Rod Dreher's Blog, page 150

The Culture War: Why We Still Fight

Vanity Fair has an interesting piece about TAC today. The author didn’t contact me for a comment, which is a shame, but he had already decided what he wanted to write, it appears. He did mention me in these passages:

While Dreher, 53, is almost certainly TAC’s most-well-known writer, his contributions are often its most-widely criticized. A orthodox Christian and author of The Benedict Option, Dreher seems to relish in the culture wars. In a 2018 op-ed, “The Trans Teen Industrial Complex,” he attacked the media for “propagandizing for gay marriage…as far back as 2005;” in a Spectator USA piece several months ago, he described Chick-fil-A’s choice to cease donations to groups with anti-LGBTQ histories as a “Germans-marching-down-the-Champs-Élysées moment.” In 2018, he defended Trump’s “shithole countries” comment, which he said was “crude, obnoxious, and wrong,” before writing, “If word got out that the government was planning to build a housing project for the poor in your neighborhood, how would you feel about it?…Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a shithole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood [into] a shithole to bring the shithole to your street?”

For TAC’s younger writers, Dreher’s crusade is low-priority. “I just think the culture war is over, just put it down,” said Mills, a 29-year-old D.C. native. “A ban on gay marriage is like, not seriously an offer, right?…The idea that we’re gonna have a national ban on abortion—it’s pretty far-fetched.” Burtka, 30, said the majority of writers on the masthead are under 35. He sees this as an advantage; they watched the Republican Party’s aughts-era fumbling from the sidelines while right-wing intellectual types elsewhere, many of whom are in their 40s and 50s, were in the thick of it, cheering on Bush. “It seems like younger conservatives are more plugged into ‘conservative realignment’ type issues,” he wrote in a text, chalking it up to a sense of disillusionment following the “failed War on Terror and the 2008 financial crisis.”

“Dreher seems to relish in the culture wars,” the writer says. It is certainly true that I write about them a lot. My conservatism is not economic or foreign policy, but social, religious, and cultural, so of course I’m going to pay attention to this stuff. The writer (and, unfortunately, my colleague) betrays a view of the “culture war” that is not only ignorant of how I view them, but of my own specific positions. I’m going to set the record straight.

About the passages the VF writer quotes, of course I wrote those things, and I stand by them. On the “shithole countries” thing, as the writer notes, I criticized Trump for saying it, but I still believe that most of those bourgeois pearl-clutchers who jumped on Trump for his vulgar remarks would turn into the world’s biggest NIMBY activists if the government decided to plop Section 8 housing in their neighborhood. In other words, they’re hypocrites.

About the second graf, Curt Mills is a libertarian, which is a fine thing to be, but libertarians do not often distinguish themselves with their understanding of how and why social conservatives believe the things we do. (To be fair, we social conservatives are also prone to caricaturing libertarians.) I have been saying since the latter part of the 2000s — years before Obergefell! — that social conservatives have lost on gay marriage — and was pilloried by Maggie Gallagher for it. She called me defeatist. To be clear, Maggie and I are friends, and she really did believe I was surrendering too soon. At the time, I argued that gay marriage was a losing battle because gay marriage itself was something that was entirely consonant with what most Americans already believed marriage was. My argument at the time was that SoCons would be better off turning our resources, financial and otherwise, to using our diminishing capital to erect strong religious liberty protections in law for dissenters.

I was right about gay marriage, as it turned out — and I was right not because I had any kind of special insight, but because I had read Philip Rieff and Alasdair MacIntyre. So now we have same-sex marriage, and, as I learned in October 2015, on a visit to Capitol Hill, we have a Republican Party that is not going to lift a finger to pass any religious liberty protections. I wrote about that 2015 moment in my book The Benedict Option, as part of my argument that in most cases, SoCons have lost the political aspect of the culture war.

My position on same-sex marriage has been clear to anyone who has read me for any length of time. It is here to stay, and it’s foolish to think otherwise. I believe that social conservatives still have possibilities to win legislative victories over transgender issues, because I don’t think trans is the same kind of things as homosexuality.

On abortion, I don’t believe that a nationwide ban on abortion is in the offing, not in my lifetime, if ever. Most informed pro-lifers know perfectly well that overturning Roe v. Wade would only send the abortion issue back to the States. States like New York and California would protect abortion rights maximally; states like Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama would set restrictions. A pro-life amendment to the US Constitution is a pie-in-the-sky hope for the pro-life movement, but not something that most of us think is achievable. To characterize the work of the pro-life movement as seeking a national ban on abortion is cartoonishly uninformed. In fact, there have been some remarkable incremental victories at the state level on restricting abortion.

And, even though abortion remains legal, and widely available, the number of abortions has been declining for years — in part, I believe, to a greater popular awareness than unborn children are human beings with personhood. If you only see the culture war in political terms, you’re going to miss the main part of it.

In all honesty, a lot of social conservative and religious conservative leaders see the culture war exclusively in political terms. It’s what they know. It’s how they raise money. It’s how they boost their influence. In fact, as I have argued for years (and argued in The Benedict Option), this preoccupation with politics blinds SoCons to what is achievable through politics — in their case, not a lot these days — and also to what is achievable through the kind of social and cultural work that takes place outside of political and policy circles. I wrote The Benedict Option as an exploration of how traditional Christians should live in this post-Christian culture — and it’s almost entirely about ways we can organize our lives together outside of a political culture in which we have much less power and influence.

It is true that I didn’t anticipate Trump’s victory when I wrote the book, and had to go back and revise a bit of it in light of the surprising 2016 Trump win. But as I pointed out, the Trump victory may give us some pro-life wins (which it did, thank God) and some good judges (which it seems to have done), but a political victory alone is not going to reverse the deeper trends that have been pushing the West towards total secularization and radical individualism. When Trump leaves office — whether it is in 2021, or 2025 — religious conservatives who had placed so much faith in having a sympathetic administration are going to be in for a very, very rude shock.

So, why do I keep up with the culture war when there are so few political victories to be had? Because whether or not you are interested in the culture war, the culture war is certainly interested in you, and in your children. When I was in my twenties, unmarried and childless, I didn’t have a real clue about how pervasive the struggle over virtues and values were. I too thought of them primarily in political terms. Then, as I wrote about in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, my wife and I had our first child, and it forced us to look much more deeply at the world in which we moved. We discovered — or at least I discovered — how my off-the-shelf Republican Party beliefs could not account fully for what I was learning.

What I discovered was not that I was really a liberal, but that I was a different kind of conservative than the mainstream. As I wrote in a 2002 cover story for National Review:

One day this summer, I told a colleague I had to leave early to pick up my weekly fresh vegetables from the organic food co-op to which my wife and I belong. “Ewgh, that’s so lefty,” she said. And she was right: Organic vegetables are a left-wing cliche. Early last summer I had made fun of neighbors who subscribed to the service, which delivers fresh fruits and vegetables from area organic farms to our Brooklyn streets.

But then the neighbors gave us one week’s vegetable shipment, and we were knocked flat by the intense flavors. Who knew cauliflower had so much taste? It was the freshness of the produce, not its organic status (of dubious nutritional advantage), that we were responding to. But you can’t get produce that delicious in grocery stores here, so when this summer rolled around, we signed up enthusiastically. Now, Julie picks up our weekly delivery in her National Review tote bag.

