Rod Dreher's Blog, page 117

Strong Review Of ‘Live Not By Lies’

Well, after hearing me bang on forever in this space about Live Not By Lies, I can finally start telling you what other people are saying about it. The book will be published on September 29; you can pre-order it now by clicking the link.

John Ehrett has a long, terrific review at Conciliar Post. The review is everything a writer could hope for: it’s quite positive (the most important thing!), but also deeply thoughtful, engaging substantively with the book, and critical at times, but in a helpful way. I’m really grateful to John.

He begins by saying that he read The Benedict Option three years ago as he was finishing Yale law school, and wasn’t quite convinced of its claims.

I thought the book’s dire depictions of creeping post-Christian orthodoxies were premature—and I had no interest whatsoever in (what I understood to be) a call to public disengagement. At the end of the day, I was relatively sanguine about the future of “liberal” discourse (in the best sense) in the academic world, coupled with an influential Christian witness in the public sphere. I was, in short, fully “Team French.”

But three years of working in the federal court system, for a DC law firm, and on Capitol Hill, Ehrett is no longer a skeptic:

But despite my best efforts, I’ve come to see that Dreher was right: there needs to be a “Plan B” for the future of American Christianity. What Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith continues to echo across the American landscape, and the shapes of thoroughly post-Christian ideologies are now coming into view. Revival has indeed come to America, as so many Christians prayed—but not a Christian revival.

Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, is something of a manifesto for this moment. At once both darker and more hopeful than its predecessor, it is ruthlessly clear-eyed about the precise threats it identifies, and yet equally clear-eyed about the ways in which ordinary Christians ought to respond to them. Perhaps most significantly, the book feels uncommonly personal, thanks to its heavy reliance on the stories of Eastern European Christians who lived through the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism—an analogy to the status quo that, as Dreher repeatedly points out, is admittedly imperfect, but that nevertheless provides a foundation for important reflections.

Much of The Benedict Option outlined an extended genealogy of the Western predicament (in the style of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed), but Live Not By Lies takes a different tack. This time around, Dreher sees danger ahead as a result of the confluence of three specific intersecting elements: cultural decadence and stagnation, a neo-religious progressive ideology, and the rise of “surveillance capitalism.”

You can see for yourself how Ehrett handles the book’s claims about soft totalitarianism. More:

But, like the “hard totalitarianism” of the Soviet Union, even this kind of social control can be resisted. The second half of Live Not By Lies is a sustained discussion of the ways in which Christians living under Soviet control preserved their religious, national, and familial identities in the face of the Politburo’s efforts to mold perfect communist subjects—and how those ways may be repurposed in the current moment.

It is here that the book is at its strongest, reflecting a remarkable depth of original research and reporting—I’m sure this is the first and last time that some of Dreher’s subjects’ stories will ever be told in the West. I’m doing no justice to the book by distilling its insights into a single list, but in a nutshell, Dreher recommends the following steps: (1) have a clear concept of the truth and do not knowingly perpetuate falsehoods; (2) cultivate cultural memory; (3) understand the centrality of the family as an independent community; (4) remain faithful in religious observance; (5) build small groups and alliances across old divides; and (6) if necessary, suffer in a spirit of forgiveness. All of this ought to be undertaken in accordance with the practical rhythm of see, judge, act: understand the nature of the challenge, think deeply about how to respond, and then proceed with conviction.

To my mind, Live Not By Lies reflects a clear understanding of the coming threat and—far more effectively than its predecessor—outlines practical countermoves in detail. But I would reach a different conclusion than Dreher about the exact nature of the coming crisis—specifically, I do not think that any coming illiberalism will be a form of totalitarianism directed against Christians as such. That is because I am not convinced that the social justice movement, such as it is, really understands Christianity to be its greatest enemy.

More on that in a second. Here’s something from the last section:

So when all’s said and done, is Live Not By Lies worth reading?

I don’t think the words “Benedict Option” ever appear in Live Not By Lies, but the new book nonetheless casts the essence of Dreher’s larger project into far clearer relief. It seems to me, having followed the evolution of Dreher’s thought over the years, that the Benedict Option—rightly understood—is about cultivating a kind of “monastery in the heart” that the Christian will not, under any circumstances, be bullied into violating. The walls of that monastery are built out of liturgy, catechesis, sacraments, memories, and family ties, among other things—and the process of constructing those walls, now and always, must be a fundamentally communal endeavor. This is the project that Live Not By Lies points toward, and on that front the new book is a great success. Add this one to your reading list.

Read the entire review. And, of course, pre-order Live Not By Lies, which will show up at your door or in your Kindle in about three weeks.

Now, what I found most interesting in Ehrett’s review, and definitely something I want to think about, is his argument that Christianity is really going to be a bystander in the coming clash between Progressivism and Atavism. You really need to read his review discussion of the idea, because I can’t do it justice by summing it up, and I want to think about it more deeply before I commit to a comment. Basically, he says that in our post-Christian civilization, the Alt-Right’s ideas, including of racial separatism, are going to mount the true challenge to Progressivism, and that the best the faithful church can do is stand on the sidelines and serve as a field hospital to care for the wounded. I hasten to add that this is not what Ehrett, a Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) Christian, wants to happen; it’s what he sees as likely to happen. The churches cannot accept either “alien ideologies” of Left or Right, Ehrett correctly says, but it has to be prepared to be a “wartime church” to attend to the casualties to come.

Reading Ehrett’s review made me think about how much has changed since I finished the Live Not By Lies manuscript and today. The final version of it — as in, the version that could not be altered — was completed sometime in March or early April, can’t remember exactly when. Covid was new, and George Floyd’s killing was still weeks into the future. Everything that has happened since then has vindicated, and vindicated strongly, most of what I write about in the book. What I didn’t see coming as hard and as fast as it has is the racial militancy of the Left. It has swept away a number of conservative (or conservative-ish) Christian intellectuals, and have no doubt that it will call up and legitimize and equal and opposite reaction among whites.

I’ve been very clear that Critical Race Theory and its various expressions are alien to Christianity. This is also true of whatever white-identity versions of the same the alt-right comes up with. Racism, whether it goes under a left-wing cover or a right-wing cover, has no place in the church. I believe, though, that the fact that left-radicals have seized all the institutions, and are pushing their ideology very hard, even violently — this is going to legitimize the same identity-politics evil in the eyes of many whites on the right.

Going back to Ehrett’s point, I think that the soft totalitarianism will be exercised not so much on Christians exclusively, nor on Christians as Christians, but rather against Christians as bearers of hated ideas — about sex and sexuality, about the sanctity of life, about gender identity, about race (that is, if you don’t affirm CRT, then you will be no safer from the pink police state than someone who affirms white identitarianism), and so forth. I don’t think there’s as much distance between my vision and Ehrett’s vision as his review makes it seem, but even if I’m wrong, we both affirm that the church of the present and the future must be a wartime church. 

The days of peace are over, whether you want them to be or not. Prepare.

The post Strong Review Of ‘Live Not By Lies’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Disembodied Brain Of Christ

Back when the Covid lockdowns started, I told a Southern Baptist friend that this crisis was going to be devastating for the churches, which would probably see a lot of people in their congregations not coming back, having gotten out of the habit of church on Sunday. I also predicted that a number of Evangelical churches, lacking a strong sacrament-based ecclesiology, would embrace online church as a normative model. Why not? After all, if you see the individual believer’s relationship to the church as primarily about the reception of information, what’s the argument against it?

My friend, a theologian, said that Southern Baptists would never go for it.

Over the weekend, that same friend e-mailed me to say he was wrong. This story just appeared in Baptist Press. You should know going in that Robby Gallaty is a very influential young Southern Baptist pastor. Excerpts:

Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Tenn., said he views the impact of COVID-19 on ministry not as an interruption, but instead as a disruption to the way things have typically been done in the local church.

Long Hollow staff see changes that track with larger changes in culture and life as necessary for faithful stewardship of the ministry God has given them. The most immediate, tangible change, according to Gallaty – and this is something he doesn’t anticipate turning around anytime soon – is attendance at church gatherings.

Before the pandemic, Long Hollow’s in-person attendance was significantly larger than viewership for its online services. The church, which ranks among the largest in the Southern Baptist Convention, has resumed in-person meetings. But its online participation is now three times larger than in-person attendance.

The shift is not unique to Long Hollow. Some expect decreased in-person attendance to be permanent.

More:

In recognition of the new reality, Long Hollow has begun the process of creating an intentional, permanent online church ministry – which includes hiring an online-specific pastor, finding ways to facilitate membership remotely, as well as conducting the ordinances and small groups in cities hours or even states away.

“The churches that are predominantly dependent upon a building are going to have a hard time transitioning into the future,” Gallaty said. “People say, ‘I just want to go back to the way things were before COVID,’ but I really don’t think that we will ever get back to that, particularly in the area of numbers … as far as in-person attendance anytime soon.”

