Rod Dreher's Blog, page 149

To Mean Is To Swing

I love this passage from an essay on Miles Davis by the critic Clive James, from his wonderful essay collection Cultural Amnesia, a big book in which he tells the story of the 20th century through profiles of outstanding cultural figures. It’s an essay about Miles, but it turns into a reflection on the risks to artists of being so successful they don’t have to be accountable to the public, or anybody else — opening the door to their self-destruction. It starts with a quote from Miles saying that if he doesn’t like the questions he’s being asked, he can get into his Ferrari and drive away. James writes:

Books about the finances of the painters are often written, because the money involved is big if the painter becomes fashionable—especially, strangely enough, if the painter belonged to the anti-bourgeois avant-garde before he clicked with the buyers. Painters have to buy materials and pay a large percentage to their galleries, so they are rarely as rich as we tend to think, but when they do break through, they break through on an industrial scale. For writers the financial rewards are comparatively small-time, but a good book dedicated to nothing except the money would be very useful. It might help to explain behaviour that is puzzled over on the metaphysical level when there are concrete explanations that have not been considered.

When Nazi Germany cancelled the distribution of Hollywood movies, MGM faced a loss of only a small proportion of its income. Thomas Mann, when he finally realised the necessity of cutting himself off from publication in his homeland, faced the loss of nearly all of his, because although he was internationally famous, his central audience was in Germany. In the Soviet Union, royalties existed only in the form of privileges—an apartment, a dacha, the chance to be published at all—but the privileges were decisive. The threat of their being withdrawn was enough to make almost anyone think twice about speaking against the state. Without this point in mind it is fruitless to go on speculating about why Pasternak, for example, was so slow to dissent in public, and was so equivocating when he did. Lovers of the arts should be slow to despise the cash nexus on the artist’s behalf: the niggling difficulties of securing and handling one’s personal finances are nothing beside the pressures of state patronage. Going to hell in your own way has everything over being sent there at a bureaucrat’s whim.

Was Miles Davis speaking for black America? Yes, of course, although he shrugged off the black man’s burden: he wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr. But Martin Luther King couldn’t have recorded Kind of Blue. Davis had his real trouble not with acceptance as such, but with drugs. In the past—the immediate past, let’s not forget—black musicians were robbed blind by white businessmen as a matter of course. Davis robbed himself, incidentally showing us the difference between a weakness and a vice. He had a weakness for women, but nobody has ever proved that he played worse for his prodigious sexual appetite. His appetite for drugs was another matter, and it would be a brave defender who claimed that drugs never affected his playing. Charlie Parker was explicit on the subject: “Anyone who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar.”

Sadder than a falling phrase from “My Old Flame,” the line is quoted on page 379 of Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya. Edited by Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro, it is a book as rich in precepts as in anecdotes, and one which should never be allowed to go out of print. Students in all fields of creative endeavour need a copy of it nearby, to instruct them in the unyielding nature of bedrock. Not long ago I heard a man playing the most beautiful tenor sax. I could tell he had absorbed everything Ben Webster and Lester Young had to teach, but his gift for assembling his phrases into a long legato line was all his own. He was terrific. But he was playing at the bottom of the escalators in Tottenham Court Road tube station. No Ferrari for him.

The entire book is like that. It’s so much fun to flip around in. Get Cultural Amnesia on Kindle — it’s the best ten bucks you will spend this month.

It wasn’t until I started writing books for a living that I understood how childish is the accusation that an artist has “sold out” because he is popular. It is true that some artists do fail to serve their talent by making art that tries to hard to appeal to popular tastes that it loses originality. That is what is meant by “selling out.” But in this piece, and in an even better essay about Duke Ellington in Cultural Amnesia, James explores the vital creative connection between artist and public. The Ellington essay is both a fulsome tribute to Ellington, and an attempt to vindicate the Duke’s great line: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” James says that the jazz of the pre-bop era was great because its artists never forgot that it had to swing — that is, it had to be danceable. Slate adapted James’s Ellington essay. Excerpts:

Ellington was appalled by the very thought that jazz might “develop” to the point where people could no longer dance to it. When he said “jitterbugs are always above you,” he wasn’t really complaining. They might have kept him awake, but he wanted them to be there. He was recalling the sights and sounds of New York life that he got into “Harlem Airshaft,” one of his three-minute symphonies from the early 1940s. If he had put the sounds in literally, one of his most richly textured numbers would have been just a piece of ­literal-­minded program music like Strauss’ Sinfonia Domestica. But Ellington put them in creatively, as a concrete transference from his power of noticing to his power of imagining. Ellington was always a noticer, and in the early 1940s, he had already noticed what was happening to the ­art form that he had helped to invent. He put his doubts and fears into a single funny line. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Characteristically, he set the line to music, and it swung superbly. But under the exultation, there is foreboding. Ellington could see the writing on the wall, in musical notation. His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the 20th century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute.

For Ellington, it was a death knell. The ­art form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its entertainment value. But for the next generation of musicians, the ­art form depended on sounding like art, with entertainment a secondary consideration at best, and at worst a cowardly concession to be avoided. In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious. Where there had been ease and joy, now there was difficulty and desperation. Scholars of jazz who take a developmental view would like to call the hiatus a transition, but the word the bebop literati used at the time was all too accurate: It was a revolution.

James compares the saxophonist Ben Webster, who played with Ellington, to John Coltrane — and the comparison is extremely unfavorable to Coltrane, of whose cacaphonous work James writes:

Supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered.

James continues:

Here made manifest is the difference between the authoritarian and the authoritative. Coltrane made listening compulsory; Webster made listening irresistible. But such enchantment was bound to be suspect for a new generation that was determined not to be patronized. The alleged progression from mainstream to modern jazz, with bebop as the intermediary, had a political component as well an aesthetic one and it was the political component that made it impossible to argue against at the time, and makes it difficult even now. The aesthetic component was standard for all the arts in the 20th century: One after another they tried to move beyond mere enjoyment as a criterion, a move that put a premium on technique, turned technique into subject matter, and eventually made professional expertise a requirement not just for participation but even for appreciation. The political component, however, was unique to jazz. It had to do with black dignity, a cause well worth making sacrifices for. Unfortunately, the joy of the music was one of the sacrifices. Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy.

That passage sent me back to my undergraduate years. LSU’s English Department put on a thing every spring called “A Gathering Of Poets,” in which they would bring in four poets for a couple of days of readings and workshops. My best friend at the time was a graduate student in comparative literature, and was put in charge of publicizing the Gathering of Poets one spring. The poets were three white people, all literature teachers, and an old black African. I can’t remember the names of any of them today, but boy, what a difference between the African’s poetry and the white people’s poetry! The white people delivered verses that were molto precioso, lifeless, paralyzed by anxiety — just the kind of thing you’d expect from the faculty. The old African — man, his verse had swing. It was poetry that was meant to be recited. It was the first time I had ever heard a poetry reading that really moved me. That old man was an outsider at this gathering. He looked and dressed like a janitor going to a funeral, and he kept a pint of whiskey in his coat pocket, out of which he nipped. But that man was a real poet, an artist who could take you to a different place with his words. I’m sure if I read all those poets’ work today, I would find more to like about the white poets’ work than I did back then. To my undergraduate ears, though, the elderly African’s verses were irresistible; the academic poets’ verses were compulsory.

Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy. Clive James was talking about artists; I’m talking about opinion journalism. Still, there are things for writers at my level to learn.

One of them is that you can’t be no fun to read. I tend to write about cultural decline, which is not a bright, upbeat subject area. But there are ways to do it. Chris Hedges is a left-wing Christian writer who writes about the same thing, from the other side. He’s an extremely vivid stylist, but he’s exhausting. You get the sense that he writes his books while standing on a box in Hyde Park. I don’t think Hedges has a sense of humor about anything. When I write about what y’all have taken to calling “Dreherbait,” it really does reflect my fatalistic amusement about the human comedy. I don’t know if that’s any kind of saving grace, but there it is.

A better example is Wendell Berry, who is not just a polemicist, but a true artist. As you know, I think he is one of the greatest living Americans, and a writer whose work I esteem massively. I noticed something about reading him, though: that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. Well, prophets aren’t known for their bonhomie, and anyway, the worst thing Wendell Berry has ever written is better than my best. Still, I couldn’t figure out why I could love the man’s writing so much, yet find it hard to take in long stretches (I’m talking about his non-fiction essays). I’m not a big reader of fiction, but I’ve read enough Berry to know that he expresses his deep love of life in his novels, short stories, and poetry. Nobody can read Wendell Berry and think for a second that this man despises the world. But if you only read his essays, you may think of him as more unhappy with life than he really is.

As longtime readers are aware, I am frequently mystified in my travels, when I meet people who have been following me for years, and they express surprise that I am a lot more lighthearted and funny in real life than I am in my blogging. This is my fault, but it’s partly the fault of the medium. I write a blog dedicated to commenting on news and current events, with a particular focus on religion and culture. The news is often pretty lousy for religious and social conservatives! But I often fail to convey the fact that I share Russell Kirk’s view: that the world is sunlit, despite its vices. My problem is the same one that I had when I was a professional movie critic: the bad movies are always much easier, and more fun, to review than the good ones.

I don’t want to overthink this. My point is just that writers need to be in touch with their readers to keep them from going off the deep end into their own obsessions, or getting stuck in a mood. Writers need to be in touch with their readers to help them keep their work (even dark work!) more on the side of irresistible, not compulsory. I really do take some of you seriously when you criticize me in the comboxes. It’s easy to know who are the serious critics who really do want me to do better, and who are the cranks throwing popcorn from the balcony. Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, I want to thank you for your praise and your criticism. Sometimes I will pop off about something in this space, and not realize that I’ve made a bad judgment, until you tell me. So, thanks.

