Rod Dreher's Blog, page 212

What’s A Biden’s Word Worth?

Uncle Joe just gets loopier ‘n loopier.From the Washington Post:

 Joe Biden painted a vivid scene for the 400 people packed into a college meeting hall. A four-star general had asked the then-vice president to travel to Kunar province in Afghanistan, a dangerous foray into “godforsaken country” to recognize the remarkable heroism of a Navy captain.

Some told him it was too risky, but Biden said he brushed off their concerns. “We can lose a vice president,” he said. “We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.”

The Navy captain, Biden recalled Friday night, had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire and retrieved the body of an American comrade, carrying him on his back. Now the general wanted Biden to pin a Silver Star on the American hero who, despite his bravery, felt like a failure.

“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!’ ” Biden said, his jaw clenched and his voice rising to a shout. “’Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’ ”

The room was silent.

“This is the God’s truth,” Biden had said as he told the story. “My word as a Biden.”

Except almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.

Read it all. It’s interesting to see how this story has changed in Biden’s telling over the years. Is this a sign of senility, or of a joshy politician who loves to hear himself talk? In the South, believe me, we have a soft spot for storytellers who improve their tales by exaggeration. But come on, Uncle Joe!

I’ll give Biden this: Trump makes up stuff too, and it’s not entertaining at all.

 

 

Advertisement

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I ate that lunch last Thursday, but forgotten I had taken the photo. This new story from the Kansas City Star reminded me about how delicious that bigot chicken tasted:

University of Kansas faculty, advocating for LGBTQ people on campus, are denouncing the school’s new relationship with Chick-fil-A restaurant chain and calling for a boycott.

Chick-fil-A had operated out of the basement of KU’s Wescoe Hall for 15 years, but this school year moved up to a prominent spot in the student union. In addition, the restaurant secured a sponsorship — the newly created “Chick-fil-A Coin Toss” at the start of every Jayhawks home football game for the next several years.

“KU granted Chick-fil-A, a bastion of bigotry, a prime retail location in the heart of our campus,” KU’s Sexuality & Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council said in a letter sent this week to Chancellor Doug Girod, the provost’s office and the athletic department.

“Moving Chick-fil-A to the Union and granting it a role at the start of all home football games violates the feelings of safety and inclusion that so many of us have striven to create, foster, and protect on campus, and sends a message that the Union, KU Athletics, and the administration at large are more concerned about money and corporate sponsorship than the physical, emotional, and mental well being of marginalized and LGBTQ people.”

“Violates the feeling of safety.” Fried chicken nuggets. Can you imagine being so freaking neurotic? And can you imagine being a college professor, and actually being motivated to complain to the Chancellor about this?

Being woke is so demanding.

UPDATE: A reader at KU passed along an August 21 e-mail from the university’s provost to staff and faculty. It included the following paragraph:

This summer Chick-fil-A moved from the Underground to the Kansas Union. Now five years into a 10-year contract, KU was contractually required to provide updates this summer that would have cost more than $3 million to implement in the Underground, but instead could be achieved for less than $500,000 with the move to the Kansas Union. This relocation does not represent a new contract. Rather, KU is following through on its contractual obligations while being mindful of current fiscal realities. Groups of KU students, faculty, and staff have voiced their opposition to having Chick-fil-A on campus because of donations from the chain’s foundation to organizations with anti-LGBTQ platforms. Moving forward, I believe it is important to have thoughtful discussion and deliberation when we enter into contracts. In the future, we will do so in a manner that is transparent and informed by our commitment to affirm diversity and to be a welcoming and inclusive campus.

It would appear that if you want to contract with KU in the future, you will be required to affirm progressive identity-politics dogmas.

The Left cannot stand the thought that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying a delicious chicken nugget. You know, a lot of us laugh at this idiocy, but imagine yourself being a vendor who would like to work with the University of Kansas, but can’t because you once donated to “organizations with anti-LGBTQ platforms” — like, I dunno, your church — or can’t in good conscience jump through whatever Diversity-And-Inclusion hoops they lay out?

I know progressives want to be thought of as the people who want health care for all, greater economic quality, and stuff. But to me, they’re the ones who won’t be satisfied until unwoke chicken nuggets are driven from the face of the earth.

