culture will accept digital means of protecting individuals from threats to their self-esteem and identity, including threats from people whose religious, political, or cultural beliefs threaten the ruling ideology of social justice. Equality — now refashioned as “equity,” or equality of outcome, not opportunity — is going to dominate access to well-paying jobs and high-status networks.

Valuing the collective over the individual is not necessarily a bad thing — we could use with a rebalanced focus towards the common good, as opposed to thinking that the common good is the sum total of individuals expressing their choices — but it is going to be quite oppressive to non-progressives, especially because the social controllers have immense power to surveil private life digitally. This is a power that grows constantly; did you hear about the new Amazon Alexa for landlords service? 

You have to keep in mind too that totalitarianism doesn’t simply want you to obey Big Brother. That would be authoritarianism. Under totalitarianism, you actually have to love Big Brother. As I write in Live Not By Lies :

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

As part of its quest to define reality, a totalitarian state seeks not just to control your actions but also your thoughts and emotions. The ideal subject of a totalitarian state is someone who has learned to love Big Brother.

Our own scientists are developing the technology to surveil our inmost thoughts — and doing so in the name of figuring out how better to sell us things. From LNBL:

Your smart refrigerator is sending data about your eating habits to someone. Your smart television is doing the same thing about what you’re watching. Your smart television will soon be watching you, literally. Zuboff reports on prizewinning research by a company called Realeyes that will use facial data recognition to make it possible for machines to analyze emotions using facial responses. When this technology becomes available, your smart TV (or smartphone, or laptop) will be able to monitor your involuntary response to commercials and other programming and report that information to outside sources. It doesn’t take a George Orwell to understand the danger posed by this all-but-inescapable technology.

Your smart device will theoretically be able to monitor how you react emotionally to programming of an ideological nature. Don’t like the scene with a transgender romance in a new series? Your device will record that, and send the data somewhere. This is not science fiction; it’s real. Once again, from Live Not By Lies:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

So: we will not be able to run a successful society in the absence of social trust. In what Brooks aptly call the Age of Precarity, young people — all of whom will have grown up acculturated by invasive digital technology and the abandonment of typical norms of privacy — will seek out means of gaining social trust in the absence of human contacts. That’s where the social credit system comes in. And that’s where the abandonment of bedrock liberal norms like free speech and freedom of religion changes our politics. One last quote from Live Not By Lies:

Soft totalitarianism exploits decadent modern man’s preference for personal pleasure over principles, including political liberties. The public will support, or at least not oppose, the coming soft totalitarianism, not because it fears the imposition of cruel punishments but because it will be more or less satisfied by hedonistic comforts. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the novel that previews what’s coming; it’s rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The contemporary social critic James Poulos calls this the “Pink Police State”: an informal arrangement in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.

Soft totalitarianism, as we will see in a later chapter, makes use of advanced surveillance technology not (yet) imposed by the state, but rather welcomed by consumers as aids to lifestyle convenience—and in the postpandemic environment, likely needed for public health. It is hard to get worked up over Big Brother when you have already grown accustomed to Big Data closely monitoring your private life via apps, credit cards, and smart devices, which make life so much easier and more pleasurable.

I wrote my recent book to help traditional Christians (and conservatives in general) prepare for life in the shadow of therapeutic totalitarianism. David Brooks has not yet read Live Not By Lies, but his new essay helps explain the book.

Hey readers, we have a hurricane hitting us here in south Louisiana tonight. The wind is picking up outside as I write this late on Friday afternoon, so I’m going to go secure some final things in the yard before the storm hits after dark. I’ll approve comments as I can, but it is likely that we will lose power for some time. Please be patient, and I’ll see y’all on the other side of this thing.

The post Social Trust & Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Yelp’s Crude Social Credit System

What could possibly go wrong?