It never occurred to me that eating organic vegetables was a political act, but my colleague’s comment got me to thinking about other ways my family’s lifestyle is countercultural. Julie is a stay-at-home mom who is beginning to homeschool our young son. We worship at an “ethnic” Catholic church because we can’t take the Wonder Bread liturgy at the Roman parish down the street. We are as suspicious of big business as we are of big government. We rarely watch TV, disdain modern architecture and suburban sprawl, avoid shopping malls, and spend our money on good food we prepare at home. My wife even makes her own granola.

And yet we are almost always the most conservative people in the room – – granted, not much of a trick if you live in New York City, but wewe’re still pretty far out there. So how did we get to be so “crunchy”–as in “crunchy-granola,” a slang term for earthy types–without realizing what was happening? Much of our crunchy conservatism comes from simply being carried along by the tide of our lives, and discovering by trial and error things that work well. But it’s also grounded in the basic attitudes we’ve long held. That, generally speaking, Small and Local and Particular and Old are better. That beauty in all its forms is important to the good life. That the bright glare of television and the cacophony of media culture make it too hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. That we are citizens before we are consumers.

And most important of all, that faith and family are the point of life. We agree with Russell Kirk, who observed, “The best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o’ evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, ‘We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.’ The institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

I confessed that I was a Birkenstock’d Burkean in a National Review Online essay, and talked about how displaced I felt as a conservative who liked both Rush Limbaugh and Garrison Keillor. My in-box quickly filled up with literally hundreds of replies from across the country, nearly all of them saying, “Me too!”

There was the pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican who wanted to find somebody to discuss the virtues of George W. Bush with over a bowl of dal. An interracial couple, political conservatives and converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, wrote to say they loved shaking up the prejudices of liberal friends at their organic co-op. Small-town and rural crunchy cons checked in, and so did their urban counterparts from Berkeley to New York to London. “I used to listen to Rush while driving around following the Grateful Dead!” someone wrote. Wrote another, “We thought we were the only Evangelical Christians in the world with a copy of ‘The Moosewood Cookbook.’”

Clearly, there are a number of thoughtful, imaginative, eclectic conservatives who fly below the radar of the media and Republican politicos. Who are these people? What do they stand for? And do you have to tune in to NPR as well as to Rush, turn on to whole grains, and drop out of mainstream society to join them?

The crunchy-con bookshelf–and because they eschew television, they have lots of bookshelves–sags with works by conservatives like G. K. Chesterton, Richard Weaver, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Southern Agrarians, and Michael Oakeshott. They also read books by more contemporary thinkers like the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry; Jane Jacobs, who championed particularity and diversity in urban planning over the dominant trend toward mass abstraction; media critic Neil Postman; and James Howard Kunstler, whose choleric jeremiads against America’s strip-mall Babylon have made him a left-leaning prophet with honor among crunchy cons. They favor books on the environment that reflect a manlier, Rooseveltian (Teddy, the good one) stance toward the natural world, which respects nature without worshiping it.

Of all the thinkers and writers favored by crunchy cons, Kirk may be the most reliable guide to their sensibility. He grasped the essential truth that conservatism was not primarily about a political agenda, but instead “a complex of thought and sentiment, and a deep attachment to permanent things.” It was a fundamental stance toward reality. For crunchy cons, the quest to live “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” is not just a nice idea–and because of this, they don’t always line up with Republican orthodoxy. As Carson Gross, a 25-year-old San Franciscan, says, “I’m always explicit with people that I’m a conservative, not a Republican.”

There are four basic areas that are touchstones for crunchy conservatives: Religion, the Natural World, Beauty, and Family.

Read it all — or, if you’d like to go deeper, you can buy a Kindle copy of the book, Crunchy Cons, that I later wrote. Even today, almost 15 years after that book was published, I often meet people who tell me how much that book meant to them. It’s a book about social and religious conservatism that is not what passes for “social conservatism” in the mainstream media, and in mainstream right-wing discourse.

If you don’t think homeschooling, for example, is a culture war issue, you’re not paying attention. If you don’t think that localism is a culture war issue, you’re not paying attention. If you don’t think that there are culture-war aspects to environmentalism, ditto. And religious liberty. And immigration. If you are on the Right and don’t think fighting porn is a culture war issue of extreme importance, you are probably a libertarian. If you don’t think defending the natural family is probably the most important culture war issue of our time, you are not paying attention, or at least not troubling yourself to see the world through the eyes of parents who are socially and religiously conservative, and who do not want to surrender their children either to the Progressive-Industrial Complex, or to unrestricted capitalism (woke, surveillance, and otherwise).

Liberals and many (though not all) libertarians assume that because they can’t see why these issues matter, that they don’t matter. Resistance from the social and religious right seems like nothing more than futile, irritable gestures. Let’s just say that the view from the trenches of family life is rather different.

The people I know who really enjoy fighting the culture war are Very Online Males in their twenties, and childless. I don’t say that to put them down. Had the Internet been a big thing when I was in my twenties (I turned 30 in 1997), I would have been right there mixing it up with them. In my experience, though, older people, especially if you have kids, don’t enjoy this stuff. God knows I don’t. I would love nothing more than to rest within a stable, healthy culture. But we do not have that, and besides, I know perfectly well that the Left will never, ever leave us alone. If you are raising teenagers today, you have to fight the culture war almost every day, inside your household. It’s called raising a family.

So, it may baffle liberals and my young libertarian friends who are unsympathetic to social conservatism, but I’m going to continue to write about the culture war, because religious and social conservatives don’t have the luxury of surrendering. The way we resist has to adapt to changing circumstances — it’s why I wrote The Benedict Option, and what’s behind my forthcoming September book, Live Not By Lies — but the fight continues, because it has to. Social and religious conservatives should be realistic about what is achievable, especially about the limits of politics. The idea that it’s still 2004, and that what made sense to us in 2004 still does in 2020, is madness. And speaking for myself, I’m no libertarian, but I believe that within America’s pluralistic polity, social and religious conservatives have to find common cause with libertarians to resist the dominant progressive integralism.

But we should never, ever allow ourselves to be gaslit by liberals or libertarians who tell us that nobody cares about this stuff anymore, so we should just drop it.

Nor, for that matter, should we allow ourselves to be gaslit by figures within Religious Conservatism, Inc., who insist that we are within one election, and one Supreme Court appointment, from “victory.” It’s not true, and it was never true, and believing that the culture war was primarily a political and legal conflict was a massive strategic error of an entire generation, from which we have yet to recover. Going forward, the most important work of the culture war will be mounting guerrilla resistance within a culture whose dominant institutions were long ago captured by the other side.

Not everybody who reads TAC is a social or religious conservative, but a lot of you are, and I hope I speak for you. If you aren’t, I hope at least that I make arguments and report information that gives you a clearer understanding of how the world looks to people like us. If I can do that, then I have been of use to you.

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Covid-19: The Apocalypse Virus

A reader sent in a story from Reuters reporting that doctors are seeing blood clotting in Covid-19 patients. Excerpt:

Signs of blood thickening and clotting were being detected in different organs by doctors from different specialties. This would turn out to be one of the alarming ways the virus ravages the body, as doctors there and elsewhere were starting to realize.

At Mount Sinai, nephrologists noticed kidney dialysis catheters getting plugged with clots. Pulmonologists monitoring COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilators could see portions of lungs were oddly bloodless. Neurosurgeons confronted a surge in their usual caseload of strokes due to blood clots, the age of victims skewing younger, with at least half testing positive for the virus.