Another lesson: the market imposes necessary discipline. This is the entire point of James’s essay about Miles Davis. When he got so rich and famous he didn’t have to care about his audience, he began to decline artistically and personally. A decade ago, when Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards published a memoir in which he took some hard shots at Mick Jagger, the rock journalist Bill Wyman (not the original Stones bass player!) published an imaginary letter from Mick to bass player Wyman, in which Mick — himself a sybarite, but also a good business manager — unloaded on Keith, who spent most of the Stones’ career wasted. Excerpts:

In the book we get the stories.

Oh, the stories. The rock, the girls. The car wrecks, the arrests. You read them on the printed page, delivered in what, I must admit, is a pretty fair written representation of Keith’s slightly tangential, drawling, effeminate delivery, resting charmingly just this side of the incomprehensible.

I was generally made familiar with the stories in a different context. They were generally related by an assistant or a lawyer, tour manager or a publicist, poking their head into a room. Keith’s disappeared. Keith’s asleep backstage and can’t be roused for the show. No one will wake him because he keeps a loaded gun under his pillow and grabs it and points when riled. Keith fell asleep in the studio again. No, Keith isn’t mixing the album. He flew off to Jamaica, and, no, we don’t know when he will be back. Keith’s asleep. Keith’s asleep. Keith’s asleep.

The scamp. Those are but one tier, and a fairly innocuous one, of the many times I was vouchsafed news of my partner. The next tier is more colorful. Keith (or his favorite sax player/drug runner/drug buddy/hanger-on) has slugged a photographer/destroyed a hotel room/gotten into a fistfight with the locals/fallen into a coma. Oh, yes, and the police are here. (Because police are whom you want backstage at a rock concert or at a recording studio.)

Or: The bandmate Keith personally vouched for is freebasing again. This last was of some interest to me, because it meant that I got to sing at a stadium backed by not one but two guitarists falling over onstage. Keith likes to talk a lot about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable.

And, yes, they do fall over onstage. (Or asleep on a chair in the studio.) I laugh at it now and blame no one but myself. Why, Keith gave me his “personal guarantee” Woody would not be freebasing on tour.

And yet I was surprised when it happened. I take the point that professionalism, one’s word, rock ’n’ roll merriment … these are fungible things in our world. It is a fair charge that I have become less tolerant in these matters over the decades. In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours’ work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)

Would Hemingway have wasted his life and talent on booze if he hadn’t become Hemingway? There is no chance of my becoming Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or anybody like that. But the lesson is still an important one for anybody who makes his living through his creative work. You can’t jack around with indulgence when you have work to do. I rarely drink anymore, not because I don’t enjoy it (though honestly, I don’t, not as much), but because I’ve gotten old enough to where it’s not worth feeling crummy the next day. That, and writing gives me more pleasure than not writing. You can’t write through a headache.

There is the more complicated matter of the market imposing discipline in terms of what you write. I’ve written two books that made The New York Times bestseller list. They haven’t made me rich — people have a completely unrealistic view of how much money authors make — but they have given me a certain ability to get my ideas for future books taken seriously by editors. A couple of years ago, I really wanted to write a book about the connection between beauty and meaning. You know me: I’m no scholar, but I do know how to read what smart people have to say about these topics, and make it comprehensible to ordinary people. I was, and am, really interested in the topic.

But when I made my pitch, my agent, and my editor, said a book like that won’t sell. I did not want to hear it. But they were right, of course. I could sell some of them, because by now I have a dedicated readership, but not enough to make any kind of splash. Publishers are not in the business of publishing vanity books. The potential readership for a book like that would likely not be worth my while. It might have been a good idea, and I might have executed it well, but the publisher and my literary agent, just did not see it working. I trust their judgment — and I need to trust their judgment, because I support my family on what I write.

I did not write that book. I went back to the drawing board, and came up with Live Not By Lies, which will be published this fall. (And by the way, if you have a Wall Street Journal subscription that gets you past the paywall, you can read a short piece I did today based on the book’s research). I had been thinking about doing this book for a few years, and I came up with a way to match the theme to the times, and to write about it in a way that convinced my editor at the publishing house that they could sell more than a few books. We’ll see when it comes out this fall. Books — albums, movies, plays, etc. — are always a gamble.

Creative types tend to have an exaggerated sense of their own talent. A friend was an editorial assistant at a major intellectual magazine once upon a time. She told me that I would be amazed by what terrible writers some of the biggest intellectuals are. The editor for whom she worked was a genius at drawing gold from the dross. I’ve learned over the years that almost every editor I’ve worked with — I can only think of one who wasn’t like this — made my work better.

A while back, someone I know sent me a manuscript that he was determined to self-publish on Kindle. It desperately needed an editor. I read it as a favor to a friend. He had some really good ideas, but he needed someone to go in and cut away all the excess prose digressions, and do the normal work editors would do. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was free to publish without the heavy hand of an editor harming his words. I don’t know what happened to that book, in the end. I seem to recall that he published it, but I don’t think anything came of it. The thing is, he really could have had a book, and I was willing to help him as much as I could. But he was restless, and didn’t want to mess with the long, frustrating process of finding a publisher. He had it in his head that Kindle has freed artist to cut out the middleman. The problem is that this guy was not a good judge of his own work. He needed a middleman — a publisher and an editor — to help him understand what was good and what was not, and beyond that, what actual readers would pay actual money to read.

The publishing business is not fair. Nor is the movie business, or the music business. Think of all the gifted writers, actors, musicians, et alia, who never get a meeting with a publisher or a studio, and don’t have an agent. Capitalism is unfair! But what is the alternative? I’ve told in this space the story of interviewing the French film director Olivier Assayas back in the 1990s. I asked him if he thought the generous subsidies he received for his films by the French government was a burden on his creativity. It was a polite way of saying, “This movie of yours I’ve just had to sit through was arty and boring. Would you have made it if you had been compelled by the market to make a movie that was actually entertaining?” Assayas was sniffy about the question, of course, and said that he only made movies that his friends would like to watch. Of course he did — and it helps when those friends sit in the Culture Ministry, and hand out cash to their favorites.

It’s hard to find a comfortable space between being faithful to one’s own creative vision and to the demands of the marketplace (beyond the small community of critics and aficionados), but when has it ever been otherwise for artists? As James says, it’s easier to do your own thing artistically when your patron is neither prince, Pope, or  Politburo, but rather the public.

The last four books I’ve written — including the forthcoming one — began as topics on this blog that took off with its readership. It’s what told me that the ideas were worthwhile — that feedback. If I ever wrote a book that made a millionaire of me many times over, I would still write this blog, because it is a lifeline to readers. It is worth putting up with the drecky comments (some of which get the commenter permanently consigned to spam) to read the good ones — and by “good” I mean ones that are critical but also insightful.

Writing — even journalism — ought to swing. That, for me, was the most important lesson taught by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and other practitioners of the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, whose work I began reading right out of college. But how are you going to know that your writing swings if you don’t look up to see if the people are dancing?

 

The post To Mean Is To Swing appeared first on The American Conservative.

Britain’s Blasphemy Culture

A scientific journal has retracted a paper it had published about neurology and gender dysphoria. Why? A bunch of transgendered people and their allies complained that it was hurtful. From their petition:

Beyond the numerous scientific and theoretical short-comings of this manuscript, the clear intent of the paper was to do harm to the transgender community, one of the most vulnerable communities across the globe. This was not only evident in the section on clinical implications that was removed, but in the basic assumption that transgender people are a deleterious deviation with a disordered network of brain regions which pervades the entire manuscript. This is not merely an example of difference in scientific opinion, but a direct attack on a vulnerable community.

And poof, just like that, a scientific paper disappears. Forbidden knowledge. I’ll tell you who’s a member of a vulnerable community: scientists who get in the way of cowardly journal editors stampeding to do the bidding of left-wing activists.

Meanwhile, the Scottish parliament has not been too distracted from dealing with a global pandemic. It is updating the country’s anti-blasphemy law to decriminalize speaking ill of the deity, but to criminalize saying things that might hurt the feelings of sacred Vulnerable Communities. Madeleine Kearns reports:

Just as the 1837 blasphemy law prohibited “composing, printing or publishing any blasphemous or seditious libel,” the new bill outlaws “displaying, publishing or distributing” anything that “stirs up hatred,” as well possessing “inflammatory material” or performing a hateful play. The prosecution would not even need to prove “intent” on the part of the accused; it would only need to prove that from their actions, hatred would be “likely to be stirred up.” As for what constitutes “stirring up hatred,” unlike Bracadale, the law is short on specifics, leaving that judgment entirely to the subjective perception of a member of a victim group or some other third party. If a minority finds something to be “abusive, threatening, or insulting,” then it is, under the law. Two minor carve-outs are made for “freedom of expression,” which means it is permissible (within certain parameters) to criticize sexual behaviors, and “freedom of religion,” which means it is permissible to criticize religion. The fact that it was necessary to explicitly state that is okay to criticize religion in a law purporting to repeal the state’s prohibition of blasphemy is almost comical. Strikingly, there is no carve-out for criticizing transgenderism, which is currently the subject of fierce debate in Scotland.

Should the bill pass, you could get seven years in prison for saying anything critical of transgenderism. I wonder if Scottish neuroscientists will feel at liberty to pursue research that could get them brought up on blasphemy charges?

In related propaganda news, Good Morning Britain featured today a long segment about Britain’s first transgender parents. Notice how the host introduces the segment: she signals that one is to be jumping for joy over it. Seriously, watch the segment. The host is the creepiest thing about it, the way she directs the emotions of the viewer. There is no question at all about how British television wants us to think about this situation.