The online approach for Long Hollow is not just a livestream of the in-person worship gathering, according Collin Wood, operations pastor at Long Hollow. Instead, in a general sense, it functions as its own “campus.” Wood said individuals and small groups of people are participating online from multiple cities as close as Chattanooga, Tenn., and as far as Portland, Ore.

Attempting to minister equally to those participating online as well as those who come in-person to the church’s physical campuses in Hendersonville or Gallatin, Tenn., is vital, Gallaty said, calling it a “both/and” approach.

“That’s the future of our church and if we say, ‘No, we’re not going to reach them online, they’re just going to have to come for in-person only,’ then I think we’re going to miss where people are,” Gallaty said.

One more bit:

Change is constant, Gallaty said. But as the body of Christ, there must be a willingness to do what it takes to reach as many people as possible even if it’s uncomfortable and different.

Read it all. 

That last graf is the tell. What’s interesting about the way the Baptist Press story is written — and this seems to reflect faithfully the position Pastor Gallaty espouses — is that it takes this particular innovation for granted as the next big thing, and as an unproblematic accommodation with the way technology has changed the way we live.

This idea — that we should accept online church as normative and necessary because that’s what allows us “to reach as many people as possible” — is completely impossible in a Catholic, Orthodox, and/or Anglican world. Our liturgies and ecclesiologies are built around the Eucharist. You cannot receive communion online, nor is the Eucharist merely symbolic of Christ’s Body and Blood.

(I’m not entirely sure about how Anglicans see it theologically, so I’m just generalizing. I am also unsure of particulars in various Mainline Protestant churches.)

The point is, Gallaty’s new practice is impossible for sacramental, liturgical churches. Many of them have had online services because of Covid, but that is understood as both temporary and defective. Some may continue to have online services for shut-ins, as they did before, but again, this is not and cannot be normative. The traditional idea of what the church is forbids it.

I haven’t had the chance to discuss this in depth with my Southern Baptist friend, but I know that he feels very strongly that the Gallaty move is going to be destructive within the broader Southern Baptist ecclesia. I’m not sure why — I await our conversation. If I had to guess — and I welcome more informed speculation from you readers who are Southern Baptists or other Evangelicals — it would be because to neglect the gathering together in the flesh would be to neglect an essential act necessary to formation and discipleship. It’s very hard to be a community if you only know each other online.

One thing I’ve never quite understood about our Evangelical friends is why they are so susceptible to trendiness. A reader of this blog with whom I corresponded earlier this year told me that she and her family recently left their Evangelical megachurch to join an Orthodox congregation. A big part of it was that the church fell all over itself trying to accommodate the Next Big Thing in worship trends, and theological trends, to keep growing the church, and to keep people interested so they wouldn’t leave. Discipleship was neglected, and theologically, it became decadent. Though my correspondent is non-white, she became frustrated at how this multicultural megachurch’s leaders began putting race consciousness at the center of that congregation’s life. But then, that’s the contemporary trend.

To be fair, it is entirely possible within a more liturgical, sacramental church to have an impersonal relationship — for the church to be a community of strangers. Back in 2005, when my wife and I were in the depths of a spiritual crisis that ultimately resulted in our leaving the Catholic Church for the Orthodox Church, the loneliness of Catholic parish life was one of the things that broke us. Catholicism, at least in the US, is only formally united. Within many parishes, it is common for people — we were certainly guilty of this — to regard one’s participation in the parish as transactional. When I became Catholic in my mid-twenties, I was not prepared for how alienated I would be within parish life, as a believing Catholic, because I believed what the Catholic Church taught. 

It didn’t take long for me to discover that that is the default mode for most orthodox Catholics in this country. You’re probably not going to hear anything meaningful from the priest’s homily (count it as a win if it’s not heretical), so just sit quietly, just you and God, receive the Eucharist, and leave after the mass ends. If you have Catholic fellowship — and we did — it was in groups not connected to the parish. It wasn’t like this in every parish we attended, but it was in most of them. The parish was where you received the Eucharist on Sundays and holy days, and where you made your donations. I came to understand this as the Sacrament Factory model. It’s not bad when you’re young, but when you have kids, it becomes difficult to manage. Toward the end of our time as Catholics, it really put me in despair, because I would look around in church and realize that it was impossible to know what anybody here really believed. And it didn’t really matter to anybody in authority, either.

When we went to church at St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral in Dallas for the first time, we were surprised to be urged to come to coffee hour after services. What? The coffee hour lasted about two hours, and it involved the congregation having lunch together in the church hall. I had never seen anything like it as a Catholic. My wife said to me,”Now this is having church. This is how I was raised.” She had been raised in First Baptist Dallas, where fellowship like this was a big deal. After we became Orthodox, I learned how important coffee hour following the liturgy was to building up a sense of church community.

I bring that up simply to say that a sacrament-and-liturgy-based ecclesiology won’t be enough to form a real community. You need more than that. You need to get together informally too. I didn’t really understand that until I became Orthodox. It is possible to be an Orthodox in good standing and ignore everybody in the church, and to leave without going to coffee hour. But it feels wrong. The Orthodox ethos conveys to you that you need to be at coffee hour too, because we’re all in this together.

I’ve never been part of an Evangelical church, but I’m thinking this morning of my wife’s beaming face on that surprising Sunday in 2005, after we had been at the Orthodox coffee hour for about 20 minutes. She had been Catholic for about a decade, and had not realized how much she missed things like this at church. I really, really hope that Southern Baptists don’t accept online church as normative. It will deform discipleship, no matter how high-quality the information transmitted from pastors over the Internet connection is.

It’s a big mistake to think of one’s church life as only receiving information about Jesus Christ and the Bible, and arranging your own thoughts and emotional reactions to it. Like I said, I was never Evangelical, but I pretty much lived that way as a Catholic — and I struggle not to live that way as an Orthodox. It’s the intellectual’s temptation: to live inside his head. The church is not the Disembodied Brain of Christ; we are the Body of Christ. Online church as a substitute for the gathering of the body forms Christian gnostics, whose minds are free from the prison of the body, from the “prison” of talking to their neighbors, from the “prison” of making an effort to get to church on Sunday morning, from the “prison” of coffee hour. Just you and Jesus, there on your sofa, with your coffee, and in your sweatpants. Download the sermon and listen to it in the afternoon, after you’ve gone golfing on Sunday morning. Optimize your consumer church experience.

“I can’t believe you saw this coming,” my Southern Baptist friend said to me. I told him that it wasn’t hard. Americans are suckers for technology, and for allowing the habitus of their lives to be dictated by technology; Christians are no different. We Christians in older churches have forms that protect us from the temptation to surrender to the convenience of online church. Evangelicals, in general, do not. I foresaw that they were going to start accepting this new mode of being not as a temporary concession to crisis, but as normal — and find a way to rationalize it. Thus:

But as the body of Christ, there must be a willingness to do what it takes to reach as many people as possible even if it’s uncomfortable and different.

Being the Disembodied Brain of Christ is the final step before the body dissolves into dust, and even the spirit is scattered to the winds.

UPDATE: A reader identifying himself as an ordained Southern Baptist minister writes:

First off, the most important tasks of the church in SBC-land is evangelism and missions. The “Great Commission” is top priority. Discipleship and formation take a back seat.

Success toward this goal is measured most often by numbers: baptisms (remember we are credo Baptist therefore a baptism represents a conversion), conversions, other decisions and re-dedications, and attendance. These days I’m sure pastors and leaders are looking at “views” as well. General rule is that a church that is not seeing an increase in its numbers is not “successful.”

The trendy aspect that you observed is a real thing. My branch of evangelicalism will jump on any trend that is not obviously un-Biblical that will help a church increase its numbers. Most fast growing mega churches are contemporary in worship style but if the trend switched toward a more high church liturgical style then you’d see churches move in that direction. Whatever you can do to get them to show up, do it. Rent a helicopter to drop Easter eggs? Sure. Build a basketball court in your worship space? Of course!

Another thing to remember is that in our world the sermon is always the most important part of the worship service. Everything before it prepares the congregant for the message and what happens after corresponds to what was shared. As you noted, it’s primarily about dispensing information. Life giving information but still information. As James K A Smith says, we treat people as “brains on a stick.”

The Lord’s Supper is an afterthought because it’s seen as a memorial meal. If it only helps Is to focus on Christ, we can focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus without the crackers and Welch’s grape juice. Many churches only observe the Lord’s Supper quarterly anyway. My church gave a how to guide for observing communion at home on Easter morning.

Virtual worship and growing a “virtual church” checks off all those boxes and many churches will give it a go. I don’t think it will build a healthy church because we aren’t brains on a stick. We need face to face interaction if we are going to be successful in spiritual formation. I just hope churches realize that before they spend too much time and money chasing this trend. But from my experience Southern Baptists like to chase trends.

This may come across as cynical and maybe it is. I am tied to my current church because of my employment. Internally, I fit more with the Anglicans these days. Maybe I’ll be able to move in that direction one day.

