Rod Dreher's Blog, page 135

A Knight Prepares For Battle

This evening I received the following letter from a Christian college undergraduate. I was really moved by it. He agreed to let me publish it here, though by agreement, I have slightly edited it to hide any identifying details:

My name is ____ and I have been a long-time reader of yours ever since I was in high school. Now I am a junior at [college] and I wanted to take the time to write you as I finally took the time to read The Benedict Option, which I finished today. Having been an avid member of your readership, I only felt that it was right that I finally read your book. I found myself resonating with its entirety as I have with most of your writing over the past three years I have been a reader. Given my background and the current context of the country, I merely want to convey a few of my thoughts and concerns about the future of the Church and the West for what they are worth.

I suppose it would be beneficial to explain my background as to provide context to my thoughts. I was raised in [major suburb] for my entire life and beginning in middle school I was sent to the private Christian school that was a part of the [conservative Evangelical] megachurch that I was raised in.  I found many of your reflections regarding consumerism, pornography, and hypocrisy in the church to be especially poignant given my own life experiences and not unlike things I have been saying for a while.

My family and church growing up espoused a Christianity that I would characterize as nearly equal in its emphasis of the Republican party platform as it did the gospel.  I say none of this to give you the idea that my family’s Christian faith is heretical or insincere but rather to highlight the blind spots that played into their lives and corresponded with my reading of your book.

In The Benedict Option, you write about numerous things involved in the creation of strong Christian communities such as classical Christian school, theologically faithful congregations, and networks of patronage, all of which I found my specific experiences in the suburban megachurch evangelical world corresponding to.  My family placed my sister and me in [a conservative Christian school] due to the increased opportunity and better environment, or so he thought. The school did an admirable job attempting to integrate biblical teaching into the curriculum along a mild classical liberal arts model, but all the hallmarks or upper-class consumerism and immorality ran rampant throughout the school. Your writings on pornography and its effects on young men are especially pertinent to my experiences as while I was originally exposed to it at a very young age, my time at the Christian institution was where it was first introduced in its most substantial way. The school attempted to integrate biblical leadership and correction but they sacrificed the institution’s credibility on the altar of athletics as they allowed (and supposedly recruited) many underqualified, spiritually-compromised, and intellectually inept individuals into the school for the sake of championships. Furthermore, the school, it seemed, began loosening its moral standards of admission as they began pricing out the faithful Christian community and merely needed paying customers to keep the machine going. I say none of this to make myself seem like the perfect student as some of my greatest moral failings occurred during my time there. However, the sheer lack of integrity that I observed in terms of who was admitted and permitted to stay after violations left me slightly disillusioned with my memories of the institution.

Despite its shortcomings, I still received a fabulous education but that allowance of mediocrity, both moral and intellectual, was not doing the institution nor its students any favors. In reading your book, it seems imperative to me that any Christian educational projects be willing to uphold the sanctity of their schools by admonishing students and families in love to live differently but not be under any illusion that a family with no commitment to the Church is somehow going to be evangelized by having a child attend the school. Some of my greatest mentors were my teachers at the institution but it seemed like the administration was constantly attempting to bolster the grandeur of the school through a new building program or athletic success rather than heeding their responsibility toward forming young people. The school did imbue me with a great appreciation for western civilization and they made a great effort in educating every student in apologetics, philosophy, systematic theology, and logic but there comes a point when Christian educators realize they also have a duty to protect their institutions from corrupting influences.

Ultimately, my time there prepared me expertly for college as I find having a cohesive and coherent Christian worldview leaves me well-armed toward my studies in [the humanities] However, I see the fissures in the foundation of the ecumenical Church as I am member of a Christian [male organization]. Our organization is so ecumenical that their does not even seem to be a total consensus on what Christian manhood and masculinity look like. We are split 50/50 between theological progressives and theological conservatives. There is beginning to be greater animosity as the progressives are pushing wokeness emanating from their frankly bankrupt theology onto the rest of us, and it seems like eventually we will reach an impasse where cooperation will no longer be possible.

This is quite the time to be a young man about to enter into the world as I see the culture my ancestors labored for 400 years in this land to build yanked down by what I see are barbarians and philistines with no capacity to create, but only to destroy. I understand the nuances of the discussion, and I am far more nuanced than I may appear in this missive but now I only see ideological excess and the wrath of man. Some have said that my very existence as a privileged (using the word correctly) white man of old WASP stock is a moral affront to them. How am I supposed to reason with that? My father taught me to treat everyone as Christ treated humanity, with a servant’s heart abounding in love, yet even with this they still consider me an enemy. It became apparent to me a while ago that the enlightenment worship of reason has been collapsing in on itself, and all that is left is self-deception. The most comical part of the entire episode of the riots in [my city] was that all the affluent white liberals promptly emptied their local gun shops of anything they could get their hands on. All I have taken out of the episodes of these last two months is that COVID-19 did not matter (because it would be politically incorrect to suggest that approved protests would aid its spread), gun ownership isn’t a problem, and school shootings aren’t an issue (because the left doesn’t want police in schools). The ideological cannibalism would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

I will conclude this letter with my reflections and angst regarding the future. I have been blessed with many opportunities but many of my cohort (theologically and politically conservative young men) are concerned that they should be making as much money as quickly as possible, acquiring guns and money, and building the walls high before the Jacobins descend on the suburbs to burn the manor houses. I personally am interested in law or military service but what happens if there comes a point when ideological purges are the new norm in government service? I say all this not to sound like I have lost hope but I am a realist by training and it is hard for me to ignore a hurricane lumbering just off the coast. Christ is with us in this age just as he was with all those who came before us but it is hard to watch that which you love be subsumed under the destructive passions of men.

Please pray for our young men and women, preparing for a life more uncertain and tumultuous than most of us have known. We in the churches, and within our families, are doing such a poor job of preparing them for the world as it is, and as it will be. We must do better.

What would you tell this young man? He reads this blog. Worthy advice only — if you smart off, I’m going to spike your comment.

The post A Knight Prepares For Battle appeared first on The American Conservative.

Human Nature: An Oppressive Construct

A reader sends in a link to this nine-minute New Yorker documentary about a woke young couple raising their child to be gender-neutral. I had to stop watching it out of pity for this kid. These loons are going to screw him or her up terribly, and he or she will hate them:

Blank-slate utopians, man. So very many of our problems today come from a refusal to accept givenness as a natural condition.

So many on the left today have forgotten human nature. In his sizzling monologue last night, Tucker Carlson featured a can’t-make-this-stuff-up moment. I’ve cued the monologue clip to that moment:

Here’s the tweet it came from:

Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton almost attacked: pic.twitter.com/Y1ph336GHI

— Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) June 23, 2020

The person lamenting the absence of the cops is Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting DC delegate to Congress. Gosh, it’s almost like if you defund the police, you will have no one to protect you from the violent and the crazy.

Here is a banana split of Schadenfreude, courtesy of The New Woke Times. It seems that a mostly white, left-wing neighborhood in Minneapolis decided that to protect black lives, its residents would no longer call the police when crimes are happening. This is not going so well for them. Excerpts:

After the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Ms. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community. Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.

Already, that commitment is being challenged. Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day. They do laundry, listen to music and strategize about how to find permanent housing. Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction or both.

Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers. At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.