Well, guess what? That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s David Wallace-Wells’s terrifying report from New York magazine, detailing how we are six months into this thing (that is, from the first moment it was detected in Wuhan), and we still don’t know how it works. Excerpts:

Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious and concerning. But while uncertainties at the population level confuse and frustrate public-health officials, unsure when and in what form to shift gears out of lockdowns, the disease has proved just as mercurial at the clinical level, with doctors revising their understanding of COVID-19’s basic pattern and weaponry — indeed often revising that understanding in different directions at once. The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week. Lately, it seems, by the day. As Carl Zimmer, probably the country’s most respected science journalist, asked virologists in a tweet last week, “is there any other virus out there that is this weird in terms of its range of symptoms?”

You probably have a sense of the range of common symptoms, and a sense that the range isn’t that weird: fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath have been, since the beginning of the outbreak, the familiar, oft-repeated group of tell-tale signs. But while the CDC does list fever as the top symptom of COVID-19, so confidently that for weeks patients were turned away from testing sites if they didn’t have an elevated temperature, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 70 percent of patients sick enough to be admitted to New York State’s largest hospital system did not have a fever.

The piece catalogs all the weird and horrible ways the virus is affecting people. And it may be mutating monstrously:

A couple of days later, in a pre-print paper others questioned, scientists reported finding that the ability of the disease to mutate has been “vastly underestimated” — investigating the disease as it appeared in just 11 patients, they said they found 30 mutations. “The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type,” the South China Morning-Post reported. “These strains also killed the cells the fastest.”

More:

It’s not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it’s common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are, still, feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn’t even stabilized. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a public-health crisis but a scientific one as well. And that as deep as it may feel we are into the coronavirus, with tens of thousands dead and literally billions in precautionary lockdown, we are still in the very early stages, when each new finding seems as likely to cloud or complicate our understanding of the coronavirus as it is to clarify it. Instead, confidence gives way to uncertainty.

This quote, taken from Science magazine:

“Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week,” Science concluded, “a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”

Read the whole New York article. Seriously, do — it’s jaw-dropping. This thing is going to be with us a very, very long time. It will change everything. Whatever plans you and I had for our lives, they’re all up in the air now.

That line: “the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.” I know that there is no proof (yet) that this thing didn’t escape from that Wuhan lab, despite the concern US officials expressed privately two years ago, after a visit to that lab. Still, a pathogen that is unlike any humanity has ever seen? Is it more likely that this came out of wet markets, or a Chinese bioweapons lab?

 

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What Trump Risks By Fatmouthing

Here is the transcript of President Trump’s controversial remarks about disinfectants and potential coronavirus treatments:

“So I asked Bill a question some of you are thinking of if you’re into that world, which I find to be pretty interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it goes in one minute, that’s pretty powerful.”

No, Trump did not tell people to vape Lysol. What he did was that thing he always does, which is to open his mouth and let his brains run out. This is relatively harmless stuff when your elderly mother calls you to say she saw somebody on Facebook talking about bleach miracle cures, and wouldn’t that be interesting if it really worked. It’s something else when the president of the United States babbles on about it in a press briefing. Pope Francis has this habit too, of just talking off the cuff, and forgetting that when you’re the Holy Roman Pontiff, you can’t just say whatever comes to mind in any given moment. He seems to have gotten better about that, but Trump hasn’t.

As a practical political matter, when you are reduced to defending the president by saying that he didn’t literally tell people to ingest disinfectant, you’re losing. People are angry, they’re tired of the lockdown, they’re scared of the future, and the last thing we need is a president who stands there like Cliff Clavin at the bar in Cheers, fatmouthing about whatever fool thing crosses his mind. The garrulous Trump has always lacked discipline, but that fault is really hurting him now, in this crisis. Of course the media can’t stand him, but he goes out of his way to provide his enemies with material.

After he caught grief for his disinfectant and UV light remarks, he said that he was actually being “sarcastic.” Right. Tell us another one, Mr. President.

If Trump wants to blow up his own political career, fine by me — I won’t miss him when he’s gone. But he’s threatening to take Republican control of the Senate with him. From the NYT:

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

The scale of the G.O.P.’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Mr. Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he is even narrowly behind in must-win Florida.

More:

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.

His daily news briefings on the coronavirus outbreak are inflicting grave damage on his political standing, Republicans believe, and his recent remarks about combating the virus with sunlight and disinfectant were a breaking point for a number of senior party officials.

Of course they were, because these senior party officials live in the real world, and they know that with the economy in collapse, the American people have little patience for this juvenile stupidity. Here’s the key part of the story:

The surveys also showed Republican senators in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine trailing or locked in a dead heat with potential Democratic rivals — in part because their fate is linked to Mr. Trump’s job performance. If incumbents in those states lose, and Republicans pick up only the Senate seat in Alabama, Democrats would take control of the chamber should Mr. Biden win the presidency.

“He’s got to run very close for us to keep the Senate,” Charles R. Black Jr., a veteran Republican consultant, said of Mr. Trump. “I’ve always thought we were favored to, but I can’t say that now with all these cards up in the air.”

Read the whole thing, especially the granular data. The Democrats already hold the House, and that’s not expected to change. If they capture the White House and the Senate, the things that social conservative voters care most about — abortion, religious liberty, SOGI laws — will be in dire trouble. Forget the judiciary: Democrats will be able to name and confirm federal judges without much trouble, and will be able to see Justices Ginsburg and Breyer off to their long-anticipated retirements, confident that they will be able to install two strong liberals.

Things could change a lot between now and November, obviously, but Trump and his party are going to have to defend the White House in the face of the greatest economic calamity the nation has seen since the Great Depression. He cannot take anything for granted. Handing the future of the courts over to the Democrats — that’s one big thing Trump is putting at risk with his big fat mouth. Nobody is forcing him to come down and spend an hour or two daily sharing his Deep Thoughts with the country. What Trump reveals in these depressing exercises is how unfit he is to run the country in this crisis. To be fair to him, many leaders around the world, including those not saddled with Trump’s indiscipline and other deficits, are struggling to meet the seriousness of the moment. The thing about these other leaders is they don’t go out of their way to remind the public how out of their depth they are.

I don’t think Joe Biden is anybody’s (other than Mrs. Biden’s) idea of the leader we need now. He doesn’t have to be to beat Trump. At this rate, Trump is going to beat Trump — and take GOP control of the Senate down with him. All he needs to do is stay away from the podium and let Pence, Fauci, and Birx handle it. That’s it! He can’t even manage that, though. Joe Biden doesn’t need to get on TV right now to help his campaign. Trump is Biden’s best possible surrogate.

UPDATE: Really interesting comment by Wyoming Doc:

Rod, this post is a knife right through the heart of medical professionals who are looking for truth – and reverence to medical ideals – and the tenets of ethical medical research.

I never dreamed as a young man I would see the politicization of medical research – but here we are. This has been going on for a while in red vs blue America – but this pandemic has really accelerated this dramatically.

What do I mean?

When I first heard news reports about this Lysol incident – my first reaction was “What on earth has he done now?”. That prompted me to actually listen to the statement you quoted above. It was actually the cable news shows that injected the words Lysol and Clorox and bleach into the conversation – not Trump. What he said though was still moronic but in a completely different way. The truth is both modalities – UV light and surface chemicals – for the treatment of various infections are in the early stages of research trials all across America – and we are talking early – as in infancy. Some of the work from what I can tell is still in animal phases. These trials are at very few and very select locations. 1 to 4 hospitals each. They would NEVER be available to the general public in a widespread way at this time – there is no guarantees they will work – and indeed they may actually be very harmful. This is called medical research. It is in the early stages an ugly business. As far as I know, none of this stuff is ready for prime time at all. My supposition is that he was sitting around the conference table – and some of the medical experts were talking about this research in a very abstract way for the treatment of COVID. He probably thought it was GEE WHIZ STAR TREK stuff – and had diarrhea of the mouth at the press conference. He does have a very beautiful mind, of course. The word “disinfectant” in this setting means something entirely different to an Infectious Disease specialist than it does to Joe Q Public. He undoubtedly heard this research earlier described by the experts with that word – and unfortunately used it. The very fact he said anything about this is most unfortunate. And he should have learned by now – when it comes to specialized expertise like medicine – sit down and shut up and let the experts have the stage. The vast majority of adults I know learned that skill long long ago.