From the press release:

Communities have always turned to Yelp in reaction to current events at the local level. As the nation reckons with issues of systemic racism, we’ve seen in the last few months that there is a clear need to warn consumers about businesses associated with egregious, racially-charged actions to help people make more informed spending decisions. Yelp’s User Operations team already places alerts on business pages when we notice an unusual uptick in reviews that are based on what someone may have seen in the news or on social media, rather than on a first-hand experience with the business. Now, when a business gains public attention for reports of racist conduct, such as using racist language or symbols, Yelp will place a new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert on their Yelp page to inform users, along with a link to a news article where they can learn more about the incident.

Yelp’s top priority is to ensure the trust and safety of our users and provide them with reliable content to inform their spending decisions, including decisions about whether they’ll be welcome and safe at a particular business. We advocate for personal expression and provide a platform that encourages people to share their experience online, but at the same time it’s always been Yelp’s policy that all reviews must be based on actual first-hand consumer experiences with the business. This policy is critical to mitigating fake reviews and maintaining the integrity of content on our platform. We don’t allow people to leave reviews based on media reports because it can artificially inflate or deflate a business’s star rating.

Yelp is experimenting with a crude social credit system. That’s bad enough, but this one is completely unmoderated. There is no way to tell if a business owner is the victim of false accusations (say, by a competitor who wants to hurt his sales). Last year, a court ordered Oberlin College to pay a local bakery $11 million when it lost a libel suit over the college falsely accusing the bakery of racial profiling — this, after a handful of black student activists ginned up false stories to hurt the bakery. Hurt it they did, especially when Oberlin joined in the boycott. Yelp is now facilitating the same thing — and I hope Yelp gets the everliving crap sued out of it.

But wait! There’s more:

Many local businesses want to create a more inclusive environment for employees and customers alike, but they often don’t have the resources that larger companies do to access training materials, educate employees, and develop language to share with their customers and employees. That’s why Yelp and Open to All® have partnered to bring local businesses a new toolkit that allows them to take the next step in creating an inclusive community. The toolkit includes a 60-minute unlearning bias training video for employees, outreach language for customers and employees, social media assets, and more. With more than half a million businesses indicating themselves as Open to All on their Yelp business page, Open to All has created resources for small and medium-sized businesses to uplevel their diversity and inclusion practices. Learn more about these new resources here.

Havel’s Greengrocer now has the opportunity to hang a “Workers Of The World, Unite!” sign on his Yelp-profile front window.

I want you to stop for a second and consider the corporate mindset that wishes to turn the Internet onto businesses and make it possible to accuse them of racism, with no proof whatsoever, and attempt to hurt their business. This is what Social Justice Warriors do. They are making our society unlivable. Now business owners everywhere have to live in fear of a false accusation of racism, accepted and magnified on Yelp, that could destroy their livelihoods.

What is “racist behavior,” anyway? The line is constantly shifting. Everything is racist to the activists and their allies. Everything. 

I want you to consider this post in light of this news from Politico, published on October 1, and sent to me by a reader in Virginia. It’s a piece written by a group of scholars:

Like a growing number of prominent American leaders and scholars, we are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half. Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election—especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process—could generate violence and bloodshed.

Unfortunately, we’re not being alarmist about the potential for violence; trends in public opinion that we’ve been tracking provide strong grounds for concern. Our research, which we’re reporting here for the first time, shows an upswing in the past few months in the number of Americans—both Democrats and Republicans—who said they think violence would be justified if their side loses the upcoming presidential election.

This growing acceptance of the possibility of violence is a bipartisan movement. Our data shows that the willingness of Democrats and Republicans alike to justify violence as a way to achieve political goals has essentially been rising in lockstep.

Read the story to see their numbers. This is so far a minority opinion on both left and right — but it still entails a shocking number of Americans, and the numbers are fast growing. Note as well that both sides are growing equally in their acceptance of violence. This is not a predominantly left-wing or right-wing thing.