More:

“I’m not being judgmental,” said Carrie Nightshade, 44, who explained that she no longer felt comfortable letting her children, 12 and 9, play in the park by themselves. “It’s not personal. It’s just not safe.”

On Friday, she sat in a shared backyard with four other women who live in neighboring houses. The women, four of whom are white, had called a meeting to vent about the camp.

Angelina Roslik burst into tears, explaining that she had spent the past four years fleeing unstable housing conditions and was struggling more than she cared to admit with the chaos the camp had brought into the neighborhood. Linnea Borden said she had stopped walking her dog through the park because she was tired of being catcalled. “My emotions change every 30 seconds,” said Tria Houser, who is part Native American.

The women agreed to let any property damage, including to their own homes, go ignored and to request a block party permit from the city to limit car traffic. Rather than turn to law enforcement if they saw anyone in physical danger, they resolved to call the American Indian Movement — a national organization created in 1968 to address Native American grievances such as police brutality — which had been policing its own community locally for years.

And:

Tobie Miller, Ms. Albers’s 34-year-old daughter, lives just a block away from her mother, but lately, she said, they have felt a world apart. Ms. Miller began a concerted effort last year to challenge her own privileges by taking a class on racial biases.

She worries that a lot of what has been written about the camp on community message boards has been influenced by racial profiling. To the extent that illegal activity is going on in the park, Ms. Miller does not blame the tent residents. “My feeling around it is those are symptoms of systemic oppression,” she said. “And that’s not on them.”

This progressive white dude was robbed at gunpoint by two black teenagers. He called the cops. But now he feels bad about it:

Two days after an initial conversation, his position had evolved. “Been thinking more about it,” he wrote in a text message. “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.”

Read it all. Please do — it is a glimpse into the kind of America these progressives wants for us all. They are lunatics. Ideology has made them crazy and self-destructive. They want to hand our cities over to armed robbers and roving lunatics.

The Minneapolis City Council, all Democratic, has voted unanimously to defund the police. If you can sell your house and leave, now is the time. Or if not, it’s time to try to break away from the city and incorporate as an independent municipality, or join with a suburb. Cities run by progressives are going straight into the ditch.

The other night, Tucker Carlson mentioned that Donald Trump laughed about this kind of thing, and said something to the effect of let the progressive cities destroy themselves. Understandable, said Tucker, but inexcusable: no American president should talk this way. He’s right. Along those lines, no American should merely laugh this off. It came upon Minneapolis very fast. Do not take this lightly.

The post Human Nature: An Oppressive Construct appeared first on The American Conservative.

Big Sister Is Watching You

Here’s a story about how Social Justice Warriors are marching through the institutions of the Democratic Party — and stomping dissenters into the mud.

Earlier this month, David Shor, a highly regarded young Democratic data analyst who once worked for President Obama made a problematic tweet. Citing historical research by the black Princeton social scientist Omar Wasow, Shor contended that protesting racism nonviolently helps Democratic candidates, but doing so violently helps Republicans. This was based on 1960s data. According to an account by liberal New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, one of Shor’s professional colleagues within the world of elite Democratic Party campaign workers, Ari Trujillo Wesler, tweeted that Shor’s tweet “reeks of anti-blackness” (she took down her tweet later).  Shor, whose job it is to figure out the mathematics of getting Democratic voters to come out in greater numbers than Republican voters, responded by pointing out that news coverage of riots drives Republican turnout.

Chait:

The next day, David Shor was fired.

Well. There is an e-mail list called Progressphiles, made up of about 1,000 Democratic Party professionals like David Shor and Ari Trujillo Wesler. Today Chait follows up with the scoop on the Shor meltdown at Progressphiles. Someone has provided him with a log of all the conversation about it on the site. He does not name names (that’s not important anyway, Chait says), but it does show how fanatically some progressives try to police discourse, even among progressives. It’s like peering into a Maoist struggle session — but these are professional political staffers who work within the Democratic Party universe.

As it happens, I had a conversation the other day with someone who participates on the Progressphiles list, and who gave me background on the controversy from his perspective, including a trove of e-mails from the list. His only request was that I not identify him. Keep in mind that this is one insider’s view. Unlike Chait, I have not seen the entire collection of e-mails from the list, but my source did send screenshots of a number of them. I’ll include some of them in the narrative below, but I will not identify the authors of each comment (though I have their names). As Chait said, their names don’t really matter. For ease of reading, I’m going to call the Democratic operative who is my source “Walter,” as in “Walter Mondale”; his real name, of course, is not Walter.

“David Shor is considered to be one of the absolute best in the business,” Walter said. “He’s a guy who can see every tree in the forest. He’s a tactician. It’s his job to see voters and figure out which combinations will work and which will not. He’s one of the best quantitative guys we have. But like in an Army, the quantitative guys are not the generals.”

What he means is that Shor has been getting out over his skis on analysis. According to Walter, Shor has been arguing for some time that Democrats should not behave in public in ways that help Republicans, and make it harder for Democrats to appeal to middle of the road voters. This is controversial within the progressive community, said Walter, because arguments that happen behind closed doors “privileges those who hold the power.”

Walter is a number-cruncher. In his view, the Shor interpretation of Wasow’s work is seriously flawed. “Dr. Wasow’s work is absolutely fantastic,” he said, “but the uses to which his work has been put, the work doesn’t necessary support it.”

Nevertheless, the “rioting helps Republicans” take was popularized on May 29 by the progressive journalist Zaid Jilani, who wrote a piece that appeared in National Review arguing it emphatically, based on Wasow’s paper.

Walter said, “Shor a very visible polling analyst who did this in a specific political context, and was saying dumb things about polling. This is something that benefits Republicans. It gives them a chance to say, ‘Hey look, here’s a Democrat saying this protesters are off the wall.'”

Therefore, said Walter, Shor “was not fired because he offended some snowflake. He was not fired because leftists do not tolerate dissent. He was fired for good reasons.”

Here’s where things get really bad.

After Ari Wesler sent that “come get your boy” tweet about Shor, a lot of people came after her. The initial Chait story ramped this up. She was doxxed, and the threats were so specific that she took measures to hide her location.

This was really happening, and it was really horrible, said Walter. And it played into the poisonous power dynamics that had been dominating Progressphiles since the Trump victory — more on which momentarily.

But first: What is Progressphiles? According to Walter, a longtime member, it has been a way for people who work in Democratic politics in Washington and around the country — specifically for those doing technology and analytics work — to get to know each other via e-mail. It was mostly a social list, he said, along the lines of, “Hey, I’m coming to town this weekend, who wants to have beers?” There was some work discussion on the list, but it was carefully moderated to not cross the line into campaign collusion.

After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, said Walter, some of the women on the Progressphiles list became very assertive and authoritarian. To disagree with them as a male was to set yourself up for an accusation of sexism.

“These people started complaining that they were being undermined by the patriarchy, and demanded that the list’s leadership be given to women exclusively, without term — meaning that they would be able to govern the list like they wanted, without end,” alleged Walter.

“Under their tenure, this list has become more terrifying to be on,” he continued. “There are sublists now formed where people get together and plan what they are going to say on this list, who they’re going to attack. There are Facebook groups where people do this. There are people on the list saying things like ‘cis white males should not apply for this job.'”

