Rod Dreher's Blog, page 128

Donald Trump Is Sorry

If you haven’t watched the Chris Wallace interview with President Trump on Fox News Sunday, I urge you to do so. Here is a link.It is as devastating as they say. If you are a conservative, you can’t find anything good in this session. Wallace doesn’t do anything special here — he simply does his job as a professional journalist — but Trump destroys himself. We are led by an incompetent who, even with his presidency on the line, and even with the Left more radical and destructive than it has ever been, is staggeringly unfit for the job. Don’t take my word for it — just watch.

Yuval Levin offers a short but good analysis in National Review. Levin looks past Trump’s crackpot answers about the pandemic, and focuses on Trump’s engulfing self pity. In his final question, Wallace tossed Trump a softball, asking the president how he will look back on his years in the White House. Levin quotes the transcript at length, then says:

Asked to reflect on his term so far as he seeks re-election, the president’s answer is that he was treated unfairly. Even when he is literally invited by his interviewer to say good things about himself, all he can reach for is resentment.

More:

And of course, he’s not wrong. The sense of resentment he has channeled has been rooted in some important realities, and even his own sense that he has been treated unfairly by his opponents as president is not mistaken. Sure he has. But that this sense of resentment is chiefly what drives him, that he can’t see past it or point beyond it, has been a crucial factor in many of his biggest failures as an executive.

He has treated the world’s most powerful job as a stage from which to vent his frustrations with the world’s mistreatment of him, and this has often kept him from advancing durable aims, from capitalizing on opportunities, from learning from mistakes, and from leading. In reasonably good times, it meant that he turned our national politics into a reality-television performance—focused, as those often are, on the drama of bruised egos. But in a time of crisis, it has left him incapable of rising to the challenge of his job, and the consequences have been dire.

Read it all. 

Levin nails it — or rather, he identifies what has made Trump’s presidency a massive failure: his catastrophic egotism.

One of the things that drew me from my college liberalism to conservatism back in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the way conservatives talked about personal responsibility. You can say that American conservatives have had a blind spot about structural inequities and problems, and you would be right about that to a certain extent. But for me, back then, I found it so depressing how the Left, which I had supported, blamed society for everything. When my father and I would argue about politics back then, he would tell me that just you wait until you get out into the real world, and have to start paying your own way. Then you’ll see. I thought he was just throwing cliches at me because he didn’t have good answers to the questions I was throwing at him.

Well, he was right. There’s nothing like seeing how much is taken out of your paycheck in taxes to start to sober you up. What’s more, I lived after college in a part of the city that had something of a crime problem. I was safe on campus, but I was no longer living on campus. I had to think more realistically about what caused crime, and how we as a society should deal with it. Eventually all my liberal pieties began to shrivel up. It’s not like the light dawned on me and suddenly I realized that the Republicans were right about everything. I didn’t, and they weren’t. But I did start to understand that disorder in society began with disorder in the individual soul, and in the family. For all their faults, conservatives understood that, and they didn’t pity themselves.

A couple of decades later, when I was well established as a conservative opinion journalist, I read Clarence Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. If you haven’t read it, you can get the gist of it in the surprisingly good recent PBS profile of Justice Thomas. 

He grew up in grinding Southern poverty, and in the humiliation and oppression of segregation. Thomas was raised by his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, who was a working man, and a hard man who believed that only discipline and education offered a way out. Clarence rebelled against his grandfather, but later came to be deeply grateful for the values Myers Anderson imparted to him. He saw that his grandfather had been right, and that far from being the “Uncle Tom” radicals would have called him, Myers, in his rough country way, had given Clarence the key to a life of integrity, despite the injustices he would have to endure as a black man.

Myers Anderson no doubt never thought of himself as any kind of right-winger, but he was a natural conservative, the kind of conservative that my own country-born father would have understood and admired. I would learn much later in life that my dad had suffered some hurtful injustices, not from the state or society at large, but from some members of his own family. I didn’t know the fullest extent of this until the final years of my father’s life, after he had had to watch his beloved daughter die from cancer. Nobody gets out of this life untouched by pain and suffering. My father never, ever felt sorry for himself, or if he did, he didn’t let it show. He could be a hard man too, and made some unjust decisions, and treated others unfairly at times. What can I say, he was a man?

One of the greatest gifts he gave me was a sense that in a just world, people should be rewarded for working hard and living by a code of honor that included self-discipline. I’ve written at length about my dad, both the good and the bad in his character, but the things that caused division between us (aside from my own faults, I mean) usually had to do with him not living up to the code he taught me.

My dad did not live to vote in the 2016 election. I’m sure he would have voted for Donald Trump, or an old yellow dog so long as it was Republican. But boy, I bet if he were alive today, he would have nothing but contempt for Trump. I can hear the words my dad used to describe men like Trump: “That’s a sorry sapsucker right there.” Sorry — the word has such deep resonance among Southern people like us. It carries with it a sense of shiftlessness, of weakness, and of being thoroughly contemptible. A man who is sorry doesn’t merit respect, even the kind of respect you would give to a bad man who was at least brave. A thief who had honor would still be no damn good, but he wouldn’t be sorry, if you follow me. It implies a  lack of character that is near total.

Trump is sorry. If you didn’t know it before, the end of that Chris Wallace interview makes it undeniable. Character is destiny. He will leave the presidency, and the country, a sorrier place than he found it when the American people elevated him to the highest office in the land. The character defects of Hillary Clinton (to say nothing of her sorry husband) do not erase that fact, and it’s a sorry thing, by now, to fall back on that as an excuse for this whining no-count bum, who wouldn’t be fit to pump gas in Myers Anderson’s delivery truck. If I were a kid in college now, and thought that Donald Trump and what he stood for was conservatism, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it either. It would have nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with character. As Levin points out, Trump had opportunities to get things done, but he was so preoccupied with his own resentments that he destroyed himself and his presidency. Nixon did this too, in his second term, but that was tragedy. With Trump, it’s trashy farce.

I saw on Twitter tonight this screenshot of the letter that George H.W. Bush left on the president’s desk for Bill Clinton gives us a stark idea of how far we have fallen, and a sense of the rubble out of which we on the Right are going to have to rebuild when he’s gone:

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Church, Academia, Diversity

I received the following e-mail from a reader, who gives me permission to post it as long as I don’t disclose his identity. I have slightly edited this to protect him:

I have read your recent posts about race relations with interest and thought you might be interested in my efforts to have my church expand its dialogue about race to include viewpoints other than the “anti-racist” position advocated by people such as Ibram Kendi.

The reader then told me his religious and professional background. He is a white liberal who attends a liberal Protestant church in a major US city, and has been active for decades in work that is part of the civil rights movement. He goes on:

About a decade ago I began to realize that the civil rights movement was being hijacked by a very different approach to race relations and racial justice, which I will simply call the “anti-racist” movement. Colleagues at work and friends at church began to mock the idea of a color-blind society and argued that society must focus on racial identity as a means of achieving “racial equity.” I found it difficult to engage in meaningful dialogue with them. I sometimes think that the only reason they did not brand me as a racist is because I had worked my entire career fighting racial discrimination.

About two years ago my church did embark on a congregation wide discussion of “racial righteousness and equity.” It soon became clear that the only views that were going to be represented were of the anti-racist orthodoxy and, amazingly to me, most of the small group discussions were racially segregated. Recently, we have had a series of sermons (virtual of course) which have espoused the Kendi model and we have even had segregated prayers, where the white senior pastor prays on behalf of the white people and the black executive pastor prays on behalf of the African-American congregants. I was stunned at how far my church had come from MLK’s vision of an integrated society.

In February of this year, I emailed the senior pastor and executive pastor and asked them to expand the dialogue to include differing viewpoints. I sent them an essay I had written on my view of civil rights and the gospel — in order to give them an example of a different approach to achieving better race relations and advancing justice. Both pastors said they were too busy to engage with me and referred me to our church moderator (the lay leader of our church board). The moderator suggested that I read Kendi’s book “How to be an Antiracist” and that he would read John McWhorter’s book “Winning the Race” and that we would then discuss the two books. I agreed and enlisted a friend in the congregation who shared many of my views on the topic to read both books and join the discussion. The moderator enlisted two other members of the congregation to join in as well.

Reading Kendi’s book was eye-opening and disheartening. Things were even worse than I had thought. In my view, Kendi espouses racial separatism and demands racial “equity”, which he defines as equal outcomes in every aspect of life. [Kendi’s critics have pointed out that unequal outcomes are an inevitable result of a free and capitalist society and accuse Kendi of being a totalitarian.] Moreover, his approach is polarizing and highly judgmental. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect is his claim that moral suasion is useless and that antiracism is all about power. His book is so dogmatic that he rewrites history in an effort to bolster his views. For example, he claims that America only passed civil rights legislation in order to curry favor with newly independent African nations so as to keep them out of the Soviet orbit and that morality played no role in the civil rights movement of the Sixties. Also, he argues that Martin Luther King advocated segregated schools so that black children would not be harmed by white teachers. Both of these claims are demonstrably false. I wrote a critique of the book and sent it to the moderator and other participants in the discussion. My friend who thinks like me also wrote a critique of the book and sent it to the same people.

So I was looking forward to finding out why our church moderator liked the book. But the discussion has not taken place, mostly due to the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath. I am hopeful that we will have the discussion in the next few months because I genuinely want to find out what my fellow church members are thinking. I have tried to dialogue with individuals in the church, but I have not found anyone who wants to take the time to actually discuss the complex issues of race and justice, other than the few members who question the antiracist paradigm.