UPDATE.2: A reader sends in these photos taken at the same time in LaGuardia airport in New York City. Not Birmingham, not Nashville: New York City. Compare the line at Chik-fil-A (top) to the line at McDonalds (bottom):

Advertisement

Bishop Hart And The Boys

A Catholic reader points me to a three-part series in the Catholic online magazine Crux, written by Christopher White, looking at allegations of abuse committed by Joseph Hart, 88, the retired bishop of Cheyenne. Hart, who served as the state of Wyoming’s lone bishop from 1978-2001, faces possible criminal charges over the allegations. In this excerpt from Part One, we learn that Bishop Hart had a habit of partying with Monsignor Thomas O’Brien and Father Thomas Reardon, two clerics who turned out to be notorious abusers:

Seventy-five miles north of Guardian Angels parish, O’Brien’s home on Lake Viking was a revolving door of high school boys, many of whom worked around the parishes and were recruited for what was described as “vocational discernment” weekends. Once there, they were greeted with a buffet of vices, including free-flowing alcohol, marijuana, and pornography.

“What happened at that lake house makes Ted McCarrick look like a saint,” said one priest familiar with the litany of abuse allegations that took place at Lake Viking – a reference to the high-profile former archbishop of Washington who was found guilty of abuse and after a Vatican investigation, removed from the priesthood.

Pat Lamb, who worked during middle school as a groundskeeper at the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary where O’Brien served from 1981 – 1983, recalls being taken to Lake Viking weekly, where upon arriving at the house he’d be offered a whiskey and coke – the first of many he would consume in the company of O’Brien, Reardon, and Hart.

On one occasion, after mowing the grass, he claims he headed upstairs to the guestroom to shower and nap – only to wake up to find O’Brien undoing his pants and fondling him.

One former altar boy, also from Nativity parish, who requested anonymity, recalls being forced to rub O’Brien down with sun lotion while he was completely naked.

“We were too afraid to tell anyone else because it was just embarrassing for us,” Lamb told Crux. “I mean, these were well-known priests. Who was going to believe us? But we did try to warn the other boys not to go to Lake Viking.”

“When news finally came out about these guys, my parents said ‘can you believe this?’ I was just relieved to finally be able to say, ‘yes, I can.’”

Part Two is published today. It tells the story of how Bishop Steven Biegler of Cheyenne, who was installed in 2017, did the right and courageous thing by re-opening the Hart case, and seeking justice for Hart’s victims. Today’s piece talks about how Biegler reached out to “Martin,” a Wyoming man now living in NYC, who had been sexually abused by Bishop Hart in confession as an adolescent. The dirtbag Hart preyed on the family after the boy’s father abandoned them.

This part of today’s piece jumped out at me:

Martin’s sister recalled to Crux attending multiple social events and being shamed by one-time friends for disparaging the reputation of a man they believed to be a devoted bishop and priest.

Charlie Hardy, a former priest of the diocese and well-known local politician, told Crux that he was stunned when he heard the initial allegations, as was everyone else, because at the time it just wasn’t natural to believe such things could be true.

… Meanwhile, at the Knights of Columbus hall in Cheyenne, a portrait of Hart still hangs, and the retired bishop continues to be a regular at their events.

And there are people who still wonder why abuse victims don’t reveal what happened to them for years and years.

Part Three will be published tomorrow. Hart denies the allegations, and his lawyer accuses the Diocese of Cheyenne of running a smear campaign against him. If you don’t follow the links to read the whole story, you should be aware that the diocese’s own investigation, the one that Bishop Biegler ordered, found credible reasons to believe that Hart was an abuser during his tenure as Cheyenne bishop. Hart was a priest in Kansas City before being moved to Cheyenne. He has a long string of abuse allegations against him from KC too.