(That really happened, in 2017, at the Democratic National Committee.)

So, when the David Shor controversy arose, the administrators of the list sent out an e-mail on the morning of June 15, announcing that they were going to remove Shor for promoting racism and inciting harassment against Ari Wesler. Walter provided me with a screenshot of the e-mail that went out to the list. Excerpt:

The moderators invited anyone on the list who experiences “harassment” to write to them. They added:

Here was the so-called “racist tweet” that Shor sent out:

His “bullying” of Ari Wesler was in disagreeing with her. The moderators also held Shor responsible for what vile people on the Internet said to and about Wesler.

Said Walter:

If they had said that they were removing him for making bad arguments that help Republicans, a lot of us would have grumbled about it, but we could have said it made sense. But they didn’t say that. They accused him of inciting a mob. They have libeled him on this list. It did not happen that David Shor called up Jonathan Chait and said this happened to me and you should write a blog post about it. That did not happen.

(Since my conversation with Walter, Jonathan Chait has publicly stated that Shor did not contact him, and continues to refuse to talk to him.)

Kicking Shor off the list, and doing so on the grounds that he is a racist and a harasser, is not only groundless, said Walter, but is going to cause tremendous harm to his professional reputation. In the collection of Progressphiles e-mails that Walter sent, someone echoes this theme:

In the stack of Progressphiles e-mails Walter provided, contributors defending Shor’s exile repeatedly bring up how BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) people feel by having their perspectives questioned. In other words, to do anything other than accept without question what BIPOC people on the list say is a sign of “white fragility” (this, even though one of the moderator-skeptical contributors in the documents I saw has an Indian name). An example of this manipulative discourse — this from a state data director of a major national progressive get-out-the-vote organization:

This person is a data director (and is white — I looked her up)! Mind you, all this is happening among people whose profession is it to analyze data and figure out how to use it to help Democratic candidates win power. These ideologues are silencing voices from within their own circles who are saying things that they don’t want to hear. This is straight-up Soviet. Is this person suppressing data, or her own analysis, to suit woke ideological goals? Remember, Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump in part because of her flawed data analysis.

Another example — this from a contributor who is a very high-profile Democratic tech staffer who has been in Time magazine, and who now works for a labor advocacy organization:

 

Check out this excerpt from one of the contributors:

Get that? Data itself is racist, and logic itself is racist, if they produce results that offend certain people. What in the Carville days was a war room has under the Social Justice Warriors become a star chamber.

Here’s something from a male Progressphiles contributor to the Shor discussion, demonstrating how the language and ideology of trauma has penetrated the Democratic Party professional class:

Can you imagine a grown man talking about “working through [his] own trauma” about the news? Can you imagine James Carville talking this way? This is not someone who has been deployed in a war zone, or was the victim of a violent crime, or witnessed a natural disaster. This is someone who reads the newspaper and cannot handle it.

Check this out. The author is a white Bernie Bro:

Rioters burned down 66 businesses in Minneapolis alone. But that’s not violence, according to this Bernie Bro who is a data and tech guy working for the Democrats. If you were a Democratic campaign, would you trust an analyst who thinks that way to provide you with solid data on how the rioting and civil unrest of the spring is affecting the voter mood?

In the e-mails Walter forwarded to me, there were some good one pushing back against the woke politburo. An Asian-American contributor waylaid David Shor’s analysis, and said he should have gotten fired for the mistakes in it, but also said that Shor was railroaded out of Progressphiles:

Another male participant who works for a labor union, and who had argued against the moderators sliming David Shor, said he had had enough, and was leaving the list. This is racist too, according to a female contributor who works at a big national progressive organization identifying and training leaders — and according to her, it’s also racist for Democratic strategists to prioritize how to help Democratic candidates win elections. The union guy’s lines are in purple:

To me, an outsider, this looks like a shark crazed by a feeding frenzy eating its own entrails. To Walter, who makes his living trying to get Democrats elected, it’s worse than that.

Remember, Progressphiles isn’t just a list of Democratic Party randos; these are the people who make the party and its institutional allies work. Since Jonathan Chait first started writing about the Shor controversy, Walter said, a number of Democratic Party donors and campaign managers have begun inundating campaign professionals with e-mails and phone calls. They are afraid that the accurate numbers and analysis that they’re paying for, and that they depend on, are being distorted for ideological reasons.

“This is all happening because these hard left women have taken over the list,” said Walter.

Why did Walter reach out to me, of all people? He reads this blog, and said he wanted me to see that there are people on that list who do not falsify numbers to suit political goals, and who pushed back on the list against fellow Democrats who want to ignore or dismiss data that challenge their biases. “I also want to reassure you and your readers that not all progressives are like this, that many of us are fair minded liberals and social democrats,” he said. “Even if we disagree on some things, we are not the political officers coming to take you to reeducation camps.”

Walter thinks this controversy, and what it signifies, is going to affect the Democratic Party’s performance in the fall.

“This list not functioning now is indicative of a big problem: we don’t trust each other right now,” he said.

“This particular group of people is supposed to be the statistical, scientific wing of the Democratic Party. To have this turn into a struggle session is insane.”

Walter repeated that David Shor is one of the best in the business at data analysis. He could probably go to Amazon and make half a million dollars a year, but he has chosen to work in Democratic politics because he is a progressive, and believes in the cause.

“But the list moderators having put out in his [professional] community that this man has incited a racial mob, his reputation has been destroyed,” Walter said. “I can’t imagine him coming back from this. I can’t imagine him wanting to.”

Think of it: the woke mob within Democratic institutions may have professionally destroyed one of the best data analysts the party has. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet bloc: totalitarianism’s requirement of loyalty to the ideology and the party’s figures over basic competence and truth-telling caused the system to rot from within.

Walter went on:

I do believe that racism is real, I do believe that sexism is real, I do believe that homophobia is a real thing. I really do believe they should be combatted. But I also believe that there are people who hide under a false flag and use this to accrue power.

I mentioned to Walter that a few months after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a progressive reader of this blog with whom I had corresponded in the past, and who worked in Washington in the Democratic Party arena, e-mailed to say that he was thinking of getting out of politics. He said that women around Hillary were convinced that sexism was the reason she lost, and that they were allowing their rage to guide them. The reader, who is male, told me in 2017 that these ideological ragebots were taking over the party, and it was becoming a miserable place to work. That reader eventually did leave politics.

Walter agreed that the apparatchik furies are in control, and it scares him for the future of the Democrats:

They have wormed their way into middle management. Nobody ever took them seriously. None of us ever thought these administrative positions were anything to really think about. But they have completely taken over the middle management of the party. They have taken over all the social institutions. It’s crazy. They’re using these institutions as punching bags for their rage rather than allowing their rage to be constructive.

As of this writing, Joe Biden is set up for a blowout victory this November. If the Democrats fail to deliver, remember this episode, and know that the cancer of wokeness ate the party alive from within.

UPDATE: Well, things have gotten interesting on the Progressphiles list today. Seth, who commented here already, told his confrères:

Whoever went to Rod freaking Dreher of all people, you gave a right-wing narcissist the opportunity to make light of my personal experiences, while using your power as a white man to get your perspective picked up at the expense of others in our community. Whoever you are, whether you are my friend or not, this was a profoundly cowardly act. I believe in forgiveness and am willing to forgive it with an apology, but please know that it was deeply shitty (and I’m pretty far down the list of people who are harmed by this nonsense).