The post The Disembodied Brain Of Christ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Defending ‘Little Hitler’

In the annals of recent political purges at universities, it’s hard to beat USC  for suspending a communications professor for using a Mandarin word that sounds like the n-word, but Taylor University, a liberal arts college in Indiana, comes close. These aren’t theological liberals doing this; these are conservatives.

Justin Lee, a Taylor alumnus, explains in the New York Post. Excerpts:

No one is immune to cancel culture, not even Christian colleges and universities. A tenured professor of philosophy at Taylor University, a conservative Christian liberal-arts school in Indiana, has been fired for refusing to take down a music video he posted to YouTube.

The video shows Jim Spiegel in his basement performing “Little Hitler,” a song he wrote about human depravity. The refrain goes:

There’s a little Hitler inside of me,

There’s a brutal killer inside everyone,

The hatred grows inside us naturally.

Anyone with a scintilla of charity and intelligence can tell that this is no celebration of the Nazi madman — but an admittedly cheesy way to communicate an essentially Christian idea: that all human begins have a propensity to sin; that evil lurks in all our hearts.

The termination has shocked the Taylor community. Spiegel has won multiple awards for teaching excellence and scholarship and led Taylor’s Ethics Bowl team to national victories. He has been an indispensable fixture of the university’s intellectual life.

Well, guess what? An anonymous faculty member filed a harassment complaint against Spiegel, based on his uploading this video to YouTube. The Taylor administration ordered Spiegel to take it down. He refused. They fired him.

Read it all.

Below is a clip of the song. As Justin Lee says, it’s a gentle satire about the capacity within all of us to do great evil. It is a thoroughly Christian message. And it’s obviously a satire! Spiegel was not given a chance even to know the identity of the person who complained about him, much less given the slightest bit of due process — that is, the ability to defend himself from accusations. For all the Taylor administration knows, Spiegel is the victim of professional jealousy.

Who wants to go to a university where popular faculty (or any faculty) can be dismissed without due process for saying, or singing, something that seems perfectly ordinary and orthodox within any Christian worldview? Be warned: the firing of Jim Spiegel sets apart Taylor as a place where you have to walk on eggshells, knowing that at any moment someone could make an anonymous complaint against you, and the administration could dismiss you. Here’s what it costs an undergraduate to go to Taylor:

 

You want to commit yourself to taking out loans to pay for a college at which the administration will not support faculty, and presumably not students who cross an invisible line? The firing of Spiegel sends a signal to every other professor on campus, and every other student: you could be next. All it takes is a single absurd accusation, based on even the simplest joke, to ruin a professor’s life.

Some of you think I’m exaggerating when, citing the testimony of Soviet-bloc emigres, I say that life in the US is starting to resemble life under Soviet totalitarianism. Here is the connection: under the Soviet system, all it took was an accusation of disloyalty — including telling a joke that offended the Party — to lose your job and even be sent to prison or into exile. This happened over and over. Last year, I visited Rudolf Dobias, an 84-year-old Slovak former political prisoner, sentenced to 18 years of hard labor in a uranium mine on a false accusation that he had drawn a cartoon making fun of Stalin and Czechoslovak communist leader Klement Gottwald. After release from prison, Dobias and his family lived a life of internal exile; he couldn’t get a decent job, his kids suffered from their father’s punishment, and so forth. All because of a single joke, one that he didn’t even tell! After our interview, Dobias mentioned to my Slovak translator that he was in constant pain now, the result of all the beatings he took in prison as a young man.

Obviously — obviously — Jim Spiegel is not Rudolf Dobias. But he’s on a spectrum. As more than a few Rudolf Dobiases told me for Live Not By Lies, free people have to resist this stuff the moment it starts. Jim Spiegel was absolutely right to refuse to take down his satirical song. The prissy authoritarians at Taylor University ought to apologize to him and hire him back. And they had better make it clear that they have done so, because this is a black mark on the school’s reputation, and a warning to students about an emerging climate of censorship, at a time when liberal arts colleges cannot afford them.

If I were a Taylor student — presuming that they are back on campus this fall — I would gather with a group every day outside Provost Michael Hammond’s office, and sing “Little Hitler” cheerfully, to cause Hammond and the university’s leadership to reflect on the nature of what they have done to a professor who has wronged no one.

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Ideology Binds And Blinds

Elizabeth Bruenig is an intelligent left-wing columnist for The New York Times. Yet this from her, in response to Friedersdorf’s tweet, knocked me flat, and made me wonder if there is something broader happening with the Left:

(Verdun? Huh? That’s the far right?)

But seriously: imagine believing that conservatives see the “major threat of the far left” as “higher taxes”! Is this really how left-wingers regard the right at the current moment, or is this just a Liz Bruenig thing?

I’m trying to think of any conservatives who have expressed fear of higher taxes as the greatest threat from a Democratic takeover of the White House. Maybe the libertarian gazillionaire Charles Koch thinks that, but I believe that is way, way down the list of concerns among most conservatives.

As I see it, the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.

In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.

My forthcoming (9/29) book Live Not By Lies is based on the belief that this is where we are headed as a nation and as a civilization, and that dissenters need to prepare themselves and their communities for resistance. Trump and the Republicans have done little or nothing to stop it, but they have not accelerated it. This fight is not primarily a political one, but insofar as it takes place on the battlefield of politics, this is what the right fears most of all.

Fascism? The alt-right exists, of course, but I feel confident in saying that what most of the right wants is to be left the hell alone. The left can’t do it. They have to re-engineer us towards utopia.

It boggles my mind that someone as smart as Bruenig, a democratic socialist, can’t recognize this. Maybe people on the right are paranoid. Maybe we are too excitable. Maybe we are misreading the situation. All of that is possible. But the idea that the greatest threat faced from the left is higher taxes? That’s just bananas.

Look, this is part of the major threat from the left is. It’s a clip from a 2018 debate about political correctness. At the point I have cued up here, Jordan Peterson asks the leftist panelists, NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg and Georgetown Prof. Michael Eric Dyson, where they would draw the line on the left — meaning, at what point can the left be said to have gone too far:

Goldberg says “violence and censorship,” but gives no real details, and doubles back on how the right is the real threat. For his part, Dyson huffs and puffs and mocks Jordan Peterson for being a privileged white racist for even asking the question.

This is the threat: that we won’t even be able to ask questions like this without being denounced as racist pigs. And more to the point, that the left itself doesn’t ask these questions of itself, because its leaders are so convinced of the movement’s virtue that it doesn’t occur to them that the left could go too far.

This afternoon I listened to a lengthy NPR interview about fascism. Michel Martin queried Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley about the topic. Stanley wrote a book about fascism. My ears pricked up when I heard Stanley’s name. He and I have a history. I encourage you to see (in order) this post, and this post, and this post. The combustible Prof. Stanley seems to believe that anybody to the right of Adlai Stevenson is a goose-stepper who deserves a good Ivy League cussin’. Anyway, there’s not yet a live link on the NPR website to the interview, but given that NPR recently published a puffball interview with the author of In Defense of Looting, and given how NPR right now is describing antifa riots in Portland like this

… the Stanley interview went exactly as I expected it to. Again, I’ll post the link when it becomes available, but the whole thing was absurd. Stanley yammered on about the fascist nature of Trumpism, and how Biden and the progressive movements offer us hope of pulling away from fascism. I have no objection at all to scholars or anybody else criticizing Trump as an authoritarian. I think it’s silly to call him fascist, but I can see some elements of classic fascist discourse in Trump’s way of talking and acting. What made me angry listening to this was that so many of the things Stanley identified as “fascist” are absolutely the way the contemporary left behaves. I don’t have access to the interview as I write this — again, check this space later for it — but I recall him saying that the real aggressors in Portland are the pro-Trump people who drove through town shooting paintballs at others. He also said that fascism requires us to think of the world as Us vs. Them — not people with whom we share a common space, and can live together in rationality and tolerance, but as evil people who must be overcome.

Jason Stanley is a left-wing academic who teaches at a notoriously intolerant university. Remember the 2015 confrontation between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and a campus social-justice mob? Watch the video, and tell me who is behaving in a fascist manner. The university ultimately sided with the mob. Jason Stanley co-authored an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education chiding the Christakises and those who criticized the mob, which was black.

What was so interesting about the NPR interview is that host Michel Martin accepted everything he claimed without pushback. It was a long interview as public radio goes — about eight to ten minutes, I think. Was it not possible for NPR’s producers to find a single other source for this story about fascism — someone who might have given a more balanced take? Who could have shone light on how a lot of people on right don’t like Trump, but see him as the only thing standing politically between them and left-wing authoritarianism, even a soft form of totalitarianism.