Our church discussion of race continues to be exclusively based on antiracist dogma. The books that have been discussed recently are “White Fragility” and “Me and White Supremacy.” Several months ago, I sent our senior pastor a link to John McWhorter’s article which argued that antiracism had become a new religion for some. She responded by saying that the article was “interesting” — but over the past several months my church seems to have actually imbibed that new religion!

The members of my congregation are sincere Christians who want to live out the gospel. They oppose police brutality and seek to fight racial prejudice and discrimination. We have a common goal. But we have very different ideas on how to achieve that goal. The leaders and movements that my church friends trust tell them that the only way to achieve the goal is to ally with the antiracism movement. I am still trying to find ways to have meaningful conversations with both black and white church members where we can explore the foundations of our viewpoints and seek common ground.

I am a liberal and we would likely disagree on many important issues. But I decided that I would not support antiracist orthodoxy simply because most liberals do. It has been frustrating to learn that nearly all of my liberal friends refuse to question the orthodoxy. I am actually glad that Kendi’s book has been near the top of the best seller list for several weeks. My hope is that enough people will actually read it and realize that it is a dangerous book which advocates ideas and methods which run counter to racial equality and stand in the way of improved race relations. I appreciate the fact that you have been advocating the traditional civil rights message of MLK and others and pointing out the flaws in the antiracist dogma.

Another reader — an Evangelical that I met in my travels — writes to tell me that he is leaving academia. He teaches at a Christian university:

Your recent posts inspired me to reach out to you. I’d like to explain my own intention to leave higher education entirely. If you think readers will find it interesting, you are welcome to share it (but please keep my identity hidden).

Over the last 10 years, our university’s traditional undergraduate enrollment shrunk by more than a third. Administrators attempted to remedy the crisis in ways that were entirely predictable. They brought in consultants; they marketed the university as an ideal destination for any career-minded person; they highlighted professional programs and portrayed their Christian identity in anodyne terms. Trustees—most of whom have no skin in the game when making university-related decisions—responded to budget shortfalls by calling for program eliminations. During this time, the university relied on athletic programs to drive enrollment.

At the end of the day, the university became a less compelling option for prospective students. The teaching environment also changed. The theological literacy of students deteriorated as the university marketed themselves to a wider demographic. While we managed to attract some good students, many (especially male athletes) were unprepared for college-level work. Retention became a responsibility for every professor. Yet enrollments still lagged, and more academic programs were eliminated, including my own.

The prospect of redefining my professional life is frightening, but staying in academia has no appeal for me. I’ve spent too much emotional energy defending the humanities only to see them subsumed by the servile arts. In cash poor colleges especially, humanities programs have only a nominal role in the curriculum. Administrators may acknowledge the inherent worth of the humanities; yet their survival requires demonstrating their value in economic terms.

For many years, I thought the Christian university could serve as a bulwark against secular drift. But its failure is assured by academia’s de facto objective. Frank Donaghue, a professor of literature at Ohio State, is precisely right: “Higher education is job training, however academics like to think otherwise” (The Last Professors, 85). In this regard, Christian universities are no different than their secular counterparts. Despite their professed mission, they are almost entirely utilitarian in their perspective and bourgeois in their aims. In some cases they can’t afford not to discard the disciplines that would help the Church think carefully and responsibly about the world and its place within it. There are exceptions to this trend, of course. But on the whole, Christian education is increasingly incapable of addressing present day cultural challenges in bold and effective ways.This became especially clear to me in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. I watched several Christian college presidents attempt to establish their anti-racist credentials through feckless moral posturing. As far as I know, none will admit to using academically underprepared young men (many of whom are racial minorities) to pad their enrollments.

Yes, administrators will continue reminding constituents about their institutions’ “enduring Christian mission” and “transformative” educational experience. Such language is an adornment masking the smell of polluted air. Scroll through the list of member colleges and universities of the CCCU. Many of them are bullshit centers of cultural assimilation and vocational training. As crushing student debt increases, these universities will have a harder time explaining why someone should pay more tuition at an institution which may not exist in five years.

Worries about my own career aside, there is something liberating about being untethered from an institution whose future is less than promising.

Here’s a different voice. A Christian academic friend forwarded me this e-mail from a correspondent, who gave me permission to post it as long as I didn’t identify him:

I think both [David French and Rod Dreher] significantly overstate the risks that Christians experience in the public sphere and in academia, in particular; I think their entrenchment in the class of social commentators who spend a lot of time *online* has inhibited their ability to reliably assess the dangers. Rod, in particular, is prone to giving too much weight to the anecdotes told by his readership and the loud voices on Twitter and blogs.

I am a [scientist] at [well-known university], a bastion for progressive social activism. Perhaps my experience is inconsistent with the experiences of academics in the social sciences, humanities, and arts; but here is my own anecdote, such that it is: nearly everyone with whom I closely work knows that I am an evangelical Christian, and I have felt only the slightest “persecution,” and I’m unsure if that is the most accurate term for those rare experiences. I have shared the gospel with my boss (an atheist assistant professor who was raised Muslim by [immigrant] parents in the States) and other colleagues in my lab; it’s not as if I am quiet about my beliefs. I wear t-shirts with my church’s logo and host lab parties at my home, where Bible verses are and Bibles are conspicuous. This isn’t to say I think those icons are effective evangelistic tools, only that my faith is far from hidden.

It’s also not as if I am insulated from the sort of people whom Rod and David would imagine are likely to be intolerant of me. A PhD student in my lab checks all the boxes: atheist/pagan, raised in southern California with some Mormon influences, married to the angry son of hyperconservative Christians, sister to a trans brother, vegan, animal rights activist, and vociferously pro-choice. She has twice worn a shirt to lab that says “THANK GOD FOR ABORTION” that nearly made me vomit. Earlier this year a rumor that I didn’t “believe in evolution” swept through my lab. It caused a little stir, especially for this PhD student, who was worried that this belief would interfere with my work and hence our ability to work together. The rumor was false, and it took several months (and a night at the pub) for her to divulge the rumor to me, which I immediately corrected.

The next morning, we debriefed our conversation. I told her, “Indeed I believe in evolution. But I want to be clear, and I want you to understand, that I believe some things that you would find absolutely wacky. I believe a dead man came back to life.” She considered it for a moment and replied, “That’s fine, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work.”

In the past, we had a research specialist who was gay and an integral member of the LGBTQ+ community in [our super-progressive town] and at the university. One day in the office, I experienced a bit of discomfort when a moderately famous professor in our department made a joke about how a church is that last place you’d expect to see a scientist. After she left, I turned to my gay colleague and said, “I was pretty uncomfortable during that interaction, as the professor made clear that she did not see science and church attendance as compatible. I know that you have experienced from people like me far worse discrimination, and I want you to know that if I ever make you feel like that, please inform me.”

He replied, “That means a lot to me. And please do the same if I repeat her mistake.” We never entered into a political discussion of whether gay marriage should be legal, or what I thought about the interactions between the church and public LGBTQ+ activism. Those things didn’t matter; what mattered was a collegial, mutual compassion and respect for each other.
In [our town], it’s common for churches and Christians to act as if they are always under attack.

Sure, every once in a while there is a hit piece in the newspaper about whether or not a church is LGBTQ+ affirming, but my experience is that the persecution is overstated. One of the problems with Christian defensiveness is that it negates the much more offensive (and by that I mean forward-moving, as a soccer team goes from a defensive posture to an offensive one after re-taking possession) act of love. Love is not advanced from a defensive posture, so I am often inclined to think that Christians who are on the defensive are so because they have neglected the Christ-commanded advance of love. This obviously isn’t always the case in world history; there are indeed plenty of offensively loving Christian groups that have nevertheless experienced extreme persecution, as the Bible predicts and promises. Only in rare cases does this sort of persecution occur in the United States.

To sum up: I live in a city that historically has been conceptualized as being hostile to Christians. [My town] is known as “the city where churches go to die.” I am in a less than secure career situation yet have been vocally Christian among people whom Rod and David would not guess to be tolerant of an orthodox Christianity. My love and compassion for them is as perceptible and offensive as my Christian beliefs. I have never been in any danger of losing my job or of losing social status or respect in my lab. It is possible that my experience is not the norm. Make of that what you will.

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Diamonds And Volcanoes

Well, he’s finally done it: Damon Linker has out gloomed and out doomed even me. From his latest, in which he says that the economy is bound to go into the crapper, Covid is going to get worse, people are getting madder and crazier, and stuff:

When it comes to the pandemic, a significant portion of the population of the United States has succumbed to magical thinking. But a natural process like the transmission of a contagious disease doesn’t care one bit about the lies with which a person, a community, or a country consoles itself. The virus will spread according to its own logic no matter what we think or how ignorant we will ourselves to be. That’s why I’ve begun to fear COVID is just going to mow us down.

What kind of social, economic, and political disruptions are we likely to see as it happens? I shudder to think. Especially after observing the unanticipated nationwide conflagration that followed the killing of George Floyd. As my colleague Noah Millman argued during the early, most volatile portion of the unrest, it made sense to think of the looting and burning as “the coronavirus riots” — because the video of Floyd’s final minutes of life was not sufficient to explain them. The manifest injustice captured on a cell phone and broadcast to the world online — like many others before — was of course the absolutely necessary condition of the protests, but there also needed to be a pent-up, bored, lonely, frustrated, and volatile population craving a cause for there to be destructive unrest.

Now imagine a nation in which the ranks of the unemployed grow every week for months on end, constantly provoked by its president, some terrified of infection, others claiming it’s a conspiracy, nearly everyone disgusted by institutional incompetence — and then the economy really starts to tank, with waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, a flood of evictions leading to a huge increase in homelessness, a bigger wave of urban crime than we’ve already seen, foreclosures that push banks to the brink and erase the equity of homeowners, and a belated stock market crash that wipes out the retirement funds of half the country.