If you have an issue with something someone has done, be an adult and deal with it directly. Don’t anonymously go to the press just because you’re a coward. Plenty of people have voiced opinions similar to “Walter’s” here, and you’ll notice that none of those people have been canceled or excommunicated or whatever other fear you convinced yourself was legitimate. I know “Walter” is supposed to refer to Mondale but all I can think of is Walter Sobchak, whose entire character is premised on his being a confident asshole whether he is right or wrong.

He adds:

Also what’s extra fucked up is I’m going to get more sympathy for this than our colleague who was harassed by Chait’s followers, and that person needs and deserves our love and compassion and support a whole lot more than I do.

I don’t know what Seth’s “personal experiences” are, and if he’s in emotional pain, I hope he is getting the help he needs. You can see what I said above. The whole “trauma” mentality on that list — the idea that feelings matter more than data — is driving the self-destructive ideological insanity.

Another person on the list — a female data scientist who recently worked for a Democratic presidential primary candidate, and who has been very critical of the way the moderators handled it wrote back when this first broke (emphasis in original):

Genuinely, to everyone on this list, I hope you’re holding up okay and caring for yourselves and each other with everything going on.

I moderate and care for several communities with varying levels of security concerns at scales far larger than Progressphiles. In all of them, defamation is seen as an abuse of power and is not tolerated.

Progressphile’s moderators have the right to make the individual determination whether or not David Shor’s tweet was racist, and have the authority to remove him. Accusing David Shor of going to a reporter to undermine a member of this community with the additional intention of creating conditions for them to receive death threats however is not only slander, it is libel.

It is horrifying any member of this community receives death threats. It should be taken seriously – and members of this community with the relevant skills should mobilize every time this happens to help with fears of doxxing and other digital safety concerns. But the continued public statements by the moderators – and their private statements to members of this group – asserting David Shor went “cap in hand” to a magazine in follow through of his plan to put someone’s life in danger without proof is clear defamation.

To make serious claims like this against someone without evidence makes this community unsafe, for everyone. It tells each of us that rumor will have more power than truth. And in a community that already has enough of that dynamic on its own, to signal to this list its moderators will uphold hearsay over facts in the way they have is only encouraging more harm.

When someone is put on administrative leave or fired, they sign NDAs. What do NDAs bar them from doing? Talking to reporters.

Please, as one person who protects and cares for communities engaged in politics and activist movements to another, retract the accusation. Do not set a precedent which sets the stage for worse in the future.

Yesterday, as I wrote above, Chait published a second piece denying that David Shor came to him with any of this. Chait wrote (as you’ve seen) that Shor was, and remains, “extremely uncooperative and fearful,” and that he (Chait) learned of the exchange between Shor and Trujillo Wesler by looking at Twitter himself. Yesterday on the list, the female data scientist commenter who wrote the above post earlier, quoted Chait’s new piece, and added (again, emphasis in the original):

(Big, exasperated sigh)

After several weeks of seeing others speak truth to power, I thank the mods for wanting to do the same on behalf of this community and its extended network. Such actions call for will power and acceptance of risk.

Yet this was not truth to power, this was libel.

Power asserted through defamation is toxic. And unwelcome. Fabricating claims and selling them as truth from a position of authority doesn’t simply hurt “white men,” it hurts victims of abuse. The mods’ actions have, instead of nurturing a safer space, made it harder for people to come forward. And made it easier for people with vendetta’s to target others. For these consequences alone, the mods owe us an explanation.

To the moderators:

In networks where individuals put themselves in legal jeopardy and physical harm in the name of justice and progress, your behavior would be flagged as high risk to the safety of their members.

You have undermined the trust of this group required for the agenda you have outlined to take hold and succeed. But, as someone who believes that agenda aims to positively transform this community, I hope you take the actions necessary to mend that trust and realize those goals.

Retract the accusation, respond with an explanation, or resign as moderators. Admitting mistakes, no matter how morally motivated or noxious, is leadership. Avoidance is not.

The post Big Sister Is Watching You appeared first on The American Conservative.

Your Woke Breaking Point

Megan McArdle is old enough to remember that when Donald Trump said in 2017 that the people coming for Confederate monuments today would becoming for Washington and Jefferson tomorrow, a number of smart people said that was an outrage. And yet, today it’s happening. McArdle continues:

Trump is no great moral theorist, but he does have a certain cunning about human behavior, enough, possibly to foresee that the Great Statucide would proceed by what conservative writer Rod Dreher has dubbed “the Law of Merited Impossibility”: Conservatives warning about the dire consequences of some social change are dismissed as hysterical cranks — and then, when exactly what they predicted eventually comes to pass, denounced as bigots for opposing the new order. Implicit in Dreher’s law is an intermediate phase in which a large number of people sit uncomfortably silent as the radicals take the moderate majority’s well-intentioned efforts further than they ever dreamed.

If you had told me 10 years ago that same-sex marriage meant Christian bakers being legally required to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, I, or any supporter of marriage equality, would have dismissed this as conservative propaganda, too silly to even bother refuting. Probably someone did tell me that, at some point; probably I laughed and said, “Come on.”

Then, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled, activists began declaring that of course those bakers had to bake those cakes. Privately, one heard from a lot of same-sex marriage advocates who thought this went too far. But publicly, they found other things to talk about. And so the default position on the left became exactly the sort of thing that everyone had declared would never happen.

What Trump understood, and his critics perhaps didn’t, was that you cannot credibly declare that some revolution in social affairs has a natural stopping point unless you personally commit to stopping it when it goes too far.

Read it all. 

The provocative academic James Lindsay suggests a good challenge here:

Talking with a brilliant friend last night keyed me into an important idea: everybody has a Woke breaking point, a point where they can’t deny any longer the fact that it’s a totalitarian nightmare. Encourage your sympathetic friends to start naming what theirs would be.

— James Lindsay, anti-revolutionary (@ConceptualJames) June 24, 2020

Well, what is it for you? What’s your Woke Breaking Point? State it and defend it in the comments. If you can’t, then we all know which side you’re on, whether you do or not. Don’t play innocent. The unwillingness of decent liberals to draw a line in the sand and defend it is why these statucidal Stalinists get away with it.

UPDATE: If this doesn’t qualify for some of you people, there is no hope for you left. This statue was paid for by the contributions of freed slaves, and Frederick Douglass gave a speech at its dedication.

We haven’t reached peak insanity, but setting an appointment to tear down an Abraham Lincoln statue known as the Emancipation Memorial in the name of racial equity has to be getting close https://t.co/BkVGbwlXql

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) June 24, 2020

The post Your Woke Breaking Point appeared first on The American Conservative.