Understand that I’m not trying to make a “whatabout” point here. I’m talking about the inability of prominent people on the left, particularly in the media, to recognize how frightening the left is to Americans on the right, and why it is frightening. The fact that the strong pushback to NPR’s marshmallow interview with the looting defender caught NPR by surprise tells us that they are really out of touch with people who are not deep inside the left-wing bubble. The Bruenig comment, then, seems entirely consonant with Stanley’s interview (in which none of his claims were contested by the NPR host), in revealing a left-wing media that genuinely does not grasp how and why half the country thinks what it does.

The prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has talked about his research showing that conservatives and moderates are much better at understanding liberals than liberals are at understanding them. Haidt said that conservatives have a broader “moral matrix” within which they interpret the world, and that prevent liberals, who have a narrower moral matrix, from grasping how they think. Haidt:

You might even go as far as Michael Feingold, a theater critic for the liberal newspaper the Village Voice, when he wrote:

Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.

One of the many ironies in this quotation is that it shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own. Morality binds and blinds.

I believe that this is what’s happening to our media, and within all institutions dominated by the left. They really and truly don’t see what’s in front of their faces. They really seem to think that it’s uncontroversial to claim that “all white people are racist.” They really don’t understand how frightening it is to normal people when a communications professor can be removed by his university from teaching a class because he explained to his students that a commonly used Mandarin word sounds like the n-word in English — and black students protested this to the administration, which suspended the professor. These stories are happening all over, as the left’s ideological hegemony grows, and people have to worry about losing their livelihoods for violating left-wing orthodoxies. As Caitlin Flanagan, a stout Trump-hater, observes:

Even onto the eleventh hour of the most important election in a generation, the left wants what it wants.

https://t.co/f3qV0HQyxe

— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) September 5, 2020

“The major threat of the far left is higher taxes.” This is not just dumb, it’s crazy. Leaving aside the 100 million dead worldwide from Communism, and focusing only on the USA in 2020, the idea that the worst thing anybody has to fear from the left is higher taxes is so blind that you realize we live on the same planet, but different worlds. I’ll leave you with this, from the left’s biggest intellectual rock star of the moment, the author of the huge bestseller How To Be Antiracist:

Trump does not want a nation of critical thinkers. He wants a nation of loyal believers.

— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) September 6, 2020

Anybody who thinks these Critical Race Theory advocates, like Kendi, welcome critical thinking is out of his mind. Any white person listening to Ashleigh Shackelford’s racist bilge in that classroom (see photo above, which I first saw on James Lindsay’s Twitter feed, @conceptualjames) would have been risking her job to offer criticism. In the clip from the presentation, Shackelford begins by saying she’s not going to argue the point (and won’t “coddle white tears”). I think people, white and otherwise, ought to have stood up and walked out at that point, as Solzhenitsyn advised in his essay on which I based Live Not By Lies. That might be too risky for them. What they’re more likely to do, if they’re not already deep in the liberal tank, is to sit there quietly, and having no way to fight back against this insulting racist garbage from a bully, resolve that at least they can stick it to the bullies by voting for Trump.

Liz Bruenig, Michel Martin, Jason Stanley and the others won’t see it coming.

UPDATE: I’ve posted this before, but this 1980s-era cartoon from SPY magazine really captures the kind of arrogance and blindness I’m talking about here. There’s a straight line connecting Ashleigh Shackelford and the artist satirized in this cartoon:

 

UPDATE.2: Here’s a clearer clip of the same Shackelford talk. She says that white people “are born into not being human” and are born “to be demons.”

The post Ideology Binds And Blinds appeared first on The American Conservative.

Can Trump Fix It?

My friend Conor Friedersdorf put a good question out on Twitter:

A Q for Trump supporters: I get why you’re frustrated by riots, parts of the pandemic response, & illiberal left excesses. (I am too.)

Since all are happening during a Trump presidency, why would anyone expect giving him a 2nd term would make things better?

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 5, 2020

I am not a Trump supporter. I think he’s been pretty much a bad president, but I cannot rule out voting for him this fall (a vote I did not cast in 2016). So Conor’s question is live for me too. I’m going to give it a shot. Keep in mind that this represents my thinking on Labor Day Weekend, 2020. I am still trying to push through this issue in my mind. Some of my friends — Trump voters and Biden voters both — can’t imagine that this is even a question for me. But it is, so here’s what I think of Conor’s question.

I don’t believe Trump will make things better. In fact, I believe a second Trump term will likely make things worse, at least in the short term. I don’t believe Trump is the cause of the riots, not at all, and I believe that the responsibility for stopping the violence rests with mayors and governors. The mayor of Portland blames all the antifa violence there on Trump, but he’s just passing the buck over his failure to govern.

A second Trump term, though, would probably make the riots more general, and more enduring. We have to be realistic about that.

However.

First, I cannot accept that these rioters get a veto over the presidency. They can’t be allowed to get away with bullying people into voting against Trump.

Second, and more importantly to my mind, a Biden presidency would open the door for the institutionalization of the values of these rioters. I don’t believe that Biden actually supports the riots. I do believe, though, that he and the Democrats are quite sympathetic to the movement that has produced political violence. Remember:

Kamala Harris says that the riots are not going to stop, ever, and to BEWARE. With a smile on her face. pic.twitter.com/xkwAUOMJcL

—

Alice Carter, Leftism’s Poster Girl

A reader writes:

I appreciated your post on moral order and civil conflict. I immediately thought of it when reading this story from the Washington Post, published the same day, which describes the life and death of a homeless addict who has long been a fixture of my own neighborhood here in Washington DC. What is fascinating is that the story describes in detail how literally hundreds of people tried in vain to help her sort out the mess her life had become before her death, and then immediately concludes that this is evidence that the system is at fault. Although the story recounts in detail how she pretty emphatically resisted all attempts to help her, this is discounted. At no point is the role of personal choice or responsibility ever mentioned, even in passing. Here is an excerpt:

“Alice Carter worked D.C.’s streets — and got worked over by them. She was a poet, addict, sex worker, parent, friend, assailant, schemer and source of inspiration to her faith community and those who loved her — when she wasn’t frustrating their exhaustive, exhausting efforts to make sure she was safe. Those efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful. On Dec. 17, Carter died of alcohol intoxication at Howard University Hospital after being found unresponsive at a Dupont Circle McDonald’s. Last month, the well-known fixture on D.C. streets became the face of a city auditor’s report that warned the District is doing too little to help those struggling with chronic addiction.”

While she definitely had mental health issues, these seem to have been exasperated first and foremost by the lack of any internal moral order. Yet her own agency in the tragic story of her life is discounted entirely, and, more worryingly, never seems to have been included as a part of attempts to help her restore order to her life. I think this is a great example of the disturbing societal shift that you describe in your post.

If you happen to write about this, please don’t use my name. This woman is now a neighborhood martyr, crushed by our oppressive system.

More from the Post story:

She was born in Maryland before her family moved to Ohio. Her parents divorced when her father was convicted of rape; they remarried after his release, then divorced again.

Carter, bullied because she was transgender, began using drugs as a teenager. She had a child with a girlfriend and survived a suicide attempt at 19 before joining a religious group that led her to Detroit and, eventually, to the D.C. area. She became a Whitman-Walker Clinic patient in 2006, when she tested positive for HIV.

Carter turned to sex work to survive, the report said, and the final decade of her life was a swirl of diagnoses, erratic behavior, hospitalizations, arrests for mostly minor crimes and failed interventions by an alphabet soup of District agencies. She was arrested in 2010, for example, after she jabbed a broken beer bottle at a man in Scott Circle, was sentenced to drug treatment, didn’t comply and ended up in jail.

On and on like that. Here is the city report about Carter’s terrible life. It’s written very sympathetically. It’s clear that this person was deeply troubled from childhood. It is an excruciating story. You really should read it, because the relatively short account in the Post doesn’t remotely do justice to the wreckage and violence of Carter’s life. Going through it, it was amazing to read about all the city services available to Carter. The system engaged Carter thoroughly. In the report, it is impossible (for me) to discern a line between “compassion” and “enabling.”

From the Post story, these grafs are so telling. First, this one:

Julie Turner, a social worker who tried to help Carter, said she met her in 2012 in Dupont Circle “passed out at a light post, half dressed with the remains of a needle in her arm.” Turner said Carter would periodically get sober, but the city’s outreach systems weren’t equipped to keep her alive.

“I want to believe that in a perfect world [with] long-term access to psychiatric treatment for psychiatric and substance abuse, Alice would have been able to transition in a healthy way,” she wrote in an email. “A week’s stay or a month in a hospital does not even put a dent in anti-social behaviors or the emotional turmoil and pain Alice felt.”

The social worker believes — or tellingly, wants to believe — that if only the system had been perfect, it could have saved Alice Carter.

But then look at this graf, about what people said at a liberal Methodist Church’s memorial service for Carter:

Deborah Smith, Carter’s mother, said her daughter struggled her entire life — with attention-deficit disorder, with substance abuse, with her gender identity. Ultimately, Smith said, “she did what she wanted to do, and you couldn’t do any different.”