More:

How seriously should we take these expressions of violence? Both history and social psychology warn us to take them very seriously. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a rising tide of armed street mobilization and of violent clashes between rival partisans ravaged fragile democratic cultures, bullied and marginalized moderate forces, and gave rising autocrats an excuse to seize emergency powers. Some of us who’ve studied the rise of authoritarians see strong parallels between that period of European history and factors at work in America today.

Exactly. This is what I talk about in Live Not By Lies. We are living in a pre-totalitarian culture. The prospect of Weimar-style street violence between extremists of the left and the right is just one sign. There are so many more, as I discuss in the book.

Now, imagine that you are a small business owner targeted by Social Justice Warriors, who use an activist-weaponized Yelp to drive you out of business with false accusations. How likely are you to care about keeping the peace in a civil order? You are going to want revenge on the people who destroyed your livelihood.

A couple of years ago, I went to a Pizza Hut takeout store in my neighborhood to pick up a pizza I had ordered by phone. The store botched the order. Standing in front of me, the pizza cook (a black man) told his manager (a black man) that I had called back and cancelled the order. It was a flat-out lie! It was aggravating to deal with a botched order while I had hungry kids at home waiting for pizza, but hey, these things happen, and we deal with it. But this lazy pizza cook lied about me to his boss to cover up his mistake. I was so angry that I tweeted about it (not mentioning the races of the Pizza Hut employees, because it was completely irrelevant). Pizza Hut corporate contacted me, but having had time to cool down, I chose not to press forward. The life of a pizza cook and a takeout pizza joint manager must not be easy, and I didn’t want to add to their travails further. I just resolved never to order pizza from that place again (it closed during Covid, by the way).

Now, imagine that the races had been reversed: that the customer was black, and the manager and the lazy, lying chef were white. It’s pretty easy to imagine a black customer assuming that a white pizza cook lying about him to cover his own backside was engaged in a racist act. I was angry, and went to Twitter at once to complain about the way I was treated at this Pizza Hut — though again, I didn’t racialize it, because there was no evidence that race played a role in the unhappy encounter. Later, when I cooled off, I regretted having done that. I wish I had instead contacted Pizza Hut corporate, and given them a chance to work it out without me making it public. But that’s not how we roll in the era of social media. Had a white manager and pizza cook done that to a black customer, this could have blown up on social media, and caused massive problems for that store — a problem caused not by a racist pizza cook, but by a lazy and dishonest one.

And now, Yelp incentivizes this sort of accusation, and the destruction of businesses and livelihoods — all to get at the devil of racism. All of this is happening in a society that is coming apart along identity-politics lines, with people on both political sides fearing and loathing the Other so much that they are willing to entertain violence to stop them.

My prediction is that we will see violence, one way or the other, and that the regime — by “regime,” I mean the state, corporate power, universities, and the media; the neoreactionaries call this “the Cathedral” — will at some point impose a Chinese-style social credit system to restore order and control. You see with Yelp’s move that the elites, especially tech elites, are eager and willing to do this, all in the name of virtue.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Yelp has make-or-break power over businesses. Adding this tag will not only keep businesses from making a living, but also inevitably subject them to harassment. And it makes me wonder, will Google begin flagging searches this way? Will Facebook begin flagging business pages?

Of course they will. It’s in the logic of the thing. These are therapeutic totalitarians.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Just saw your post about the new Yelp feature and the reader follow up about it coming to other platforms. Below is a screenshot from Google Maps I took a few weeks ago when I was looking for a place to eat for dinner–so it’s already out there. I completely get in our current environment how we’ve gotten here, but nonetheless it’s still baffling to me because I really don’t see how the below designations are relevant to the dining experience. I’m just looking for something good to eat, that’s it! Designating “transgressors” is a dubious practice at best in my mind, but creating a space where folks have to publicly affirm on selected irrelevant issues is a whole ‘nother level.

It truly is the modern day Havel’s Green Grocer.

The irony of me sending this from my gmail is not lost on me either…

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