And this is how this will affect medical research. Already this weekend, with hysterical laughter, all of Blue America is dismissing both of these modalities as a total joke. If Trump says anything – it therefore must be retarded or demonic or both. The most promising and the farthest along of any of these trials was being done by a company called AYTU BIO and their Healight device to try to treat COVID in the lungs with intra-tracheal UV light. This is FDA approved – and is being done at UCLA and Cedars Sinai. I have learned today that both TWITTER and YOUTUBE have at least partially deplatformed this company – for reasons that are completely unclear to me. My guess is UV light therapy is now associated with Trump and no longer fits the blue news agenda. But if any of your readers have better information about this I would love to know. The fact that this happened this soon to the President’s statement is very alarming to me…..

What if the research on this gets canned because of this. More tragically – WHAT IF IT ACTUALLY WORKS? This is the tragedy. Medical research should never have to do with politics. Ever. The cost and expense and priorities of it have everything to do with politics – but the actual mechanics and results – NEVER. This is a very slippery slope we are traveling as a country. I despair frequently.

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View From Your Table

Cupar, Kingdom of Fife, Scotland

 

James C. sent this to me from his home in Scotland. I forget exactly where it is, but the important thing is the food, which he describes as:

Bavarian sauerbraten  with the mighty Barolo of Piemonte—a match made in heaven!

I’m sitting on my back patio drinking a Birra Nursia blonde, and beavering away on my manuscript. You may ask yourself: why, Writer Guy, are you drinking a strong beer while you are trying to write through the fog of mononucleosis? The answer is: because man does not live on caffeine alone.

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LARPing Martyr’s Ankle Jewelry

Here in Baton Rouge, yesterday was “a day that will live in infamy,” according to Pastor Tony Spell, the Pentecostal preacher who has a rather inflated image of himself. Did the Japanese air force surprise-attack his back patio? Pretty much: the pastor was fitted with an ankle bracelet as a condition of his house arrest. A local judge put him on house arrest after a hearing over aggravated assault charges stemming from Spell’s backing a church bus towards a protester. The authorities allowed him to stage the clamping for his online audience — watch on Facebook here.

Spell compared himself to Jesus Christ on Golgotha, and Rosa Parks in the back of the bus. Then, when he finally condescended to enter into his kitchen for the clamping of the ankle bracelet, the man who installed the thing could hardly have been more polite. Spell gassed on comparing what was being done to him to the Pearl Harbor attack. The sweet stout man who put on the ankle bracelet bowed his head when Spell began to pray. Whatever this is, it is not the Gestapo.

Well, this morning Spell left his house and headed to his church to preach. My guess is that the authorities have been trying not to fulfill this cat’s dream of becoming some sort of First Amendment martyr, but that with this stunt in defiance of a judicial order, Spell will have gotten on their last nerve. I’m watching the service now on Facebook. The church is only half full, maybe less. Spell’s sermon is one long oration of self-praise and repetition. Now there’s a crowd of people on their knees wailing and speaking in tongues. They are holding on to each other, crying, glossolaling like there’s no tomorrow. I took a couple of screenshots below. Spell is expected to turn himself in to police after the service.

I look at this guy, and don’t see Jesus, or St. Paul in chains, or Polycarp, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or anybody from the Christian tradition worthy of emulation. I see a man who is full of himself.

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Hanus Days Festival Online

Hello all, I will be participating on Sunday in the above online group discussion, as part of the Bratislava Hanus Days, a Christian ideas festival that this year has to be held on the Internet, because of You Know What. The discussion will be held in English on the BHD YouTube Channel (here is the link), at 2pm Eastern time/1 pm Central. 

Please tune in! The others — philosopher Dariusz Karlowicz, sociologist Gabriele Kuby, and sociologist Mark Regnerus — are real intellectuals, and all believing Catholics. I, on the other hand, have the most interesting hair of the lot.

In all seriousness, I spoke at Bratislava Hanus Days last year, and was really impressed by the quality of the discussions. I’m very sorry that Covid-19 has forced the 2020 festival online, but I’m really pleased to be able to participate in it.

If you aren’t able to watch live, I’ll post as an update to this post the finished recording when the BHD folks post it to YouTube.

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What We Have Lost

Good column from Andrew Sullivan today. Excerpt:

So we have created a scenario which has mercifully slowed the virus’s spread, but, as we are now discovering, at the cost of a potentially greater depression than in the 1930s, with no assurance of any progress yet visible. If we keep this up for six months, we could well keep the deaths relatively low and stable, but the economy would all but disintegrate. Just because Trump has argued that the cure could be worse than the disease doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true. The previously unimaginable levels of unemployment and the massive debt-fueled outlays to lessen the blow simply cannot continue indefinitely. We have already, in just two months, wiped out all the job gains since the Great Recession. In six months? The wreckage boggles the mind.

All of this is why, one some days, I can barely get out of bed. It is why protests against our total shutdown, while puny now, will doubtless grow. The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify. We remain human beings, a quintessentially social mammal, and we orient ourselves in time, looking forward to the future. When that future has been suspended, humans come undone. Damon Linker put it beautifully this week: “A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it’s a life haunted by a shadow of futility.” Or, in the words of the brilliant Freddie deBoer: “The human cost of the disease and those it will kill is enormous. The cost of our prevention efforts are high as well. You’re losing something. You’re losing so much. So you should mourn. We’ve lost the world. Mourn for it.”

I’m seeing things now from public health experts (for example) saying that we need to realize that there won’t be a return to the status quo for years to come — at least two or three, which is likely the minimum time necessary to develop a vaccine (and even then, there is no guarantee that we can develop a vaccine). We can’t live under a total cessation of economic activity, but we also can’t go back to how things were before the pandemic came. The new normal is going to be something very different from what we were used to.

Here in south Louisiana, we are looking at the autumn without LSU football. I’m sure we will have games, but they will be played in an empty Tiger Stadium. There will be no tailgating. This might sound like a luxury to some, but the Saturday football games, and all the socializing that goes with them, are a huge part of the joy of living in this part of the world. I am not a big fan of football per se, but I really love autumn in Louisiana, because of the communal pleasures associated with LSU Tiger football. We are losing that, and I feel pretty bad about it.

But not as bad as I feel about the possibility that my older son will start his junior year at LSU without classes to attend. Or that when he graduates, it will be into an economy where it will likely be very, very hard to get a foothold. I could write forever about the big things that I mourn the loss of, but I’d like to keep this post — and the comments thread — more personal.

What are you mourning right now? No need to say “for all the sick and dying,” or “my children’s future,” or anything like that. I presume we all mourn for those big things. Tell me about the little things you miss, the things that gave you particular joy, or meaning, or pleasure, but that will not be back for you anytime soon.

Here’s one that weighs heavily on me, more than I expected: the end of non-essential international travel.