From a 2003 comment at the Catholic World Report blog, by “Diogenes”:

Jason Berry relates one woman’s glimpse of priests in the making at the Diocese of San Diego’s St. Francis Seminary [Lead Us Not Into Temptation, p. 246]:

Mary Jones’s first inkling that something was amiss came in autumn, 1980. She left a check for her son Bob at the seminary, and looked in the piano room. “Cushions were on the floor. Guys were in togas, with wine goblets, not all wearing underwear … I started crying. A priest came over and said gently, “This is not a time when parents are welcome.” …

Why did she let Bob continue in the seminary? “I wanted to preserve our relationship at all costs. It’s like those cults. Once you lose communication, you lose it all. When Bob told me he thought he was gay I went to his spiritual director, and I practically tore his apartment up.” Crying, she said: “It’s not that he’s gay — it’s whether he became gay because of the seminary. I was the best mother I could be! I educated him in Catholic schools.”Poor woman. Without graduate training in spirituality she can’t hope to understand all that’s involved in formation-for-ministry these days. Her son’s 1980 seminary classmates, of course, are by now pastors, vicars, monsignori — and soon will be seminary rectors and bishops themselves.

Remember the massive, root-and-branch, scorched-earth clean-up of West Coast seminaries that took place after the sex abuse scandals broke? Neither do I.

That was written in 2003, recall.

UPDATE: I removed the last link. In an otherwise interesting piece, the author made a false accusation against me. I address it in the comments section below, but as not everybody who will follow the link will read the comments section here, I just took it down. What he said about me was not the point of the article.

Advertisement

Identity Politics & The Great Scattering

Mary Eberstadt just published a great new book, Primal Screams: How The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Her thesis is that the fragmentation and dissolution of the family as an institution created a primal craving for a sense of identity among young people. In this essay for Quillette, Eberstadt explains her diagnosis:

Of all the issues that divide us, none seems as inimical to reasoned discussion as identity politics. Conservatives excoriate such politics as politically opportunistic theater, the acting out of coddled “snowflake” students. Liberals and progressives put forth an opposing grievance-first narrative, arguing that identity politics emanates from authentic wounds.

But what if both contenders have a piece of the truth? What if many identity-firsters today are claiming to be victims because they and their societies are victims—only not so much of the abstract “isms” they denounce, but of something else that till now has eluded description?

Let’s try a new theory: Our macro-politics have become a mania about identity because our micropolitics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what happened during the decades in which identity politics went from being a phrase in an obscure quasi-radical document to a way of being that has gone on to transform academia, law, media, culture and government.

Yes, racism, sexism and other forms of cruelty exist, and are always to be deplored and countered. At the same time, the timeline of identity politics suggest another source. Up until the middle of the twentieth century (and barring the frequent foreshortening of life by disease or nature) human expectations remained largely the same throughout the ages: that one would grow up to have children and a family; that parents and siblings and extended family would remain one’s primal community; and that, conversely, it was a tragedy not to be part of a family. The post-1960s order of sexual consumerism has upended every one of these expectations.

Who am I? is a universal human question. It becomes harder to answer if other basic questions are problematic or out of reach. Who is my brother? Who is my father? Where, if anywhere, are my cousins, grandparents, nieces, nephews and the rest of the organic connections through which humanity up until now channeled everyday existence? Every one of the assumptions that our forebears could take for granted is now negotiable.

Eberstadt calls what has happened the “Great Scattering”. I know some of you readers are thinking at this point, feh, that’s just more social-conservative, traditional-family-values boilerplate. You’re wrong. I’ve never seen a cultural analysis quite like this.

Eberstadt looks at the statistics on family break-up (or never-forming), as well as social-science analyses, and correlates them with cultural evidence (e.g., popular music), and sees a generation or two whose primary experience of family is abandonment. The family is where we are first socialized. If we don’t start out in life with a stable, nurturing family, we are much more susceptible to all kinds of anti-social pathologies and habits of mind.

This is not to say that all people who get caught up in identity politics therefore come from broken family situations, and that all people who come from broken family situations are therefore destined to become identity-politics fanatics. Her point is that in general, we have become a society in which the family has been undone primarily by the Sexual Revolution, and that that unbinding of the primarily socializing institution has effects on our politics. Eberstadt says:

Wherever one stands in matters of the “culture wars” is immaterial. The plain fact is that the relative stability of yesterday’s familial identity could not help but answer the question at the heart of identity politics—Who am I?—in ways that now eludes many. The diminution and rupture of the family and the rise of identity politics cannot be understood apart from one another.