Red Guards Then, Black Guards Now

You need to watch this. It’s painful, but necessary. A gay Seattle black man, Karlos Dillard, torments a white woman he claims cut him off in traffic, flipped him off, and called him a n-gger.

pic.twitter.com/nide2njLvx

Look at this poor woman’s terror at having her life destroyed by being turned into the next Karen meme by this sociopathic SJW liar from the favored caste practicing viral video tsujigiri on random innocents for the lulz. No one is safe from these monsters

— Irenist

Benedict Option In Covidtide

Last night I was on the phone with an old friend, an Orthodox priest, and we were talking about Covidtide. He said to me that this year has been a dry run for all Christians on how we would be able to keep the faith under conditions of persecution, when we couldn’t get to the church. He told me that he sees it as a time of preparation — a time when God allowed us a glimpse of what is to come, and revealed to us our own shortcomings. We talked for a bit about how the churches have, and have not, used this time wisely, and how we individual Christians have and have not done so. In my own case, I have not used it to deepen my prayer life — something I now see was a big mistake, one that I am going to rectify.

A few hours after that conversation, I came across something unexpected: a Spectator piece by Daniel French, an Anglican vicar, on how the Covid emergency has awakened faithful Christians to the need for the Benedict Option. Excerpts:

Coronavirus and the fallout from it could have been a chance for the Church of England to talk about the grand vision of Christian hope and mortality. The Bible warns us of plagues and pestilence. It tells us that we live in a broken world. It makes it clear this pandemic is far from unprecedented. Yet it also has a message of good news. Instead, too many of the Church’s senior figures have ditched this vision, choosing rather to scare us or play politics when it comes to coronavirus.

This missed opportunity, sadly predictable, uncovers a deeper Anglican crisis than push button issues like gay bishops, transgender liturgies, or declining congregations. Ultimately it stems from a lack of confidence among bishops and theologians when it comes to the supernatural. This is little surprise given how dominant secular progressive theology is in the Church. But the result is depressing: at a time when so many were reevaluating their lives – and realising how easily the things they took for granted might not always be there – too many senior figures in the Church were absent.

Father French — more information on him and his parish here — writes about how during this time, a group of orthodox Anglican clergy have banded together, realizing that they really are on their own. More:

For this group, three thinkers are shaping post-Covid orthodoxy; C S Lewis, Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher. … If this post-Covid orthodoxy is becoming a reality, it was one predicted by the journalist Rod Dreher in his bestseller ‘The Benedict Option’. Dreher argued that Christians opposed to progressivism may end up driven to form ‘under the radar’ moral communities and networks. He bases this observation on Soviet countries where underground churches paralleled the official state-run churches. A lot of us (not just ministers) feel vulnerable to the so-called ‘Cancel Culture’ and cannot see that the Anglican establishment will be able to shield us from the rising politically correct barbarians at the gates. To support people in troubled times, orthodox clergy need overseers, mentors and a support network of spiritual combatants. This new network – unlike the C of E establishment – could plausibly offer just that. Could an underground, online church emerge from the lockdown? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Read it all. 

I reached out to Father French and told him that Live Not By Lies takes that idea even further. I told him about Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who escaped the Gestapo and lived in Bratislava under his mother’s last name. About how, in 1943, he saw that communist totalitarianism was coming for the Slovak people, and at times in the face of the institutional church’s disapproval, he prepared the “Family,” a network of faithful Catholic students around the country who prepared themselves spiritually and otherwise for the coming persecution. Father Kolakovic knew that the faithful had to take advantage of their liberty to lay the groundwork to continue the life of the church under persecution. From Live Not By Lies:

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

After events of the last two months in this country and in Britain, I have no doubt in my mind that this is coming. I have spent Covidtide finishing this book to ready it for its September 29 publication, but I have not prepared myself spiritually. That ends today. The writing is on the wall, for those with eyes to see.

If I could, I would have the publisher issue Live Not By Lies today, so Christians could busy themselves now figuring out how to establish these cells and these networks. It’s not possible to move the publication up, though. Until that day, please be thinking about what a Father Kolakovic would say to us today — Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, and so forth — and what he would do. What would “the Family” look like in our time and place?

The time to see clearly, to think hard about what we see, and then to act in the face of this knowledge, is now. One sign of hope that I’ve seen in all my Benedict Option travels abroad: faithful Christians really do have allies everywhere. Those with vision look beyond the ecclesial and denominational divisions, and recognize that in the eyes of the persecutors, there is no meaningful differences among us. From Live Not By Lies:

Along with other prisoners, [Kolakovic follower Silvester] Krčméry would sing hymns, and would pray litanies for everyday needs, including for a spirit of humility and willingness to endure all for the sake of Christ. This brotherhood was an integral part of the spirituality of Christian resistance. Father Kolaković had taught the Family the virtue of reaching across church lines to establish brotherhood with other Christians. Captivity and torture turned this into a practical reality.

“In prison, nobody recognized any confessional differences,” writes Krčméry.

This same principle echoes in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand and other former captives of the communists. It is not a false ecumenism that claims all religions are essentially the same. It is rather a mutual recognition that within the context of persecution, embracing Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shattered,” becomes vital to spiritual survival.

Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher and the godfather of the Charter 77 dissidents. We Christians who stand to be shattered by what is here and what is coming need to start living differently right now. We need to find each other. We need to build these networks, while there is time. I’m champing at the bit for this book to come out so we can all talk openly about all this, in light of the advice I received, and report in the book, from the Christians who endured hard totalitarianism.

The post Benedict Option In Covidtide appeared first on The American Conservative.

They’re Coming After Churches Next

The Episcopal Church — this Washington DC parish in particular — is super liberal. That’s not good enough — these leftist, racist vandals went after it anyway (even though the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is a black man):

St. John’s Church has been vandalized with spray paint reading BHAZ (Black House Autonomous Zone) pic.twitter.com/8D7UITVTK0

— Richie

Catholic Poland: Tomorrow’s Ireland?

Last week I saw that the Catholic news site Crux featured a report on a big controversy among the bishops of Poland. Here’s how the report begins:

A bishop at the center of a documentary on sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Poland has tried to defend himself, but has only generated more controversy.

The film “Hide and Seek” documented a dramatic case of abuse of power by Bishop Edward Janiak of Kalisz in central Poland. In 2016, when a family visited him to report that their son was abused by their parish priest, Janiak expelled them from his office and didn’t report the case to the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, as the law required.

The documentary was released on May 16, and on the same day Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the Primate of Poland and Delegate of Child Protection at the Polish Bishops Conference, reported the case to the Holy See through the Vatican embassy, using the procedure outlined in a new Vatican law – Vos Estis Lux Mundi – which was promulgated by Pope Francis on June 1, 2019. It was the first time the law had been utilized in Poland.

Janiak responded with a June 13 letter to the Polish bishops rejecting the accusations and attacking Polak for reporting him.

Readers may recall that when I was in Poland last year interviewing people for Live Not By Lies, I was quite surprised to have a number of conversations with young Catholics who told me that they expect Poland to go the way of Ireland in a decade, maybe two. What they meant was that they — even though they are practicing Catholics — expect to see a collapse of the Church and the rapid secularization of Polish society. I found this hard to believe the first two times I heard it, but I kept hearing it, in Warsaw and in Krakow. I met an older priest and asked him what he thought. He shook his head sadly, and said yes, it’s coming.

Every single person who told me this, when I asked them why, they said that it was because of problems with the institutional church, and its loss of credibility with the young, postcommunist generations. A big part of the loss of credibility is the cover-up of clerical child molestation.

When I saw the news from Crux the other day, I reached out to one of the young Catholics — an orthodox Catholic, I hasten to say, quite conservative theologically — to ask him to explain what’s going on to me. He wrote back:

Well, there is lots of trouble. I will provide you with the immediate context of these events, but will try to remain as succinct as possible. If you would like me to explain or elaborate on anything – I will be glad to help.

