Rod Dreher's Blog, page 202

The Diversity Commissariat Announces

An academic reader writes:

It’s another day, another initiative when you have full-time diversity staff apparently. Posted to all faculty today, we will apparently now have trained “inclusion advocates” on all search committees for full-time positions (!), who will “provide a statement reviewing the search process, and assuring full inclusive practices were implemented… or acknowledging concerns”. So in other words, they’re ideological policemen to oversee the very important process of who become new teaching faculty at the college, probably especially targeted at the skilled trades and math and science departments that have so unreasonably persisted in just trying to hire the best person for the job with little concern for what identity boxes they checked off. There is a 100% chance this initiative increases strife on what have historically been quite amicable hiring committees. Should at least be interesting to see what gets tucked into “full inclusive practices”. Would love to know exactly how the search committees we already have are somehow supposed to be failing at inclusion. Remarkable.

The attachment reads:

Become an Inclusion Advocate!

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion is looking for employees willing to serve as “Inclusion Advocates.” These individuals will serve in a formal role on search committees, with specific responsibilities designed to promote inclusive hiring practices.

At a minimum, and in consultation with the search committee chair, Human Resources, and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, an Inclusion Advocate will:

Serve on search committees for all full-time positions.

In most cases, be selected from outside the hiring department. A closely related department, even if within the same school or division, is encouraged.

Review and approve recruitment plans and job advertisements prior to the beginning of a search.

Review availability and application pool data and, if necessary, suggest additional recruitment options and/or changes to the recruitment plan and/or search timeline.

Provide a statement reviewing the search process, and assuring full inclusive practices were implemented during the search, and/or acknowledging concerns related to the search prior to the final hire being approved.

We are looking for faculty and staff participants who are deeply committed to equity and diversity on campus, possess good listening skills and empathy, and are eager to promote policies and best practices that retain and recruit the strongest LCC workforce possible.

Interested? Sign up today for the upcoming two-day training session: 2-4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 14, and 10 a.m.-noon Tuesday, Oct. 15, in the Centre for Engaged Inclusion.

You must complete both sessions to be eligible to serve. Refreshments are included. At the conclusion of the second session, you can decide whether to have your name included on the list of advocates willing to be invited to serve in this role.

“Centre for Engaged Inclusion.” It sounds like a gynecological euphemism. Doctor, the patient is suffering from engaged enclusion. This fraudulent system cannot collapse fast enough.

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China: The Techno-Totalitarian Leviathan

More American capitalist kowtowing to Beijing:

Apple has removed from its App Store a smartphone app used by Hong Kong pro-democracy activists to crowdsource the location of protesters and police, after Chinese state media suggested the tech giant was aiding “rioters.”

Apple initially rejected the app last week, saying that it “encourages an activity that is not legal,” and allows users to “evade law enforcement,” according to its developers.

So, what do you think? Do you believe that American tech companies — and American companies in general — will risk the immense revenue they get from the Chinese market to stand up for liberal democratic values? Or will they capitulate, and lie to themselves and to the public about what they’re doing. Here’s Alan Jacobs with a comment.Excerpt:

I thought this day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Beijing expected it to come so soon either: the Chinese authorities were playing a long game, biding their time and building their power, and I do not think they were relishing an immediate confrontation with Western capitalism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Beijing clearly perceives these protests as an existential threat, and have decided that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the center of the table … and the capitalists immediately folded like a Chinese-made lawn chair.

NBA officials are bowing and scraping to Beijing and begging forgiveness while trying to tell Americans that they’re not really apologizing. (Adam Silver says he’s not apologizing for Daryl Morey’s exercise of free speech, but then what is he apologizing for?) ESPN/Disney is muzzling its employees. Apple is banning apps that Beijing wants banned, for whatever reason.

Jacobs says that it would take Apple a very long time to rebuild its supply chain outside of China. It’s clear that if Beijing says, “Jump,” Apple will say, “How high?” All these American capitalists are bullshi**ers. You have to see the quote Jacobs has from a former NBA league president about money and “social responsibility” — and you have to read the questions Jacobs poses about a conflict these woke weaklings are likely to face. His entire post is here. 

The book to read right now — the book that every American should read, without delay — is We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China’s Surveillance State, by the German journalist Kai Strittmatter. I finished it this morning, and let me tell you, reading it is something close to a red-pill experience. I thought I had a pretty good handle on how extensive China’s surveillance state was. I was wrong. It’s much more extensive than I realized. And what’s more, reading this book made me realize that the dystopian Western future I’ve been thinking about all year — “soft totalitarianism” is the phrase I use — is not speculative science fiction. It already exists in China. We have the technology to institute it here in America. What we lack — for now — is the will. That could easily change. The system is so entrenched in China that I can’t imagine how anybody could resist it. It is not yet in place here. We can’t even begin to act against it happening here until we understand what is possible.

Kai Strittmatter (henceforth, KS) writes about how China has disproven one dogmatic belief of the Internet theorists: that the Internet cannot be controlled. Of course it can be. If the State wants to close off a country to the rest of the world, it can do it. If it wants to control the Internet within its own borders, that is also possible. What China is showing now is that it will exercise its economic soft power to control the discourse in other countries.

Take a look at this passage:

In a post on the messaging service WeChat (Weixin) – swiftly deleted – the sociologist Sun Liping from Beijing’s Tsinghua University identified three techniques for ‘mind control’. One central technique is the control of news sources: ‘The meal you cook can never be better than the rice you cook it with.’ The system successfully blocks information from outside and replaces it with ‘patriotic education’. Hence, for example, the ubiquitous narrative in which China’s ‘special national circumstances’ have made the country into a unique place unlike anywhere else in the world, and which requires the Party to rule in the precise way China’s subjects are currently experiencing. Secondly, the system starts building the parameters for your thought when you’re very young, changing the way in which you ask questions and steering you into predetermined channels. Once you have swallowed and internalised what the Party has fed you, says Sun Liping, you can’t even ask certain questions: they lie outside your realm of experience and powers of imagination. And thirdly, the system inspires the kind of fear that suppresses awkward questions: ‘If you don’t swallow all this, you’ll be punished.’