Read the whole thing.

Eberstadt did an interview with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the book. Here’s what she said she wants to accomplish with the book:

Ideally, and for starters, conservatives and other critics of identity politics might come away from this book with a more empathetic understanding of where our national divisiveness is coming from. There’s a lot of collective anguish lurking under all the electronic flame-throwing, bizarre behavior on campus, and other manifestations of social unraveling and descent into unreason. If we’re going to ameliorate it, we need first to understand its fundament.

As for the liberal-left side of the spectrum, I hope readers will understand that this book is an attempt to understand identity politics from the ground up — that it takes such politics seriously, even if its analysis may challenge common suppositions.

It’s also to be hoped that some of those same readers might re-think the wholesale embrace of the sexual revolution and all its works. Within living memory, there have been men and women of the Left who did just that — among them, Christopher Lasch and other writers cited in the book. Maybe some liberals today might be persuaded to think twice by the data in Primal Screams about the revolution’s more pernicious consequences, such as the sharp rise in psychiatric trouble among the young, the role of pornography in divorce, the explosion of loneliness on a scale never before recorded, the rise in so-called “deaths of despair” that are plainly related to loss of love.

Partisanship aside, I hope all readers take home this thought experiment: If we urged on other animals the destructive behaviors we shrug at in ourselves, there would be public uproar about the suffering that would result — and rightly so. As J. M. Coetzee, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, explained, “Destroying the family life of highly social, intelligent animals leads inevitably to misery among individual survivors and pathological misbehavior among the group.” He was speaking about elephants, of course. But his words apply to humanity as well.

Obviously I’m a fan of the book. Mary, who’s a friend, asked me to write a response to it, to be included in the appendix. My words are there, as are responses by Peter Thiel and Mark Lilla. In my short essay, I interpreted Mary’s thesis through a Benedict Option lens, and wrote about how the Ben Op should be seen as a project dedicated to re-forming those primal familial and religious bonds as a gathering-in — this, in opposition to the Great Scattering. Peter Thiel’s piece talks about the economic basis of the family’s dissolution — namely, that we created an economy that discourages family formation.

Lilla, a liberal, partially endorses Mary’s thesis. He agrees that the breakdown of the family has something fundamental to do with the rise of identity politics. He does not really agree that it’s the fault of the Sexual Revolution. Lilla says that the main forces driving this are bigger than the Sexual Revolution. The first, in his view, is wealth. He points out that newly-rich China is now undergoing many of the same social problems Mary identifies, but without having undergone a Sexual Revolution. The second, even bigger cause, is modernity itself — specifically, says Lilla, the phenomenon Zygmunt Bauman tagged “liquid modernity.” I talk about this in The Benedict Option. It’s the concept that the rate of change is so rapid in our time that structures, habits, institutions, and so forth melt before they can ever solidify. It means the dissolution of all permanent things.

I agree with Lilla that the phenomenon is not monocausal, but my sense is that he is mistaken to downplay the role of the Sexual Revolution. Christian sexual teaching is not easy to live by, but it generally provides for strong families, chiefly, I think, because it binds men to their mates, and thereby creates a stable home for their offspring. That’s the ideal. Obviously there was never a golden age of perfectly Happy Families. Still, the fact that this ideal caused some to suffer a loss of personal happiness (e.g., being stuck in a loveless marriage) does not negate the fact that as a sociological matter, it’s healthier in principle for children to grow up with a mother and a father in a stable bond than otherwise.

The loss of the stable family may not have been caused primarily by the Sexual Revolution — that is, economics and the overall speed of social change played roles — but the Sexual Revolution did eliminate, or at least greatly weaken, the institutions that could make it possible for humans to ride out liquid modernity without drowning: Family and Church.

In her fascinating 2013 book, How The West Really Lost God, Eberstadt proffers a theory of secularization rooted in the breakdown of the family. I can’t do that book justice in this space (read this interview to learn more), but her basic argument is that humans learn how to love and worship God in society — and that means primarily (though not exclusively) in their families. When we lose the family, we find it harder to hold on to God. And, in her new book — which is basically a sequel to the first — she argues that when we lose the family, we find it harder to hold on to Man.