Tick, tick, boom.

Read it all, but only if you have a bottle of whisky near to hand.

You’ll find it strange to hear from me, but I’m feeling a bit more hopeful these days. Not optimistic — I don’t see any reason for optimism — but hopeful. It’s nothing that’s really discussable at length here, but I can tell you that it involves signs manifesting in the lives of people I don’t even know, but who are in touch with me, indicating that the divine is active in their lives (I’m speaking broadly on purpose). Just extraordinary stuff — enough to keep my spirits up, for sure. This kind of thing is a reminder that there is meaning behind the veil.

One of the good things that has been happening to me lately is discovering the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and getting back into the writing of Paul Kingsnorth. I read over the weekend his 2019 book Savage Gods, which is about writing (the savage gods are words) through a midlife crisis. This line:

The world happens on the other side of a thin gauze and I can only ever break through by accident and all my life the gauze has been there and I have never believed in the world, have never believed it was real, and the only time I have ever really, truly felt alive, ever really felt I could break through it, tear it, come out into the real has been when I am writing.

… reminded me of Tarkovsky, who wrote about how art is a portal to transcendence and eternity. More Tarkovsky:

The meaning of religious truth is hope. Philosophy seeks the truth, defining the meaning of human activity, the limits of human reason, the meaning of existence, even when the philosopher reaches the conclusion that existence is senseless, and human effort—futile.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognise and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.

Tarkovsky says that any and all art that has any meaning must be “an act of sacrifice.” Whenever Tarkovsky talks about art, I read him as also talking about religion. Recently I was e-mailing with a reader who has recently begun to have a hunger for God, despite having been a lifelong atheist. He said that one thing that has kept him away from faith all these years has been the belief that Christianity is nothing but fussy moralism (he didn’t put it quite like that, but that’s what he meant). He had no idea how deep and rich the actual tradition is until very recently. Inspired by his e-mail, I sent him this photo of a page from the Orthodox theologian and priest Dumitru Staniloae’s great book Orthodox Spirituality:

 

 

Staniloae is talking about St. Maximus the Confessor, who suffered torture for his faith, and who later died in the year 662. Now, if the only thing you thought Christianity was is politics (progressive or conservative) and moralism, wouldn’t it knock you out of your chair to discover this?

Tell me, Christian or otherwise, are you sure that the world is as you think it is? Are you sure that you have found all there is to find? Maybe, as we were talking in another thread, you have been looking all your life at what seemed to be a meaningless forest, but suddenly, you see a trail that was there all along, but hidden from your eyes. There it is. You are only able to see it because everything is shaking loose.

When everything shakes loose, that is a time of holy fear. For me, the journey into Christianity has been a pilgrimage into a living mystery, one that started with awe — that is, holy fear — in the nave of the Chartres Cathedral, when I was seventeen, and that has continued in fits and starts ever since. I have learned the hard way how true is the wisdom that Tarkovsky speaks, and the saints have spoken: that there is no spiritual progress, or artistic progress, without sacrifice. It just cannot be done. In Tarkovsky’s great film Andrei Rublev, the iconographer rediscovers his vocation when he understands that true art requires sacrifice, and emerges from the experience of suffering. Rublev had lost his faith in art, overwhelmed by the pain and cruelty of medieval Russia. But then it was revealed to him that pain and beauty are intimately related. As Tarkovsky puts it so memorably in his nonfiction book Sculpting In Time:

Diamonds are not found in black earth; they have to be sought near volcanoes.

We are living in a time in which the volcanoes are rumbling back to life. This is frightening. It might kill us. But it might also help us to become fully alive, if you follow me. Pay attention to the things being revealed to you now. There will be diamonds.

Tell us all, readers, about the diamonds you have found near the volcanoes in your life — especially the diamonds you are harvesting right now.

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Heroes, Villains, And America’s Fate

Over the weekend, I received a detailed letter from a college student who is scared. This student is on the political left, but is feeling beaten down and discouraged by the woke mob at their super-elite school. The student wrote to me because the student believes that what I call “soft totalitarianism” really is coming, and the student wants some advice on how to carry on in this ideologically rigid, miserable, oppressive environment.

I sent the student a digital copy of Live Not By Lies to help him/her think through their future there. It’s a book specifically for Christians, as you know, but the analysis of woke culture is general, not specifically Christian, and the advice for dealing with it given by the Russian and Central European Christians I interviewed is mostly applicable to all free people, not just religious believers.

I asked the student to consider that they are in a rare position to be living among the class of people who will be ruling this country in the decades to come. The student will have had the experience of observing them up close, and learning how they think. This information may well be very valuable in the future, to help undermine these future tyrants, and to protect liberal values, and dissidents. In fact, Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the hero priest who laid the groundwork for the underground church in Slovakia, knew that Soviet tyranny was coming to that country five years before it actually arrive — this, because he had studied Soviet Russia closely, and understood better than most how the Soviets thought.

I asked the student to send me some remarks when they are finished with the book. I’m very curious to know if the book spoke to someone like them. The student has been sending me some comments as he/she reads, and so far, the book is really resonating.

I bring that story up because of some interesting results from a new Fox News poll. The headlines are mostly about how far Biden is ahead of Trump. But what caught my eye are what the poll found out about one salient aspect of the culture war:

 

That’s not so bad, huh? But look, as National Journal‘s Josh Kraushaar did, at the demographic breakdown of the data:

 

Here’s a screenshot of the nitty-gritty:

The coming decades are going to be full of conflict. Don’t you doubt it. What this “heroes or villains?” question is really asking is, “Do you believe in the civic religion of America?” Think of it like this: how could the Catholic Church hold itself together if a significant number of Catholics decided that Jesus Christ, St. Peter, and St. Paul were villains? It couldn’t. A nation is not a religion, but it has to hold its founders in esteem — and this is especially true of America, which was not founded on a tribe, as most other nations were. You don’t have to believe that Washington, Jefferson, and the Founders were without sin — of course they weren’t — but you do have to believe that what they did was good, even heroic. Certainly not villainous. This is what is so poisonous about The New York Times‘s 1619 Project: they are aiming directly at the American founding, trying to delegitimize America as a nation.

To think that Washington et al. are villains is to spite the foundation of the nation. I went to Monticello a few years ago, and visited Jefferson’s library. He was an Enlightenment figure to the marrow, and as such, meaningfully different from me. Every time I visit the home of a someone unfamiliar to me, I look at their bookshelves to get an idea of who they are. Funny, but scanning the titles in Jefferson’s library gave me a stronger sense of who he was as a man than all the classroom instruction I had had. And it made Jefferson more alien to me than I imagined.

Yet it did not diminish my esteem for him, and what he and his brothers accomplished with the Founding. The principles for which Jefferson stood ultimately undermined and overturned the system of slavery that he hypocritically upheld. Alas, I believe that they will also ultimately undermine the religion upon which they depend for depth and force, and therefore undermine themselves. This is the Patrick Deneen thesis, pretty much. The American story will end, as all human stories do, in tragedy. We are all fighting the long defeat.

Still, to see what Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and that patriot generation saw, and to build what they built — my God, what heroes! I utterly despise this shallow, mendacious, destructive habit of mind we have of demonizing people in the past who don’t live up to our supposedly perfect standards. Even if it is true that the family that owns The New York Times has slaveholding roots, that in no way negates its achievements in journalism, yesterday, today, or tomorrow — though the Sulzberger family should think long and hard about how the insane ideological crusade the paper has embraced is sabotaging the paper’s own authority. This fanatical political religion, the one that says serious flaws in the character of the Founders renders them all villains, is the philosophy of many American elites, and they have been evangelizing among the youth in classrooms and in media for a long time.

In 2005, the esteemed political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published Who Are We?, a prescient discussion of identity and nationhood. In it, he forecast a possibility for the US:

Huntington died in 2008, and did not, therefore, live long enough to see even the Creed (his term for traditional American civic nationalism) being dismantled by America’s elites. If Huntington — the foremost political scientist of his era — believed that the Creed alone was not enough to hold a disparate nation together, what hope can there be for a nation in which roughly one out of three citizens believe the Founders were, on the whole, evil men?

Keep in mind that today, the “villains” segment of the population is relatively small, but unless you believe that somehow the “villains” young adults will be educated or persuaded away from their views, and that children now in school, and incoming in the next few decades, will be taught something different about the Founders — the future looks dark. It will be a future of culture war over the legitimacy of our national institutions, and the nation itself.

Going back to the campus experiences of “Alex” — my fake name for the student  above — as well as The New York Times,  I can foresee that it will be a war at which the people who have been privileged enough to inhabit the elite institutions of American life are the ones who are at the vanguard of destroying their legitimacy. I would like to see polling data focusing on the views, re: the Founding and the “Creed,”  held by college students and recent graduates of the most elite educational institutions in America. I would like to see those compared to college students from non-elite state universities, as well as of peers who did not go to college.

I have written in this space before about a friend of mine, a foreigner, who did graduate studies at an elite US university. He said that the thing that stayed with him most about that experience is observing how emotionally and psychologically fragile the American students were, but at the same time utterly confident in their right to rule. It shook him up. I believe that the coming generations of American elites not only will consider themselves to be at war, in some real sense, with the “unenlightened” Americans — the Bitter Clingers — but will also use the mechanisms of the surveillance state (of which Woke Capitalism will be a de facto part) to maintain control.