Y’all know how much I enjoy traveling, especially to Europe. It might seem to you that this is nothing but fun to me — fun in the sense of a holiday at the beach, or a trip to Disneyworld. It certainly is that. But it’s way, way more than that. I love history, I love art, and I love food and culinary culture. Studying these things, and immersing myself in them, brings me great joy. Above all, I love meeting new people from these worlds, and learning about their lives, their joys, and their families. I have tried to share with you, through photos and words, how much I have come to love these things, but honestly, I can’t do it justice.

The idea that it may be years before I can go back to Europe and see my friends, or take my own children to visit the places I have come to love and cherish — that hurts. I was born in a fortunate time, the era in which ordinary people were able to afford international travel. I’ve written in this space before how entranced I was as a very small boy to hear the stories that my Great-Great Aunts Hilda and Lois told about serving in France with the Red Cross during the First World War, and how they cast a spell on me by spreading the Rand McNally atlas out over my little legs, and telling me stories of all the countries they visited as young women. The seeds those dear old ladies planted in my heart have borne rich fruit for me, personally and professionally.

Aunt Hilda, Aunt Lois, and me (in Lois’s arms), 1968

Now those days are probably over for a while. When they come back, they will be sweet indeed. But for now, I mourn their loss. I so looked forward to every overseas trip I have ever taken. Over the course of my marriage, my wife has often observed about me that I need those trips to look forward to, to get me through the everyday. She’s right about that. I don’t know why I’m that way, but I’m that way, and now I can’t be that way for a while, because of this virus.

There are far, far more consequential things my family will have to deal with as the result of this pandemic. I know that. I would give up foreign travel forever if it meant that my children would be able to have a normal education, enter the job market normally, and so forth. And I know that people are mourning dead family members, lost careers, and so forth. A middle-aged writer losing for a time the opportunities to travel abroad is small beer, compared to that. But this one is personal to me, and I mourn what I have lost. Here is an account of a 2015 visit I made, with James C. and Sordello, to Lyon. World of wonders!

What do you mourn that you have lost in this new world? Make it specific, and personal to you, please.

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Globalism: Lysol-Huffing For Elites

Listening to Trump gas on yesterday about the possibility that ingesting bleach could cure coronavirus, I thought, “This guy is Cliff Clavin.” You remember Cliff, the barstool know-it-all in Cheers, who would float stupid theories like they were great wisdom?

So look, some Celebrity Math:

It is infuriating and humiliating to have to listen to the President of the United States carry on like this. There is no justification for it. Every time he opens his mouth, the man confirms that he’s a fool. However, I was reading last night someone on Twitter saying that he wishes that the US were like Germany, a country that has strong confidence in its experts, and listens to them, and therefore has handled the virus pandemic much better than America has. Yeah, I get that. I think we’d probably be better off too — up to a point.

I will never, ever forget how the smartest people in US foreign policy, on the Republican side, led this country into the Iraq War. In the 1960s, the smartest people on the Democratic side did the same thing with Vietnam. The title of that famous David Halberstam book about that war’s architects, The Best and the Brightest, is meant to be ironic.

I want you to watch this tough 15-minute interview Tucker Carlson just did with Peter Walker, a former top-echelon executive at McKinsey, the global consultants:

Walker has defended the Chinese Communist regime, with whom he worked as a McKinsey consultant. In this interview, Carlson roasts him for defending China’s treatment of its Uighur Muslims, including throwing a million of them into concentration camps. Walker tries to have it both ways, saying that yeah, it’s suboptimal, but you have to understand that the Chinese see the world different from us. To them, that’s an acceptable price to pay for stability. Carlson calls that a defense of fascism. It’s a tough interview.

Around the 8:30 mark, Carlson queries Walker about how much money he personally made counseling China over the years. Walker doesn’t answer. The context of the question is that American experts profited by counseling American political and business leaders to outsource manufacturing to China. Walker admits several times in this interview that the US is now vulnerable because it has become too dependent on China. Carlson keeps asking him if he, Walker, regrets having advised Americans to send so much of our manufacturing to China. Walker will not admit that he was wrong. It’s really something: Walker says flat-out that it was a mistake, but he won’t concede that he made any errors in judgment. He sticks with the mistakes were made defense, and adds to that a version of everybody was doing it at the time.

As Carlson points out in the exchange, that’s true: almost all the experts at the time (the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s) really were saying that globalization was a great idea, and that US corporations should take advantage of cheap overseas labor. Peter Walker is telling the truth. And this wasn’t just a Republican thing; the Clinton-era Democrats were big globalists too. Our entire expert class promoted this stuff, signed it into law and policy, and executed it. Only marginal figures like Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader, widely regarded by the mainstream as fringe weirdoes, warned that it would come back to bite us. And now look.

Where else in the mainstream media, aside from Carlson’s show, are you going to see a TV journalist laying into the Davos Men who built the system? Where else are you going to see the experts shown up like this, and made to own up to their own mistakes? Carlson is doing a great public service.

Look, don’t get me wrong: nothing justifies Trump’s crackpot daily digressions. He’s a lunatic. But let us not assume that the experts are always right, or always have the public’s interest foremost to mind in their policy recommendations. Nobody — well, almost nobody — is going to inject Clorox into their veins, or huff Lysol, because our dingbat president wondered aloud if it might cure coronavirus. But this nation spent a generation putting itself at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party on the basis of sober, thoughtful advice from experts, Republican and Democratic, who believed globalization was the way of the future. I don’t believe that these experts were necessarily malicious, or advised what they advised in bad faith. But they were the best and the brightest, and our leaders followed their recommendations. We are in a world of trouble now because of it.

UPDATE: Well, I was wrong about “almost nobody” considering Lysol huffing etc.:

NEW: Maryland sends out emergency alert after receiving more than 100 calls on consuming disinfectant, governor's office says. https://t.co/5X210PxiN9

— ABC News (@ABC) April 24, 2020

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The Germs That Destroyed An Empire

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the global economy to a halt. The geopolitical upheavals yet to come will dramatically change world history, in unpredictable ways. The United States is only three months into its struggle with coronavirus, and is experiencing an Icarus-like plummet from the economic heights. The tiny coronavirus will ravage the nations, and may even cause empires to fall.

We have been here before. In his 2017 book The Fate Of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Oklahoma University historian Kyle Harper examined the roles that climate instability and plague played in weakening the Roman Empire. The fate of Rome reveals an eternal truth: that not even the greatest concentration of wealth and power in the world can infallibly protect a nation from Nature. I spoke to Prof. Harper by phone yesterday from his home in Oklahoma:

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RD: You open your book with ceremonies in Rome, in the year 400. The emperor and his consul have arrived in the imperial city, to much public fanfare and ritual celebrating the greatness of the Roman Empire. Ten years later, the city of Rome was sacked by barbarians; by the end of the century, the Western Empire was gone. “The Fate of Rome” explores the role the natural world played in Rome’s decline and fall. Would you summarize your argument?

KH: It’s in the simplest terms, that the natural environment, including the physical climate and biological environment, played an important role in what we normally refer to as the fall of the roman empire. To me, it’s both a political and economic transformation that occurs over the course of several centuries.

You start in the middle of the 2nd century, Rome is the biggest empire in the world, one in every four people in the world lived in the Roman empire. It was poor by modern standards, of course, but by preindustrial standards, it was prosperous, and powerful. Flash forward five centuries, there is still a Roman state, but it controls maybe a quarter or a fifth of what it had controlled. There’s significant population decline, far less trade and economic specialization, and de-urbanization. The combination of state failure in most of the empire, and the economic decline, or collapse, and population decline, that’s what I mean by the fall of the Roman Empire.