As Sarah Ruden, Philip Rieff, and others have written, one of the most distinguishing marks of the early Christian church is that it rejected the sexual individualism of Greco-Roman society. Today, if a Christian family rejects the sexual individualism of post-Christian America, and lives by spiritual and moral discipline, they may have what it takes to resist a primary force pulling the family apart, and leading to social breakdown. If a Christian family does not have a strong relationship with God, in community, it will be much harder for them to resist the deadly currents of liquid modernity.

If social structures outside the family were stronger, breakdown within families would not be quite so consequential. Moms and dads can’t control society, but they do have significant control over the lives of their families — if they will assert it. There are no foolproof methods; human beings have free will, after all. I know families that were a hot mess, but who produced incredibly strong, morally sane Christian offspring. I know families that were ideal by any measure, who produced kids whose lives are a catastrophe. On average, though, it is better to live one way than another.

All of us ask of ourselves the question, “Who am I?” We live in a civilization that no longer offers any confident answers. Hence the “primordial emotionalism and fierce irrationality” (Eberstadt) around identity politics. It’s not just left-wing identity politics either. I will close by sharing a passage Eberstadt cites in her book, taken from Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle’s 2017 look at how the alt-right grows out of 4chan and online culture. Nagle writes:

The sexual revolution that started the decline of lifelong marriage has produced great freedom from the shackles of loveless marriage and selfless duty to the family for both men and women. But this ever-extended adolescence has also brought with it the rise of adult childlessness and a steep sexual hierarchy. Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and a growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.

Eberstadt says that young men today have to figure out how to negotiate a culture that promises unlimited sexual pleasure as a birthright, but in fact results in the most sexually desirable males enjoying more or less a monopoly on sex. This, by the way, is a major theme of Michel Houellebecq’s novels. What kind of man is it who cannot find a sexual partner in a world of broad sexual liberty? What does he do with that sense of failure and rejection? What if he has never had a father teach him that manhood does not depend on sexual conquest? What if he has no religion to instruct him that chaste singleness can be a holy state of life?

How does he not give himself over to some kind of identity politics? Identity politics provide bad answers to the question, “Who am I?”, but if you’re lost and desperate, a bad answer may be better than no answer at all.

Advertisement

News From St. Euthanasia’s Parish

Earlier this week, the Associated Press chronicled the assisted suicide of Robert Fuller, a Seattle cancer sufferer who choreographed his demise. From the AP’s report:

The day he picked to die, Robert Fuller had the party of a lifetime.

In the morning, he dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt and married his [male] partner while sitting on a couch in their senior housing apartment. He then took the elevator down three floors to the building’s common room, decorated with balloons and flowers.

With an elaborately carved walking stick, he shuffled around to greet dozens of well-wishers and friends from across the decades, fellow church parishioners and social-work volunteers. The crowd spilled into a sunny courtyard on a beautiful spring day.

A gospel choir sang. A violinist and soprano performed “Ave Maria.” A Seattle poet recited an original piece imagining Fuller as a tree, with birds perched on his thoughts.

Shortly thereafter, he injected a suicide potion laced with Kahlua, his favorite drink, into his feeding tube, and that was the end of him. This was legal under the state’s “Death With Dignity” law.

This part of the story has proved controversial:

Fuller began returning more often to the Catholic church he had long attended. His spiritual views were hardly orthodox — he considered himself a shaman, and described his impending death as a state of “perpetual meditation” — but Seattle’s St. Therese Parish was known for accommodating a range of beliefs. Fuller was beloved there, and he craved the community. He had sung in the gospel choir and read scriptures from the lectern during services, sometimes delivering insightful or funny remarks off the cuff, said Kent Stevenson, the choir’s director.

… The Roman Catholic Church opposes aid-in-dying laws, citing the sanctity of life. But Fuller’s decision was widely known and accepted among the parishioners. At the service where he received his last communion on May 5, the Rev. Quentin Dupont brought over a group of white-clad children who were receiving their first communion.

They raised their arms and blessed him.