In my forthcoming book, I wrote about a conversation I had with a college graduate (non-elite school, as it happens) in her mid-twenties, who told me that communism is a beautiful idea. I asked her what she thought about gulags. She had no idea what I was talking about. None at all! She was born shortly after the Cold War ended, and apparently nobody had bothered to teach her what communism was, and is. This young woman did not strike me as a woke militant, but rather someone just drifting through life, like so many others. Contrast that with Laura Nicolae, the daughter of Romanian immigrants who escaped communism, who wrote this 2017 column in the Harvard Crimson. Excerpt:

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

I wonder how many of those Harvard grads believe that the American Founders can better be described as “villains” than “heroes.”

If we have learned anything from this terrible year, it’s that things we thought were permanent and stable are not. Soft totalitarianism is coming. It is time to prepare for the struggle ahead. Live Not By Lies details and encourages one kind of preparation. There are, and will be, others. The thing to do is to stop assuming that everything is going to work itself out for the better. We can hope that things will, but optimism is not a plan.

The post Heroes, Villains, And America’s Fate appeared first on The American Conservative.

Who Can Hear The African Drums?

A reader sends in a good piece from Nautilus magazine, by an ethnomusicologist who writes of being deceived by his African drum instructors. Or was he? Alexander Gelfand writes about how he and his wife Ingrid had been in Ghana for a week when they were invited to join with drummers playing for a royal house, on a holy day for the people there. More:

The rhythms played on the big bommaa drums consist of several sets of patterns that are executed in unison by both drummers, each one longer and more complicated than the last. At first, I was able to match Antwi stroke for stroke. But as we moved into the longer and more complex material, things went completely off the rails. Suddenly, Antwi seemed to be adding rhythms that I’d never heard before. I tried to keep up with him, to imitate his hand movements even if I couldn’t quite make out what he was playing.

But I couldn’t. Standing there in front of the assembled royals, the truth slowly dawned on me: The rhythms I was supposed to play in public in Aburi were not the same as the ones that Obeng had taught me in Toronto, and which he had repeated for Ingrid and me during a brief private lesson just the previous day. Instead, they included swathes of material that were radically different from anything he’d shown us thus far; so different that I couldn’t figure them out, let alone execute them, in the heat of the moment. But no one else seemed willing to admit it.

“Alex, what is wrong?” Antwi asked as the two of us sat down next to Ingrid during a break. “You played these yesterday, no problem.”

“The rhythms are different,” I said, still in shock at having totally blown my public debut.

“What?”

“These rhythms are different. They aren’t the ones I played in Toronto. They aren’t the ones we played with Obeng in our lesson yesterday.”

“Of course they are the same,” said Antwi. “Only faster!”

This kept happening. They couldn’t follow the new rhythms, but kept being told that they weren’t new rhythms at all. More:

I had no choice but to soldier on at the drums. While I did, I also struggled to comprehend what was happening. Eventually I boiled it down to two choices: Either we had radically divergent ideas about what constituted musical sameness and difference, about what gave a piece of music its unique identity and aural signature; or Obeng was intentionally hiding the full rhythms from Ingrid and me for unknown reasons. Was it deception or mental disconnect?

Gelfand then writes about how drumming, in Ghanaian culture, is not just about rhythm, but language. They communicate through drumming. It’s really fascinating stuff. More:

This music was important. Why, then, did Obeng insist on withholding information that would have prevented us from blowing almost every performance we gave while we were in Ghana? Did he have some ulterior motive? Or was there some basic aspect of Akan music that rendered it opaque to us on a fundamental level—culturally, psychologically, or even neurologically?

Gelfand speculates, with scientific backing, that Western-trained brains are simply unable to perceive things that African-trained brains can. There might also be some deception at work. He talks about how African cultures practice modes of concealing sacred information until they trust people to handle it. Gelfand:

We had already experienced this dynamic of concealment and revelation first-hand. During our time together in Toronto, Obeng had never so much as mentioned to me that the smaller instruments in the fontomfrom “spoke” just like their larger cousins. Then, one day in Aburi, when Ingrid and I were at the palace helping Obeng move the fontomfrom drums around, he casually revealed what the iron bell and the three small drums were saying. It was a full-blown conversation:

Wanko a wobeko.

Woto, wobeto.

Wawie moframma kum?

Pren pren, pren pren.

“You will go even if you don’t wish to go.”

“You fall, you will fall.”

“Have you killed the little children?”

“Just now, just now.”

“What does it mean?” Ingrid asked. “Why were they killing the children?”

“It is about the old days, when the ancestors made ‘medicine,’ ” Obeng said. He went on to describe how human beings were once sacrificed at the palace, something I’d previously only read about in anthropological studies and historical texts. Needless to say, we were both taken aback—especially me. For several years, I thought that I’d been tapping out some harmless dance rhythms, when in fact I had been participating in a brief audio play about the ritual slaughter of children.

I don’t know why Kwame Obeng chose that particular moment to enlighten us, but I doubt it was happenstance. Perhaps, unbeknownst to us, Ingrid and I had somehow demonstrated our worthiness.

Read it all. 

Gelfand says nearly two decades after those experiences in Ghana, he still can’t explain why he and his wife couldn’t perceive those rhythms.

The reader who sent that to me said it reminds her of this old post from 2012 on this blog, in which I discussed the experiences of linguist Daniel Everett, who spent years living among a remote Amazon tribe, learning their language so he could translate the Bible into it. (Everett, in his memoir, discloses that eventually he lost his religious faith.) I wrote in 2012:

I find myself this morning taken by a concept that recurs in the book: the subjectivity of knowledge, or, to phrase it another way, the cultural contingency of epistemology. Which is simply a fancypants way of saying not simply that the truths we know are culturally conditioned, but our way of knowing truth is also.

Everett begins his book with a startling anecdote. One morning, he and his family were awakened in their riverbank hut by the sound of the tribe rushing down to the river to see something amazing: a theophany. The excited Piraha were pointing to a beach on the opposite side of the river, where they saw “Xigagai, the spirit” appearing, and threatening the men with death if they went into the jungle. Everett writes:

Even I could tell that there was nothing on that white, sandy beach no more than one hundred yards away. And yet as certain as I was about this, the Pirahas were equally certain that there was something there. Maybe there had been something there that I missed seeing, but they insisted that what they were seeing, Xigagai, was still there.

His young daughter came out to have a look, and like her father, saw nothing. Everett continues:

What had I just witnessed? Over the more than two decades since that summer morning, I have tried to come to grips with the significance of how two cultures, my European-based culture and the Pirahas’ culture, could see reality so differently. I could never have proved to the Pirahas that the beach was empty. Nor could they have convinced me that there was anything, much less a spirit, on it.As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another’s views more readily. But as I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

It is a fundamental principle of the Western rationalist mentality that reality is that which can be measured independently. But what if there are some objective realities that require subjective belief to be detected? I wrote back then in that post:

Everett also discusses the practical differences between what he had eyes to see, versus what his Piraha friends could see. He says that often the Pirahas saved him from danger because their eyes could see a threat in the jungle — the pinprick-red eyes of a caiman on a jungle trail at night — that his Western eyes could not perceive. The threat was there, but he could not perceive it because he had not been raised in a culture that valued seeing those things. On the other hand, on the occasion when he would take some Piraha to the city, they were utterly lost and defeated by things (e.g., traffic patterns) Everett could clearly see, and judge, because he’d been acculturated in a particular way.

What if there are realities that are only visible or audible to those who have in some way allowed their minds, through subjective belief or through cultural conditioning, to accept? The evil spirit on the sandbar is a woo-woo instance, but for the sake of argument, what if there really was an immaterial being of some sort there, and the inability of the Westerners to see it is a visual version of the inability of the Western drummers to hear the Ghanaian rhythms?

I don’t know the answer. I’m just throwing it out there for discussion.

The post Who Can Hear The African Drums? appeared first on The American Conservative.

David Shor And Whiteshifting America

Y’all remember my publishing something here about the hatefest on Progressphiles, an e-mail list for Democratic Party professionals? They booted out David Shor, a whiz kid on political statistical analysis who had worked for Barack Obama. His sin? He tweeted a study that he said claimed that violent protests helped Republicans, while non-violent ones helped Democrats. The mob savaged him for that, accusing him of racism, sexism, you name it. They drove him off the list, and helped get him fired. Shor, incidentally, is an actual Marxist, and something of a genius at his job, I was told! But none of that mattered.

Well, New York magazine has published a long interview with Shor in which he refuses to talk about that controversy, but instead offers analysis of the election and the electorate. It’s really interesting stuff. I’m grateful, as a conservative, that the Democratic Party establishment is so hysterically p.c. that they would push out a man as intelligent as Shor. He’s still doing political work, but his name is toxic, for the stupidest reasons. Conservatives have to hope that the party keeps sabotaging itself by sidelining its gifted personnel like Shor. Here’s some of what he says to New York (the questions are in boldface):

A tasteful Marxist (or whatever the opposite of a “vulgar” one is) might counter that class biases were implicated in that mechanical error — that cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class pollsters and operatives’ eagerness to see their worldview affirmed led them to ignore the possibility that their surveys suffered from a systematic sampling error.

That’s exactly right. Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that my team [at Civis] told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at scale.

The right strategies for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.

What is the definition of racist in this context?

Ah, right. People yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.

I think that winning back these voters is important. So if I was running for office, I would definitely say that the reason these voters turned against us is because Democrats failed to embrace economic populism. I think that’s sound political messaging. But in terms of what actually drove it, the numbers are pretty clear. It’s like theoretically possible to imagine a voter who voted for Democrats their whole life and then voted for Trump out of frustration with Obamacare or trade or whatever. And I’m sure that tons of those voters exist, but they’re not representative.