 

Hannah, born male, and Jake, born female, had the baby using one of Jake’s eggs (when she stopped taking testosterone to harvest and freeze them), which they had implanted into the womb of a surrogate. According to the couple, they have been working with Channel Four for the past year to document all parts of it, including the “embryo transfer,” for the sake of making what they have done more acceptable. It works, too.

Think about it: in the UK, you can say anything you like about God, but you cannot blaspheme against transgenderism. The Scottish police have been vigilant about defending progressive illiberalism for a while:

This is what I’m talking about when I talk about “soft totalitarianism.” Again, the breakfast television presenter is the most unnerving aspect of that interview. She’s a merry Scots version of Ri Chun Hee, the North Korean newsreader who lays down the party line with stentorian vigor.

The post Britain’s Blasphemy Culture appeared first on The American Conservative.

Liberals As Culture War Self-Saboteurs

There are people who still believe that the culture war is nothing but a pseudo-event ginned up by right-wing Christians to make gullible people vote against their interests. They should talk to this frustrated reader below, who writes:

I’m a centrist Democrat, in my mid-60s, and by most measures that applied in the 70s and 80s, a liberal. By today’s standards…well, let me give you an example.

Last week, some people I know posted comments about the protesters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere. Now, I can accept disagreements, and I think it was way beyond stupid to bring weapons to those protests. But my progressive friends posted the wish that these folks would get the virus and die. They also made a big deal about how this was a prime example of white privilege because these folks would certainly have been arrested had they been black and carrying weapons. Perhaps, although I think in tense times the police thought that making a fuss could have caused more tension. In addition, friends of mine who went to the gathering in Harrisburg, some of them libs, some conservatives, said the number of people who carried guns was much smaller than reports suggested.

Between the condescending accusations of privilege and the wishes that people would get sick and die, I thought it might be good to point out that accusing working class people of being privileged would further alienate a group that in the past was reliably Democratic, and that by ignoring and looking down on them we’ve hurt our cause and helped the current president. Oh, the hue and outcry! Who am I? (I’ll cop to being middle class and lucky.) Blacks and Latinos have long been…(OK, true enough, but it’s not like coal miners in Harlan County have been fat and happy for all these generations.) Finally, I posted the following:

Some important stats: We are closer with each census to becoming a country where whites are at about 50 percent of the population. In 2000, 77 percent of the country was white, in 2010, around 70 percent. By those measures, we are a generation away from that 50/50 split, let alone a white minority, which will probably happen. A lot of things can occur culturally and politically in a generation, especially if progressives operate under the assumption that the demographic change we’ve been anticipating has already happened. In addition, roughly a third of the country is white collar and college educated. The rest is blue collar and high school educated. If the demographics hold, then a majority in each group is white. I’m willing to be that, proportionally, a larger percentage of blue collar folks are African American or LatinX, but that still leaves a lot of people who are left behind in the current economy and are white.

If my nightmare happens and Trump is reelected, he’s gone in 2024. But the judges he appoints will make profound changes that will last for the next 50 years. Roe V Wade is just the beginning. We will see tremendous expansion of executive power, unbridled support for large corporations—manufacturers (actually, companies that used to make things but now let people in China do that), big finance companies, and tech companies—and restrictions on all manner of freedoms we take for granted. As much as I admire RBG, she and Breyer should have retired at the beginning of President Obama’s second term so he could appoint liberal justices who would be in their positions for years to come.

I’m convinced that had the Democratic Party paid attention to the decline in union membership and power over the last 25 years, Trump’s win in 2000 would not have occurred. The Clinton campaign did not go into Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and other rust belt states. Another statistic worth keeping in mind: Cities in those states, such as Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, are, in fact, minority white, so not reaching out to them may have lowered voter turnout.

As I said earlier, we can continue to call people who are from these states, people who have seen a steep decline in income and a dramatic rise in drug use and drug related deaths, privileged. But there are a lot of them, they’re very angry, and they vote. They’re ripe for demagogues like Trump, Hannity, and Limbaugh to stir them up. And we helped make them this way by ignoring their problems.

The reader continues, addressing me:

I only used Latinx, a horrible term, to avoid that particular discussion.

I realize that you and won’t agree on the court, but keep in mind that all my friends really should. Oh, no! Far more important to demonstrate one’s bona fides in this culture war. And, really, what exactly are people who use the term “White Privilege” actually doing for poor blacks and Latinos? Do they really think blacks and Latinos who aren’t political activists or college professors give a damn that these folks have some exquisite superiority over other white people, especially poor whites.

Because of the narrow minded stupidity of these allegedly educated and sensitive people, we will have to endure 4 more years of this clown. Further evidence: the soft pedaling of the accusations of harassment by Joe Biden. The fatal blow, if one was needed, to the press.

Incidentally, when I looked for an image to illustrate this post, I put “hunters white working class” into the search box at the photo source. I wanted an image that included a gun, because my correspondent said that guns figured into his liberal friends’ complaints. The image above came up. The man in the stock photo resembles more than half the white guys where I live in Louisiana, during hunting season. That guy could be a rich Baton Rouge lawyer, or he could be a guy who does shift work at a chemical plant. Know how Getty Images labeled it? I took a screen shot:

This is what the kind of people who provide stock photos for media see when they look at an image of a hunter with a shotgun: a “redneck” — that is, a backward rural white person. Gosh, I can’t imagine why white working class people vote their resentments, can you?

UPDATE: A reader who is a hunter and a parish priest in the Deep South writes:

It’s not even a shotgun. It’s a lever-action rifle, like a Winchester model 1892 vel sim. Every hunter knows the difference. Not the Getty images people though, obviously.

UPDATE.2: Here’s a really moving, detailed comment from a reader named Muleke:

..more people making unwarranted assumptions about who and what I support.

My father was killed in action in the Vietnam war, and I was raised by my mother, her sister and their mother. My mother did the best she could, but she was a widow trying to raise a child alone in the seventies. Whatever benefits you think the families of dead soldiers received in those days, it was less than that. I grew up in poverty, and I suffered frequent physical and mental abuse at the hands of my aunt and grandmother, both of whom suffered severe mental illness. They were “woke” before it was a thing. They despised men and they vented their rage on the only male in reach, me. I was also physically abused by one of my elementary school teachers.

I suffered (and still suffer) from PTSD and severe depression, but no one understood at the time that children could develop mental illness, and it went untreated for most of my life. I’ve struggled my whole life to create some order and financial stability. I finished college, but I’ve been trapped in low paying, dead end jobs my whole life. I married late, and that marriage ended in divorce when my wife joined a cult.

I am the very model of the disaffected, white, working class male. Fortunately, I’ve never had issues with substance abuse and I’ve never been in trouble with the law, but my life is a mess and I don’t see it ever getting any better.

I voted for Obama in 2008, largely due to my disgust at the war in Iraq, which looked like Vietnam all over again. I didn’t vote for Obama in 2012. I would never vote for Hillary Clinton. I didn’t like Clinton for lots of reasons, but the main one was that she struck me as the worst kind of warmonger… a hawk who personally despises the people who would bear the burden of her wars.

I saw the repulsive, knee-jerk anti-police attitude of my more liberal friends. My white liberal friends claimed they weren’t against white people, they were against white supremacy. They weren’t against men, they were against the patriarchy. And then they would go on long rants against “middle aged white male heterosexuals,” or (if they were middle aged, white and male) “old white male heterosexual cisgendered Christians.”

They said I must be a racist because I didn’t support Obama again in 2012, and I must be sexist because I wouldn’t vote for Clinton. I saw liberal comedians openly mock people who had lost their jobs to globalization and automation. I saw working class salaries devalued by mass immigration. I felt utterly betrayed by both parties.

So I must have been a Trump supporter, right?

…right….

Early in the 2016 primary, Trump said some extremely provocative things, and I understood he was doing it to get headlines, because it was going to be extremely difficult to get people to take his candidacy seriously. And several times I thought he misjudged, and went too far, and it would hurt his bid, and I was wrong. But then, I really thought he misunderstood his own audience, when Donald Trump mocked McCain for being a POW.

And no, I’m no fan of McCain. I remember his role in wrecking the economy in the S&L crisis. But when I grew up, the working class men I knew all flew POW flags. And this man who was born rich, this man who bought his way out of serving in the war that killed my father, mocked a vet in public for being a POW. And I thought, this is the one that sinks his campaign, because I thought I knew his base.

I didn’t. And if I had seen the interview at the time (I have seen it since), I would have heard that Trump got exactly the reaction he was looking for.

So no, I could never vote for Trump, or stand with the fake patriots who did support him. But I wasn’t planning on voting Democrat either, until I watched the briefings on the coronavirus. I watched them on C-span, so you can’t blame CNN for taking things out of context. Day after day I saw a man who was clearly, fundamentally unfit for any position of responsibility.

And I get the rage and frustration at the status quo, because it enrages and frustrates me. But that is precisely why we can’t take four more years of this buffoon. It isn’t that he’s “coarse” or “politically incorrect” or even “divisive”. It’s that he is profoundly dishonest and repulsive, and incapable of placing country before his own re-election bid, even for a moment. When he’s sober, he sounds like he’s having an incoherent, drunken rant. Trump was tweeting -and saying on live TV- stuff that was as crazy as Nixon said on tape. Only Nixon tried to have the tapes suppressed.

I understood the rage and frustration Trump’s base feels, because it is my rage and frustration. What I can’t understand is how anyone can think Trump is actually helping. No one will take the legitimate grievances of working people seriously so long as they idolize this charlatan.

A number of my friends are Republicans, and not at all “never Trumpers”. But they intend to switch sides this time because the conservative brand can’t take four more years of this. All the judges in the world will not save Christian conservatives from the backlash Trump is stirring up.