She did what she wanted to do, and you couldn’t do any different. There it is. There is no system capable of saving an Alice Carter, who, in part for reasons beyond his control, was incapable of managing his freedom.

A sane society would have institutionalized Alice Carter ages ago, to protect Alice Carter from himself, and to protect the community from Alice Carter. Seriously, read the city’s report. You go from page to page, wondering how on earth someone like this, well known to authorities (both criminal justice and social work), could still be on the streets. And yet, there was Alice Carter, haunting downtown Washington DC, menacing himself and the public with violent outbursts (e.g., threatening people with a box cutter, throwing furniture in restaurants).

And yet, the reader who sent this story to me is afraid to let me identify him because “this woman is now a neighborhood martyr, crushed by our oppressive system.”

A society that will not defend itself from its Alice Carters, or defend its Alice Carters from themselves, is not a stable one. A society in which no one can speak the truth about this is doomed.

The post Alice Carter, Leftism’s Poster Girl appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christopher Rufo, Hero

The independent journalist Christopher Rufo uncovered something truly outrageous at Sandia National Laboratories: a program that indoctrinates white employees into racist self-hatred. 

He went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday night to tell this story, and to call on the president to stop these Critical Race Theory-based programs in federal agencies. See the clip here.

And now, this:

 

It goes on, but the point is this: by executive order, all these Critical Race Theory programs are cancelled in the federal government. 

Not any more! https://t.co/7Z2wxA6K13

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020

We can win these fights! All credit to Chris Rufo and Tucker Carlson for their work on this, and many thanks to Russell Vought and the president for their action. I want to strongly encourage my readers to become a patron of Chris Rufo’s work. This is quite a fierce and monstrous dragon we have to slay — and he is doing the work that the mainstream media won’t do, because it believes the dragon is actually a noble lion.

The post Christopher Rufo, Hero appeared first on The American Conservative.

Fear Of The Mob Vs. Loathing Of Trump

You might have seen the video of the Rochester, NY, cops, back in March, putting a spitting hood on a naked and cuffed black man having a PCP freakout. They restrained him in such a way that he asphyxiated. The video just came out this week. People are understandably angry. Protest is completely reasonable. Keep in mind (as usual) that we don’t know all the context, and keep in mind that the cops put the hood on the suspect because he was spitting (and, they say, he claimed he had Covid). But it’s the same thing: knee on the neck. This video shows behavior by police that seems exceptionally cruel. The naked man having a drug freakout was lying down in the cold street, while it was snowing. The cops laugh at him. It’s a bad, bad scene.

 

 

I think protest against that is perfectly legitimate — and, given that there is some evidence that police tried to brush this case under the rug, perhaps even necessary. But this kind of protest, which went down tonight in Rochester, is not:

#HappeningNow the protesters in Rochester NY are “shutting down restaurants”, tables are broken, people running off scared #rochesterprotests pic.twitter.com/oxmlZp526w

— @SCOOTERCASTER (FNTV) (@ScooterCasterNY) September 5, 2020

Watch the whole video. It’s insane. What do these idiots think they are going to accomplish with this? It’s truly berserk. I think most people would be naturally sympathetic to their side after seeing that cop video, but after this?

More:

See? How can you watch this and not think to yourself, “Yep. These people are definitely the good guys”? https://t.co/Ys4SqQZzgt

— Leonydus Johnson (@LeonydusJohnson) September 5, 2020

Meanwhile, it’s starting to look like Jeffrey Goldberg’s report that Donald Trump insulted dead US troops might be true. Even Fox News stands up the reporting. It is certainly consonant with Trump’s low-rent character, and his gutter tongue. This could really hurt him.

But in the end, do you think voters are more likely to be driven by loathing of Trump’s trash mouth, and/or of the police — or fear of woke mobs attacking them in restaurants and elsewhere in public?

It’s a fair question: Oh, come on, how could the US president stop a woke mob in an American city? We’re talking about political symbolism here. If an American president holds detestable views about dead soldiers, and expresses them, it is vile and hateful, but it doesn’t hurt anything but people’s feelings. To react against Trump because of this — assuming it’s true — is understandable, but it really is about symbolism. If he really said these things, then he desecrated something sacred: the memory of our soldiers.

These mobs really do threaten people, though again, there’s not a lot this or any president can do about them, in most cases. But at the level of symbolism, they convey to people a sense the the militant left is out of control, and threatening to those who are going about their business peaceably, and who even might support their cause.

Fear of the mob, or loathing of Trump — which is more powerful, in terms of political psychology?

Look at this: BLM protesters tonight in Rochester are attacking people’s homes:

Black Lives Matter activists are now climbing onto people’s homes in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/JffhYf4nzf

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 5, 2020

More:

Black Lives Matter rioters are setting fires in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/HllS35sTYl

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 5, 2020

Black Lives Matter in Rochester: "If we gotta burn it down we gonna burn this mothefu**er down.”

pic.twitter.com/IyIJVY2VHI

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 5, 2020

All the DC and New York elites are focused on the allegations against Trump. Expect that narrative to dominate news coverage. But these violent protests, the news of which will primarily get out over social media, are what will be the real story over Labor Day Weekend.

The post Fear Of The Mob Vs. Loathing Of Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.

Moral Order And Civil Conflict

I have been thinking of this clip since I first saw it last week. It’s NBA commentator Chris Webber, on the NBA players refusing to play to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake:

Every word Chris Webber says here should be listened to. pic.twitter.com/L2mKUqEHL1

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) August 26, 2020

I don’t follow basketball, so I don’t know who Chris Webber is (I looked it up; my point is that he was a stranger to me before this clip). He speaks with emotion, and from the heart. He strikes me as a very good man. He begins by telling his audience — and he’s speaking to young black men — that voting isn’t enough, that they have to get out there and change the world to make things better. He seems to mean protesting against police brutality, but his initial comments suggest something more. He starts by saying he’s speaking for the “marginalized,” and reflected on how much it meant to him as a kid when the NBA great Charles Barkley came to visit his school. Role models are important, he said. And of course he’s right.

Here’s the thing that baffles me. It doesn’t make me angry, let me be clear, but it does give some potential insight into why, as a conservative, the various conflicts around race — the shootings, the protests — land within me so differently than they land within others. As you read this, whatever your views of the protests and the shootings, I ask you to suspend your defensiveness for a second. What I’m trying to do in this post is not say I’m right and you’re wrong; I’m trying to understand why so many of us have such strong but opposite reactions. I hope that my fellow conservative readers will watch that short Chris Webber clip. I find it impossible to listen to that man and not feel real empathy with him, even if he’s mistaken (and I think he is, more on which in a second).

If you’ve been reading this blog for at least a month, you’ll recall the huge uproar over a post I did when new George Floyd police bodycam footage came out. I wrote that the new footage, which showed him violently resisting arrest for nine minutes before he was put on the ground, caused me to reject the received narrative of the Floyd death. Prior to that, I knew he had resisted arrest, but I thought that meant that he gave the cops some lip, and then they brutally slammed him into the ground, put a knee on his head, and choked him out. That’s not how it went down at all. They struggled with him for nine minutes to subdue him. He refused over and over to get into the squad car, and kicked and struggled when they tried to put him in. That’s what led to him being put on the ground. Plus, as we now know, he had enough fentanyl in him such that if he had not been subject to police restraint, Floyd’s death would have been ruled an overdose.

I argued at the time (and still believe this) that these material facts will be important in the Minneapolis police officers’ defense — and they may result in all of them being acquitted. I don’t want to get into that again; I’m just reminding you. More recently, I argued that in the Jacob Blake case, the fact that he was wanted for felony rape, violently resisted arrest (perhaps with a knife), resisted tasing, and defied legitimate police orders to stop, even reaching into his van (where, for all the cops new, meant he was reaching for a gun) — all these facts may result in no charges against the officers involved. I’ve talked to lawyers who say they will be very surprised if the cops face charges here. Again, I don’t want to argue the legal merits in this space. The point I want to make is a moral one: to some extent, Jacob Blake is morally responsible for what happened to him. That doesn’t mean he deserved to be shot in the back seven times; the DA and possibly a jury will decide that. The point is that if he had obeyed the police officers’ legitimate orders, he would be walking today. Maybe in a jail cell, but he would be walking.

Same with George Floyd. If he had not violently, for nine minutes, resisted arrest, and if he had not ingested a ton of fentanyl, he would be alive today. Understand me: that does not mean that the police aren’t still guilty of brutality and abuse. They might yet be! Both of these things can be true at the same time: the cops behaved with criminal brutality, and George Floyd is in some moral sense complicit in his own death.

I think most conservatives would agree. Why is that? I’ll offer a theory in a second, but let’s bring up one more case.

Breonna Taylor was the innocent black EMT in Louisville who died in a hail of police gunfire when cops tried to execute a no-knock warrant on her apartment. They were looking for her ex-boyfriend, a drug dealer, and had reason to believe he was there. They were looking to arrest her in connection with her ex-boyfriend, a drug dealer with whom she had been involved on and off. Taylor’s then-boyfriend didn’t know who was trying to break into her apartment, and opened fire on police. That was when they started firing into the apartment, killing Taylor.