The Chinese Communist Party is doing this in China, using the Internet. You don’t have to have much imagination to see how this same kind of thing is possible in the US. This does not require a police state. What if Google and other key sources of online information stopped allowing people to access sources of information that contradicted whatever Silicon Valley had decided was the Official Line? This “safe space” mentality that generations of American schoolchildren — and in particular those who grow up to attend elite US universities — have been schooled in changes what they are willing to tolerate, and the questions they allow themselves to ask. And cancel culture shows what happens to you when you dissent.

The Internet never forgets. The information about your thoughtcrimes is stored away somewhere, and will be forever. In China, they are open about what they do. In the US, it’s creeping up on us.

In China, says KS, people don’t really object to this control:

As long as social controls and intimidation go hand in hand with material rewards, and people are encouraged into consumerism. As long as they have the feeling that they’re enjoying more freedom than ever before.

This is what we too are becoming. Imagine trying to convince someone a decade ago to put into their homes a speaker that records their conversations and shares them with a major corporation. People would think you were crazy. Well, guess what: that’s what smart speakers do, but people accept them because they’re fun, and they offer the consumer more comfort and “freedom.” As of February 2019, 66 million smart speakers had been sold in the US. This is the new normal. And as Shoshanna Zuboff has documented in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Americans are becoming accustomed to having companies surveil them, because that’s just what you do. Your “smart” appliances watch what you do, and send the data back to the company, which uses that data to sell you more things. Nobody cares anymore. You feel powerless in front of it. In China, that’s because the police state mandates it. In our case, the government isn’t pushing this; it’s big business, and we’re fine with that. Chinese people may be more culturally accustomed to an authoritarian regime, because that’s all they’ve known. Here, our individualism and consumerism renders us prostrate before the demands of capitalism.

Check this out:

He spoke of the nationalistic and militaristic education system that the Party had rolled out across the country in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which was now being developed further under Xi Jinping. It was having the desired effect, the painter said. ‘People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost. The brainwashing starts in nursery school. It was different for us. They called us a lost generation because schools and colleges were closed back then, and many of us were denied an education. But in reality we were probably the lucky ones. We fell through the cracks. The brainwashing didn’t get us. Mao was dead, and everyone was desperate for China to open up, for reform, freedom.’

David tells me that he sometimes gives them English books to read in his lessons, especially works of history, and sometimes articles from the New York Times. ‘But they look at me helplessly. Their thinking isn’t joined up any more, they don’t have any background knowledge.’ This is a generation who with just a few more clicks could access all the information in the world. But they don’t do it. They don’t want to.

‘My students say they haven’t got time. They’re distracted by a thousand other things,’ says David. ‘And although I’m only ten years older than them, they don’t understand me. They live in a completely differentworld. They’ve been perfectly manipulated by their education and the Party’s propaganda: my students devote their lives to consumerism and ignore everything else. They ignore reality; it’s been made easy for them.’

More:

Censorship doesn’t just work because the regime makes it difficult to access free information: ‘Rather, it fosters an environment in which citizens do not demand such information in the first place’.

Do I really have to explain how our own distracted youth, who have been given no sense of history by this culture, and no strong religion, and therefore no ground on which to stand outside the consumerist culture and judge it, are just as vulnerable? We don’t see it because we don’t live in a police state. That’s what’s so unnerving about KS’s book: everything that has been perfected in China already exists here, in a rougher version.

China is much farther along in deploying artificial intelligence and related technologies for the sake of social control. In China, facial recognition software is so advanced that people use their faces to pay for things all the time. It makes life so secure and convenient. But:

The cameras can do more: they report when a face turns up at a particular place – a bus stop, for instance – with suspicious frequency. ‘That could be a pickpocket,’ says Xie. At SenseTime, a few blocks away, they also demonstrate how the cameras analyse crowds. The system can tell when a lot of people are gathering, says the company’s spokeswoman Yuan Wei. And when a lot of people are about to gather. The algorithm can also see when a lot of people are moving in one direction, while a single individual is going against the flow. ‘The system then identifies this person as abnormal,’ says Yuan Wei. And it sounds the alarm.

When he says “the system” identifies a person as abnormal, he means that the machine does it. It doesn’t require a human being to have eyes on the potential dissident. AI takes care of it for you.

The cost of consumer convenience:

Two apps, Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay, have split the market for cashless payments between them – and the Chinese love them. An entire population has switched to mobile payment in record time. Hardly anyone uses debit or credit cards any longer – and nobody carries cash. In 2017, the Chinese used their phones to make 17 billion US dollars’ worth of transactions. That year, over 60 per cent of all cashless transactions worldwide took place in China. I could pay with WeChat in the snack bar in my side-street, the greengrocer’s, the hairdresser, and use it to buy noodle soup for the equivalent of £1.30. Eventually, people started giving me funny looks when I reached into my trouser pocket for cash. In Beijing, even the beggars now use barcodes, which passers-by can scan using WeChat to make their small donation.

At a courthouse in the Haidan district of Beijing, you can use WeChat to submit files and pay fees. The identity of the person submitting is confirmed via facial recognition.105 And in December 2017 the state press announced pilot projects in 26 cities to test WeChat as a state-recognised, electronic social-security identification and ID card. It’s the dream of every lazy citizen. It’s also the dream of the surveillance state, which gets news of its citizens’ every move and every transaction delivered for free in real time.

It’s the dream of every lazy citizen. Good thing we Americans aren’t lazy, that we would rather live in a more difficult way, as long as it preserves our privacy and liberty. /sarcasm off

Behold, the future:

Middle School No.11 in Hangzhou drew enthusiastic attention from the press in 2018 when it had ‘eyes in the sky’ installed in every classroom: surveillance cameras with a continuous view of every student.113 ‘They are all-knowing eyes; nothing gets past them. As soon as someone nods off or starts daydreaming, he is captured on the spot, using facial recognition,’ said an article on Sina.com.

According to the article, the cameras not only capture how often during the eight-hour school day a student’s mind wanders; they also they also ‘analyse facial expression and mood – whether someone is happy, sad, annoyed or reluctant – and send the data straight to a terminal that analyses the student’s attitude to learning. The system really does have magic powers.’

The school has long since done away with the school card that students used to use for the canteen or the library. ‘Students scan their faces to get food, they scan their faces to buy things, and they scan their faces to borrow books.’ Big data and facial recognition, according to the report, are helping ‘students to study more efficiently.’