I’m sick of the left assuming I’m a Trump supporter just because I’m a middle aged, hetero, white working class male. But shame on conservatives if they make the same error.

The post Liberals As Culture War Self-Saboteurs appeared first on The American Conservative.

Where Did All The Catholics Go?

Couple of interesting tweets from political scientist Ryan Burge, who studies religion as an academic, and is also a Baptist pastor. He’s an interesting person to follow on Twitter — @ryanburge:

I know, the nones are growing rapidly.

But, the share of evangelicals who are going to church weekly or more has never been higher – same for mainline Protestants.

There’s been no real shifts among black Protestants.

The real decline is Catholics – 45% in 1970’s, 25% today. pic.twitter.com/Dst7ORGt42

— Ryan Burge

Lincoln Diocese Admits Kalin Wrongdoing

I would like to apologize again for the light blogging. I am literally down to the final chapter on my manuscript revision, and I also had my daily Epstein-Barr virus attack, which sent me to bed for hours. When I woke up a short time ago, I saw that the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, has issued a statement about its own internal investigation of the late Monsignor Leonard Kalin.

Background: on August 1, 2018, I published an extraordinary letter by Peter Mitchell, a laicized priest of the Lincoln diocese. He was writing as part of the broader discussion that summer of how Cardinal Theodore McCarrick got away for so long with his sexually abusive behavior. In his letter to me, Mitchell talked about being a seminarian in Lincoln in the 1990s. Kalin had been the vocations director for the diocese, which was known all over the country for its vibrant conservatism. According to Mitchell, though, Kalin was a manipulative man who engaged in homosexual grooming behavior with the seminarians. Mitchell said, in part:

Just as Newark’s Archbishop McCarrick had a ritual habit of inviting a seminarian to share his bed, Lincoln’s Monsignor Kalin had a standard method for maneuvering young men into unwanted intimate situations. Each afternoon at the Newman Center, a summons would go out from one of the young male students who worked for Kalin as his “janitors” to see who among the seminarians was available to “take Monsignor walking.” The one chosen for this ritual (always only one) was then instructed that at the end of the walk – I still can’t believe I am saying this – he needed to “help Monsignor to take a shower” in one of the locker rooms at Memorial Stadium, to which Kalin somehow had a private key. The unconvincing premise was that Monsignor was old and feeble and “needed help” in the shower. Although I succeeded in always finding a way to excuse myself from “helping” with his shower, I know that the men who did – and there were many – endured Kalin’s attempts to initiate sexual contact with them.

Every seminarian was required to have a private meeting with Kalin in his residence every couple of months. Whenever I would go in for my session, Kalin would criticize me extensively (which often involved him swearing at me) and then tell me that the most important thing I needed to do to prepare to be a priest was to “learn humility” (meaning obey him unquestioningly). Then, after working me over emotionally, Kalin would conclude by issuing an order: “Give me a hug.” He would hold me for several minutes, cheek to cheek, with his body pressed against me.

I always found it bizarre and deeply off-putting, but at the time, in my naïveté, tried to explain it away as the somewhat eccentric kindness of an old man.

Mitchell added:

Assuredly, the outside observer will rightly ask, “But why would you remain in the seminary if you were subjected to and surrounded by such compromising and offensive behavior?” It is a question I have asked myself over and over in the past few years, turning it over like a prism, trying to ascertain a clear understanding of its many facets.

At the time, it seemed to me and many of my peers that the important thing was to “just get ordained” so that we could help others as “good priests.” In addition, the reputation Kalin enjoyed, both within the diocese as well as nationally, made it extremely difficult to oppose his wishes. He held all the power over our evaluation and program of formation, had the ear of the bishop, and had great influence over the assignments of seminarians and priests. In a word, he held complete control over our lives if we wanted to become priests.

Although Kalin passed away in 2008, the seminarians he favored became the priests who continue to hold the reins of ecclesiastical power. To this day, anyone who tries to speak critically of Kalin’s behavior and legacy is met with a code of silence for “the good of the Church.” If I ever tried to express frustration with Monsignor’s treatment of me, priests in positions of power over me quickly shut me down, almost robotically: “While he may have had a few flaws, he was very orthodox and recruited so many vocations.”

That Mitchell letter was a bombshell in Lincoln. Some accused Mitchell of lying. Others said he was telling truths that needed to be made public. One young man came forward to say that the Lincoln priest who molested him as a boy was his uncle. I wrote a number of posts about it. The upshot was to call into question the squeaky-clean, super-conservative reputation that Lincoln had cultivated. It turned out that there were big problems there.

The Nebraska Attorney General’s office launched a sweeping investigation of sex abuse cover-ups in Nebraska’s Catholic dioceses. We are still awaiting the results. The Diocese of Lincoln also hired its own investigator. Today the diocese released a statement — not the report, but a statement about the report — concerning its findings on Monsignor Kalin. The statement, by Omaha Archbishop George Lucas, who is administering the diocese while its bishop is on medical leave, is here in full. Excerpt:

The investigation of Msgr. Leonard Kalin was a result of allegations made in 2018 of his misconduct while he served as the diocesan vocation director and chaplain of the Newman Center from 1970-1998. Although Msgr. Kalin died in 2008, Bishop Conley believed it was important to have an independent third party investigate the allegations. A public announcement of this investigation was made and people were invited to contact the in­vestigator, Tom Gorgen, a licensed a private detective. The investigator conducted 35 in-person interviews and reviewed records and documents. His findings are reflected in this letter.

The primary allegations centering on Msgr. Kalin included his leadership style; sexual advances towards col­lege students and seminarians; his use of cigarettes and alcohol as well as frequent trips to casinos to gamble; promoting a homosexual culture at the Newman Center; and that the Diocese of Lincoln Chancery was aware of Msgr. Kalin’s behavior but failed to take timely and appropriate corrective action.

The findings indicate that Msgr. Kalin did often smoke, drink and take gambling and other trips while serving at the Newman Center, and he often invited seminarians and college students to partake in these activities and travels.

The investigation did not find there was a culture of homosexuality at the Newman Center. The investigation did reveal that Msgr. Kalin did on occasion make sexual advances toward some seminarians and college students. The findings also revealed that Msgr. Kalin’s leadership style was demanding and authoritarian which some of the interviewees described as “old-school” and “my way or the highway.” Interviewees acknowledged that he did, on occasion, publicly criticize seminarians.

Finally, the investigation did find the Diocese of Lincoln Chancery leadership was aware of the culture of socializing, and alcohol and cigarette use at the Newman Center. However, no information or facts discovered during the investigation support the allegation that the Chancery leadership knew of sexual impropriety by Msgr. Kalin prior to 1998. When this activity was made known, he was put on restrictions and moved out of the New­man Center.

Despite Msgr. Kalin’s many positive contributions to build a faithful community at the Newman Center, the investigation findings regarding his wrong and inappropriate conduct are disturbing and painful. The exercise of power and authority that leads the faithful to act in a sinful way never should be tolerated. For the harm that has been done, I offer a sincere apology on behalf of the diocese.

I shared the results of the investigation with some key individuals in advance of this public acknowledgement. I have also reached out to former seminarians and college students who studied and worked alongside Msgr. Ka­lin at the Newman Center, as well as those who participated in the investigation. I am aware that some of those interviewed had very positive experiences to report about their interactions with Msgr. Kalin, and others did not. I recognize the sacrifice made by all who took the time to talk to the private investigator, and what was, for some, the pain of opening old wounds. I thank them for their courage and willingness to share their experiences.

Again, the entire statement is here. A more detailed statement by the diocesan investigator Archbishop Lucas acknowledged at the end that some priests of the diocese were put on leave after allegations from the summer of 2018. He said that he is trying to resolve those situations.

Peter Mitchell, the original whistleblower, has issued his own statement reacting to the Lincoln chancery’s remarks today. It reads, in part:

The Diocese of Lincoln’s statement today about Msgr. Kalin attempts to distract laity and priests from asking the questions and seeking the answers they deserve. Such as:

How many men who are presently priests were abused in some way by Kalin? I have heard from multiple sources that the investigators report, which Bishop Conley received in the fall of 2019 and chose not to make public before he left on his leave of absence, revealed that there are many. Can the Diocese of Lincoln confirm how many priests who spoke with the investigator said that they were in fact abused by Kalin? 

What does “on occasion made sexual advances” mean? Was it daily? Weekly? Was it every afternoon that he went to take one of his infamous showers with a seminarian? Every time he took one of his famous trips to Las Vegas and the Jersey shore? This is a brilliant sleight of hand which the diocesan lawyers who wrote it should be proud of. It reveals nothing that was not already known and is sandwiched in the middle of a long statement that is vague and dismissive of people’s serious complaints.

Also, my original article published in August 2018 never claimed that there was a homosexual culture specifically at the Newman Center, but rather within the clerical hierarchy of the diocesan system and seminaries nationwide and in Lincoln. Can the diocese of Lincoln confirm that there is not a homosexual power structure among its Priests? 

Can any of the many outstanding priests of the Lincoln diocese who were in the seminary under Kalin’s authority in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s confirm that they never experienced any sexual impropriety by Monsignor Kalin, nor suspected it, nor reported it?

He goes on to say that today’s statement about the investigation is a “cover up” by an “old boys’ club” network among the church hierarchy.

I must say that I side with Mitchell in his characterization of the statement’s remarks on Kalin’s sexual advances. The only line in the Lincoln statement about it is this:

The investigation did reveal that Msgr. Kalin did on occasion make sexual advances toward some seminarians and college students.