When you take the results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote share, you see the biggest individual-level predictor for vote switching was education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and non-college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the propensity to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.

You can say, “Oh, you know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.

I think people take the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016 election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.

How should Democrats do that?

So there’s a big constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.

If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.

And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a politician running on this position, and another politician running on the opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for predicting who people voted for.

So this suggests there’s a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.

Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.

So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

Read it all. And I do mean “read it all” — you can’t get the entire picture of what Shor is saying without doing so. All of it is quotable, but I want to focus on this passage above. It’s also important to keep in mind something Shor says later in the interview: that young white people are very, very liberal — a fact that’s going to be increasingly important as time goes on.

Now, about what Shor says in the quoted passage: I’m thinking this through, and my initial reaction is to react strongly against his idea of “racist”. Generally speaking, the left has a habit of characterizing any opinion held by a white person that contradicts progressive dogma about race as “racist,” in the sense of being motivated by racial animus. They don’t do this with persons of color, whose views of politics as a vector for racial self-interest is taken as normal. It’s only whites whose conception of themselves as a coherent racial group with its own legitimate interests as a group is characterized as immoral. I don’t know what those “Google search terms” cited by Shor are, but it is possible that what he calls “racist” are rather “racial.”

Do you see the difference? If a black man searches with a candidate’s name and terms connected to race, would we call that “racist”? Depends on the terms, but I would not assume that the googling represented racism, as distinct from an interest in political issues related to race. Shor is obviously a very smart man, but I wonder to what extent he has drunk the critical theory Kool-Aid, which holds that whites are chronically racist, and that any inquiry having to do with racial consciousness or assertion of racial self-interest by a white person is therefore racist.

Here’s what I mean. Earlier today, I posted about a diversity training course that the US Government ran its employees through. It is extremely alarming, as a white person, to read the materials from that course and to recognize that the federal government is training its employees to view the world through a racist, anti-white lens. Two of the most popular books in the country now are Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be Antiracist. Both of these books construe “whiteness” as evil, and advocate working systematically to disempower white people. In DiAngelo’s case, her book defames white people who object to any of this as emotionally “fragile”. This is an old Soviet trick: construe dissent as pathological, in need of psychiatric handling. But this is where the Democratic Party is, and where the American ruling class is.

Here is something Shor told New York:

There’s this sense in left-wing politics that rich people have disproportionate political influence and power. Well, we’ve never had an industrialized society where the richest and most powerful people were as liberal as they are now in the U.S. You know, controlling for education, very rich people still lean Republican. But we’re at a point now where, if you look at Stanford Law School, the ratio of students in the college Democrats to students in the college Republicans is something like 20-to-1. Harvard students have always been Democratic-leaning, but only like three or four percent of them voted for Donald Trump. So there is now this host of incredibly powerful institutions — whether it’s corporate boardrooms or professional organizations — which are now substantially more liberal than they’ve ever been.

It’s true! And part of being “substantially more liberal” is adopting and advancing illiberal views on race. It is simply true that the Democratic Party and American elites (e.g., leaders of corporations, universities, media, and other institutions) are now lined up around a construal of race and society that disadvantages, and at times demonizes, white people as a group. Every day there’s more news about it. A white progressive Seattle city council member has suggested firing city police officers based on race. There have been strong objections, and it wouldn’t be legal, but the fact that this even conceivable in progressive discourse today tells you something about where the left is, and the Democratic Party is.

They deny it, of course, and anyone who points this stuff out, they accuse of “white nationalism.” It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, in policies that are as race-neutral as possible, and that neither reward nor punish individuals on the basis of race. It’s all “white nationalism” to the left.

Last year, political scientist Eric Kaufmann released a book called Whiteshift, in which he calls for the recognition of the validity of white identity politics. He explained it to Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker in this interview. Excerpts:

You write, “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Can you say a little bit more about what specifically you’re arguing for?

Yes. Part of this comes from a view that what’s ultimately behind the rise of right-wing populism are these ethnic-majority grievances, particularly around their decline, and that ultimately this is about nostalgia and attachment to a way of life or to a particular traditional ethnic composition of a nation. Wanting for that not to erode too quickly is the motivation. I think the survey data show that it’s much more about that than about material things, for example, or even fears. It’s about attachment to one’s own group rather than hatred of other groups. This is an important distinction. The survey data from the American National Elections Study show that whites who feel very warmly toward whites are not any more cold toward, say, African-Americans, than whites who aren’t very warm toward whites.

When you say that “white interests” will need to be discussed in politics, I presume you acknowledge that the interests of white people are generally taken into account as much as any group, if not more than other groups. Do you mean explicitly discussed?

There should be an equal treatment of groups in the cultural sphere. There’s no question whites are advantaged economically, politically. I’m not going to dispute that. But in the cultural sphere, on immigration, the group whose numbers have declined, or who experienced a more rapid sense of change and loss due to migration, are the white majority. If, for example, they’re saying, “We would like to have a slower rate of change to enable assimilation to take place,” I think that’s actually a legitimate cultural interest. It doesn’t mean that it should drive policy. I think a moderate group self-interest is fine.

This is seen as toxic, as expressed by a majority group, but when minorities express these interests, that’s seen as quite normal. I think that when it comes to white liberals, there tends to be a double standard, as there is with white conservatives, by the way, when it comes to groups expressing their self-interest.

Are you saying that it is in the “self-interest” of white people to have lower immigration rates, or are you saying that if white people perceive that it’s in their interest, they should be able to express that without being shamed for being racist? Or both?

I’m saying that for the conservative members of the white majority who are attached to their group and its historic presence, I think that sense of loss and wanting to slow down that sense of loss is an understandable motivation. The problem is when you bar that from the discussion. It then gets sublimated and expressed in what I think actually are more negative ways, when it comes to racism. I think it’s not very different from African-Americans in Harlem not wanting Harlem to lose its African-American character. It’s a similar cultural loss-protection argument, which is actually not that different from wanting to preserve historic buildings or ways of life. The problem is that then they go toward fear of criminals and terrorism, and immigrants putting pressure on services, and all the things which there’s very little evidence for, and I think are more negative because they actually stigmatize an out-group, which is closer to the definition of racism than simply being attached to one’s own group. Not that that doesn’t carry some risks as well, but I think that it’s more problematic to suppress it for the majority and not for minorities. I think that’s creating a quite negative situation.

Kaufmann argues that the denial of the legitimacy of white political interests will inevitably drive white voters to support actual race baiters:

Yeah, exactly, they may vote for people who are noxious or say nasty things about minorities, like Donald Trump. Yeah, that could be a negative effect. Whereas if a mainstream, civilized individual took on these concerns, and said, “You can’t have everything you want; no one can have everything they want; you will get part of what you want”—I think that would be a better way of going about it. People would feel, “O.K., I am not such a bad person; I have been listened to.”

But to essentially not have this group be allowed to express interests while other groups are, in a situation where this group is shrinking, I don’t think this is a sustainable situation. There are identity politics on all sides, but I would like to see it be a moderate form where each group goes for less than what it really wants and accepts a compromise. Whereas I sometimes find that on the radical left they are encouraging minority groups to go for a maximal group interest.

Read it all. 

Going back to David Shor’s comments, if I’m reading him correctly, he’s saying that yes, of course the Democrats have these policies that disadvantage white people as a group, but these policies are not racist. White working class people are racist, but their votes are gettable if Democrats distract them from what they (the Democrats) really believe, and will do on race-related matters, and emphasize what they will do on economic matters.

This is useful for conservatives to know for a couple of reasons. First, obviously, it is a wake-up call to white voters to understand that the Democratic Party really is committed to policies that will disadvantage them on the basis of race, though the Democratic Party cannot be honest with itself about this. And it’s a wake-up call for Republicans to once and for all fully embrace economic policies that favor the majority.

One more thing: I believe future historians will look back on this time in disbelief that a major political party, and all the elites of this multiracial, pluralistic, heavily armed nation, chose to embrace a belief system and policy program that exacerbated racial consciousness and hostility. But that’s where we are.

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‘We Teeter On The Brink Of Catastrophe’

From a conversation with the scholar Glenn Loury, who is black, in City Journal:

Yu: Hundreds of thousands of people are protesting George Floyd’s death, as well as broader issues having to do with the structure of American society. On June 1, President Christina Paxson wrote a letter to the Brown University community indicting the structures of racism and prejudice that she and most on the left claim to lie at the heart of American society. A few days later, you wrote and published your challenge to this letter. Why?

Loury: If my dear colleague, Christina Paxson, professor of economics, as well as president of this university, were simply to have said, “Dear colleagues, I have been pondering the events of the last few days and weeks, and it has brought me to a set of conclusions that I want to share with you from my heart,” and then she proceeded to do so, I would not have written to my friend, nor would I have made public what I wrote, which was printed in City Journal. I wouldn’t have done it because she’s entitled to her opinion. But that’s not what happened.

What happened was a letter signed by the president and cosigned by the provost. It was signed by the senior vice president for administration, by the senior vice president for finance, by the person in charge of advancement and development for the university. It was signed by the university’s general counsel, by the vice president for diversity and inclusion, and by every other functionary all the way down the line to the dean of the School of Public Health. They signed a political letter.

These events don’t speak for themselves. Americans disagree about Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is not axiomatic. The group represents a thrust in American politics. We can talk about it. I’m not without sympathy for the struggle for racial justice, but I have disputes with people when it comes to interpreting what’s going on in American cities. The letter doesn’t mention the fact that it’s dangerous on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods where police have to operate every day, that there are a lot of weapons out there, or that the homicide rate is extraordinarily high and that most of the people committing the homicides in these places are black.