A student named Xiao Qian admits that he used to be a bit lazy in the lessons he didn’t enjoy as much: ‘You might close your eyes for a minute or read another school book under the desk.’ With the eyes in the sky, those days are gone: ‘Now you feel the gaze of a pair of mysterious eyes on you constantly, and no one dares to go off-task any longer.’

Here’s more:

In some districts you have to install a state-monitored GPS transmitter in your car, if you own one. You can only buy petrol once your face has been scanned at the petrol station and the system has declared you harmless. In every city, town and village, cameras follow your every move. If you’ve been identified as a potential troublemaker, then in some places the cameras will send an alert as soon as you stray more than 300 metres outside the ‘safe zone’ that has been designated for you. If you own a mobile phone, you must install the Jingwang (‘clean net’) app on it. This app has access to the content of your phone and, according to the government, is supposed to ‘prevent people from accessing terrorist information’. It detects all ‘damaging information’ and ‘illegal religious activity’ in the form of text messages, e-books, websites, images and videos, and automatically reports them to the authorities.

At the countless police checkpoints you have to pass through several times a day in this province, officers scan your face with their smartphones, then check your phone to see if you really have downloaded Jingwang. If you buy a kitchen knife, a QR-code assigned to you will be stamped on the blade at the point of sale.119 The authorities know how often you go to prayers, whether you have friends or relatives abroad, and whether you know anyone who has been to prison. All this is stored on your file, along with your finger prints, your blood group,scans of your iris and samples of your DNA, which the government takes at free health check-ups without informing you of what will happen to them. (The construction of the police force’s DNA database relies on technology provided by the American company Thermo Fisher, as the New York Times recently revealed.) The sum of all this information determines whether you are permitted to stay in hotels, rent a flat or get a job. Or whether you end up in one of the many re-education camps set up all over the province.

KS writes about how China is in some cases extending its Social Credit System mentality to foreigners. Want to do business in China? Better not do anything to offend the Chinese government. That factory you have in Shenzhen is nice; it would be a shame if something happened to it. The capacity and the will to monitor a person’s presence online and in social media exists in China. Under China’s system, if a Chinese citizen is connected socially with another citizen with a low social credit score, it will cause their own social credit score to go down. What if an American business executive puts a Facebook post up about a documentary about the Dalai Lama they saw, and liked. That will get them in trouble with China, if the Chinese are monitoring their account.

Think it won’t happen? Last year, a US employee of Marriott was fired after the Chinese raised hell over his having simply liked, from a Marriott Twitter account he was working,  a tweet by a Tibetan separatist group thanking Marriott for calling Tibet a country. The Chinese don’t allow Twitter in China, so no Chinese citizens (except those overseas) could have seen the tweet. Doesn’t matter. That’s how Beijing rolls. We have seen this week how much power the Chinese have over the NBA.

Finally, KS writes:

We are witnessing the return of totalitarianism in digital guise. The People’s Republic of China has always been a dictatorship. But it was only for a few years under Mao that it was a totalitarian state, which tried to creep into every last corner of its subjects’ brains, its eye watching over their bedrooms and their closest relationships. The new totalitarianism will be much more sophisticated than the versions that Mao and Stalin gave us, with undreamed-of possibilities for access and mind- control, now that we have all stored our minds in smartphones – now that we record every step we take and every thought we think digitally. Best of all, the new totalitarianism has the luxury – unimaginable in the past – of being able to dispense with terror as an everyday tool. It’s enough if the violence remains at a subliminal level, as an ever-present threat. In this way the new regime insinuates itself, quietly and imperceptibly at first, making citizens into its accomplices.

‘Wouldn’t it be the best of all worlds if, in a few decades, we didn’t have to talk anymore about the system and its rules?’ Zhao Ruying asked me. She is the department head in charge of implementing the Social Credit System in Shanghai. ‘We may reach the point where no one would even dare to think of committing a breach of trust, a point where no one would even consider hurting the community.’ She beamed with delight at the thought. ‘When we reach this point, our work will be done.’ Then the new man will have been born.

Please, take my advice and read We Have Been Harmonised. It’s important. I was pleased to see that Strittmatter, at the end, points out that everything he identifies as part of the techno-totalitarian present in China is already happening here in the West, in a more rudimentary way, usually connected with commerce, not the state. We have the freedom now to set clear limits, via the law, on what corporations, institutions, and the state can know about us through technological means. But we won’t even think about doing it if we keep sleepwalking, and mindlessly handing over our privacy to Big Data.

The portrait of China in We Have Been Harmonised has given me a big boost on my current book project, which is to interview people who lived through Soviet-style totalitarianism, and get advice from them about how to recognize and resist totalitarian means and the totalitarian mindset. In China, it’s almost certainly too late. The state already knows everything about you, and can stamp out any resistance before it has the ability to coalesce. The people raised in such a society won’t even think about liberty, because they will have been conditioned to be obedient — not out of fear, mostly, but because you will not be able to do anything in China without compromising yourself. Using the predictive powers of AI, the Chinese state will know that you might be about to do something “wrong” even before you become aware of it — and the state will intervene to stop you. This is not Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”; this is China today.

Will it be us tomorrow? It might well be. Again, read this book. There is no reason to believe that what happens in China will stay in China. As KS points out, the Chinese are already selling surveillance-government franchises to cities in Africa and Latin America. The Chinese Communist Party is making their entire country a “safe space,” and deploying the most advanced technology to make it happen. Mao could only have dreamed of what Xi has accomplished.

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White Fragility In Our Time

Clip of the Day: Oak Park, Ill. town trustee Susan Buchanan lambastes her colleagues for discussing updating the town’s diversity statement while being white. pic.twitter.com/CzBG2HqpYi

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 10, 2019

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From a local Chicago news report:

“Oak Park has a place for everybody,” said Trustee Susan Buchanan.

But a Monday night a discussion on rewriting the village’s diversity statement got heated over some specific words. Those words were: “We work to break down systems of oppression.”

“I hesitate to send the message to our police department that they are a system of oppression,” Moroney said in the meeting.

Moroney clearly frustrated Buchanan.

“You have been white from birth! Why are you arguing, what is a system of oppression? You have never experienced one!” Buchanan said.

Oak Park is 68 percent white, and has no minority people on its board of trustees. But it’s got a diversity statement! A super-woke one!