This man, Kalin, was the vocations director of the diocese! And he was hitting on young men — this they admit, which vindicates Peter Mitchell’s whistleblowing, but is also unsatisfying. No, we don’t need gross physical details, but surely the diocese ought to say more about what Kalin did, and how seminarians — who were under his direct authority — reacted. Perhaps this was part of the investigator’s charge, and he found no solid evidence to justify the claim that Kalin’s sexual misconduct affected the character of the diocesan priesthood.

Mitchell is correct, though, to point out that he did not allege that there was a homosexual culture at the Newman Center in Lincoln. Here, from that 2018 column, is what he alleged:

Just as Father Robert Hoatson of the Archdiocese of Newark has noted in his sworn affidavit, I experienced profound discrimination as a seminarian and later as a priest because I was a heterosexual in an overwhelmingly homosexual environment where sexually active gay priests protected and promoted each other. The experience of this homosexual atmosphere – at times overt, at times closeted – is felt across the board by heterosexual priests I know in numerous different dioceses and religious orders. It is “everywhere” within the Catholic clergy, but seems to be especially prevalent among priests within the power structure of chanceries, seminaries, and the church’s bureaucracy, up to and including the Holy See, where I served for a brief time in 2008-2009.

… The relevant and germane question today is, what ongoing effects has the systemic abuse of powerful men like McCarrick and Kalin had on those who are presently serving as priests? How many of these men’s “intimate friends” are now themselves bishops and chancery officials holding power over other priests’ lives?

At least in Lincoln, the answer is: many.

I know so many good, generous men who serve as priests there and elsewhere who live in fear of church authority and who remain silent about Kalin’s abuse because they know that Kalin’s protégés and protectors hold the reins of ecclesiastical power. The power of Kalin’s “friends” exactly mirrors that of McCarrick’s “friends.”

Archbishop Lucas’s statement today does not address that, though in , it does come up. The private investigator said:

Though Mitchell had not alleged that there was a homosexual culture at the Newman Center, he did allege that there is, or was, a gay network active in that diocese’s priesthood, and beyond. He focused on Kalin because the man who was the gatekeeper on vocations in the Lincoln diocese for many years was a sexually aggressive homosexual who came on to seminarians, and who promoted those he favored, and punished those he did not. Mitchell alleged that Kalin was part of a network within the church leadership that took care of each other, and overlooked sexual misconduct. After Mitchell published his piece, others came forward to allege problems within the culture of the priesthood in Lincoln — take a look at this post, which includes allegations against Father Charles Townsend. The question raised by that allegation, and by my interview with “Father Gruff,” who was a Lincoln seminarian now serving as a priest of another diocese, has to do with a culture of homosexuality and cover-up within the priesthood of the Lincoln diocese — a culture in which Monsignor Leonard Kalin was a linchpin.

Based on what the private investigator says in the clip above, there is not enough evidence in his Kalin investigation to justify what Mitchell alleged. If that is the truth, then one has to accept it. Unlike Mitchell, I’m not prepared to say today’s statement and overview is part of a “cover-up” — but something still doesn’t feel quite right about this.

If you’re in the Diocese of Lincoln, what do you say? Do you believe church authorities in this matter?

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Grabby Joe Biden’s Achilles Hand

Damon Linker says that there’s more confirmable substance to Tara Reade’s accusations against Joe Biden than Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh — and that’s very bad news for the presumptive Democratic nominee. Linker says that Biden can probably still have the nomination if he wants it, because even if these allegations are true, he’s still going to have the support of the party’s base. But it will be a great gift to Team Trump. Linker writes:

On substance, Trump will have zero moral ground to stand on. But he won’t be taking a stand in the name of treating women with respect. Neither will he be accusing Biden of being a sexual predator. Instead, he and the entire Republican noise machine will constantly, relentlessly hammer Biden, leading Democrats, and the media for flagrant hypocrisy and double standards. The moral content of the issue won’t matter one bit. What will matter is that Biden has set himself up as a moral arbiter on issues of sexual harassment and violence, insisting we must “believe all women,” and that in the fall of 2018 he and many other members of his party sought to destroy the reputation of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for allegations of sexual assault that were less convincingly corroborated than those Reade has lodged against Biden.

The Democratic nominee for president and his party are ruthless political operators who seek above all else to destroy their enemies and help themselves, all the while setting themselves up as impartial moral authorities. This will be the message, driven home over and over again: that claims of purity and impartiality are pretense, transparent fakes. Democrats might posture like they’re better than Republicans, including the president, but they aren’t. They’re every bit as bad. They’re just more dishonest about it.

Read the whole thing. Linker mentions Tara Reade’s mother calling Larry King, and he mentions her friend (a self-described “strong Democrat”) going public to say that Tara told her about Biden’s alleged sexual assault at the time. I had heard about those, but until seeing Linker’s column, I had not heard about the 2008 Alexander Cockburn column in the left-wing web journal CounterPunch mentioning Biden’s reputation. Cockburn wrote:

Biden is a notorious flapjaw. His vanity deludes him into believing that every word that drops from his mouth is minted in the golden currency of Pericles. Vanity is the most conspicuous characteristic of US Senators en bloc , nourished by deferential acolytes and often expressed in loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns and the like. On more than one occasion CounterPunch’s editors have listened to vivid accounts by the recipient of just such advances, this staffer of another senator being accosted by Biden in the well of the senate in the week immediately following his first wife’s fatal car accident.

I think Linker has it exactly right. If you have forgotten about how enraged the Right was over the way the Democrats and their media allies treated Brett Kavanaugh, you may be certain that conservatives haven’t. (I wrote about it a lot back then — see here, for example — and I made it clear that I did not know whether or not Kavanaugh assaulted Ford on that night over thirty years ago; what I objected to was the kangaroo court assault on Kavanaugh by tribal ideologues of the Left. This stuff is primal with us conservatives. We saw the way the Democrats and the media treated Kavanaugh, and we saw that they could and would do that to any one of us.

If I were a Republican operative, I would start making the Biden-centered ads now about the #MeToo hypocrites in the Democratic Party. As Linker says, this is not a matter of pointing out that Biden is less of a sexual creep than Trump. That’s not what’s at stake here.

So, let me throw it to the room: if Biden is persuaded to step down before the Democratic convention, who should replace him? Who will replace him?

From a strictly strategic point of view, I think Andrew Cuomo should replace him, and probably will, as long as he chooses Elizabeth Warren as his veep.

If you doubt the potency of this Reade thing as a Republican campaign issue, I invite you to watch this clip of Lindsey Graham’s electrifying Senate committee speech during the Kavanaugh hearing. I remember exactly where I was when I heard it. I bet many of my conservative readers do too.

UPDATE: From the Daily Beast:

Women’s groups and prominent feminist figures have remained almost universally silent over a former staffer’s accusation of sexual misconduct against former Vice President Joe Biden—including those individuals and groups who came to express regret for how the Democratic Party handled similar accusations made against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

The collective non-response from mostly Democrat-aligned groups comes as potential female running mates struggle themselves in responding to the Biden allegation, which has the potential to upend his campaign against President Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women in alleged incidents spanning decades. And it echoes the division among progressives when the #MeToo movement revived scrutiny of Clinton’s own alleged sexual misconduct.

The Daily Beast contacted 10 top national pro-women organizations for this story, including Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Organization for Women. Most organizations did not respond to a detailed request for comment about the allegation by Tara Reade, a former staff assistant in Biden’s Senate office who has accused the former vice president of forcibly penetrating her with his fingers in the early 1990s. Others replied and did not provide a statement.

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The Hard Road Ahead

Political scientist Yascha Mounk is downcast. Writing in The Atlantic, he says he has been holding out hope that this or that thing would be the miracle we needed to defeat the pandemic, but now he’s saying we need to resign ourselves to the sad fact that the path out of this Covid-19 crisis is going to be long and hard. Excerpts:

There was real reason to indulge in each of these hopes. But in the past several days, a series of developments have undermined the factual basis for all of them. So I am, finally, starting to reconcile myself to a darker reality: The miracle of deliverance is not in sight.

Herd immunity? Consider the price:

Experts estimate that for a population to reach herd immunity, up to 80 percent of it would have to be exposed to the coronavirus. Even if the virus has a fatality rate of a little less than 1 percent, this means that letting it spread through the population of the United States would cause about 2 million deaths.

There are no treatment drugs on the horizon either. So:

The only way to restart the economy, then, is to put a highly effective system in place to test millions of people, trace their movements, and quickly quarantine those who might have been infected.

But even as the past few days have brought bad news about the science of the pandemic, they have brought terrifying news about its politics: It now seems less likely than ever that the United States will do what is necessary to reopen the economy without causing a second wave of deadly infections.

America is still behind on testing for COVID-19. Although Trump promised almost two months ago that anyone who wanted a test could get one, the U.S. has still conducted only about 5.4 million. The country needs to increase its testing rate at least threefold to reopen safely.

We aren’t anywhere close to being able to do that, though. And the president is not giving us reason to expect that the federal government is on top of this mess.

Read it all. 

I doubt very much that most Americans will be able and willing, either psychologically or economically, to continue this lockdown for much longer. What happens when big, angry crowds of people who have lost their livelihoods, their homes, and their futures take to the streets demanding action — and the government is incapable of giving it to them?

This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. I’ve been saying in this space for some time — long before the pandemic — that the United States is in a pre-totalitarian state, according to the measures laid out by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Widespread loneliness, social atomization, loss of faith in institutions, a mania for ideology — these and other factors were present and worsening before the pandemic struck. What kept us together in spite of them was our relative wealth. Now, because of the coronavirus, we are staring into the face of mass impoverishment — and nobody, except for the superrich, is safe from it. Keep in mind too that the failure of the Russian imperial government to respond effectively to the 1891-92 famine there profoundly undermined confidence in the regime, and helped set the stage for the later revolution.