From a strictly legal point of view, the cops may walk because they were fired on first. That is the conclusion of seven Louisville defense attorneys, including black ones, interviewed by the local paper:

LeBron James wants them charged. So does Beyoncé.

And so do 10 million other people who have signed a petition at change.org demanding justice for Breonna Taylor — and that Louisville Metro Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, Officer Myles Cosgrove and ex-Officer Brett Hankison be charged with killing her.

But in interviews and emails, seven experienced Louisville defense lawyers who are not involved in the case — and who have an average of 37 years each in practice — say the officers should not be charged with murder or manslaughter because they had a legal right to defend themselves once her boyfriend shot at them.

Three of the attorneys are Black.

“It is unfortunate that this young lady was killed,” said Aubrey Williams, a former president of Louisville’s NAACP chapter who has spent much of his 40-year career fighting police in court.

“But for the life of me I don’t see them indicting or convicting.”

Jan Waddell, another defense lawyer who is Black and has likewise frequently tangled with police, also said Mattingly and Cosgrove are likely immune from prosecution because Kentucky law allowed them to return fire in self-defense when Mattingly was hit in the leg with a bullet fired by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who said he didn’t know the intruders were police and thought the couple was being robbed.

“The seemingly unending list of unarmed Black men who have been and continue to be gunned down by white police officers … does not and cannot justify the return of an indictment based on revenge rather than the facts of the case and the law,” Waddell said.

This is why due process is so important. And it’s why we have to resist jumping to conclusions about these cases. I do not like no-knock warrants, and instantly sympathized with Breonna Taylor. She should be alive today. But I am finding it hard to imagine on what grounds the cops could be indicted. It’s a tragedy, what happened, but was a law broken? That sounds heartless and legalistic, but if we don’t have the law, what do we have? Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, in the wake of this tragedy, has introduced a bill — the Justice For Breonna Taylor Act — that would ban no-knock raids in the US. I support this.

Yet reading this powerful, long piece in The New York Times by Rukmini Callimachi, about everything that led up to Taylor’s death, paints a more morally complex picture. I urge you to set aside any idea that I’m trying to “blame” Taylor for her own death. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m trying to think through the circumstances that lead an innocent person like Taylor to such a violent death.

Callimachi writes about how Taylor had been involved romantically with Jamarcus Glover, a drug-dealing thug. Excerpts:

The daughter of a teenage mother and a man who has been incarcerated since she was a child, Ms. Taylor attended college, trained as an E.M.T. and hoped to become a nurse. But along the way, she developed a yearslong relationship with a twice-convicted drug dealer whose trail led the police to her door that fateful night.

The story picks up with police surveilling a drug house where Glover did business:

At 5:53 p.m. [in January], a white Chevrolet Impala pulled up in front of the house, and Mr. Glover exited. The car was registered to Breonna Taylor, the report says.

Over the next two months, the new squad surveilled the Elliott addresses where Mr. Glover operated, and Ms. Taylor’s apartment 10 miles away. A GPS device the police put on Mr. Glover’s car tracked it to her apartment complex six times, according to the internal report. And Ms. Taylor’s new car — a Dodge Charger — was seen at the trap house on multiple occasions; she was photographed in front of it in mid-February.

The police thought that Taylor was alone in the apartment on the night of the raid. More:

Although Ms. Taylor had no criminal record and was never the target of an inquiry, Mr. Glover’s frequent run-ins with the police entangled her. She had been interviewed in a murder inquiry, and paid or arranged bail for him and his associates.

When Mr. Glover called from jail after an earlier arrest in January, she told him that his brushes with the law worried her, according to a recording; each said “I love you” before hanging up. A GPS tracker the police placed on his car later showed him making regular trips to her apartment complex, and surveillance photos showed her outside a drug house.

In a series of calls hours after her death, as Mr. Glover tried to make bail, he told another woman that he had left about $14,000 with Ms. Taylor. “Bre been having all my money,” he claimed. The same afternoon, he also told an associate he had left money at Ms. Taylor’s home.

Mr. Aguiar, the lawyer for her family, said that no drugs or cash were found at her apartment after the raid. Thomas B. Wine, the Jefferson County prosecutor, countered that the search was called off once the shooting occurred.

So we don’t know for a fact if she was holding Glover’s drug money. Yet she still seems to have been tangled up with him. More:

Christopher 2X, a longtime community organizer whom Ms. Taylor’s family turned to after her death, said her relationship with Mr. Glover had to be acknowledged. “You can’t just look away from it and act like it’s not there,” he said. “My hope is courageous people will say: ‘There it is — it’s what it is — but was this shooting justified? She should be alive today.’”

Why did a judge authorize the no-knock warrant? Look:

The warrant cited five pieces of information establishing what the police said was probable cause: Mr. Glover’s car making repeated trips between the trap house and Ms. Taylor’s home; her car’s appearance in front of 2424 Elliott on multiple occasions; surveillance footage of him leaving her apartment with a package in mid-January; a postal inspector’s confirmation that Mr. Glover used her address to receive parcels; and database searches indicating that as of late February, he listed her apartment as his home address.

More:

But since Ms. Taylor’s death, what has emerged in bank statements, cellphone records, bail paperwork, audio recordings of police interrogations and other documents is a trail of evidence pointing to a complicated liaison between her and Mr. Glover, dating back to 2016.

Mr. Aguiar said in a statement last week that the police department had gone to “great lengths after Breonna died and this case received national scrutiny to dig up all of her past.”

But the lawyer also apologized to the public for having previously understated the extent of her relationship with the drug dealer, saying he had been unaware of the jailhouse recordings.

Court records show that Mr. Glover was convicted of selling cocaine and spent years in prison, starting in 2008 in his home state of Mississippi, where he was handed a 17-year sentence. In 2014, after moving to Kentucky, he was convicted of a second drug offense. He began dating Ms. Taylor in 2016, according to a statement he gave the police.

That December, a favor he asked of her — renting a car and lending it to him — ensnared her in a murder inquiry. A man was found slumped over the wheel, eight bullets riddling his body. Inside the car were three baggies of drugs and Ms. Taylor’s rental contract, court records show.

Breonna Taylor came from difficult circumstances. Her father was incarcerated for murder. She wanted a different life for herself. But she made a terrible mistake:

“Graduating this year on time is so important to me because I will be the first in my family to accomplish this,” she wrote in her scrapbook during her senior year, next to a photo of herself in a cap and gown. “I want to be the one who finally breaks the cycle of my family’s educational history. I want to be the one to finally make a difference.”

She enrolled at the University of Kentucky and a year later, in 2012, began a banter on Twitter with Mr. Walker, then a student at a university two and a half hours away. He was 20, she was 19. The flirtatious tweets grew into a friendship, and then a romance four years later, according to his account.

“I kept on telling her, I don’t want to be friends no more,” he recalled in an interview. “But I’m a Gemini, and she was also a Gemini. So, you know, some days it was, ‘Yeah let’s, let’s get married and have a kid,’ and another day it’s like, “No, let’s be single and live carefree lives.”

They began dating in the summer of 2016, he said. But a few months later, she started seeing Mr. Glover. For nearly four years — until weeks before her death — she went back and forth between the two men, Mr. Walker told the police.

She had a good boyfriend — Walker — but she could not shake the bad boy, Glover. And that is part of the reason she is dead.

Read the whole thing. Me, I don’t understand why the police, if they wanted Breonna Taylor, couldn’t have simply arrested her outside her apartment. Why did they need to do this dramatic raid? Even if it is found to be legally defensible, in the end, you have to wonder about the judgment of the police department here. But you also have to wonder about the judgment of Breonna Taylor, in continuing her relationship with this dirtbag Glover who just used her, and dragged her into his dirty business.

I bring this all up not to say “Breonna Taylor is responsible for her death” — it seems clear to me that there was a serious flaw in policing here — but to point out a major factor in drawing lessons from what happened to her, from the arc of her short life. What does her death mean?

Here’s where I’m going with this. My father taught my sister and me never to get mouthy with a police officer if we have an encounter, and always to obey them if placed under arrest. This was not part of an “or they will kill you” story; this was rather part of a story that said police are invested with legitimate authority, and even if you are innocent, you should obey them and let the legal system sort it out. I have passed on the same culture to my own children. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, in light of what’s been going on in our society, and I’ve been realizing how grateful I am to my late father for the gift he gave to us kids of moral order.