Surveys have shown that by far the wokest demographic are white liberals. This clip featuring a Chicago-area hysteric is a good example of that. Keep in mind that women are heavily overrepresented among elementary and secondary schoolteachers. Is there any wonder that public schools have become re-education camps for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity?

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Trump Fatigue

You know, I’m old enough to remember when Republicans in Congress called down fire and brimstone on the Obama administration for not cooperating with Congressional oversight in the Benghazi probe. Here’s a 2012 clip of Congressman Trey Gowdy blasting executive branch members at an oversight hearing. Gowdy has just joined Team Trump, to help Build The Stonewall.

This ought to be a big deal to conservatives: to protect the right of Congress to do oversight on the imperial executive. I don’t respect the administration’s contempt for Congress. We all know Adam Schiff gonna Adam Schiff, but Trump brought this entire mess onto himself, and he can’t bluster his way out of it.

People — including Republican voters — are getting fed up with it. These numbers are not moving in the way the president needs them to:

 

He is getting what he deserves with this query. I don’t know that he deserves to be impeached, but any president who carries on as he did should face a Congressional investigation. And he said what he did only one day after the Mueller Report’s release! Just so unbelievably cocky.

I just read what President Trump said about the wife of an American diplomat wanted in Britain in connection with a road accident that killed a British citizen. It’s disgusting, and shameful:

Donald Trump has defended the wife of a US diplomat who allegedly killed a British teenager in a car crash by saying it is hard to drive on the other side of the road.

Trump acknowledged that ‘a tragedy occurred’ and described suspect Anne Sacoolas – who he did not name – as ‘driving on the wrong side of the road,’ then suggested he had done the same too in the UK, where he has two golf courses.

‘Those are the opposite roads. That can happen,’ Trump said. ‘I won’t say it ever happened to me, but it did. When you get used to driving on our system and you’re all of a sudden on the other system, where you’re driving, it happens. You have to be careful.’

Trump on Wednesday publicly rebuffed a plea from Prime Minister Boris Johnson to waive diplomatic immunity for Sacoolas who is suspected of killing Harry Dunn, 19, and instead suggested the victim’s family meet her for ‘some healing’.

Dunn was killed when his motorbike crashed into a car on August 27 and Sacoolas, 42, who is married to a US intelligence official, fled to the US despite telling police she would not do so.

She is alleged to have killed a teenager with her bad driving. Trump doesn’t deny that. He just says that her diplomatic immunity should get her off. He won’t even send her back to be questioned by our closest ally. What an insult to the British. What a shameful moment for us Americans.

And now, we go to what Trump has done to the Kurds. Here is one of the US’s top Syria experts:

This is vomitous:

NEW: Asked about the Kurds, President Trump says they “didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy” and that they’re fighting for “their land.” pic.twitter.com/PbCb2wzm8T

— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) October 9, 2019

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From Fox News:

I just spoke to a distraught US Special Forces soldier who is among the 1000 or so US troops in Syria tonight who is serving alongside the SDF Kurdish forces. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever taken.

“I am ashamed for the first time in my career.”

— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) October 9, 2019

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Did you read the big Mark Bowden piece in The Atlantic based on his interview with generals? This part really stood out for me, in light of his Kurdish decision:

In the long run, however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy, uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F. Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and miscalculations led to a crushing international response.

Unpredictability becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a strategy that says, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And then somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue might be, before the president ever says anything, everybody should know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”

None of our military leaders knew he was going to do that then. None of the Congressional leadership knew. He just got off a phone call with Erdogan, and then made his move. Because the Kurds didn’t help us at Normandy, I guess.

I’m worn out with this guy. Once more, I’ll have to remind myself of what losing the White House is going to mean to the causes I care most about. But it’s starting to look like if he remains, and continues with this crackpot leadership style, he’s going to lose the White House anyway.

 

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Woke Capitalism In Your Face For DQSH

Health care giant Kaiser Permanente says if you don’t like Drag Queen Story Hour, “Too bad … because at Kaiser Permanente, we believe everybody deserves the right to thrive.”

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Satanism At The US Naval Academy

A reader affiliated with the US Naval Academy said that people there received this e-mail yesterday:

The reader said that e-mail set off a firestorm. A few minutes later, the Chief who authored that e-mail sent this follow-up:

(Readers, these were sent to me as screenshots. I can’t copy-and-paste in a more readable format. If you are having trouble reading it, the gist is that the Chief is a confessed Satanist, and is inviting others at the USNA to participate in a Satanic ritual.)

My source comments:

Obviously, the email raises more questions than it claims to answer. How can this chief claim no sponsorship or endorsement from the Satanic Temple, even as he admits he’s a member? He claims not to conduct or promote symbolic evil, when that’s what Satan is in literature (and he’s the closest thing to evil incarnate in the real world). The website he links to talks about Black Masses and “unbaptisms,” but they don’t engage in ritual sacrifice. The list goes on.

This source said that the command chaplain, a Catholic priest, had no idea any of this was going on, and is furious. The Satanists did not go through proper channels, it appears, so this event might not happen.

Given all this, I thought this story couldn’t possibly get any more interesting, but then something else happened that made me decide to write you. This afternoon, a midshipman who is very involved in one of the Protestant organizations on the Yard wrote an open letter to leaders of other Christian organizations. I’ve reproduced it here, with his name redacted:

(Disclaimer: My opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, the Naval Academy, or any government institution. The opinions expressed here are solely my own and in my personal capacity as a Christian.)

Open Letter to Christians on the Yard

The Satanists have come to the Academy! As much as that tagline may elicit strong reactions in even the most casual believers, one should examine the phenomena occurring beneath the surface. The Satanic Temple (TST) as it were is calculated for shock value. It is a clever exercise in narrative building and optics manipulating. In the present culture, there is nothing the media loves to hate more than a group of angry Christians. What’s more, there’s nothing the media loves more than to prove these angry Christians wrong. TST is just such a ploy.

If one examines the literature and tenets of the group, overt worship of the devil is not one of the core beliefs. Rather, its principles would be right at home in a meeting in the Temple of Reason of revolution era France. It is a simple repackaging of old humanist ideas that have been around for centuries. The insidious trick is that the Temple has opted for symbolism designed to rile up the Church. In this fallen world, there certainly are individuals who worship the supernatural being of Satan. However, the Satanic Temple is not an organization of these individuals. In fact, TST denies the existence of the supernatural altogether.