Now, imagine that I wrote not a Left letter, but a Right letter: “I think the blacks are complaining too much.” Suppose I wrote that letter and I had everybody in the administration sign it. So it’s a political statement. It may be a very sympathetic and a very persuasive statement, but it’s political! Universities ought not to be political in this sense. When I received that letter, signed by everybody on the payroll of this university who gets paid above $400,000 a year, I thought: “This is thought-policing.” They’re telling us what to think. They’re saying that this is what “Brown values” require one to think. They’re speaking about a “We” with a capital W, and it’s including everybody.

Well, it didn’t include me! So, I object. I object to the soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that. That’s the last thing that a university should be doing. It’s malpractice. It is administrative malpractice of this precious institution to be swept along by political fad and fancy, and then demand the assent of every administrator, in lockstep, without any dispute among themselves. This is horrible, I thought. I thought the propagation of such groupthink at our university was just horrible.

I know this will seem a bit hysterical, but I felt violated by the letter, because it was trying to tell me what to think. And not only that. It was also, in effect, telling me what I can say in my classes without contravening “Brown values.” It was telling me what I can and cannot write, what I can and cannot pronounce in my public statements if I wish to remain a member in good standing in this community. That is an outrage, in my opinion.

More:

[Loury:] Structural racism, by contrast, is a bluff. It’s not an engagement with history. It’s a bullying tactic. In effect, it’s telling you to shut up.

Take structural racism’s narrative of incarceration. It’s supposed to be self-evident that if there’s a racial disparity in the incidence of punishment from law-breaking, then the law is illegitimate. Well, an alternative hypothesis is that, for reasons that we could perhaps spend lots of time pursuing, behaviors are different. Behaviors that bear on lawbreaking are different between races, on average. Violence is one behavior, but it’s not the only one I’m talking about. People have tried to do these studies. They’ve examined whether policing practices can accommodate disparity in arrest rates. They’ve examined whether court dispositions are somehow structurally biased, finding blacks guilty when whites would have been found innocent; whether judges systematically pronounce longer sentences for blacks than for whites. The net finding was no.

More:

I don’t know if you saw my piece in Quillette about the looting and the rioting, but I pick up these pieces published in the New York Times, respectable left-wing journals. I’m reading them, and the writer is saying, “America was founded on looting. What did you think the Boston Tea Party was?” Or, “You’re talking about looting when George Floyd lies dead? Oh, I see, black lives don’t matter as much as property.” These are, to my mind, incomprehensibly idiotic. I don’t mean that to cast aspersions. The civilization that we all enjoy rests upon a very fragile foundation. Look. I’m in my backyard. It’s very nice. I’ve got a lot of space. There’s a fence. The birds come. I have a lawn. It’s mine!

Now, if a homeless person comes and squats in my backyard, I call the police. I have him removed, forcibly. There should be no lack of clarity about whether George Floyd’s death somehow excuses or justifies burning a bodega to the ground that a Muslim immigrant spends his whole life building. Being confused about that, equivocating about that, splitting the difference about that—I don’t understand how we’re going to have a reasoned discussion. My thoughts go back to, protect civilization. Again, I know how that sounds. It’s hyperbolic. It’s exaggerated—but only a little! My gut response is that this is not the time for argument. This is the time to protect civilization and protect institutions. When people start toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and spray-painting on statues of George Washington, “a slave owner,” things fall apart. The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe.

Finally, on the fact that we are going to have to learn to live with racial disparities in institutions, as the cost of freedom:

Yu: If there’s no available policy intervention, and there’s also no way we can change people’s minds, then is it hopeless? Is disparity always going to be the case?

Loury: Yes. My answer is it’s hopeless. But let me rephrase the question, and I’m channeling Thomas Sowell now. You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism. Again, hyperbolic, I know. No, I’m not talking about Eastern Europe circa 1960, but look at it this way: there can’t be a disparity without somebody being on top. People don’t recognize this.

What groups are on top? What about the Jews? You could say, “There are too many Jews in positions of influence.” If there are too few black lawyers who are partners in big law firms, doesn’t it follow that are too many Jews who are partners at these big firms? If there are too few blacks who are professors of mechanical engineering at places like Carnegie Mellon, why aren’t there too many Korean professors at these places?

If the system is structured to deny the potentiality of black humanity, then the system is structured as to affirm the humanity of the particular groups that are overrepresented in the prized venues of American life. People don’t realize that they’re playing with fire when they take these disparities as ipso facto evidence of systemic failure. They insist on wholesale interventions into people’s exercise of their liberty in order to enact a reduction or elimination of disparities, yet a world without any disparities is a world where you don’t have so many—name your group—who’ve got so much money or so many prizes. There are only so many positions. There is no under-representation without over-representation. This is arithmetic.

What is the nature of the world that we live in? Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.

A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.

But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.

Read it all. It’s terrific. Thank God for Glenn Loury — and John McWhorter, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, and other black public intellectuals who are not surrendering to the mob.

My belief is that the institutions in this country — political, academic, corporate, and otherwise — are going to err on the side of tyranny to achieve an egalitarian outcome. The younger generations are very much to the left on these matters. We who are not have to fight it with all we have, but in a democracy, we are fighting a long defeat, at least in the short run. This is why I wrote Live Not By Lies: in the short term, we are going to have soft totalitarianism imposed on us, and many people will welcome it. We who do not welcome it are going to have to find the courage and the means to resist.

The post ‘We Teeter On The Brink Of Catastrophe’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Anti-Racist’ Grift

Christopher Rufo reports on an insane grift a white “diversity consultant” is running:

Last month, a private diversity-consulting firm conducted a training titled “Difficult Conversations About Race in Troubling Times” for several federal agencies. The training called on white employees at the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Credit Union Administration and the Office of the Comptroller to pledge “allyship [sic] amid the ­George Floyd Tragedy.”

According to a trove of whistleblower documents I’ve reviewed, the training begins with the premise that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and hold narratives that “don’t support the dismantling of racist institutions.” Therefore, the trainers argue, white federal employees must “struggle to own their racism” and “invest in race-based growth.”

The trainers then ask “white managers” to create “safe spaces,” where black employees can explain “what it means to be black” and to be “seen in their pain.” White staffers are instructed to keep silent and to “sit in the discomfort” of their racism. If any conflicts arise, the trainers ­insist that whites “don’t get to decide when someone is being too emotional, too rash [or] too mean.” Whites are told they can’t protest if a person of color “responds to their oppression in a way [they] don’t like.”

Howard Ross, the consultant who created the training, has been a fixture in what might be called the ­diversity-industrial complex. Since 2006, he has billed the feds more than $5 million for trainings.

In 2011, he billed the General Services Administration $3 million for “consulting services.” NASA coughed up $500,000 for “power and privilege sexual-orientation workshops.”

Read it all. 

That article (in the New York Post) is based on an amazing series of tweets by Chris Rufo, featuring screenshots of the training material. For example, Howard Ross directs federal employees to think obsessively about race:

You can’t even object to this stuff; your opposition only proves how racist you really are:

What if a white employee disagrees?

They will be told that “white silence has been one of the most powerful detractors from real progress in social justice” and that whites must “sit in the discomfort” of their own internalized racism and white supremacy. pic.twitter.com/ugmxYFVOUC

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 15, 2020

And:

During the training session, white employees are warned that “this is not the place to get [their] feelings validated.” The trainers tell them that people of color are not “obligated to like you, thank you, feel sorry for you, or forgive you.” pic.twitter.com/D22Qoy1dSX

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 15, 2020

See it all @realchrisrufo.

Our government is paying millions to this grifter to train employees in racial spite. Unbelievable. Howard Ross isn’t a fly-by-night operator either. Here he is giving a talk to Google employees. 

The post ‘Anti-Racist’ Grift appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Something Is About To Be Illuminated’

I had such a positive reaction the other day to my post about Paul Kingsnorth’s wonderful, eerie short story “The Basilisk” that I decided this morning to share more Kingsnorth with you. He’s an English writer who lives in rural Ireland. For years he was part of the environmentalist movement, but came to believe that the world didn’t want saving from apocalypse. He dedicated himself to writing about the search for meaning through the apocalypse. Here, from his website’s FAQ, is some information about him:

Where are you coming from politically?

I have never found a tribe that I would want to be part of. But here are some things I believe.

I believe that the global industrial economy – what William Cobbet called ‘the Thing’, but what we might equally simply call the human empire – is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself, razing and homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and increasingly using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial machine which may one day supplant us. This is known as ‘progress’. Its cultural arm, individualist liberalism, is meanwhile engaged in stripping all meaning, truth and traditional support structures from our lives, in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as liberation.

In opposition to this, I believe in a healthy suspicion of entrenched power, whether it is entrenched in leaders, states or corporations; decentralisation of economics, politics and culture; connection to land, nature and heritage; an attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty. Hell, a man can dream.

What rude names have you been called?

I’m building a collection. Over the years, I’ve been called an anarchist, reactionary, communist, left-wing oikophile, crazy collapsitarian, woolly liberal, nativist, cave-dweller, Luddite, Romantic, doomer, nihilist, fascist and – my favourite – ‘lower middle-class eco toff.’