As I finish the revision of my forthcoming book about the rise of soft totalitarianism, what concerns me most is the long-term effect of virus-caused poverty and instability will prepare us to accept degrees of surveillance and control that we would not have tolerated before — this, as the cost of getting back to normal. I’m not saying that evil actors in the state will hold us hostage to that. I’m saying that it might genuinely be the only way to restore the country to something resembling normal — and that people will be so exhausted psychologically and battered economically to say no to it. China’s present could easily be our future.

Once the system is in place, it’s not going to go away. This is my fear.

We are going to have to reach very deep into the reserves of social capital this country has, if we haven’t spent it all down, and figure out how to live on what remains.

The post The Hard Road Ahead appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Did YouTube Remove The Doctors’ Briefing?

Received this letter from Wyoming Doc today, which I post with his permission:

Over the last few days, I along with some 5 million other Americans watched a video of 2 ER doctors in California discussing our current status and situation regarding COVID. They had their own spin on the government’s own numbers. They said a few things that I categorically disagree with. I disagree with lots of things I read and see. That is part of having a human mind that can think critically. The ER docs’ overall take was that the current lockdown approach was not helping and very likely making things worse — not only with the viral epidemic, but certainly with our economy.

I will confirm for you that for the last three weeks, my number of COVID patients has been absolutely dwarfed by the number of patients with acute anxiety, depression, wife beating, child beating, suicidal ideation, and any number of young grown men crying like babies on televisits or in my office. Large numbers of people are losing their livelihood, and they are freaking out. We are headed for a severe tragedy in this society, and its name is not COVID.

I will also tell you that I am on a conference call every day with some of the pre-eminent epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors in this country. Just Monday, one of the brightest epidemiologic minds in this nation basically stated – and I am paraphrasing – “I am certainly not minimizing this virus. This thing is evil. But it, like its cousins, is not really amenable to our current approaches. The immunity response is looking more and more like it is variable and incomplete. Therefore vaccines and immunity testing are going to be very unreliable if not impossible with our current abilities. That may change in the future, but who knows how long that will take. More importantly, a fundamental aspect of public health — herd immunity — may be very different with this current virus than we have experienced before. This virus is most definitely not measles. We just do not know the extent yet, but things are certainly not going to be what we are used to. Because of this, the current lockdown approach may not be of any help at all; it may actually be making things worse. We just do not know — and the stakes are enormous. We absolutely have a tiger by the tail. We are walking through the undiscovered country.”

This statement had some things in common with the two physicians in California on their YouTube video. Nothing they said was inflammatory. They were not instructing anyone to harm themselves. They were doing nothing but questioning the current narrative and the current recommendations from the authorities. Again, a few of the things they said I categorically disagree with. If anyone has proof of what they said that was incorrect, I AM ALL EARS. This is called debate and investigation. In their own way, they were making some of the same points as the epidemiologist on my phone calls.

Rod, the very essence of medicine is that we have to evaluate current facts on a minute by minute basis with all of our patients — and often we have to make huge midstream corrections. Could it be that the current facts on the ground about this virus no longer support the extreme measures we are taking? Have we learned more about its nature to fine-tune our response?

But this morning was spine-chilling for me. Why am I so concerned? THIS ER DOC VIDEO WAS JUST PULLED BY YOUTUBE. Just like the UV light company, for reasons that are completely unclear.

My fear is that the docs were intelligently countering the prevailing narrative. They exposed 5 million sets of eyeballs to their take on things. They were making too much sense. Opponents of theirs have every right to put up their own YouTube videos. And they have. And the opponent video I have seen make very good points — and they also said things that I believe are categorically untrue.

However, the whole exercise has made me think and think hard about this whole thing. I know from my facebook feed that other doctors I have as friends all over this country are thinking hard too. Examining every angle — AS THEY SHOULD BE DOING. And they are often coming to the same conclusions. What if the official narrative is not entirely correct? Why are we NOT evaluating current data, and making course corrections? Why are the American people being exposed to a constant end-of-the-world narrative that may have been more in tune with data from two months ago, but certainly is not now.

I watched Rachel Maddow last week and wanted to go and blow my head off. It is the end of the world, you know. Ummm, no it is not Rachel. You, Rachel, would do so much more for your country by hosting a debate about these issues rather than putting up the same old talking heads on your side. FOX would do the country a favor by doing the same thing.

This is very scary for those of us who love the intellectual challenges and debates in medicine. It is only through these debates that progress is made.

I have watched this kind of thing happen in journals, lecture halls, conference halls, and classrooms my entire career. Debates are always clarifying and edifying. THEY MAKE US ALL THINK ABOUT OUR TIGHTLY HELD IDEAS, AND OFTEN MAKE US REALIZE HOW WRONG WE ARE.

I deeply admire both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. They are brilliant experts. I love to hear their side of things. It is expertly presented. However, to the surprise of many Americans, especially the cable TV lovers, there are actually experts just as bright who disagree with them in some aspects of this — and get little if any coverage at all on the national news. I would also add that I can guarantee you that both of these ER doctors individually have way more actual on the ground experience with COVID than Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx combined. All voices deserve to be heard in total.

I will tell the story of one of the best examples of “official narrative” in my career. The man who wrote the standard historical textbook of endocrinology was a very old man when I was a resident in the early 1990s. At the time we were giving out female hormones to every single menopausal woman in the country — literally handing them out like Halloween candy. A lecturer from the OB GYN department at Harvard ( a worldwide expert in hormonal replacement therapy ) was at our school for Grand Rounds in 1992. The thesis of her presentation was that we were not giving women enough hormones, that the dose needed to be doubled or tripled. It was also her opinion that we should not wait until menopause: hormones should be started the very day a woman decided to no longer have kids.

The use of hormones was so ingrained in all of our minds at this time that no one even thought about saying a word. This was standard operating procedure. This old man endocrinologist — 92 years old at the time — stood up – hobbled to the front, ot his finger pointed at her face, and said, “YOU ARE GOING TO RUE THE DAY YOU ARE RECOMMENDING THIS. GIVING WOMEN EVEN ONE DROP OF HORMONES IS A DISASTER FOR THEM!”

He was laughed off the stage by all the OB docs. One even said men could just never understand. He was also lambasted for using data and facts from the 1950s. He stood his ground with them. Valiantly. All of the arguments verbalized against him that day — every one — were cultural, gender-related, emotional or political. NONE were medical or scientific. But no one listened to him. At that time hormonal replacement was the OFFICIAL narrative. If you did not toe the line, you were a misogynist, a moron or worse.

I learned a lot about ad hominem attacks that day. But I also learned way more about projecting your political beliefs onto medicine. As time went on, my complete respect for that professor has blossomed — because he stood his ground against all the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the official narrative.

Of course, we all know the result of that debate. The wanton use of hormones did indeed prove to be a disaster. It killed and maimed literally thousands upon thousands of women. These drugs easily killed exponentially more women than COVID ever has. We have looked back on the studies that supported the use of hormones, and found complete disregard for the scientific method, complete deception about the data, and injection of a political/ cultural debate into science where it most definitely never belonged. This whole affair will be a stain on medicine forever. Those that knew the problems like my old professor were laughed at and silenced by their colleagues with dishonest agendas, the drug companies, the politicians, the medical establishment and the media.

Have we as a society learned a thing from mistakes like this? Absolutely not. It is clear to me the advent of electronic media and the complete control of that media by a few Silicon Valley oligarchs has multiplied this assault on ideas exponentially.

My blood turned cold when I found out about YouTube disappearing this video today. If anyone of your readers knows more about the reasons, I would really like to know. This is antithetical to the scientific method. This is against everything this country — indeed Western Civilization — is founded upon. It is critical that we debate one other in any endeavor that involves science. And it is very scary to me that one side can just be disappeared. We are entering territory that is a very slippery slope.

It is completely disheartening to see a debate — probably one of the most critical in our nation’s history — stopped by a Silicon Valley company disappearing one of the combatants, for no other obvious reason than someone daring to question the prevailing media narrative.

I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING IN THE USA.

Rod, I really would like your take on this. The good the bad and the ugly are being brought out in us by this pandemic. This to me is a very concerning step on a slippery slope.

Here is a link to the website of the California television station that aired the briefing. You can watch the entire briefing there. The station says it went viral, and had received over 5 million views. The station acknowledges that YouTube took down its video of the briefing, and says it was given no reason for the act other than the briefing violated YouTube standards.

Not knowing why YouTube took down the briefing, I am hesitant to say anything. But I absolutely believe that it’s wrong to censor what qualified medical professionals (read: not quacks) are saying about the crisis, which is so unique in our experience as a nation. A strong lockdown was necessary at first. If there is good medical evidence that the lockdown, and related public health strategies, might be doing more harm that good at this date, then let’s hear that argument.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this official statement from the American College of Emergency Physicians:

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.

COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. Members of ACEP and AAEM are first-hand witnesses to the human toll that COVID-19 is taking on our communities. ACEP and AAEM strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Massihi as a basis for policy and decision making.

My guess is that YouTube was contacted by ACEP, which asked YouTube to take down the briefing. As Wyoming Doc attests, herd mentality is a thing in medicine. Maybe ACEP is right, though. I’m in no position to judge that. I would imagine that YouTube deferred to the organization’s expertise. I can’t help wondering, though, why unconventional medical speculation by a couple of physicians merits this kind of treatment by YouTube, which otherwise allows all kinds of videos through.

Is there something I’m not understanding here? Seriously, help me out.

UPDATE.2: Just approved all the comments that had been building up. There are lots of links there criticizing the scientific information and reasoning of these two docs, for what it’s worth.