The use of the pentagram, Baphomet, black mass, and other overtly anti-Christian themes is meant to throw Christians into a rage. After all, there is nothing more antithetical to the worship of Christ than the worship of the Deceiver. The gambit is that angry Christians will not examine TST’s beliefs and merely attack it for its symbolism. In contrast, the TST members will appear very level headed and cooly point out that they do not worship the devil. Granted, the humanist path is equally under condemnation, but dealing with humanism necessitates much different tactics. Humanists take great pride in their portrayal of religious types as superstitious troglodytes itching to burn people at the stake. It is no small coincidence that TST is headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, the site of a series of witch trials in the early colonial days. As such, when Christians are thrown into a blind rage at the sight or thought of a group calling themselves the Satanic Temple, they play right into the trap.

The question remains, how do we respond as Christians? The first thing that should come into our minds is Matthew 5:11. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount provides a wealth of examples for Christians to follow in these types of situations. Jesus also said in Matthew 10:16, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” Satan is the father of lies. The ploy used by TST to bait Christians into vitriolic hatred should come as no surprise given our adversary’s deceptive nature. He is the master of spiritual irregular warfare and we should by no means expect a symmetrical attack. TST is just such an asymmetrical bait and switch intended on catching us off guard.

My views on TST should not be construed to mean a condemnation of individual members. As Jesus said, the greatest commandment is love. I do not believe that the individual attendees are actively trying to deceive Christians. However, their actions as part of the organization contribute to the phenomena I described above. The response should not be to call for exorcisms, protests, or any forms of direct attack. Instead, one should engage with the individuals on a personal basis and genuinely explore their beliefs. Engagement in civil dialogue and apologia is a Christian’s greatest asset.

On another note, the TST’s presence at the Naval Academy is likely to be rather short lived anyway. Yes, the first meeting will be exceptionally well attended due to the hype generated. However, one should remember that it is an incredibly small minority of midshipmen that asked for this service. Next week, one can expect barely half of the original attendance. By the third week, the fad will likely have fizzled out. This progression will only happen if we let it. If we fall for the bait, come out with guns blazing, and use symmetric attacks against an asymmetric opponent, TST’s recruitment goes up and attendance is sustained by controversy.

Detractors may say, did not Jesus drive the money changers from the Temple? Did not Jesus instruct his disciples to carry a sword when going out to the dangerous countryside of Judea? Did not Jesus say, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34)? The answer is yes. Jesus never stood by while evil took place. He actively fought, “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). The course of action I have outlined above exactly answers Jesus’ example. By engaging in civil discussion, spreading the Gospel Truth, and not falling for the deception, we are indeed struggling against the spiritual forces of evil. We should look to Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees. Whenever they endeavored to trick Him with a question or hypothetical, He would not engage on their terms. Instead, he would attack the underlying motive behind their deceptions and defeat them. The Satanic Temple is a stumbling block in the same way if one is not careful. Therefore, “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can make your stand against the devil’s schemes” (Ephesians 6:11).

Very Respectfully,

Brother in Christ

My source adds:

(Obviously, his disclaimer applies to this email as well.)

As I read the letter, I thought to myself: “This is David French-ism.” He outlines the situation perfectly, calls for dialogue and non-confrontation, and writes exquisitely well. I respect the viewpoint, and am happy that he was compelled to write such a letter. However, the Christian response to SATANISM is civil discussion? That’s how we got abortion, gay marriage, etc, etc. I’m not about to start beating people up or anything, but I feel like a large group praying outside the room (if they meet), asking the Catholic priests on the Yard to do exorcisms, and other supernatural tactics, ought not to be abandoned, and might even witness to other midshipmen that Christians don’t just get pushed around all the time. I think Christians should force the decision on people: God or Satan? Anyway, I think this is another case of Sohrab Ahmari getting the big picture right even as French nails the details better, and would be interested in your thoughts. …

Leaving aside whether the real-life David French would respond the way the Protestant midshipman did — I have no idea if he would or would not — I take the reader’s point. How far does classical liberalism go? Should it tolerate actual Satanism? More to the point, should believing Christians tolerate it?

When I say “tolerate,” I am not talking about taking illegal direct action to stop the meeting. We could have that discussion, but that’s not what the Christian reader who wrote to me is suggesting. He is suggesting not “civil discussion,” but spiritual warfare. 

He’s right. If those Satanists declared themselves to be members of a reconstituted Thule Society, an Aryan neopagan group that included some early Nazis, or the Ahnenerbe, the racial-mystical think tank supported by Heinrich Himmler, I wonder if the Civil Discussion Protestant would have the same response. At some point, one has to recognize that one is dealing with actual spiritual evil, and that there can be no compromise with it. Does the Protestant midshipman believe that Satan exists, as all small-o orthodox Christians do? If so, then he must recognize that whatever the Temple of Satan people say, they are doing homage to the spiritual being who is the source of all evil, hatred, cruelty, and defilement that exists.

“Civil dialogue”? “Engag[ing] with the individuals on a personal basis and genuinely explore their beliefs”? This response is almost comical in its inability to take evil seriously. Praying against this evil, both openly and privately, and stigmatizing it in every way, is exactly the correct Christian response.

Note well, in this case we’re not talking about heathens, or other pagans. We are talking about Satanists. They are not the same thing. And, we are talking specifically about what the spiritual response of Christians in this particular community should be to the affirmative presence of Satanists among them. This unnamed Protestant midshipman must think that Satanists are nice liberals. It reminds me of what some good-hearted, genuinely decent liberal Christian friends of mine used to tell me ten, fifteen years ago, when I was mixing it up with radical Islamists: that if I could just sit down at the table with the Islamists, we could work out our differences and come to a mutual understanding.

This was, and is, a complete misreading of the nature of radical evil. Sometimes, you don’t need to “understand” — you need to resist. Again, if the Naval Academy Satanists were proposing to revive Nazi occult rituals, nobody would have to give this a second thought.