He was not perfect, and not a saint, but my dad, born to a factory worker and the first in his family to go to college, raised us kids in a modest home where my sister and I absorbed a sense of order naturally. I sometimes write about that much-discussed 1994 piece Robert D. Kaplan wrote in The Atlantic, titled “The Coming Anarchy” — I’m not going to waste one of my free Atlantic stories to link to it, but you can look it up. In it, Kaplan writes of a long journey he took from West African, through Egypt, Turkey, and on to southern Asia. He was trying to figure out the geopolitical future of that part of the world. The thing that has stuck with me through the years since reading it was his comparison of the slums of West Africa to those in Cairo and Istanbul. The difference was not money; everybody was dirt poor. The difference was that the West African poor had no sense of internal order, but the Egyptian and Turkish poor did — this, concluded Kaplan, was the gift of Islam. They had internalized the tenets of the Islamic religion, and conducted themselves according to its teachings.

Now, West Africa is both Islamic and Christian, but one has to wonder to what extent these Abrahamic religions have been internalized by the people within those cultures, and to what extent they are still under the sway of their traditional pagan gods. Islam and Christianity could be a thin veneer over resilient traditional paganism. Note well: I’m making a sociological claim here, not a theological one.

Broadly speaking, the traditional pagan religions of West Africa (which were imported to the New World with the African slaves) hold that the cosmos is fundamentally chaotic. Mankind lives at the mercy of the gods. Reality is controlled by unseen forces. The best a man can do is to keep those forces at bay by propitiating them, or perhaps by controlling them to do his bidding. In a society determined by this kind of pagan cosmology, it can be rational to live by irrationality. If the gods might destroy your field because they are mad at you, then what sense does it make to live by agricultural practices that would bring order to your farm? Ideas have consequences, and so do religious ideas.

My dad was not much of a churchgoer, but he imbued his children with the unquestioned sense that the universe was rational, ordered, and moral. This was our reality, an unseen reality made manifest in the way my dad and mom governed our house, and taught us to regard the world. I think my dad believed too much in moral rationality: he really struggled to deal with the fact that his daughter, who had lived 100 percent by the code he believed in, was struck down by cancer in her forties. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. She had done everything right, and this happened. Some things really are beyond our ability to control.

But my father was more right than wrong. I write a fair amount about how he came from rural poverty, and understood what it was like to have nothing. After World War II, when the GI Bill opened up opportunities for poor and working class men to go to college, he took advantage of that. The self-discipline and (if you want to be fancy) metaphysics he was handed by his parents and their rural Southern culture allowed him to prosper materially. My dad was a Christian, but not a big churchgoer. What he believed in was hard work, self-discipline, and personal honor. In his view, the world rewarded those who lived by that code — and if a poor man who did was mistreated, or a rich man who didn’t prospered, then that was a sign of injustice.

I’ve thought a lot about how my dad rose from poverty, and why people who haven’t risen from poverty are stuck there. This is a big topic, but the point I want to bring up here is tied to the West Africa vs. Cairo and Istanbul story. I’ve written here in the past about a family I know up in my home parish — a white family who would be classified as “the working poor.” When we were living up there, we regularly saw the matriarch of the family, who kept us updated on the travails of her sprawling clan. The stories she would tell — some of which involved drugs and booze — were hard to grasp for middle-class people like my wife and me.

We tried to help them materially on a couple of occasions, but we finally realized that it was futile. These people constantly sabotaged themselves. Here’s the key: it finally became clear to my wife and me that this family lived in a chaotic cosmos. They believed that bad things just happened to them. They had almost no sense of cause and effect. If bad things happened, it was either bad luck, or someone else wishing them ill. The matriarch was a dear woman, a hard-working woman, but she was saddled by a bunch of no-account men, and reckless women who followed their passions wherever they led. Materially, this clan had far more resources than my dad, a child of the Great Depression, ever did. But they lacked a sense of internal order, and a sense that reality was governed by laws — the Tao, if you like.

This was the West Africa vs. Egypt and Turkey story, played out among white Americans in the same parish. I was raised in a lower middle class home, in terms of personal wealth, but my father, our patriarch, was extremely rich in wisdom.

He taught us to stay away from drugs, because they would ruin your life. Alcohol was permitted in his world, but drunkenness was taboo. A man who can’t hold his liquor is shameful, he believed. When I was arrested as a college freshman for drunk driving, the shame of it was what upset him so much. Look at you, with your name in the newspaper, disgracing the family. You were raised better than that. 

He was right: I had been raised better than that. It didn’t happen again.

My father imbued us kids with a strong sense of personal responsibility. Yes, the world is unfair, he would say, but that doesn’t give you the right to “act up,” as he put it. He despised self-pity, and considered it a moral fault. He warned us that keeping bad company would lead to bad things for us. Don’t go along with the crowd, he would say. Do what you know is right, no matter what it costs you. Respect others, and respect yourself. You could pick up the Book of Proverbs, and there you would find the world of my father, pretty much. He was so old-fashioned, and I thank God for the gift of that old-fashioned country man. When I read Clarence Thomas’s great memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, about how his strict grandfather, who raised him, saved him by impressing upon him a rock-solid set of values, I realized that Justice Thomas’s grandfather was a harder-edged version of my own dad.

I go on about this for a reason. What happened to George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Breonna Taylor would not have surprised a man like my father. Floyd was a career criminal and a drughead. Blake was a violent man too. Taylor’s extended romantic relationship with a career criminal brought her to ruin. All of these cases, regardless of how they are adjudicated in a court of law, would have been seen by my father as examples of what happens to people who refuse to live by the Tao (I mean this in the C.S. Lewis sense of “natural law”), or who entangle themselves with those who refuse to live by the Tao. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis wrote:

The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.

I have a friend, a Catholic convert, who used to be addicted to cocaine. Once he was speeding on his motorcycle, flying high on the drug, when he heard a voice say, “If you want to live, stop this.” (Or something close to that.) He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. He stopped. He found God. He radically changed his life. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he continued on that path, he would die. He had to get rid of his drug friends, and, well, repent in every way. But he was walking the road to death.

Why am I going on and on about all this? Because all of this is part of the worldview of conservatives, a moral orientation toward the world that conditions how many of us interpret these high-profile cases of police violence against black people. When I saw Chris Webber’s moving statement, I wondered if he really does believe that the problem of police violence against black men is solely one of out-of-control police who need to be reigned in by lawmakers. Does he truly not see that this problem is far more morally and culturally complex?

I’m sure he doesn’t. You can’t watch that Chris Webber statement and think that that man is a cynic. Again, he comes across to me as a good man, a moral man. But I think he is a liberal, and that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has taught us a great deal about the differences in moral foundations between liberals and conservatives. I’ll get to that in a second.

Last night, I corresponded with a reader — an academic who is an Evangelical Christian — about all this. He gives me permission to quote his letter below. I brought up in our conversation how much I struggled to understand the worldview of people who regard Floyd, Blake, and Taylor as nothing more than people acted upon, and as not having some moral responsibility for their lives, and how they ended up in these terrible situations. The reader wrote back:

I’m in the same boat. I can’t fathom what other people are thinking. The best explanation I have is that other people are not thinking in legal terms of responsibility/duty and what sorts of duties are conducive to a lawful and peaceful social order.

That led me to talk to the reader about how deeply grateful I am for the gift my father gave me and my late sister — the gift of internal moral order. My dad was a man who placed immense stock in moral authority. He worked in government, as a health inspector, and he had to deal with people all the time who tried to flout the moral order. A couple of times people tried to bribe him to give their facilities a pass on health inspection. That made him fighting mad, mostly because these men assumed that he was the kind of dishonorable man who would take a bribe. In my recollection, Daddy never really sat us down for straightforward moral instruction, but everything about the way he lived, and the stories he told about the world, conveyed to us kids that if we wanted to live in a peaceful and lawful social order, then we had individual duties toward that end.

When I was in third grade, I read Roald Dahl’s book Danny, The Champion of the World, about a little English boy whose father was a poacher. I could not get over the idea that this kid, who was about my age, had a father who broke the law, and taught him that lawbreaking was normative. I bring this up not to condemn the book, but to give you an idea of the work of moral formation that my father was accomplishing within my sister and me. The father was supposed to be the incarnation of moral authority, and goodness. When he wasn’t, then the whole world made no sense. That’s how it was for me, for better or for worse. Maybe you can see why the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and the moral corruption of so many Catholic bishops (who did not enforce the moral law), tore me down to the foundations.

Anyway, my academic Evangelical reader wrote back:

They say if fish were scientists, the last thing they would discover is water. It is less an object in their world than the condition upon which their world is founded. It may be similar with the social order. Maybe the social order of mid 20th century America was so successful as to render it invisible to those of us with functional homes. We just take it for granted.

Stephen Wolfe, recent LSU PhD, has made the claim that the problem with elite Evangelical political theology (think what Mere Orthodoxy and The Gospel Coalition have become) is that it came of age at a time when the civil society was so healthy that Evangelicals could take the stability of the social order for granted and never had to think of politics in terms of the social order needing to be established or sustained:

 

“Since Christian political theory for decades has developed in conditions of abundance and under a modern state, it has emphasized ethics and just distribution of resources (which the state can easily extract and redistribute). But it has largely neglected the foundations of political order. And so we have highly moralistic political theory that is fearful of power and control of civil institutions, especially since modern institutions facilitated Christian space for moralizing. The result is political theory that is incomplete, for it assumes (often in the background) the modern state’s ability to order society, and we lack the ability to address conditions of disorder. What we need today is a complete Christian political theory — one that is itself sufficient for political order. What we have now is entirely dependent on secularist ordering. We require new (or the old) ways of thinking that oppose the dominant posture towards politics found among our Christian leaders.”