UPDATE.3: This just in from Wyoming Doc:

Rod – I would like to say a few words about some of the things your commenters are saying.

I agree with their statements – they have found the exact same glaring problems I did when I first saw this video.

That does not mean they should be banned from the Internet.

I have 30 years of sitting through medical lectures galore where people were obviously spewing misinformation.

My job as a CRITICAL THINKER is to find the truth but more importantly the chestnuts they may impart and give me – TO MAKE MY MIND THINK.

And this video did exactly that – It has made me think. It has made me question assumptions.

More importantly, based on my Facebook feed of 843 friends and family members – it has made lots of Americans think. I applied gentle redirection in a few cases this weekend to the obvious errors – but normal non-medical thinking Americans were coming up with chestnuts about what these 2 said – that made even me think.

What is wrong with us? We have a crisis of the ages – and we are afraid of our citizenry thinking through problems? Really? Is it that bad?

One commenter talks about epidemiology and how most doctors do not know anything about it. WRONG. I sat through an entire hour a day for 2 years doing epidemiology and medical informatics. I guarantee I know a lot more about it than Lady Gaga who seems to be a go to expert on MSNBC. Or Dr. Phil on FOX. Some of the medical “experts” – not really MDs – on both side’s media have been laughably incompetent. It is really hard to be scientific when you are trying to inject politics into something this complicated. And they prove it constantly.

The coup de grace however is the statement from the ACEP – I urge each one of you to go look at it.

I. COULD. NOT. HAVE. MADE. MY. POINT. BETTER.

OMG. THE SMUG ARROGANCE. IT BURNS.

This small little statement is the very definition of an ad hominem attack. It should be used as an example in law schools and logic courses everywhere. My little gray cells take me back to my undergraduate days and my LOGIC 101 course. The wizened professor’s first syllabus page. AD HOMINEM ATTACKS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED IN THIS COURSE. TO ENGAGE IN THEM INDICATES TO ALL THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY LOST YOUR ARGUMENT.

When the ACEP is resorting to name-calling as their only line of defense, you know they have a big problem. They have placed zero evidence of any kind in this piece. They do not even bother to point out what the evildoers said that were “reckless and untested musings”. What part of the official narrative has been tested in a controlled trial? Please tell me.

I know you say you care about the public and their health, ACEP – Well 5 million of the public looked at this video this weekend – and many of those people are now thinking about this situation much more critically – and appropriately so. Their very lives and livelihoods depend on what we do next. Before attempting to destroy your own member’s reputations – at least one by one point out the problems you had with the video – and PUT YOUR OWN EVIDENCE FORWARD. IN DETAIL. REFERENCES PLEASE – They cannot – because there is precious little evidence for anything about COVID. I just cannot believe you took the step of bashing two of your member’s reputations. And criticizing anyone for not producing peer-reviewed evidence at this stage of the game is IMBECILE. There is no peer-reviewed anything – we have not had the time. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx say things all the time that are not peer-reviewed.

This kind of thing is exactly why the doctors on the ground in this country have increasingly zero patience with these big national medical organizations – their endless money draining from members, the constant meaningless testing (MOC), the million and a half dollar salaries, the 6 million dollar condos.

And financial interest my ass. You and your minions are probably already looking for ways to de-license or de-board these 2 guys. How dare they say a word about the official narrative.

Friends – I want to harken back to my original letter. This kind of tripe is exactly how the ACOG and the ABIM behaved when the research started going against them in the hormone replacement therapy trials. Multiple small statements like this full of ad hominem venom were commonplace from both of them. This is specifically why I put the words “medical establishment” in my letter to Rod.

This response is not the response of a serious medical organization grounded in science – they are showing the true colors – the official narrative must be protected no matter what. SHAME ON THEM – ALL OF THEM.

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She Beat Two Totalitarianisms

Good news — having gotten over a thoroughly vexing hump in my manuscript revision, it looks like smooth sailing for the rest of the week. I might even be able to finish the thing by tomorrow, and return to normal posting here. I have a bunch of stuff to post about the SSPX scandal, including a good letter from someone who lives in the St. Mary’s community, and who writes in defense of it.

While it was still on my mind, I wanted to commend to you all one of the best books I have ever read, period. The other night, I was reading in bed on my Kindle from Clive James’s wonderful book of profiles of important 20th century figures, called Cultural Amnesia. He wrote a short piece on a woman about whom I had heard nothing: Heda Margolius Kovaly. What a life she led! HMK was a Jew of Prague who survived the Nazi death camps, and then survived persecution by the Communists (though her husband did not; he was hanged as a traitor after a 1952 show trial).

James says that if he had one book to recommend to young people who wanted to begin to understand what 20th century politics meant, it would be HMK’s memoir, published in English as Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968. James opens his essay with these lines from her book:

A few miles out of Prague, the limousine began to slide on the icy road. The agents got out and scattered the ashes under its wheels.

James tells the story of HMK’s life. She was carried off with her family, all Jews, by the Nazis to their death camps in occupied Poland, but survived, and returned to Prague. She rediscovered her childhood sweetheart, also a survivor of the camps, and married. They both joined the Communist Party, mostly because the communists were the farthest thing from the Nazis they could find, but also, especially her husband Rudolf, because they really wanted to rebuild a more just Czechoslovakia. Rudolf Margolius became a state economic functionary, and they quickly saw what a monstrous lie communism was. In 1952, Rudolf Margolius was convicted of treason in a show trial and, along with the other so-called traitors (most of them Jews, note well), hanged. Their bodies were incinerated, and the secret police took the ashes by car to be disposed of in the country. After telling that story, Clive James directs his readers:

Now look again at the quotation above.

That was the life of Heda Margolius Kovaly: to survive the Nazi death camps, alone of her family, only to come home and live through her Jewish husband being turned to ashes by the communists, and those ashen remains used to keep the secret policemen’s sedan from getting stuck on an icy road.

Needless to say, I bought HMK’s memoir on Kindle at once, and sat up till three a.m. reading it. I finished it the next day. It was impossible to put down. The Czech communist state punished her and her son Ivan as family members of a traitor, by making them live in wretched poverty. She remarried a friend, Pavel Kovaly, and he too suffered for his connection to them. HMK kept fighting the state bitterly to exonerate her husband’s memory. She finally succeeded (the state admitted that all of the convicted had been truly innocent), but my God, what a story. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she and her family fled for good.

Aside from the sheer human drama of this book — what a film it would make! — there is what HMK tells us about ideology and inhumanity. I had read in Anne Applebaum’s history of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, and had picked up in some of my own interviews, that the countries that came under Soviet occupation weren’t uniformly against the communists. Aside from having a fair number of true-believing communists in their population, there was the fact that the peoples of Eastern Europe were broken and exhausted from the Nazi occupation and the war, and eager to believe anything that promised them a better future.

I didn’t really understand that, deep down, until reading HMK’s memoir. If I had endured what she did at the hands of the Nazis, you’d better believe I would be eager to embrace the most anti-Nazi party I could find. And if I had lived through all that destruction and cruelty, I would be desperate for hope in anything that promised renewal. I defy any of you to read HMK’s book and say that you wouldn’t have been susceptible to the same deception. HMK is hard on herself and Rudolf for falling for what the communists had to say, and in being so, she offers a gripping portrait of how idealism can blind a man. She writes:

When the war finally ended, our joy soon changed into a sense of anticlimax and a yearning to fill the void that this intensity of expectation and exertion of will had left behind. A strong sense of solidarity had evolved in the concentration camps, the idea that one individual’s fate was in every way tied to the fate of the group, whether that meant the group of one’s fellow prisoners, the whole nation, or even all of humanity. For many people, the desire for material goods largely disappeared. As much as we longed for the comforts of life, for good food, clothing, and homes, it was clear to us that these things were secondary, and that our happiness and the meaning of our lives lay elsewhere. I remember how some of our fellow citizens for whom the war years had been a time of acquisition and hoarding, stared when we did not try to retrieve stolen property, to apply for restitution, to seek inheritances from relatives. This was true not only of Rudolf and myself but of any number of people who had come to identify their own well-being with the common good and who, rather logically, ended up in the most ideologically alluring political party–that of the Communists. The years of imprisonment had yet another paradoxical effect. Although we continually hoped for freedom, our concept of freedom had changed. Shut up behind barbed wire, robbed of all rights including the right to live, we had stopped regarding freedom as something natural and self-evident. Gradually, the idea of freedom as birthright became blurred.

And she warns:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

More:

I have often thought that many of our people turned to Communism not so much in revolt against the existing political system, but out of sheer despair over human nature which showed itself at its very worst after the war. Since it is impossible for man to give up on mankind, they blame the social order in which they live; they condemn the human condition.

By the mid-1940s, at war’s end, it was possible to know something about the cruelties of Stalinism. The Margoliuses and their fellow idealists thought it wouldn’t be that way in their own land — that the problem with Stalinism was Russia, not Stalinism:

In Czechoslovakia, it would all be different. We would not be building socialism in a backward society under conditions of imperialist intervention and inner turmoil, but at peace, in an industrially advanced country, with an intelligent, well-educated population. We would leap over a whole epoch. Still, I did not feel like getting involved in politics. I kept saying to myself, “All I want is an ordinary, quiet life.” But I came to realize that a quiet, simple life is neither ordinary nor easily attained. In order to be able to live and work in peace, to raise children, to enjoy the small and great joys life can offer, you must not only find the right partner, choose the right occupation, respect the laws of your country and your own conscience but, most importantly, you must have a solid social foundation on which to build such a life. You have to live in a social system with whose fundamental principles you agree, under a government you can trust. You cannot build a happy private life in a corrupt society anymore than you can build a house in a muddy ditch. You have to lay a foundation first. Rudolf used to laugh and say, “I never thought you’d be one of those people who’re neither hot or cold. If you sit on the fence now, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!”