The matter of Satanists meeting at the USNA raises the broader question of the limits of tolerance in a liberal society. Is Satanism a religion like every other? Theologically, I would say no. But as a matter of public accommodation in a pluralist polity, a liberal one in which there is a formal separation of Church and State, it is hard to see how lines can be drawn to defend society against this evil. The phenomenon reveals the instability at the heart of classical liberalism. And the reader who wrote me is correct: the Satanists-at-Annapolis case does speak to the philosophical dispute between Sohrab Ahmari and David French. At what point does liberalism cross the line from being a tool that can be used to defend the Good when it has become unpopular, and becomes instead a clear and present danger to the Good?

 

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Gender Theory Outlaws Reality

Check out the important updates to the post about LGBTQ Equity Week in a suburban Chicago school district. If you haven’t read the original post, please do. You won’t believe how extreme the lesson plan is. Reader Jefferson Smith, who is a leftie, says it goes too far, and asks why parents won’t stand up against stuff like this? I wish I knew the answer. My guess is that nothing frightens middle class people more than being thought to be not respectable.

On this topic, here’s a remarkable piece that ran the other day in The Public Discourse, titled “Overruling the Visible: The Emperor’s New Gender.” The author, Margaret Harper McCarthy, talks about the case heard at SCOTUS this week, in which a male-to-female transgender person sued the funeral home who dismissed him because he said he was changing his sex to female, and began dressing as a woman. Excerpts:

What is at stake here is much more than the right of an individual to free self-expression or an employer’s freedom of religion to hold and act on such “stereotypes.” Since everyone in the workplace of that individual employee will be asked to accept that he is “a woman,” what is at stake is whether or not their—and, by extension, every person’s—pre-ideological, innate knowledge of oneself as a boy or girl, imbibed quite literally at the maternal breast, will be for all practical and public purposes officially overruled as false, a “stereotype.”

Conversely, what is at stake is whether or not the alternative will be for all public and practical purposes officially true: namely, that everyone’s “identity” is arbitrarily and accidentally related to his or her body—as ghost to machine—even if the two are “aligned” in the majority of cases, as the fashionable prefix “cis” means to suggest.

This is the metaphysical heart of transgenderism, the thing that few people commenting in public life ever talk about, preferring instead to harp on “rights.” More:

There is no question about the nihilistic objectives of the new philosophy of sex. Those objectives were already in play at the beginning of the sexual revolution. This was conceived by its founder, Wilhelm Reich, to be the most comprehensive of revolutions, because it rebelled against the very principle of reality itself, rejecting the “finalistic” notion of sexual acts. But now, in addition to obscuring the objective reality of sexual acts, “gender” would prevent us from seeing what we are—a man or a woman—or, indeed, that we are anything at all. Taking the “new clothes” of the famous Emperor in a new direction, the cloak of “gender” would render invisible all the naked evidence.

Here is the newness of the ancient attempt to extricate ourselves from the given relations in which sexual difference entangles us. It is, as Hanna Arendt said, “the knowledgeable dismissal of [the visible].” David Bentley Hart suggests a compelling reason for this. If modernity is in large part post-Christian, it cannot simply revert back to paganism and its mores. It must go further back. Since the Christian God is the One who Created all things, it must get behind everything, visible and invisible, to the only “other god” left: “the Nothing” of spontaneous subjectivity. “Gender” is precisely this: the attempt to free the will from any prevenient natural order. This could not have been more clearly stated than by Butler when she channeled Nietzsche, saying: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming . . . the deed is everything.” But it was also chillingly stated two decades before when the feminist Shulamith Firestone called for the eventual elimination of the sex distinction itself.

One cannot, of course, just will the sex distinction away. But one can try to make it conform to the new “spontaneous” will. Indeed, if the temptation to cut ourselves off from all that gave us birth gets its inspiration from radical liberationist movements, it depends on the technological manipulation of human biology for any hope of success.

Read the whole thing. Harper McCarthy has zeroed in on the unsurpassable radicalism of transgenderism, and how it requires the denial of material reality. This is how you get such crackpot things as this definition of “lesbian” from the Equity Week lesson plan: “People who love or are attracted to the same gender, often referring to women.” Because there can be male lesbians, don’t you know.

And things like this:

And things like biological males now presenting as females beating biological women at women’s sporting contests — with the women, who are at a significant physical disadvantage, having to suck it up for the sake of Progress. For example, this rather tall, muscular transwoman who won the world championship in cycling, racing against biological women:

It’s outrageously unfair to actual women, but we aren’t allowed to see what is right in front of our eyes.

In this week’s oral testimony at the Court, Justice Breyer said something interesting. From SCOTUSBlog’s recap:

Cole was followed at the lectern by John Bursch, who argued on behalf of the funeral home. Treating men and women equally, Bursch argued, does not mean that employers need to treat men as women. Bursch suggested that, if the plaintiffs prevailed, an overnight shelter for women would have to hire a transgender woman, even if some of the women at the shelter had been the victims of domestic violence or rape.

Justice Stephen Breyer dismissed what he described as Bursch’s “parade of horribles.” We are deciding, Breyer said, simply whether discrimination against transgender people falls within Title VII’s ban on discrimination “because of sex.”

Argh! The “parade of horribles” is important not because of consequentialist reasoning, but because it casts light on the real-world problems that would be caused by the Court deciding that gender theorists are right, and that the body — our male bodies and our female bodies — mean nothing. The “parade of horribles” itself is evidence against what Justice Breyer is trying to do: abstract human beings from their bodies.

There is a case coming before a district court soon, in which the defendant, charged with making a threat, is a man who presents as a woman. The man, I am told by someone working on the case, claims to be pregnant, and says he can feel the baby kicking. The sex of the defendant has nothing to do with the charge, let me be clear, and this defendant is either a nut or a troll. But I wonder: if this trans-female wanted to apply for pregnancy-related disability in a state that had strong transgender protections in its laws, on what grounds would an employer legally refuse? That a man can’t get pregnant? But this is a woman! What if a female-to-male transgender who was legally a man, but still had a uterus, got pregnant? Can “Dad” have maternity leave? Why can Dad-With-A-Uterus have maternity leave, but Penis-Having-Pop can’t?