If you read the whole thing, you can see a photo of the priest, Jesuit Father Dupont, and all the first communion children surrounding and blessing the man who intended to commit suicide days later.

How on earth does a Catholic priest and parish — even a parish like St. Therese’s, with a reputation as very progressive — bless and further participate in what the Catholic Church teaches is an abomination: suicide?

After the AP story appeared, the Archdiocese of Seattle released a statement saying that the parish’s leadership had not known at the time of Father Dupont’s public blessing that Fuller was planning to kill himself.

I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but — surprise! — the Archdiocese is not telling the truth. Whether they unwittingly repeated a lie told to them by the Jesuit and others in the parish, or were consciously participating in that lie to cover up the parish’s collaboration in a suicide, is not yet known.

Why do I say that? Christine Rousselle of Catholic News Agency reports that Fuller’s Facebook feed contradicts the Archdiocese. Excerpt:

Social media posts made by Robert Fuller, the man whose assisted suicide was profiled Aug. 26 by the Associated Press, suggest that he scheduled his funeral with his parish days before his suicide, and that a priest had “given his blessings” to the suicide plan.

In a March 16 Facebook post, Fuller claimed that he had completed the legal steps required to receive a prescription of life-ending drugs, and that he had the approval of a priest to end his own life.

“I have absolutely no reservations about what I am doing,” he wrote. “And my pastor/sponsor has given me his blessings. And he’s a Jesuit!!!”

Fuller did not name the priest referenced in the post, and the pastor of St. Therese parish, Fr. Maurice Mamba, is not a Jesuit. Several Jesuits assist with Sunday Masses at the parish. Examination of past parish bulletins show that only one, Fr. Quentin Dupont, SJ, regularly celebrated the Sunday Mass that Fuller normally attended.

That’s what you call diligent reporting. More:

Other posts on Fuller’s Facebook page recount that he met with parish staff as he planned the final days of his life, including a party held in the hours before his suicide on May 10, and his own funeral.

On May 4, Fuller posted details of his upcoming funeral, which he had arranged to be held in the parish on May 17. The May 19 parish bulletin from St. Therese included a notice of Fuller’s death, and confirmed that his funeral was held at the church on May 17.

In the same post, Fuller wrote that he had one week left to live. He thanked his “faith family” at St. Therese, and invited people to join him at Mass the next day and at his “end of life celebration party” on May 10 – the day he died.

A choir from the parish was the one cited in the AP story as serenading Fuller as he prepared to inject himself with poisoned Kahlua.

From the journalist Rousselle’s Twitter feed, this screenshot of Fuller’s Facebook page:

Some screenshots for your viewing pleasure. (Yes, I needed to charge my phone last night.) pic.twitter.com/Ap6MjY5J9X

— Christine Rousselle

Saving The Humanities

Last night I watched my eighth-grade daughter packing up her schoolbooks after finishing her homework. She had been reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses,  for one of her classes. That’s eighth grade at Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge. Tuition at the classical Christian school is about $4,000 per year, and from my perspective, worth every penny. The school operates on a shoestring budget. Everything goes into the classroom. This is not a school for gifted and talented kids, but for all Christian kids. It’s demanding, but it’s amazing to see what kids can do when challenged.

I thought about Sequitur just now while reading the British political philosopher John Gray’s essay explaining why he believes that the humanities can’t be saved in universities. I encourage you to read the essay, because the problem, according to Gray, is probably not what you think. Excerpt:

The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible.

In other words, the radicals have destroyed the foundations on which rationality are built — and unless they are reconstructed, the humanities cannot be saved. Gray, who is an atheist, says that it makes no sense to commit to earning a degree in the humanities today, because the teachers, by and large, instruct students in progressive dogmatics, and nothing but:

[Students] also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

Gray concludes:

It would be better to admit that the battle there has been lost, and advise young people to get to know the canon by themselves. It will not cost them tens of thousands of pounds to buy a copy of Montaigne’s essays, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example. If they want to move beyond western traditions, they can read Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic and hilariously funny Demons, the delightful Chuang-Tzu and dozens of other world classics.