I am happy with all of these, and hope to collect more. I would like to be remembered as a writer who meets George Orwell’s description of Charles Dickens: ‘a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

The New York Times profiled him a few years ago. Excerpts:

On the surface, it can indeed seem as if Kingsnorth is giving up. Last week, he and his wife made a long-planned move to rural Ireland, where they will be growing much of their own food and home schooling their children — a decision, he explained to me, that stemmed in part from a desire to distance himself from technological civilization and in part from wanting to teach his children skills they might need in a hotter future. Yet Kingsnorth has never intended to retreat altogether. For the past three years, he has spent a good portion of his time trying to stop a large supermarket from being built in Ulverston, in northern England. “Why do I do this,” he wrote to me in an email, anticipating my questions, “when I know that in a national context another supermarket will make no difference at all, and when I know that I can’t stop the trend caused by the destruction of the local economy, and when I know we probably won’t win anyway?” He does it, he said, because his sense of what is valuable and good recoils at all that supermarket chains represent. “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.”

It’s an ethic reflected in the novel he has just published. When he was a schoolboy, Kingsnorth told me, his teachers described the Norman Conquest, in 1066, as a swift transformation. An army of Norman and French soldiers from across the channel invaded England and swept away Anglo-Saxon civilization. The old ways vanished, and a new world emerged. He was surprised to learn, much later, that a resistance movement bedeviled the conquerors for a full decade. These resisters were known as the Silvatici, or “wild men.” Eventually William the Conqueror drove them from the woods and slaughtered every last one of them. They were doomed from the start, and knew it. But that hadn’t stopped them from fighting.

In Kingsnorth’s telling, it also didn’t stop them from wondering whether they should keep fighting. On the afternoon following the concert, standing in the wooden shelter, he described his novel as being both about the collapse of a civilization and about the collapse of long-cherished certainties about what it means to be civilized. His introductory remarks were lively and entertaining, but nervously so, as if he were reluctant to begin. Later, he told me it was the first time he’d ever read publicly from the book. He read a strange excerpt, a sort of dream vision about a young boy and a stag. “I have no idea which part of my subconscious I dredged this up from,” he later wrote me, “but the conversation they end up having is pretty much the conversation I have with myself at the moment when it comes to what the hell I can possibly do to be of any use at all”:



when will i be free saes the cilde to the stag

and the stag saes thu will nefer be free

then when will angland be free

angland will nefer be free

then what can be done

naht can be done

then how moste i lif

thu moste be triewe that is all there is

be triewe

be triewe

You can well imagine why I’m an admirer of his work. He’s like three-quarters Wendell Berry and a quarter J.R.R. Tolkien. Here’s a link to some essays and short stories Kingsnorth has written. Here, for example, is a reflection he wrote at the spring equinox in Covidtide. Excerpts:

The Irish writer John Moriarty wrote a lot about chthón. His life’s search was for ways to re-embed us in what we have lost, to take us around and down again, to correct the Western Error. In his autobiography, Nostos, he writes:

Chthón is the old Greek word for the Earth in its secret, dark, depths, and if there was any one word that could be said to distinguish ancient Greeks from modern Europeans, that word chthón, that would be it. Greeks had the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the pieties and beliefs that go with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the wisdom that goes with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the sense of spiritual indwelling that goes with the word, we haven’t. In the hope that they might continue in the goodwill of its dark but potentially beneficent powers, Greeks poured libations of wine, of honey, or barley-water sweetened with mint down into this realm, we don’t.

I would like to say that we forgot all about chthón, we with our space stations and our stellar minds, our progress and our clean boots, our hand sanitizers and our aircon units, our concrete vaults and our embalming fluid; that for a short period we escaped into aérios, or thought we had, and now we are going to have to go underground again, and you can be sure we will be dragged there by the Hag against our will, and we will fight and fight as the sun comes down the shaft and we see again what is carved on the stones down there.

You can forget about chthón, but chthón won’t forget about you.

I would like to say that I know what to do about all this, or what to learn. I would like to teach it to you so that you may learn too. I would like to be a prophet in a time when prophets are so sorely needed.

Unfortunately, I am not qualified for this role. I don’t know anything at all, and I am learning, painfully, that this was my lesson all along.

I don’t know anything at all.

My society does not know anything at all.

All the things I was brought up to label as learning : my A-levels, my Oxford University degrees, all the books I have read and written, all the arguments I learned how to formulate, all the ideas I learned how to frame, the concepts I learned how to enunciate. All this head-work, all these modern European ways of seeing, understanding, controlling, managing, directing the world:

Nope.

None of that was it.

I am reminded of the story about Thomas Aquinas who, near the end of his life, at the pinnacle of his unparalleled theological achievements, had a mystical vision. Nobody knows what Aquinas saw, but he said afterward that all of his work is like straw.

More Kingsnorth:

Cultures that last are cultures that do not build. Cultures that last are cultures that do not seek to know what cannot be known. Cultures that last are cultures that crawl into their chthón without asking questions. Cultures that know how to be, that look at the sun on the mountain, and say, yes, this is the revelation.

People last when they do not eat apples that were not meant for them, when they do not steal fire they do not understand. People last when they sit in the sun and do nothing at all.

Let us learn from this! we say. Let us take this crisis and use it to make us better! Better people, more organized people, wiser people. Sleeker people, more efficient people. Let us become sustainable! Let us learn to tell new stories, for the old ones are broken now!

We should be saying: stories were the problem. We should be saying: no more stories, not from us.

We should be saying: break the stories, break them all. Nothing of this should be sustained.

We should be saying: no more normal. Not now, not ever.

We should be saying: we could die any moment, and this has always been true. Look at the beauty!

We should be saying: see the sunlight crawl down the passage of the tomb.

We should be saying: something is about to be illuminated.

We should be saying: watch.

Read it all.

I do not agree that “cultures that last are cultures that do not build” — or perhaps I don’t understand what he’s saying here. But mostly I do agree with this. What Kingsnorth is testifying to here is the bankruptcy of the Western compulsion — especially the modern Western compulsion — to penetrate mystery, to solve it, and to be done with it. What Kingsnorth is saying here is the same thing that Wordsworth said: “We murder to dissect.”

Earlier this morning I was having a text exchange with a friend in which I told him about my own surprising healing from anxiety and resulting physical sickness some years back, and the role contemplative prayer played in it. I told the story in greater detail in my book How Dante Can Save Your Life. Here’s an excerpt from that book, recounting a conversation with my priest, Father Matthew Harrington:

“Benedict, you asked me once for a prayer rule,” he said, using my patron saint’s name, as is the Orthodox tradition. “I have one for you.”

“Great!” I said. “What is it?”

A prayer rule is nothing more than a daily prayer discipline. It can be short or long, depending on the spiritual need and capabilities of the individual. I did not know what to expect from Father Matthew, but I certainly did not expect what he handed me.

This rule required me to pray five hundred Jesus Prayers a day, a demanding discipline. If done with the proper attentiveness, this takes about an hour. To pray in the right way, you have to clear your mind of all thoughts and images and let nothing but the words “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” (the shortened version of the prayer that I used) pass through your mind like the coming and going of the tide. Most people use a prayer rope, a kind of Orthodox rosary, to help them keep track of their prayers.

“Five hundred Jesus Prayers?” I said, nonplussed. “How long do you want me to follow this rule?”

“Every day for the rest of your life.”

This seemed ridiculous, but I didn’t show how I felt. I resolved to obey. It wasn’t like I could do much more than sit around the house anyway.

How hard can it be to sit still and pray in a focused way for an hour? Try it. Your thoughts will swarm around your head like a cloud of stinging wasps, distracting you every two seconds. Still, you press on. The goal is to achieve inner stillness and connection with God. On most days, I would lie in one of the alcove beds in the darkened bedroom, with the light out and the curtain pulled, and silently pray on my prayer rope.

As each tiny knot of the black woolen rope passed between my thumb and forefinger, I would breathe in on “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and exhale on “have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I felt stupid. I could not settle my mind. It seemed at first that I would have to stop after every five or six prayers to refocus. This was work! But after a couple of weeks, I noticed that I felt slightly less tense. The prayer worked like a hatchet, chipping away at the ice encasing my heart.

Until I began to pray the Jesus Prayer diligently, I had not realized how captive I had been to unwanted thoughts. In time, the prayer discipline trains your mind to deflect these thoughts to protect your inner stillness. One benefit of this technique is acquiring the skill to maintain inner stillness no matter how distracting or upsetting the world can be.

“Following a prayer rule helps us see the movements of our heart, movements of our soul,” Father Matthew explained to me. “It makes us quiet. We ask ourselves, ‘Why does my heart keep going back to that one thought?’ It allows us to see what we’re fighting. And then there’s the asceticism of it: ‘I’m going to make myself do my prayer rule.’ You have to fight through it sometimes, and it’s that asceticism that causes us to appreciate and deepen our life in the Church.

“This is a struggle of the heart, Benedict, not the intellect,” he said, as if he could read my mind.

Many months later, after I was restored, I asked Father Matthew how he knew that I needed the prayer rule, as opposed to something like, “Read the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and think about them.” He said, “Simple — I knew that you needed to get out of your head.”

Of course. But the simplest things are often the hardest to accomplish. And we often don’t learn. After a while, I let my prayer rule slip away. At the beginning of the Covid crisis, I once again developed symptoms of the Epstein-Barr Virus, which was brought on last time by deep anxiety, said the rheumatologist, and which came back because of the same thing. With no liturgies in my life, I pretty much stopped praying, and slipped further and further into melancholy. Last month, after hitting a kind of bottom, I phoned Father Matthew, now living in Washington state, and talked about all this, and went to confession (which Orthodox bishops allow now, as a concession to the Covid emergency). He told me that I absolutely must return to prayer. I said yes, you’re right, and resolved to do so.