Separate gender from sex, and it’s madness. As Ken Myers says, “Matter matters.” If you liked the Margaret Harper McCarthy essay, check out this one on transhumanism published by the scholar Mark Shiffman, in a 2015 issue of First Things. He says transgenderism and transhumanism are a modern manifestation of Gnosticism, which he describes thus:

The world is not an order of beings manifesting God’s goodness; it is rather an order of inert matter in motion, available for the human will and intellect to master and manipulate. Ancient Gnosticism sought deliverance from evil by severing the spirit’s ties to the material world. Modern Gnosticism appears at first to take a much more optimistic view of creation. Its hopes, however, are not placed in nature as created, but rather in the mind’s capacity to construct models that will unlock the powers trapped within the given order of beings, so as to release their infinite possibilities and make them subservient to our needs and aspirations. It hopes to escape evil not by fleeing the world, but by stepping away in distrust, securing the independent power of the mind through the scientific method, and then turning against the world with a vengeance and transforming it to suit the human will.

This is going to end in disaster. Let me end by recalling this passage from a blog I posted some years ago. In it, I refer to the science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella, “Tower Of Babylon”. It’s a story about Elamite miners in ancient Babylon who are participating in the construction of the famous tower. When the story begins, the builders have reached the vault of heaven (the story depends on ancient cosmology), and who are thinking about piercing it, even though they fear that it might bring a second deluge upon the earth. This passage jumped out at me:

Hillalum could not keep his doubts silent at such a time. “And if the waters are endless?” he asked. “Yahweh may not punish us, but Yahweh may allow us to bring our judgment upon ourselves.”

“Elamite,” said Qurdusa, “even as a newcomer to the tower, you should know better than that. We labor for our love of Yahweh, we have done so for all our lives, and so have our fathers for generations back. Men as righteous as we could not be judged harshly.”

“It is true that we work with the purest of aims, but that doesn’t mean we have worked wisely. Did men truly choose the correct path when they opted to live their lives away from the soil from which they were shaped? Never has Yahweh said that the choice was proper. Now we stand ready to break open heaven, even when we know that water lies above us. If we are misguided, how can we be sure Yahweh will protect us from our own errors?”

Men as righteous as we could not be judged harshly. Of course not.

The metaphor is that when we rise too far above the earth from which we derive, from our givenness, we call forth apocalypse.

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NBA, Stop Being Beijing’s Enforcers

these are the signs that led to two fans being kicked out of Tuesday’s 76ers vs. Guangzhou Loong Lions game *in Philadelphia* pic.twitter.com/xzQxhNyqIy

— David Paulk 波大卫 (@davidpaulk) October 9, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Un-freaking-believable. In Philadelphia, the birthplace of American freedom! This is the United States of America, not the Communist Party of China’s b*tch. Every single NBA fan should go to every single game wearing shirts or carrying signs defending Hong Kong. What a disgrace these craven American businessmen are.

I am traveling today, readers, so approving comments will be hit and miss till the afternoon (I’m headed to suburban Chicago for the Touchstone conference). I’m continuing to make my way through German journalist Kai Strittmatter’s mind-blowing book We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China’s Surveillance State. If you’re anything like me, you knew that things were overbearing in China, but you had only scant idea of how intense and thorough things are there. We can’t do much about how Beijing runs its own country, but we can certainly refuse to let them dictate what Americans — a free people — can and cannot say.

The NBA’s cowardice is particularly galling, because league management has been so woke about NBA players supporting left-wing social causes in the United States. But when it comes to supporting the basic liberties of a people — Hong Kongers — against a tyrannical surveillance state, these American businessmen collapse. As someone said on Twitter this morning, what will the NBA do if players at these exhibition games against Chinese teams start kneeling at the playing of the Chinese National Anthem?

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Schooling Social Justice Warriors

What did you learn in school this week, dear little child of mine? Well, in a prosperous school district in suburban Chicago:

Starting Monday, Evanston/Skokie School District 65 is having LGBTQ+ Equity Week in all of its pre-K, elementary and middle schools.

“Students and educators will engage in a week-long curriculum that celebrates and affirms LGBTQ+ identities with the goal of fostering a deeper sense of allyship within our schools and the creation of a welcoming, inclusive environment for every child and adult,” said an e-mail from the district to parents.

The curricula is tailored for each age and grade level, and touches on topics including LGBTQ identities, family diversity, gender stereotypes in fairy tales and historical figures, to name a few. Parents were given access to lesson plans.

I strongly encourage you to follow that lesson plans link. To the school’s credit, they aren’t hiding anything. This is the conceptual vocabulary that kids in pre-K, elementary, and middle school will be learning this week:

Unbelievable. They are teaching kindergartners in public school about the basics of LGBT activism. In first grade, they will be training these kids in the basic of transgender theory. Second and third graders will be writing gender ideology fairy tales for the little kids. And on and on. Middle schoolers will be compelled by their public school to embrace LGBT activism.

For the teachers, this background:

More info for the teachers:

There’s more. Here’s a guide for how teachers are to handle parents who object:

This is the lie they always tell: that this is only about being nice and respectful. Because compelling middle schoolers to make activist posters is so necessary to learning tolerance.

I invite you to read all the lesson plans.

District 65 is in a deeply blue (as in liberal) part of the country, so not typical. But if this isn’t in your public school district now, give it time. You conservative Christian parents who insist that your kid has to remain in public school to “be salt and light” are going to need to up your game.

St. Benedict, in his Rule, said that the monastery is a “school for the Lord’s service.” US public schools are becoming training facilities for propaganda and social justice activism. Read the lesson plans and see for yourself. They are feeding gender ideology to kindergartners. Even the special ed kids have to learn how to salute the rainbow flag.

(Thanks to the Chicagoland reader who tipped me off.)

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Your Reading Life

The Guardian has a questionnaire up with the wonderful critic Clive James, about his reading life. Please read it. I have taken their questions and answered them here, for myself. I would love to read your own answers to some or all of these questions. Let’s make this one of those fun, long threads that we do around here from time to time.

The book I am currently reading

Oh man, I’ve got a bunch of books going right now. Almost everything I read is related to the book project I’m working on now, which has to do with the experiences of people under Soviet-style communism, and what we in the 21st century can learn from them as we figure out how to prepare for the coming of what I call “soft totalitarianism.” To that end, I’m reading at the moment We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China’s Surveillance State, by Kai Strittmatter. China is doing now what I fear will be coming to us in the years ahead. This book gives me a clearer idea of what I fear is headed our way. I’m interviewing those who lived under Soviet-style communism because their experiences are clearly relevant, despite being from an earlier technological era, and because the literature of dissent — especially Christian dissent — is so rich.  And because I can travel to those formerly communist countries and interview people in ways that aren’t possible today in China.