When we look at that with fresh eyes, we can see that the natural environment played a big role. Every generation of historians looks at the past differently, because we see with the eyes of our own world, and because we have new evidence. It was true of Herodotus, and it was true of Edward Gibbon, who wrote the greatest treatment of the fall of Rome, and saw it through Enlightenment eyes. This gave him certain insights, but also gave him certain prejudices. In our time, we know so much more about the germs the Romans had, and periods of climate instability. We can see things that we couldn’t see as recently as ten years ago.

The climate changes for natural reasons, as well as for now human-caused ones – nobody who studies climate change denies that climate changes for natural reasons too. We historians have learned a lot about climate in the past. Ice cores, tree rings, and all sorts of paleoclimate data from periods when you don’t have pressure and temperature and humidity records, are used to piece together a puzzle. During the period when the Roman Empire was growing, the climate was very stable and very favorable for agriculture in the Mediterranean, which was the economic basis of the Roman economy.

And then, what’s come into much greater focus on the past few years is what is now called the Late Antique Little Ice Age. From the 530s, it gets much cooler across the entire northern hemisphere. It was caused by volcanic eruptions. It plunged the climate system into a new period. That was bad in the immediate term, but also in slower, longer term ways, for the agricultural economy.

Health in the Roman Empire was bad, and then it got worse, and still worse. You can divide human history into two periods if you want: before 100 years ago, when the leading cause of death was infectious disease, and the time since then, when infectious disease has been exceeded as a cause of death by cancer, heart disease and other causes. Cert in the Roman Empire infectious diseases would have been the leading cause of death. Life at the best of times was short and precarious. Life expectancy at birth was in the twenties. People died from a range of diseases – malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, and so forth. There is evidence that the Romans were particularly unhealthy, even by premodern standards. The Romans were short, which could be caused by a lack of nutrition, but I think it can be argued that in a dense urban environment without antibiotics, the population is highly conducive to parasites.

Then boom, Rome suffered a series of really shocking pandemic events. The first of these is in 160s AD, the Antonine Plague. We don’t know with certainty what caused it, but the leading suspect is smallpox. It was tremendously disruptive to the Roman population. Then in the middle of the 3rd century there was a shadowy plague, the Plague of Cyprian, named after the Christian bishop of Carthage, whose writings are the main source of our knowledge of the disease. We don’t know a lot about it, but we do know that it coincided with a period of really great crisis for the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire should have fallen apart in the middle of the 3rd century.

Then there’s a little bit of a lull, until the biggest bang of them all, the Justinianic Plague, which started in the 540s, under the rule of the late Roman Emperor Justinian. It is the worst biological event, not only in the Roman Empire, but probably all of human civilization to that point. We now know for sure what it was, the same bacterium [Yersinia pestis] that brought about the Black Death. It spread amazingly quickly over Roman trade and road networks. It killed, I think, as much as half the population, like the Black Death, in parts of the empire. It recurs every ten years or so, in various parts of the empire. It provides a kind of bookend to this entire period.

It’s impossible to read your work and not think about how the American Empire in this time of pandemic. The very thing that made us so rich and powerful – a global trading system that we have dominated – also has made us more vulnerable to plague. And, the relative mastery of nature by science and technology has given us moderns a false sense of security. What are the similarities between America today and Rome then that stand out most to you?

History gives us perspective on these kinds of events. Sometimes it means similarities, sometimes differences. Sometimes you can only see the pattern when you zoom out. I do think there are patterns that can help us have perspective on the Covid-19 pandemic. I really see it as emerging at this point of tremendous pressure between two countervailing tendencies over very long sweep of history. We encourage the emergence of new diseases as we expand in numbers, and are more interconnected and interdependent. All of that, when you look at it from perspective of a pathogen, is quite appealing.

I think that there are definitely similarities here with what happened in the Roman world, because we’re part of a continuous history of population growth and globalization. The ancient plagues were new pathogens introduced by the Roman Empire over global trading networks. The Romans really had an early form of globalization. For example, it’s during the High Roman Empire that the Romans and the Chinese become aware of each other. The Romans were part of a massive trading network over the Silk Road and over the Indian Ocean. Their consumer culture and their early capitalism creates this enormous market. Where goods and people go, germs go too. Covid-19 is only the latest example.

But the big difference [between Rome and us] is our science, and the whole medical apparatus, has freed us from the burden of infectious disease, up to a point. I’m talking about the developed world, though in much of the undeveloped world, there is still a big problem of infectious disease. But to grow up in a place like the United States is to be largely free from fear of infectious disease. Our daily routine is marked by an almost constant taking-away of the harm from pathogens. Even without thinking about it, we’re surrounded by all this technology and culture that insulates us from disease. That works, until it doesn’t. We certainly still have vulnerabilities. Covid hits all of them. We couldn’t predict when, precisely, this was going to happen, but it was predictable that at some point, a new, highly contagious respiratory virus was going to happen.

But is it helpful to compare these two periods – America under the Covid plague, and the plagues that struck the Late Roman Empire?

These worlds are so different. As a humanistic pursuit you want to understand how other humans have grappled with this. If anything, we learn more about the past from the present, as opposed to the present from the past. You can read these [ancient] sources talking about their fear and trauma, with a deeper sense of what that was like.

But it’s harder to do the opposite. It’s very hard to import lessons from history. You can see from history that these events are often moments of great cultural change, but that’s very complex and hard to understand. In the middle of the 3rd century crisis, of which the plague of Cyprian was one part, it was a moment that galvanizes really deep change, in ways we don’t have the sources to follow entirely. It’s down to the deepest elements of the human psyche that are hard to fathom. Paganism doesn’t die, or decline, but it does sputter. Even without the presence of Christianity, there was bound to be big changes in the spiritual life of the Roman world. The emperor Aurelian brought in the worship of the sun god, Sol Invictus. That’s a very weird thing to do. Also, we saw the rise of the Christian church in the later third century. I’ve been increasingly convinced that by the time Constantine converts [in 312], most people aren’t Christians, but a significant number are.

As the empire crumbles, and civil life begins to change, people’s relationship with the gods, and ideas about the gods, begin to change.

You write about Pope Gregory the Great, who served as pope from 590 to 604, as a key figure in post-imperial Roman West. He came to power amid the Justinianic Plague. Why was he so important?

The Justinianic Plague was a major event in the Latin West. What’s amazing is we didn’t know that for sure until a year or two ago. Even in my book, I was trying to build out an argument based on very limited evidence. It used to be called the Dark Ages because it’s hard to see into these centuries. We don’t have the richness of evidentiary documents. Just in the last few years DNA evidence has been increasingly acquired that shows the Justinianic Plague reached all the way to the far west, to Britain.

The plague struck a Western world that was already quite fragmented, particularly north of the Alps. Italy was still very much a part of the Mediterranean Roman world. Someone like Gregory the Great grew up in that world. Gregory was born around the time of the first plague, and grew up in a world where the plague came back frequently. It’s likely that his immediate predecessor died of the plague. Someone like Gregory was nevertheless a late Roman person. He spent a lot of time at Constantinople, and knew the Greek East. But he would also look into the post-Roman world. The famous episode of missionizing Anglo-Saxon Britain is a story of a Roman pope sending out missionaries to a formerly Roman world.