The Margoliuses discovered that they had believed in a lie. She reflects:

What I remember most vividly from this period following the coup is a feeling of bewilderment, of groping in the dark that was doubly oppressive because the darkness was not only outside but inside me as well. How could we have been so credulous? so ignorant? It seems that once you decide to believe, your faith becomes more precious than truth, more real than reality.

Yes, that is so. It is so not only for communists, but for all true believers. In that line, I recognize people who refused to believe that their own children were being sexually assaulted by clerics, because believing in the Church was more precious than truth, more real than reality. It is absolutely critical for us to recognize that this isn’t just something that befalls communists, or Catholics, or any other distinct group. This is something that could befall any human being, in any time. This is Heda Margolius Kovaly’s testimony. It is the testimony of the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn told us that the world deceives itself if it thinks what happened in Russia cannot happen anywhere. It can! It can, because human beings are always desperate for hope, and meaning, and always desperate to believe in something.

One more thing from HMK’s book, about a fellow menial worker who helped HMK when she was sick and poor and an enemy of the state:

She was young and pretty and she accepted life with all its trials cheerfully, like a bird in the sky. She was yet another proof to me that nothing limits a person more than what was then called “a clearly-defined world view.” The people who, in my experience, proved most astute and dependable in a crisis were always those who professed the simplest ideology: love of life. Not only did they possess an instinctive ability to protect themselves from danger but they were often willing to help others as a matter of course, without ulterior motives or any heroic posturing.

Now, I’m going back to finishing my own manuscript. It will have been improved by the insights and experiences of this extraordinary woman, Heda Bloch Margolius Kovaly, targeted for destruction by two totalitarianisms, but victorious in the end. Read all about her victory, which is a victory for the human spirit, in her memoir. She died in 2010, at the age of 91, but may her memory be eternal.

If you’d like to hear the voice of this great lady, watch this video interview of her from 1988:

Here, at The Other Europe, are some other archived interviews from the late 1980s, with members of the anti-communist opposition, who had no idea at the time that Communism was about to fall.

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Kierkegaard’s Way

I appreciate y’all’s patience with my lighter blogging over this past week. At the risk of being whiny, this relapse of the Epstein-Barr virus is really doing a number on me. I am finding it especially challenging to focus. This was the problem I had during my last round with the virus, but it seems worse now, probably because I’m older. I dunno. But I have to finish the revision of my next book this week, and I am trying to use as many of the hours of the day when I’m at my sharpest to devote to the manuscript. Consequently, I’m blogging less right now. If you want to make a joke about how it’s impossible to tell when I’m blogging with a clear mind, and when I’m blogging through a mononucleosis fog, I’ll laugh along with you, because it’s probably true.

I want to share with you a wonderful essay from Harper’s: editor Christopher Beha’s warm and appreciative review essay of a new biography of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard — often called “SK” by scholars — meant a lot to me as a younger man, and was instrumental in my conversion to Christianity. This part of the essay speaks to why. Before we get there, you should know that SK believed that there were three “stages of life’s way” on the journey to becoming a true Self: the Aesthetic (living for pleasure and sensual feeling), the Ethical (living by a moral code), and the Religious (living entirely for God; this mode combines the previous two, and transcends them). In this passage, Beha talks about SK’s Fear and Trembling, the philosopher’s 1843 meditation on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac at God’s command. It is a bizarre story, the Old Testament account, but in it, writes SK, we see an icon of the kind of “infinite resignation” it takes to be truly religious. Beha writes:

For Kierkegaard, this was the nature of the truly religious life. It entailed an inward turning toward God, one that could not be reduced to a moral law. In the preceding decades, great effort had been made to rationalize Christianity and situate it as the foundation of a universally binding ethical code. The problem, from Kierkegaard’s perspective, was that Jesus did not call us to obey a set of rules; he called us to love. It cannot be that adherence to an ethical code is the highest life, because it is possible to obey every rule placed in front of you without ever feeling love in your heart. To the aesthetic and the ethical was added a third category, the religious, which was beyond both.

Placed in this tripart relationship, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious seem almost to represent a Hegelian progression, but one stage does not lead inevitably to the next as they do in Hegel’s system. There is no internal contradiction in the aesthetic life that ushers us out of it. We must choose to be ethical as an act of individual will. And since choosing in this way, and standing by our choices, is precisely what the ethical entails, we must in a sense already be living in the ethical sphere in order to choose it. Nothing in the aesthetic sphere—which is precisely the sphere wherein such choices cannot occur—could make us ethical by degrees. (From A’s papers: “Experience shows that it is not at all difficult for philosophy to begin. . . . But it is always difficult for philosophy and philosophers to stop.”) What is required is a qualitative leap from one state to another.

A similar leap must move us from the ethical to the religious. The ethical sphere gives us the satisfaction of adherence to a code, seen in Judge William’s smug complacency, and so it does not push us on to something greater. Yet we continue to have moments of anxiety or despair, as when we sense that no amount of upstanding behavior will change the fact that we and all we love are fated to die, or when we recognize that our ethical code is built on air, that it does not—cannot—have a universal basis, that the Christian story on which these ethics claim to be built cannot be rationalized as a Hegelian synthesis of the absolute and the particular or the necessary and the contingent, but must be accepted as a paradox, an absurdity.

In Kierkegaard’s view, it is precisely this anxiety that makes our inward turning possible. It is in this anxiety that we begin to be truly religious. For religious life does not unfold according to a universal code. Like Abraham, we cannot know in advance if we are doing it correctly. We must give ourselves over to it, as Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, in great fear and trembling. This is the famous leap of faith for which Kierkegaard is perhaps best known (although he never used the expression). The phrase is sometimes taken to mean that we ought to throw ourselves into belief even though we have no intellectual basis for doing so. In fact, it means that no amount of philosophical consideration or ethical behavior can bring about the inward turning that religious life requires. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Read the entire essay. The book Beha reviews is Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard, by Clare Carlisle. It will be published on May 5.

The line I highlighted was a critically important aspect of SK’s teaching, for me as a college student wrestling with belief. I kept thinking that if I read the right argument, then I could believe in God. Something about this seemed … wrong, somehow, but I couldn’t figure it out. Reading an introduction to Kierkegaard’s thought , a book that’s now long out of print and hard to find, convinced me that I was going at the question of God’s existence all wrong. It would not matter if I encountered a convincing philosophical proof of God’s existence. The question was less a matter of the mind and more a matter of the heart. I was deceiving myself to mask my cowardice — my fear of believing. After Kierkegaard, I could not un-see what I had seen about myself: that I will only be able to know God by committing myself to loving and serving him as my “absolute telos” — that is, the Person whose presence would give meaning to every other thing in my life. I can no more be talked into that than I could be logically convinced to fall in love with someone who would be good for me. But anything short of that is not true religion.

SK taught me that to know God is like knowing how to play the violin. It’s something you cannot learn to do by reading a book about it. It’s something you can only learn to do by practicing it, and by wanting to know the art of violin-playing so much that you sacrifice for it. In other words, the encounter with God cannot be merely abstract and cerebral … or it’s not an encounter with God. SK was reacting strongly to Enlightenment rationalist Christianity. With relation to God, my own problem was that I wanted to make the leap of faith while keeping my options open. I wanted to try on faith as a possibility, but keep the door open to abandoning religion if it didn’t work out for me. This is what I did, too, in college — though after reading Kierkegaard, I couldn’t deny that I was faking it. I couldn’t deny that I was not brave enough to be religious, to take that leap of faith: the “leap,” as Beha explains, being willing to give myself body, mind, and soul to the worship of God.

It will not surprise you to know that at the same time, I idolized Romantic Love, and wanted nothing more than to lose myself in the love of a woman … but was equally afraid to surrender to a flesh-and-blood woman, thereby foreclosing my options. This was a fundamentally immature stance, but it’s where I was stuck for a long time, both with regard to God and Woman. SK spoke directly to me as I was restlessly searching for what it meant to live truthfully. His point was the same one that St. Augustine made in his Confessions: that our hearts are restless until the rest in God. I would have thought that was pious mumbo-jumbo before reading SK. After SK, I knew that it was true, though it was not a truth I was ready to face. I still had some running away to do.

The SK paradox I could not un-know, though, was that by resisting commitment to God because I wanted to retain the power to define myself according to my desires, I was not becoming my true Self, but asserting the right to change masks with the seasons. Furthermore, I was looking for religion to deliver me from anxiety. SK taught me that to be fully human is to live within the tension between time and eternity. To believe that there is no respite from that anxiety, or that there is total and permanent respite from it in this life, is to live in despair, and, in fact, to live a lie.

Finally, SK taught me that my idea of the religious life had been completely conditioned by middle-class respectability. I thought the only choice one had in life was between what SK called the Aesthetic mode, or the Ethical mode. I was living out the Aesthetic mode, and while it was fun, it was not serious, and not grounded in anything. But the Ethical mode seemed more respectable, but still called forth the question, “Is that all there is?” I thought the Christian religion was nothing more than an expression of life in the Ethical mode. I thought it was what you did when you got tired of carousing, and got Serious About Life, and acquired a wife, kids, and a career.

I had that all wrong, according to Soren Kierkegaard. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a wife, kids, and a career. It’s just that religion is something else.

It has been many years since I’ve read Kierkegaard, who is not an easy writer. The Clare Carlisle biography will be out next week. If I’m finished with my own manuscript by then, maybe I’ll buy it over Kindle. It sounds well worth reading. Carlisle is a British scholar, and the book has already been published in the UK. I found this passage from the introduction whetted my appetite for more:

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