As everywhere, in Poland we have a really big problem with priests-pedophiles. Lots of cases have been covered up and still most bishops prefer to hide all the problems from the public. With few good exceptions (e.g. Archbishop Wojciech Polak from Gniezno, the primate of Poland), they deal with them by simply moving a priest-offender secretly to a different parish. Of course, the moved predator still attacks and nothing improves.

Last year, two Polish liberal journalists – Sekielski brothers – published a documentary film “Tylko nie mów nikomu” (“Do not dare to tell anyone”) in which they uncovered a few cases of violation of the Church’s child protection procedures by covering up numerous priests who were sexual offenders. Bishops simply ignored the Vatican’s instructions, have not punished offenders in any way and sometimes even ruthlessly demanded silence from the victims, treating them as if they were rubbish.

The film has been extremely popular in Poland. However, only the primate and few other bishops reacted to it in a positive way. The primate declared a zero-tolerance policy on pedophiles and encouraged other Polish bishops to do so (he has no formal means, other than the general ones issued by the Pope, to oblige them to do so). Moreover, he helped to create a St. Joseph’s Foundation, directed solely by Catholic laymen. The Foundation aims to help the victims. It’s leader – Marta Titaniec – does a splendid job! Unfortunately, many other bishops denounced the film as “an attack on the Church” and belittled the facts presented in it.

Because of it, a few weeks ago, a new film by the Sekielski brothers was published – “Zabawa w chowanego” (“Hide-and-seek”). It is slightly different than the previous one – it concentrates mostly on a case of one pedophile priest. Lots of convincing data and testimonies are presented in this film. A few priests and lay Catholic journalists helped Sekielskis in creating this new film, so it is now really hard to simply denounce it as a “liberal attack on the Church”. The film clearly indicates that the bishop Edward Janiak of Kalisz (Calisia) in Poland simply ignored the priest’s appalling behaviour for a few years and did literally nothing to stop him. By this, he violated almost every single Church procedure which should have been applied. This film also gained wide public attention and caused even greater outrage — it clearly shows that since the first film virtually nothing has changed.

The bishop of Kalisz went mad. He issued a pastoral letter in which he claims to be “attacked by the media” as a part of a wider godless offensive against the Church. Moreover, he demanded that in the diocese of Kalisz the priests signed a letter of support, in which they were expected to reject accusations aimed at their bishop. To a great positive surprise, the local clergy openly refused and asked the Vatican to start an investigation. It is a good sign of change — when Bishop Juliusz Paetz’s case appeared a few years ago, the mechanism was exactly the same, but the clergy obeyed the demands, signed the letter and remain silent till this day. Consequently, the Primate decided to act and issued a similar petition for an official church investigation to the Pope.

Because of this, the bishop of Kalisz issued a second pastoral letter. It shows that Bp Janiak is afraid of punishment and wants to create fear among other bishops that if he will be judged, others will follow. In a very crude way he criticises the primate for his decision to ask the Vatican for an investigation. He suggests that the St. Joseph’s Foundation operates without support of most of the bishops. Bp Janiak also states that he is innocent and the primate’s attack on him is pointless (he really publicly mouths off to the primate!). To Bp Janiak’s satisfaction, the Vatican appointed Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki from Poznań to lead the investigation (the diocese where Juliusz Paetz was earlier an ordinary). It is highly likely that Gądecki will intentionally lead the investigation in such a way that Bp Janiak will not be found guilty.

The Primate and most laymen are furious, but we cannot do anything. We feel helpless and humiliated. We only pray that God will help us. The Vatican does not seem to pay sufficient attention to what is happening here. The Church in Poland has always had a great autonomy in the Church’s structures, but it now turns out to have horrible side effects. We even started fundraising for a big advert in La Repubblica begging the Pope for real help, because the usual channels of communication have clearly failed. I do not know if this will help, but we are running out of rational, more ordinary ideas. Most of the Polish bishops silently support Janiak (or at least are not determined to investigate his case) and do not want any such further “attacks on the Church” to happen. A classical Irish-style scenario of an aggressive clergy-driven secularisation is happening now and the faithful cannot do anything to change it.

Man, if the West loses Poland to secularism, what’s left?

The post Catholic Poland: Tomorrow’s Ireland? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Soft Totalitarianism Of The Left Brain

Two or three years ago, I wrote about this fantastic book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. It came out in 2009, to rapturous reviews. Here is a link to Dr. McGilchrist’s website. 

This is how it presents the book (the introduction of which you can download from the site):

This book argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.

Most scientists long ago abandoned the attempt to understand why nature has so carefully segregated the hemispheres, or how to make coherent the large, and expanding, body of evidence about their differences. In fact to talk about the topic is to invite dismissal. Yet no one who knows anything about the area would dispute for an instant that there are significant differences: it’s just that no-one seems to know why. And we now know that every type of function – including reason, emotion, language and imagery – is subserved not by one hemisphere alone, but by both.

This book argues that the differences lie not, as has been supposed, in the ‘what’ – which skills each hemisphere possesses – but in the ‘how’, the way in which each uses them, and to what end. But, like the brain itself, the relationship between the hemispheres is not symmetrical. The left hemisphere, though unaware of its dependence, could be thought of as an ’emissary’ of the right hemisphere, valuable for taking on a role that the right hemisphere – the ‘Master’ – cannot itself afford to undertake. However it turns out that the emissary has his own will, and secretly believes himself to be superior to the Master. And he has the means to betray him. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he will also betray himself.

The book begins by looking at the structure and function of the brain, and at the differences between the hemispheres, not only in attention and flexibility, but in attitudes to the implicit, the unique, and the personal, as well as the body, time, depth, music, metaphor, empathy, morality, certainty and the self. It suggests that the drive to language was not principally to do with communication or thought, but manipulation, the main aim of the left hemisphere, which manipulates the right hand. It shows the hemispheres as no mere machines with functions, but underwriting whole, self-consistent, versions of the world. Through an examination of Western philosophy, art and literature, it reveals the uneasy relationship of the hemispheres being played out in the history of ideas, from ancient times until the present. It ends by suggesting that we may be about to witness the final triumph of the left hemisphere – at the expense of us all.

It’s a fantastic book. Well, a reader last week e-mailed to suggest that I go back and re-read the final chapter, in which Dr. McGilchrist — writing in 2009, mind you — speculated on what a society tyrannized by the left brain would look like. The reader said it’s startlingly relevant to us today. McGilchrist argues that in the West, we have begun to manifest symptoms of collective schizophrenia. Here are some excerpts from the McGilchrist book, with some commentary by me:

The normal relationship of reality to representation has been reversed. At the beginning of this book, I summarised the left hemisphere’s role as providing a map of the world. That map now threatens to replace the reality.

My contention is that the modern world is the attempt by the left hemisphere to take control of everything it knows so that it is the giver to itself of what it sees.