His entire papacy takes place against a background of great environmental stress and change. You can read his letters and see this. In his view, it all presaged the Last Judgment. These Christians thought the plagues were warnings from God telling them that the Last Judgment was imminent, and they should prepare for that. His leadership was extraordinary in the city of Rome. Without intending it, and in terms that he would never put it, he was sketching a first draft of what a medieval papacy would look like. It’s not a coincidence that they would later look back to Gregory as the first kind of medieval pope.

You write about how much it meant to the plague-stricken city of Rome that their bishop, the Pope, led penitential processions around the city to ask God to deliver them from plague. Why was this important?

These were very authentic intercessory prayers meant to mobilize an entire community to a change of heart, to repentance. He thought that was the medicine called for. It would certainly have galvanized the energy of the community. Gregory didn’t invent these kinds of rituals himself, but they were still fairly new. He was inventing a model of how to behave in this kind of crisis. What does a leader do? Gregory was very visible.

The apocalyptic mood of the era was not just confined to religious figures, you write, but was general throughout Roman society. “the sense of impending doom was not a weight around the neck; it was more like a hidden map, a way of orienting motion in confused times.” What do you mean?

What we have are a number of texts, mostly by bishops, that present events in the world around them in apocalyptic terms. But this was widely shared. Sometimes they are in inscriptions by lay people, or show up in cultural practices. It’s easy for us to think about Christians back then being apocalyptic in the sense that they were desperate, or giving up because the world was about to end. I don’t think that’s how it was. For them, it was a positive program. This life was always meant to be transitory, and just part of a larger story. What was important to the Christians was to orient one’s life towards the larger story, the cosmic story, the story of eternity. They did live in this world, experience pain, and loved others. But the Christians of that time were called to see the story of this life as just one of the stories in which they lived. The hidden map was this larger picture.

What spiritual reverberations do you predict will emerge from the coronavirus panic? What are you keeping an eye on now?

Historians are terrible futurists. It’s a hard question. I’m an optimist by nature, but all this has been dispiriting to watch. I have been overwhelmingly impressed by the ways in which a traumatic event like this is shaped and configured by the pathologies we have. This is a very disheartening time for our country. We are very dysfunctional right now. That didn’t cause the pandemic, but the pandemic seems to eat away at what are already our vulnerabilities. The cultural canyon between different parts of American society. The vast inequality that seems hopeless – the two Americas. This crisis has painfully exacerbated all of those. The lack of empathy and graciousness all around is very dispiriting. I’m a bit of a pessimist in the short term. We will eventually get this virus under control. But do I think we will learn from it in the short term, and that it will cause us to heal as a country, turn away from consumerism, degradation of the environment, and all the problems we have? I can’t say that I see that changing in the short term.

Let’s end with a personal question: as a historian of the ancient world, and as a believing Christian, where do you find hope in this pandemic?

We just have to do what we are called to do in good times and in bad. You just try in the little ways that you can to love everyone around you all the time. This just gives Christians a chance to exhibit that in little ways. That’s always a ground for hope. You get different chances in life to be given the gift of trying to love others. I don’t think that’s profound theology, but it’s the truth.

—

Kyle Harper’s book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, was published by Princeton University Press in 2017.

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SSPX Scandal: Michael Gonzalez’s Story

Last autumn, Emma Green of The Atlantic published a report about St. Marys, Kansas, a Catholic village dominated by priests and lay members of the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist Catholic religious order that broke away from the Catholic Church over Vatican II. Green wrote:

Throughout American history, religious groups have walled themselves off from the rhythms and mores of society. St. Marys isn’t nearly as cut off from modern life as, say, the Amish communities that still abjure all modern technology, be it tractor or cellphone. Residents watch prestige television on Hulu and catch Sunday-afternoon football games; moms drive to Topeka to shop at Sam’s Club. Yet hints of the town’s utopian project are everywhere. On a recent afternoon, I visited the general store, where polite teens played bluegrass music beside rows of dried goods. Women in long, modest skirts loaded vans that had enough seats to accommodate eight or nine kids—unlike most American Catholics, SSPX members abide by the Vatican’s prohibition on birth control. At housewarming parties and potluck dinners, children huddle around pianos for sing-alongs.

In their four decades in St. Marys, the followers of SSPX have more than doubled the town’s size. Even with six Masses on Sundays, parishioners fill the Society’s chapel to capacity; overflow services are held in the gym of the Society’s academy, which inhabits an imposing campus built by the Jesuit missionaries who called St. Marys home in the 19th century. The school is constantly running out of classroom space. The parish rector, Father Patrick Rutledge, has to scramble each summer to accommodate rising enrollment. Real estate sells at price points closer to those of Kansas’s big cities than of its other small towns.

She also connected St. Marys to the Benedict Option:

Dreher addressed his book to fellow conservative Christians, but in calling for a strategic retreat from society, he tapped into an impulse felt by a range of groups in America. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C., contemporary followers of Marcus Garvey, the 20th-century Pan-African activist and thinker, have built infrastructure designed to free black people from systemic oppression: community gardens to provide food in neighborhoods devoid of grocery stores, and Afrocentric schools that teach black pride. Young leftist Jews skeptical of assimilation have founded a number of Yiddish-speaking farms in upstate New York, in an effort to preserve their ethnic heritage as well as Judaism’s agrarian tradition. Environmentalists have established sustainable settlements in rural Virginia, which serve as both utopian experiments in low-impact living and shelters for the climate disasters ahead.

These groups ostensibly have little in common, but they share a sense that living according to their beliefs while continuing to participate in mainstream American life is not possible. They have elected to undertake what might be termed cultural secession. Katherine Dugan, an assistant professor of religion at Springfield College, in Massachusetts, who studies Catholicism in the U.S., describes the desire for protected, set-apart communities as “a natural American response to not liking what the cultural context is.”

It made perfect sense that she did that. St. Marys sounds like exactly the kind of place you would expect from a Catholic trad Benedict Option. A number of readers asked me why I wasn’t commenting on Green’s piece. I couldn’t tell you at the time. Now I can.

When Green’s report appeared, I had just met a man named Kurt Chione at a Ben Op conference. Chione told me he used to be part of the St. Marys community, and taught at the school. He told me that he had been driven out after a student confided to him back in the late 1980s that he had been molested by an SSPX priest, and he (Chione) went to the local police with the story. Nothing was done for the boy, and Chione was fired. The boy later committed suicide. Days before I met him by happenstance at a hotel breakfast bar, Chione said he had been interviewed by agents of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who were looking into the case, and came across Chione’s name as someone who tried to help the boy.

I had no reason to disbelieve Chione, but was also not in a position to do any kind of real investigative work to see if Chione’s allegations had merit. But they were substantive enough, and fit an all too familiar pattern, that I could not in good faith comment on Emma Green’s story. With Chione’s permission, I sent the information I had from him to several journalists for both secular and Catholic publications. I have no idea what, if anything, they did with it.

Now Christine Niles of Church Militant, a muckraking conservative Catholic web journal, has broken the story, under the headline, “SSPX: Sympathetic To Perverts.” Church Militant has a take-no-prisoners attitude toward sex abuse in the clergy — and now, they’ve turned their cannons on the SSPX. This is no doubt going to upset a significant number of Church Militant‘s readers, which are strongly on the Catholic Church’s right flank.

According to Niles’s story, the boy Kurt Chione tried to help was named Michael Gonzalez. He killed himself in the year 2000. Most of what Chione told me (except for the name of the boy, and his alleged assailant) he seems to have shared with Niles.