Jonathan Haidt talks about the six foundations of conservative morality:


Care/Harm
Fairness/Cheating
Loyalty/Betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation
Liberty/Oppression


and three foundations of liberal morality:

Care/Harm
Fairness/Cheating
Liberty/Oppression

I’d guess that with Floyd, Haidt’s analysis would be that liberals feel compassion for him (I mean the poor guy died a horrible and pitiable death) and that hits on the Care/Harm, and I suppose they come in with a narrative of racial oppression and the compassion activates the Liberty/Oppression circuit.

But conservatives start off not terribly sympathetic because the dude degraded himself with his hedonistic drug use (Sanctity/subversion), and broke the law which could hit on Fairness/Cheating and resisted police (Authority/subversion). That doesn’t leave as much room for the conservative Care/Harm to play a huge role.

My main area of research is connected to Haidt’s stuff, but I won’t give my reorganization of his schema here, I just think he leaves things sort of unfinished.

A really really really simple way to break it down would be the Order vs Chaos (experience of pure subjectivity). Here I am thinking in the key of Nietzsche who emphasizes the tension between the Apollonian spirit (rationally ordered where the self is perceived as distinct from objects of its understanding) and the Dionysian spirit which is experiential and in which the distinction between self and world and other self breaks down. You might also think of it in more complementary terms: Logos and Spirit. I believe Male and Female largely manifest, represent, and symbolize this intra-Trinitarian complementarity and this is built into the structure of the cosmos. (CS Lewis seems to have thought this way too though he would have emphasized analogy to the Dao and yin and yang rather than Nietzsche)

We tame this tension in marriage, domestic life. The home really is the first political society. The father orders the home–imposes order on it–but the mother makes it habitable: mother invites you in to share a world of experience. When in balance, it’s great. What more could you want? But order without this intersubjective and shared experience becomes tyrannical and oppressive. There are fathers who impose an arbitrary and life-stealing order on their homes–their homes are unlivable. Subjectivity without order becomes chaos. Single moms who can’t say no, who invite everything in court chaos. I think there is a wonderful illustration of this in [the Terrence Malick film] The Tree of Life.

I think something has happened in the Western world where women are unable to manifest their role and achieve the sort of transformative intersubjective experience they seek (perhaps breakdown in home and cessation of reproduction) and their repressed maternal and feminine instincts are being expressed in politics and activism and a feminization of the social order.

There is a lot in that letter, and certainly contestable. Feel free to argue with him. I should say that my father did not at all impose an “arbitrary and life-stealing order” on our home. For my sister and me, his authority was mostly something life-giving, something we craved. It made us feel safe. And because our home was where we first learned about the world, we were conditioned to regard authority as something natural and good and life-giving.



I get that many others have not had that experience. I’m bringing it up here, though, for the sake of discussing the conflict within American society over the way we interpret this terrible conflict over race, police violence, and society. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory is quite helpful in giving us a framework to understand all this. I don’t want to make this already-lengthy post even longer by quoting Haidt’s definitions of the moral foundations (my reader quoted them in his letter), but about them, Haidt writes:

The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying primarily on the Care/harm foundation, with additional support from the Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression foundations. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all six foundations, including Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation.

That’s absolutely the case with me. My reader, who is also a religious conservative, explained pithily why people like us interpret what happened with Floyd in a way less sympathetic to him. Similarly with Blake, the reason police were there was because he had broken into the home of a woman, who called 911. The reason they were arresting him was because he was wanted on a felony sexual assault warrant for allegedly breaking into a woman’s house and raping her digitally.

Even if true, that has nothing to do legally with Blake’s shooting. Remember, we’re talking about judging what happened morally. Blake starts out in a bad place with moral conservatives (in the Haidt scheme) because he is an accused lawbreaker who allegedly raped a woman.

It strikes me that every one of these three cases — Floyd, Blake, Taylor — involve a radical failure of men to be good men. And this, I think, draws us back to where I began this long blog post: with Chris Webber’s moving appeal to young black men to get involved to fight police brutality. You can’t know the fullness of Webber’s thinking on the matter from a short television appeal, but if he thinks this terrible situation is solely the fault of brutal policing, well, how can he possibly think that? How can he (and other liberals) not recognize the dominant role that a culture of male lawlessness plays in these violent encounters? How can we expect a culture in which nearly three out of four babies are born into fatherless families — as is the case in black America — to produce well-adjusted men?

It seems to me that liberals lack the conceptual framework to deal holistically with grave and complex problems like this. (Something similar happened regarding rampant gay male promiscuity in the AIDS crisis; for some reason, many liberals seem unable to hold people they regard as society’s victims responsible for their own behavior, even if the suffering of those people is to some degree society’s fault too.) We can and we should fight brutal policing through reform legislation and policies. It’s not an either-or situation.

But if you want to avoid having potentially fatal run-ins with police, then you should stay away from the drug world. If the police arrest you, you should obey them. If you have friends or lovers who are involved in criminal activity, you should get away from them at once. You should not valorize lawlessness, and you should reject a culture that does.

This 2011 video, filmed in the violent and poor black part of my city, by a rapper who is now quite famous, is an example of this last point. You tell me how young men acculturated by this kind of thing are going to avoid a life of lawlessness, and not risk violent conflict with law enforcement. It’s not going to happen. Common sense tells you that. But common sense is quite lacking today. People who grew up in functional homes, in functional social orders, may take for granted the internalized sense of lawfulness that gives us the freedom to carry on our lives without violence. Maybe we have forgotten this, and this inhibits our understanding.

What do you think? Serious, thoughtful comments only. If you only want to rant, from the left or the right, I’m not going to post your remarks.

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Pariahs Of Their Block

A reader writes:

I’m asking you to keep me anonymous, because I just don’t feel like I’m up for any potential social justice drama, especially considering where I currently live.

I am a right of center but mostly conventionally and reverent Catholic  (Mass the way it was intended, in Latin, I feel that people like us don’t have a political home in the 21st-century).

I am married with two young children, and my wife and I live in an upper middle class, progressive neighborhood, in a large northeastern city. I work in what we might call “the culture industry“ so I am quite familiar with “corporate wokeness”, but I have been able to coexist peacefully if uneasily with it for several years I’m my professional life.

Now, my neighbors are also overwhelmingly liberal, but we also had (past tense) good relationships, mainly because my wife and I are too afraid to share some of our more “conservative” political opinions. I’ve often prayed if I should actually engage some of them about the problems of the inner city ghettos thugs (I’m sorry, but there’s no other word for some of these people) , and the deep, dark, even demonic zeitgeist of secularism in today’s America.

But overall, I have not “gone there”, and up until June, my family felt safe and “tolerated“ if not embraced, even though we were a distinct political minority.

The George Floyd protests changed all of that. About a week after the riots started, one of my neighbors emailed the street email list we use to plan block parties and told everyone she was “buying black lives matters“ signs for all of our front yards. She made it very clear that she expected all of us to put the signs in our front yard.  Of course, as you might expect, immediately many people responded enthusiastically, and within a week, literally every house on our block had a Black Lives Matter sign except for mine. I just don’t feel comfortable putting political things up, unless they are directly related to my personal theological values.

A few weeks after the signs went up, I noticed something very strange about my formerly friendly neighbors. When our family would take our daily walks down the street, people would turn their backs to us. Friendly “hellos” from us were met with stone silence. The neighbor who purchased the signs for the street was especially cold to me. After a few weeks of this, I finally confronted her, and asked her if there was some kind of problem that I should be aware of, that we could be able to talk out.

She just pointed to my house, smirked, and said “you know EXACTLY what the problem is.“ Then she walked away.

So now we’ve been ostracized by our neighbors for weeks, and have decided to join thousands of other people in fleeing American cities. They have become completely impossible to live in, unless you are willing to drop all of your values and embrace progressivism. The “for sale” sign in front yard is now a sad reminder to me of this. We’ve had enough. How many more of us are there? I wonder.

I know you are now have finished a book project about “soft totalitarianism“ and I felt that our painful story might be an example of the kind of thing you have been discussing. Feel free to share this, but please leave my name out of it. Thank you again, for all that you do for people like me.

UPDATE: Just heard from a friend, who said he just got home from hanging out with a bunch of his buddies tonight. The group expressed lots of exasperation with wokeness, which is hitting some of the guys at work. It’s on everybody’s mind, even the least political members of the group. Said my friend, of the current cultural moment, it “clearly has moved a couple of the guys from ‘I’m sitting this one out’ to voting for Trump.”

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