His argument is that the intuitive right brain (the Master) communicates with the logical left brain (the Emissary), which sorts the intuitive impressions and makes it possible to live in reality. A healthy person, and a healthy society, lives in a state of balance between the two. But since the Enlightenment, we have privileged the left side and its way of knowing so much that we are badly out of balance, and in fact becoming mad. What the neuroscientist says in the excerpt above is that the left brain is obsessed with control, with making all crooked lines straight so it can master them. We are in a condition now in which the left brain takes its own construal of reality to be reality itself, and silences anything from the artistic, religious, intuitive side of the brain that challenges its dominion. Here is the dilemma:

One [the right brain] says ‘I do not know,’ the other [the left brain]  ‘I know – that there is nothing to know.’ One believes that one cannot know: the other ‘knows’ that one cannot believe.

More:

What is beyond reasonable doubt, however, since it has been established by repeated research over at least half a century, is that schizophrenia increased pari passu with industrialisation; that the form in which schizophrenia exists is more severe and has a clearly worse outcome in Western countries; and that, as recent research confirms, prevalence by country increases in proportion to the degree that the country is ‘developed’, which in practice means Westernised.

McGilchrist says we have in texts from the ancient world clear descriptions of what we would recognize today as bipolar disorder, but no descriptions of schizophrenia. It is possible that this is a psychological disease of modernity. Why would this be the case? McGilchrist says modernity (including industrialization, secularization, and so on) functions to sever the individual from a sense of place, of history, and

the roots of all meaning in shared values and experiences, the vast implicit realm from which imagination draws its power. Once this rupture has occurred, it can no more be remedied by a conscious effort of the will than a flower plucked from the plant can be made to grow again by being stuck back on the stalk.

Modernity entails “an unfaltering belief in the future complemented an uncompromising scorn for the past,” he writes. Twentieth-century totalitarianisms (Nazi, Communist) were radical expressions of modernity: an attempt to annihilate the past to control the present and the future in the name of ideology — that is, in the name of a fully human construal of the world.

And today? What would a left-brained world look like? Among Dr. McGilchrist’s predictions in 2009:

The concepts of skill and judgment, once considered the summit of human achievement, but which come only slowly and silently with the business of living, would be discarded in favour of quantifiable and repeatable processes.

I think here of Hannah Arendt’s list of qualities of totalitarian thought: of how loyalty to the ideology and the political leader are valued over actual skill. We see this today in the loyalty oaths to Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity that academics are more and more being required to take. We see this in the growth of diversity bureaucracies within institutions, to compel all to accept and obey the ideology. McGilchrist:

The essential elements of bureaucracy, as described by Peter Berger and his colleagues (see p. 390 above), show that they would thrive in a world dominated by the left hemisphere. The authors list them as: the necessity of procedures that are known, and in principle knowable; anonymity; organisability; predictability; a concept of justice that is reduced to mere equality; and explicit abstraction. There is a complete loss of the sense of uniqueness. All of these features are identifiable as facilitated by the left hemisphere.

More:

The left hemisphere prefers the impersonal to the personal, and that tendency would in any case be instantiated in the fabric of a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society. The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world. Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people.

The scientist wrote this in 2009! This is exactly where we are today. Here is a passage from Live Not By Lies:

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

What race are you? What is your sex? What is your family background? These increasingly determine your fate in the progressive soft totalitarianism.

Back to McGilchrist, who predicted in 2009:

Such a government would seek total control – it is an essential feature of the left hemisphere’s take on the world that it can grasp it and control it. Talk of liberty, which is an abstract ideal for the left hemisphere, would increase for Machiavellian reasons, but individual liberty would be curtailed.

Panoptical control would become an end in itself, and constant CCTV monitoring, interception of private information and communication, the norm. Measures such as a DNA database would be introduced apparently in response to exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances, against which they would in reality be ineffective, their aim being to increase the power of the state and diminish the status of the individual. The concept of the individual depends on uniqueness; but according to the left hemisphere’s take on reality, individuals are simply interchangeable (‘equal’) parts of a mechanistic system, a system it needs to control in the interests of efficiency. Thus it would be expected that the state would not only take greater power directly, but play down individual responsibility, and the sense of individual responsibility would accordingly decline.

More:

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust.

What happens when the state moves to seize your children, on the grounds that based on evidence it has gathered from sorting through the data it has collected from your online activities, and what Alexa has heard in your household, you are raising them to believe bigoted things that threaten the social order. You don’t think this can happen? It happened two years ago in Norway. You can bet that they will try this here too, eventually.

Back to McGilchrist, from 2009, forecasting a social order dominated by the left brain:

Anger and aggressive behaviour would become more evident in our social interactions, since of all emotional states these are the most highly characteristic of the left hemisphere, and would no longer be counterbalanced by the empathic skills of the right hemisphere. One would expect a loss of insight, coupled with an unwillingness to take responsibility, and this would reinforce the left hemisphere’s tendency to a perhaps dangerously unwarranted optimism. There would be a rise in intolerance and inflexibility, an unwillingness to change track or change one’s mind.

More:

We would expect there to be a resentment of, and a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder: Weber’s ‘disenchanted’ world. Religion would seem to be mere fantasy. The right hemisphere is drawn forward by exemplars of the qualities it values, where the left hemisphere is driven forward by a desire for power and control: one would expect, therefore, that there would develop an intolerance of, and a constant undercutting, ironising, or deconstructing of such exemplars, in both life and in art. Pathos, the characteristic mode of the right hemisphere, would become impossible, perhaps shameful. It would become hard to discern value or meaning in life at all; a sense of nausea and boredom before life would be likely to lead to a craving for novelty and stimulation.

And:

Above all, the word and the idea would come to dominate. Cultural history and tradition, and what can be learnt from the past, would be confidently dismissed in preparation for the systematic society of the future, put together by human will. The body would come to be viewed as a machine, and the natural world as a heap of resource to be exploited.

McGilchrist — speaking as a neuroscientist, not a political or a religious thinker — goes on:

In the real, practical, everyday world what I have called the ‘return to the right hemisphere’ is of ultimate importance.

… It seems, then, that, even in its own terms, the left hemisphere is bound to fail. That will, however, not stop it from persisting in its current path. And the task of opposing this trend is made more difficult by the fact that two of the main sources of non-materialistic values, which might therefore have led to resistance, are both prime targets of the process that the left hemisphere has set in motion. We have no longer a consistent coherent tradition in the culture, which might have passed on, in embodied and intuitive form, the fruits of experience of our forebears, what used to form the communal wisdom – perhaps even common sense, to which modernism and post-modernism are implacably opposed. The historic past is continually under threat of becoming little more than a heritage museum, whereby it becomes reconstructed according to the stereotypes of the left hemisphere. And the natural world used to be another source of contact with something that still lay outside the realm of the self-constructed, but that is on the retreat, and many people in any case lead lives almost completely devoid of contact with it.

More:

The Western Church has, in my view, been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values, but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems. At the same time the liturgical reform movement, as always convinced that religious truths can be literally stated, has largely eroded and in some cases completely destroyed the power of metaphoric language and ritual to convey the numinous.

One last passage from McGilchrist:

I have tried to convey in this book that we need metaphor or mythos in order to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not dispensable luxuries, or ‘optional extras’, still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the process. We are not given the option not to choose one, and the myth we choose is important: in the absence of anything better, we revert to the metaphor or myth of the machine. But we cannot, I believe, get far in understanding the world, or in deriving values that will help us live well in it, by likening it to the bike in the garage. The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.