Niles has far more information about sex abuse allegations against SSPX priests and affiliated laity, and publishes it, quoting whistleblowers and others. Let me be clear: I do not know if these stories are true, and am not claiming that they are. I link to it because SSPX takes the report seriously enough to issue a sharp response (more on which in a moment), and because I talked at some length with Kurt Chione about all this last fall, and tried to interest other journalists in checking out his story. While offering here no final judgement on the substance of Niles’s reporting, it does seem clear that she has brought to light some troubling information that cannot be easily dismissed. I hope other journalists will finally get interested in what happened in St. Marys, and within the culture of the SSPX. Michael Gonzalez and his family deserve justice.

Here’s one strange twist in the story. In the bit below, “Jassy” is Jassy Jacas, a longtime parishioner at St. Marys, who in 2015 informed SSPX officials that Father Pierre Duverger had behaved inappropriately with her in the confessional, and had allegedly sexually assaulted a different woman. Jacas claims she got the runaround, and was told to stay quiet about Father Duverger, for the good of the SSPX:

The SSPX was thrown into a panic after Church Militant contacted them with a query about Fr. Duverger.

In their eventual email response, they didn’t realize — until it was too late — that they had accidentally included in the email thread a series of behind-the-scenes emails among leadership strategizing about how to respond to Church Militant. Their emails reveal an organization devoted more to protecting the institution than of concern for victims.

Most of the strategizing came from James Vogel, communications director for the U.S. district for the SSPX. He’s editor-in-chief of Angelus Press, the official publisher of the SSPX.

In an email dated February 24, 2020, Vogel acknowledges to others in the thread — again unaware that Church Militant would see the email — the ugly history of sex abuse in the SSPX: “We cannot issue a blanket denunciation of the accusers and say he [Duverger] is innocent of everything. Church Militant has already dug into some of our ugly cases in France; what if they find out the history here?”

He goes on to say, “We can admit he’s been placed under restrictions, but I still think MOST people will find it bizarre he is allowed to teach/run a school under the circumstances.”

After some back and forth with Fr. Wegner, Wegner writes, “Here is it not about mollifying Church Militant. If we go down that road they will judge us as Jassy does. For them, as for Jassy, the only proper outcome would be to have him in a religious prison.”

Making clear their concern is to stem further inquiry, he goes on to ask, “But what is the right middle between saying pretty much nothing and soothing them?”

Vogel responds, “It is an interesting strategy, but it is a kind of deflection … which might not be bad as an interim decision! … Whatever we say or decide: They will respond. … It will not end with Fr. Duverger; Jassy’s claims and contacts will be a veritable ‘gold mine’ for them.”

After all this behind-the-scenes strategizing, the SSPX chose the way of silence, issuing Church Militant a curt response, Fr. Wegner claiming he could not discuss the matter and instead referring us to SSPX attorneys. When Church Militant contacted the attorneys, they also refused to talk.

Astonishing. Today, SSPX published online a formal response, denouncing the Church Militant article as “yellow journalism.” Excerpt:

Through Church Militant’s story, it wishes to expose a culture of coverup in the SSPX. Instead, it exposed its own gross lack of ethics when it took private internal correspondence, which was accidentally sent to it and quoted from it out of context. Even so, as the quoted passages make clear, the discussion did not center on covering up any public wrongdoing but focused instead on how best to respond to Church Militant’s inquiries.

Well, no, the quoted passages do not make that clear, at least not to me. There was nothing at all unethical in Church Militant quoting that email inadvertently forwarded to it, especially because the information in the e-mail was directly about the SSPX’s attempt to keep Church Militant from learning damaging information about its operations. Still, Church Militant should reveal the entire e-mail, so that its readers can decide whether or not CM quoted the e-mail out of context to make SSPX look bad. If it doesn’t, there is nothing preventing SSPX from doing so, to prove its claim here.

More from SSPX:

It is well-known that Church Militant is not a serious journalistic enterprise but a repository of sensationalized stories, hit pieces, and videos featuring the opinions of its controversial founder, Michael Voris. Further, Church Militant has repeatedly used the SSPX’s name to generate web-clicks and revenue while hoping to stoke the fires of public controversy by baiting it into a war of words. Prudence dictates caution when dealing with a tabloid, and we will not be so baited.

The SSPX is committed to full transparency in all of these cases. We will be releasing detailed responses to every allegation.

I will be looking forward to those responses. SSPX is correct that Church Militant is a muckraking tabloid, but that doesn’t mean that they are wrong here. It only means that the reader should approach its claims carefully. But sometimes, it takes muckrakers to expose the truth. As Ross Douthat wrote in 2018:

The first time I ever heard the truth about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., finally exposed as a sexual predator years into his retirement, I thought I was listening to a paranoiac rant.

It was the early 2000s, I was attending some earnest panel on religion, and I was accosted by a type who haunts such events — gaunt, intense, with a litany of esoteric grievances. He was a traditionalist Catholic, a figure from the church’s fringes, and he had a lot to say, as I tried to disentangle from him, about corruption in the Catholic clergy. The scandals in Boston had broken, so some of what he said was familiar, but he kept going, into a rant about Cardinal McCarrick: Did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him? Invites them to his beach house, gets in bed with them …

At this I gave him the brushoff that you give the monomaniacal and slipped out.

That was before I realized that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the Catholic Church, you had to listen to the extreme-seeming types, traditionalists and radicals, because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot. (This lesson has application well beyond Catholicism.)

In truth, I hope SSPX can credibly knock down every one of Church Militant‘s allegations, because stories of sexual abuse and cover up by clergy are sins that cry out to heaven for justice. CM’s report includes an account of a father from the St. Marys community who is now in prison for raping his own children:

In St. Mary’s, Kansas, for example, just this year, two SSPX parishioners — Dean Johnson and Peter Palmeri — have been jailed for serious sex crimes against children, the latter a father who raped his own children — while three SSPX priests who had certain knowledge of his deeds refused to report him to authorities.

Palmeri was arrested and charged last year on multiple counts of rape and child sex assault. He’s now in prison. He’s father to a large family that are longtime parishioners of the local SSPX chapel and worked at St. Mary’s Academy.

According to one eyewitness, not one, not two, but three SSPX priests knew of his abuse and said nothing, even ordering him to stay quiet.

That man goes on the record with Christine Niles, using his name. This is not an anonymous informer. It is a man who was once engaged to a daughter of Peter Palmeri, and a victim of his. That witness, Kyle White, names three SSPX priests with whom he says he had personal contact about Palmeri, and who told him to stay quiet.

Is that charge true? If so, those priests deserve to be held responsible for this morally indefensible behavior. This didn’t allegedly happen in the distant past, but just a few years ago. Those poor Palmeri children, my God.

I am no longer a Catholic, but I am generally quite sympathetic to trads. My longtime readers know this, which is why they were understandably surprised that I did not comment on Emma Green’s favorable story about the SSPX village. I hope Emma Green will revisit her St. Marys story in light of these new allegations. Were I a Catholic trad, I would have been strongly tempted to move to St. Marys, based on Green’s sympathetic and beautifully written piece. And now?

Truth is the most important thing. A society built on lies and cover-ups deserves to fall, so it can rebuild on the foundation of truth. This is not the first time SSPX has been accused of harboring sex abusers. In 2017, a Swedish documentary hit the society pretty hard on this front. If what Christine Niles and her sources say happened really did happen, then it needs to come out. All of it. Everything. The moral and spiritual credibility of the SSPX is on the line here. It especially needs to come out because there are people who even at this late date, hold the belief that sex abuse is a problem of liberal churches, and liberal theology. In fact, theological orthodoxy is no guarantee of moral decency.

 

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