That night, I decided to watch Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia. I don’t know why. I didn’t know what to expect. Turns out it’s about a Russian writer who is in the grips of melancholy, because he cannot get out of his head. A holy fool tells him that if he doesn’t stop smoking, he won’t be able to do the work he’s supposed to do. This is the fool’s oblique way of telling the writer that he has to loosen his passionate ties to the world. It’s not at an overtly Christian work, but the climax involves the writer carrying out a supremely simple, but incredibly difficult, ritual — an act of faith — that finally gets the writer out of the torments of his head. It costs him his life, but the scene brings to mind the words of Manfred in Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto 3, who died excommunicated from the Church, but was saved by asking for God’s mercy as he lay dying from battle. He tells Dante that “none is so lost/that the eternal Love cannot return/as long as hope maintains a thread of green.”

For the Russian writer, his was a struggle of the heart, not the intellect.

Don’t you think that’s true with most of us? Don’t you think that that is what Paul Kingsnorth is getting at?

I see that my country is failing. We are beset by plague, and cannot conquer it, because we refuse to give up the freedom to steal fire not meant for us. We believe that limits are intolerable, that we should be able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without consequences. Money and technology will see us through.

Until they don’t. Yes, eventually medical science will conquer this thing, or at least make it more bearable. For that we should be grateful. But if we waste this trial and the gift it gives us, revealing to us our spiritual state, we will have made a profound mistake.

I agree with Paul Kingsnorth: watch. 

You never know what is going to be revealed to you. You should live in such a way that you can see it when it manifests. The historian Tom Holland, not a confessing Christian, but now a churchgoer who is walking into a mystery, said in a recent interview:

I think I am naturally conservative. I think I’m more moved by things that have been than things that might be. I feel the power of what’s happening now as something that is rooted in the past.

So, essentially, what has happened is that I have lost my faith, and my faith was liberalism. I just don’t think it has any secure foundations at all. As Western power retreats, we’ve come to realise that these values that [we] had assumed were universal – human rights, the inherent dignity of Man, the obligation of the rich to the poor – are actually very culturally contingent. Our assumption that there are universal values is itself very culturally contingent – and specifically Christian, I think. I can find no basis for believing in any of this stuff at all that does not involve a conscious leap of faith.

I also feel that the legacy of Christian writings, of Christian experience, of Christian activism, of all the things about Christianity that stir and move me, [is] richer than anything that my secular liberal assumptions have to offer. I find it rich and beautiful and exciting in a way that as a child I found the Romans rich and beautiful and exciting.

And there’s a power to it. This is the most powerful way of explaining what humans are about that has ever existed, in terms of its impact, its influence, the numbers who’ve followed it. And so I feel an incredible tug. You know, if I’m not just going to become a kind of Nietzschean, let’s-revel-in-power! kind of nihilist, I have to take this leap of faith. And if I’ve got to take a leap of faith to believe this stuff that I viscerally believe in, I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb.

You’ve said that you go to church but you don’t pray. When you take part in a service, what’s going on in your head? Is there always some mental reservation or is there a sense in which you say ‘Amen’?

Sometimes I think: This is just a fascinating cultural expression of something that’s been going on for hundreds of years. And then there are other times when I think: This is the key to why I think the way I do. Perhaps I just need to stop overthinking it.

Maybe I should just ‘surrender to the Spirit’. One of the things that really struck me writing Dominion was the vast [impact] that the idea of the Spirit has had – the idea that you can read something and suddenly the Spirit enables you to see things afresh, the idea of this fire that blazes and spreads across the world. There’s this tension between head and heart, between thought and Spirit.

The church I go to is London’s oldest parish church ­(it was founded by a jester of Henry I). It is absolutely a sacred place to me, because it’s a place where you can feel humble before the immensity of human experience. You know that people have wrestled with the issues and ideals that you are wrestling with, and maybe they’ve been hypocritical and haven’t measured up to what they believe. That is what I find powerful and moving about it, and with the lockdown I find I miss it far more than I would ever have imagined.

So, maybe that is the Spirit, who knows? ‘The wind blows wherever it pleases.’ I think it’s good to feel that you might be a leaf being blown on the wind.

In Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, the writer at one point skulks across the nave of a ruined medieval abbey. Here’s the clip — it’s in Italian. You hear the voice of a woman (presumably the Virgin) asking the Lord to speak to the poor writer, who is in a bad way. The Lord says the writer wouldn’t be able to hear him if he did. She asks the Lord to reveal himself to the writer, who needs to know that he is there. God says that he reveals himself every day, but the writer cannot see:

I was so deeply moved by this movie, which I began watching only minutes after my confession, and my confessor telling me to return to prayer. It felt like a revelation. After the movie was over, I searched online to find out where that amazing medieval ruin is. It turns out that it’s the Abbey of San Galgano. Who was St. Galgano? He was a medieval Tuscan who had led a passionate life, until he had two visions of St. Michael the Archangel. In the second, the Archangel told him to give up his worldly life, and devote himself to God. Galgano reportedly said that it would be easier for him to put his sword through a rock than to give up his worldly passions. He brought his sword down on a rock next to him — and it went through, almost up to the hilt. He immediately converted, and became a hermit. You can still see the sword in the stone inside the church the medieval Tuscans built in his honor. Later, some of his Cistercian followers built the great abbey dedicated to Galgano, though it later was abandoned.

Now, you don’t have to believe that the sword in the stone story is true (though I do) to understand the symbolism. Here’s why I bring it up. After discovering that the abbey in Nostalghia was St. Galgano’s, I believe I finally understood why an Italian engraver, Luca Daum, came to my 2018 talk in Genoa and gave me this, from his hand:

It’s called “The Temptation of San Galgano”. Notice how the serpent who tempts him to abandon his sacrifice comes from inside his head. From the rock where his cross-like sword stands impaled, a symbol of Galgano’s sacrifice, grows the Tree of Life.

I found Luca Daum’s email address and wrote to him about it. He responded, in part:

On what you confide in me about St. Galgano, I tell you what I have always known in words, but then on the practical side it always amazes and surprises me, and that is how God acts despite and despite us, but nevertheless often through us.

God is truly a good Father!

He loves us as we are but He wants to lead us to the Beauty of the Project that must be realized in us.

You have been caressed by God, dear Rod, through the image of an obscure Italian engraver, who only wanted to show you his esteem, and certainly did not imagine anything else.

God used this, as He could use anything else, to embrace and comfort you, and, I humbly say, me too.

We are generally so fragile and consequently superficial that we find it hard to recognize God’s hand in our troubled daily lives.

Yet Providence is there and acts, and every now and then it shakes us more clearly.

Dear friend, I am very grateful to you for putting me aside from your moving experience, I will remember you with greater affection, for I feel more deeply and mysteriously bound to you in a common destiny.

After all this, I felt so reassured by my return to prayer, and challenged to deepen my faith in this apocalyptic age. So, my message to you is: Watch. Pray. Practice inner stillness. Prepare yourself to see and to hear. Something is about to be illuminated. The world is filled with mystery. Do not seek to know what cannot be known — just receive it with awe and gratitude, and with the resolution to change your life.

Here’s the thing: this is what gets me out of bed in the morning — the theophanic pilgrimage of life, and the hope of stumbling upon inbreakings of grace and revelation. I don’t write about that much here, but it’s what I live by, and think about a lot. I think I need to find a way to write a book about it.

UPDATE: I still can’t figure out what Kingsnorth means by saying that “cultures that last are cultures that do not build.” Maybe I’m not understanding him. Or maybe he’s just wrong. One might say that cultures that last are cultures that do not build things for their own sake, but for some greater end. I dunno.

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Carl Loeb, Hero

I love this letter to the editor of The New York Times, which the paper published today:

To the Editor:

Re “An Opinion Editor and Writer at The New York Times Quits” (Business Day, July 15):

I read Bari Weiss’s resignation letter with … well, a sense of resignation. And elation. Resignation because you’re losing a fresh, skeptical voice. Elation because she called you out on your new toxic woke culture and put her money where her mouth is.

I identify as a left-leaning centrist. My education trained me to greet the world with an open mind. I believe in dialogue, not debate. And as a Times reader since college, I can see it plain as day: The Times has largely abandoned dialogue when it comes to cultural issues and ideas. You’ve handed the keys to America’s greatest paper to a strident, new orthodoxy that will not tolerate intellectual diversity. God, how sad.

I used to love reading William Safire’s column in The Times; I didn’t agree with his politics, but I celebrated his dexterity with the language.

I never thought I’d turn to The American Conservative for comfort, but at least it has the guts to publish controversial opinions that run counter to conservative orthodoxy. I used to get that from The Times. Want to know how to sell more papers? Publish a greater diversity of ideas, generate more conversation and, every once in a while, make a Jacobin mad.

Carl Loeb

Fairfax, Calif.

I LOVE YOU CARL LOEB! You come to Walker Percy Weekend next year, and you and I are going to get sloshy on bourbon at the bar at the St. Francisville Inn.

Carl Loeb’s comments make me realize that we here at TAC are succeeding at what we’re trying to do: be interesting.

I have a lot I could write about this morning, but I think I’m going to do another post about Paul Kingsnorth, because it’s a nice change-up from culture war posts. Don’t get me wrong, the culture war is hugely important. But we need other things, don’t we?

Anyway, if you appreciate the work we do here at TAC, please consider donating to us. It’s tax-deductible, and man, do we ever need it at our little shoestring operation. And we’re making a difference. Maybe you saw that Justice Alito cited The Benedict Option in his recent majority opinion on an important religious liberty case. If not for TAC, where I worked out these ideas, there would have been no Benedict Option book. If this new book I have coming out, Live Not By Lies, makes a difference, you can thank TAC, where I worked out its ideas on this blog.

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