I strongly urge you to read The Master and His Emissary. Here is a fantastic 11-minute animated video that lays out Dr. McGilchrist’s thesis:

He says at the end, quoting Einstein, that the right brain is a “sacred gift” and the left brain is a “servant” of that gift. What we have done is created a world in which the servant has lost the gift and become a tyrant. Dr. McGilchrist calls for a rebalancing.

How do we achieve that rebalancing? He does not say. Can anyone? The point to be taken here is that what we are living through now is not merely a political crisis, and it cannot be solved through politics alone.

UPDATE: Listen, leftists, if you have a serious criticism to make about McGilchrist’s work, or my use of it here, I’m happy to approve of it. But I’m not interested in publishing your usual knee-jerk flak, which I’ve been getting since I put this up. Don’t waste your time. If you want to know more about his thesis before commenting, download the book’s introduction at this page.

UPDATE.2: Folks, honestly, do yourself a favor and read more about McGilchrist’s book before you dismiss it. It is much richer and more complex than some of you think. Here is a review of it in The Guardian, by philosopher Mary Midgley. Excerpt:

The book’s title comes from the legend of a wise ruler whose domains grew so large that he had to train emissaries to visit them instead of going himself. One of these, however, grew so cocky that he thought he was wiser than his master, and eventually deposed him. And this, says McGilchrist, is what the Left hemisphere tends to do. In fact, the balance between these two halves is, like so many things in evolution, a somewhat rough, practical arrangement, quite capable of going wrong. The bifurcation seems to have become necessary in the first place because these two main functions – comprehensiveness and precision – are both necessary, but are too distinct to be combined. The normal sequence, then, is that the comprehensive partner first sees the whole prospect – picks out something that needs investigating – and hands it over to the specialist, who processes it. Thus the thrush’s Left is called in to deal with the snail-shell; the banker’s Left calculates the percentage. But, once those pieces of work are done, it is necessary for the wider vision to take over again and decide what to do next.

Much of the time this is indeed what happens and it is what has enabled brains of this kind to work so well, both for us and for other animals. But sometimes there is difficulty about the second transaction. Since it is the nature of precision not to look outward – not to bother about what is around it – the specialist partner does not always know when it ought to hand its project back to headquarters for further processing. Being something of a success-junkie, it often prefers to hang on to it itself. And since we do have some control over this shift between detailed and general thinking, that tendency can be helped or hindered by the ethic that prevails in the culture around it.

McGilchrist’s suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato’s time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. (Thus, as a shocked nurse lately told me, it is proposed that all nurses must have university degrees. Who, she asked, will actually do the nursing?) And the ideal of objectivity has developed in a way that would have surprised those sages still more.

This notion, which now involves seeing everything natural as an object, inert, senseless and detached from us, arose as part of the dualist vision of a split between body and soul. It was designed to glorify God by removing all competing spiritual forces from the realm of nature. It therefore showed matter itself as dead, a mere set of billiard-ball particles bouncing mechanically off each other, always best represented by the imagery of machines. For that age, life and all the ideals relevant to humanity lay elsewhere, in our real home – in the zone of spirit. (That, of course, was why Newton, to the disgust of later scholars, was far more interested in theology than he was in physics.) But the survival of this approach today, when physicists have told us that matter does not actually consist of billiard balls, when we all supposedly believe that we are parts of the natural biosphere, not colonists from spiritual realms – when indeed many of us deny that such realms even exist – seems rather surprising.

UPDATE.3: Dr. McGilchrist himself e-mailed to say:

Thank you for pointing out the parallels between what I seemed to predict and the current circumstances.  I say ‘seemed to predict’ because, of course, it was already happening.  But the rapidity and totality of the loss of free speech – which means precisely nothing unless it means that you respect the right of people to say things of which you disapprove – is far more serious than I could have anticipated then.  With that falls what we mean by civilisation.  And, to their eternal shame, the great institutions of learning are conniving at, even accelerating, that downfall.

Another problem that I indicated is that the left hemisphere mode of thinking is not only out of touch with reality, but cannot even understand a nuanced position, in which there are degrees of truth.  All context is ignored and only rigid doctrine permitted.  Life however is, and always will remain, complex.  Which is why we must all be allowed to say what we think without fear of bullying and intimidation.  There is much to criticise in modern Western society, and you will know from reading my book that I am hardly blind to it.  But free speech, and a passion for fairness, are two of its most valuable and irreplaceable qualities: almost unique in the history of the world.  If misunderstood, they contain the seeds of their own destruction.

The Dutch have a saying, ‘trust comes on foot and departs on horseback’.  I can hardly see it now for dust.

One point I would make in conclusion – and I know you know this, so it is for the reader’s benefit – I didn’t suggest that we were all getting to be schizophrenic.  Rather I thought that, like subjects with schizophrenia, we were apparently incapable of understanding what the right hemisphere could tell us.  Unfortunately for us, the right hemisphere is more intelligent, more insightful and more in touch with reality than the left.  All of which is explored in my next book.

The post The Soft Totalitarianism Of The Left Brain appeared first on The American Conservative.

#CancelYale

Ann Coulter is pushing a brilliant campaign to compel Yale University to change its name:

How about a bill withholding all federal funds from Yale University until it changes its name? The school’s namesake, Elihu Yale, was not only a slave owner, but a slave trader.

Quite a dilemma for the little snots who attend and teach there! It will be tremendously damaging to their brand. After all, true sublimity for a Social Justice Warrior is virtue signaling and advertising their high SAT scores at the same time.

Elihu Yale was certainly that: a slave trader, and a cruel man. Yale University bears his name because he was an early benefactor of the school.

Yale in 2017, because its namesake, 19th century Yale alumnus John C. Calhoun, was pro-slavery. So why is Yale not jettisoning its name? Why the hypocrisy?

The answer, of course, is that “Yale” is a global brand of almost matchless prestige. In terms of branding — which is not the same as quality — Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge are among its only competitors. To surrender “Yale” would be a severe blow to the value of a Yale diploma, precisely because of the sense of elite identity Yale has accrued over the centuries.

So, how serious do the leftist Yalies — alumni, faculty, administrators, and students — take their moral commitment? They are very happy to strip other people of their problematic historical identities, in the name of moral purity. How do they justify not applying the same standards to themselves?

Surely it cannot be the case that they want other people to pay a price for historical identity, but don’t want to pay it themselves. Yale was founded as the “Collegiate School,” before changing its name to Yale in honor of a major donor. Why not switch back to Collegiate School? The answer is that to do that would be like Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame choosing to revert to her birth name, Norma Jeane Baker. Not quite the same thing, is it?

It would mean a tremendous sacrifice for Yale University and its alumni, and a meaningful loss of identity and prestige. But how could they do otherwise, given their moral commitments, and given that Elihu Yale was a slave trader? So what if there might not be a Yale University if not for Elihu Yale? We must be morally perfect.

Of course I don’t believe at all that Yale should do this — but nor do I believe other places should jettison their history because of this contemporary moral panic. Yale lefties, of whom there are many, do not share this view. So what’s their excuse? A Yale by any other name is just as good, right? Right?

Yale’s leftists should put up or shut up. Ann Coulter is right to troll them hard. My guess is that all those campus crusaders would not at all be willing to surrender their identity as Yalies. These culture-war controversies are not about morality, but about power.

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