I’m also reading Koestler’s Darkness At Noon, and an advance reader’s copy of Rusty Reno’s forthcoming, Return Of The Strong Gods, which will be published next week, to help me understand how my own thoughts about the future of US politics under surveillance capitalism fit into what Reno foresees. I’ve also got an advance reader’s copy of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Serotonin, which will be published in English on November 19, but I’m trying to make time for it. Trying to stay disciplined in my reading is hard.

The book that changed my life

The one everyone expects me to say is Dante’s Commedia. It’s true! And I wrote a book about how Dante changed my life, and can do the same for you.  But the even more profound change in my life via a book was encountering Thomas Merton’s 1940s-era autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s the story of how Merton went from being a bookish, party-boy aesthete and religious unbeliever to Catholic convert, and ultimately became a Trappist monk. I first read it at 19, I believe, and it hit me with tremendous force. It radically changed my ideas about Christianity. I saw so much of myself in Merton.

For me, Merton opened the pathway to Christianity, and to Catholicism. Yes, it was a difficult thing to discover that the Church that drew Merton in doesn’t really exist anymore — or, to be precise (because I’m not making a theological point, but an aesthetic one), the forms of the Church that drew Merton in don’t really exist in modern Catholicism, outside of Traditional Latin Mass communities. But you can find the kind of thing that captivated young Merton everywhere in Eastern Orthodoxy: the manifestation of liturgy, beauty, and mysticism, as part of every Sunday’s worship. I discovered that Orthodoxy was what I, still dazzled by Merton, thought Catholicism would be when I converted.

My love of monasticism comes from Merton’s account of life with the Trappists. I doubt that I would have written The Benedict Option if it hadn’t been for reading Merton as a lost young man. Maybe I wouldn’t even be Christian. I’m so grateful to God for what He did for me through The Seven Storey Mountain.

The book I wish I’d written

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. It’s a perfect novel about the decline and fall of a traditional culture — in this case, the Austro-Hungarian Empire — as told through the lives of three generations of a family. Not only is the prose exquisitely beautiful, but Roth’s observations are very fine-grained and deep. One day, when I’m old, I hope I have the wisdom and confidence to attempt write a Radetzsky March about Christianity in our time.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

The collected journalism of Tom Wolfe. He showed me what journalism could be — that it could be as vivid as a novel.

The book I think is most under/overrated

Overrated? Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me. Look, I know I’m not the audience for this book, but I read it anyway because everybody, and I mean everybody, was raving about it. Attention had to be paid. I didn’t expect to love it, but I expected to respect it, because Coates, when he was blogging at The Atlantic, had been one of my favorite bloggers. I could not believe how bad this book was — how emotionally overwrought and shallow, and, yes, racist. Naturally it lit up the sky among the literati (e.g., A.O. Scott of the NYT called it “essential, like water or air.”) It’s the Social Justice Warriors’ Song Of Roland.

Underrated? Well, by the time I found my way to The Radetzky March a couple of years ago, I couldn’t believe that nobody talks about that book. Also, one of my favorite novels is Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Laurus. It’s a fictional account of a holy man in medieval Russia. Most of the people I meet who have read it had the same experience as me: being stunned by its greatness. But far, far too few people have read it. The Kindle edition is under four dollars. Please, please, please, give it a shot.

The book that changed my mind

Dominion, by Matthew Scully. It’s a book by a Christian writer — a conservative who wrote speeches for George W. Bush, in fact — that makes a case against animal cruelty. I read it when it came out in the early 2000s, and was knocked over by its depth and beauty. I was not the kind of person who would normally read a book about animal welfare, so I went to Dominion out of sheer curiosity. What kind of conservative writes a book like that? Scully convinced me that we conservatives — especially Christian conservatives — were and are seriously wrong about animal welfare, particular on factory farming. The Trump administration is terrible on regulating factory farming — and most conservatives, I believe, don’t care at all. I wish every conservative would read Scully’s book.

The last book that made me cry

Collected Poems, by Les Murray, who died last year. An Australian gave the book to me on my trip there earlier this year. Murray’s poems are terrific. He was a misfit, and a Christian, and on the autism spectrum. He had a painful childhood, and a difficult relationship with his father. His poem about his father’s death, “The Last Hellos,” made me cry. Here’s a video clip of Murray reciting it. 

The last book that made me laugh

Novelist Gary Shteyngart’s memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union, and as a Soviet Jewish emigre to New York, Little Failure. It’s a very, very Jewish book. No doubt because I was raised on 1970s-era Mad magazine, I absolutely love the Jewish sensibility. If you appreciate that ironic sense of humor, you have to read this book!

The book I couldn’t finish

I would say about one-third of the books I begin, I never finish. There are too many books out there calling to me, so if I get bored with a book, I have no problem tossing it aside.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Crime and Punishment. I struggled through The Brothers Karamazov, but I just don’t have it in me to read Crime and Punishment. I am ashamed to say it, but reading Dostoevsky gives me no pleasure. I consider that a fault of mine, not his.

My earliest reading memory

I learned how to read very early, and had Little Golden Books around me constantly. I recall one book in particular made a strong impression on me. I must have been three years old. I don’t recall the name of it, but it involved a forest fire, and a cricket who woke up all the animals, and led them to safety. I loved that cricket so much that I insisted that my parents call me by that cricket’s name for a while. (As a very small kid, I was so into reading that the wall between books and real life was porous to me.) It’s funny to think about that in light of The Benedict Option.

My comfort read

Anything by P.G. Wodehouse. It is impossible to be sad after reading about Bertie and Jeeves. It is always a reminder too of what a glorious thing the English language can be.

The book I give as a gift

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The greatest comic novel of all time, and a very, very New Orleans book.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

How Dante Can Save Your Life. It’s a deeply personal book for me, but one with the happiest ending. It’s about God’s healing and transformative grace coming to us through words. It’s about reading a poem not as a literary artifact, but as a map to lead you out of the dark wood of life, and back home. Of all my books, it’s probably the least-read, but it’s the one I think most important.

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