Read it all. I look forward to hearing in the comments section from traditionalist university scholars in the humanities. Is Gray right? If not, why not? As I’ve written here, even the world of Classics scholarship is being infused with the nihilistic energy of wokeness.

Let me offer some encouragement. As I indicated in The Benedict Option, classical Christian schools today are functioning as a kind of early medieval monastery, in that they keep a dying tradition alive. Writing in Christianity Today, Louis Markos delivers a terrific essay explaining what this model of education does. Excerpts:

In the fall of 2018, I spoke at Mars Hill Academy, a classical homeschooling co-op in Lexington, Kentucky. It began in 1995 and offers classes in Latin, Western civilization, rhetoric, and worldview, as well as English, math, and science. A cynic might have warned me that I would be greeted by insular families trying to protect their children from secular culture, a rigid Bible-only approach to learning, a legalistic mindset, and a withdrawal from civic engagement.

What I found instead were parents, students, and teachers with a shared vision of an educational program steeped in the Great Books and committed to glorifying God, freeing the mind from the marketplace of idols, and shaping virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens.

I’ve seen this phenomenon in many of the classical Christian schools I’ve spoken at—with some startling moments. Once, while explaining to an attentive group of teachers and students that the classical virtue of courage represents the Golden Mean between a lack of courage (cowardice) and an excess of courage, I asked what Aristotle might have meant by an excess of courage. A nine-year-old boy in the front row with white hair and a piercing glance shouted “bravado.” This young man had already begun to absorb the classics.

As in most schools I’ve visited, Mars Hill’s curriculum balances pagan (i.e., Homer, Aristotle) and medieval Christian (i.e., Dante, Chaucer) authors with major authors from the last 500 years of European and American literature (i.e., Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Faulkner).

In contrast, Western society today is increasingly eager to cut itself off from both its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman roots.

Markos talks about how fundamentalists and evangelicals of the postwar generation withdrew into an intellectual ghetto — but now, that’s changing:

This was the predominant attitude of evangelical Christians in the 1950s and 1960s. Conversely, today Mars Hill Forum is one of a growing number of evangelical homeschooling co-ops that want to raise up a generation of Christians who know the Bible and who live virtuous lives, and who are also firmly grounded in the pagan classics of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the Roman Catholic classics of the Middle Ages. I’ve spoken to a number of such groups across the country and have found in each the same contagious atmosphere of learning and desire to be salt and light in the wider culture.

So what caused conservative evangelicals to reverse themselves on the classics?

You really need to read the whole thing to understand this important evolution in the lives of American Christians. Part of it has to do with the influence of C.S. Lewis:

Lewis helped unlock in the evangelical soul a longing for things of which they had been taught to be suspicious: tradition, hierarchy, liturgy, sacrament, numinous awe, and literature that was not specifically Christian. In both the medieval Catholic and classical pre-Christian world, evangelicals began to find works that stimulated them to ask the big questions. (Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?) They realized that by wrestling with the classics, they could gain a more holistic vision of how God has worked in history and thus become more effective ambassadors for Christ in a modern and postmodern world.

In some cases, this tectonic shift in the evangelical world has led significant numbers of conservative Protestants to become Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican—not only out of a longing for liturgy and sacrament but because the classics brought with them a re-encounter with the early church fathers. And yet most evangelicals who cross the Tiber, the Bosporus, or the Thames maintain much of their passion for the Bible, the Cross, and the spreading of the gospel. Many stand at the forefront of a new conservative ecumenism.

Amen! Markos points out that contrary to those critics who say classical Christian education is only about privileging dead white European males, the movement is spreading to include ethnically diverse student populations, and even spreading abroad, to non-Western countries. Indeed, two summers ago, at a national classical education conference, I talked to four young Christian men from Chengdu, China, who were planning to start a classical Christian school there. They didn’t see learning about the Western intellectual tradition through the eyes of ethnicity. They saw the great thinkers and artists of Western civilization as giving something to the universal church, and indeed to all of humanity.

Here’s the most hopeful paragraph from Markos’s piece:

Paul addressed his pagan audience from Mars Hill, and in a sense all classical Christian education, whether Protestant or Catholic, takes place on that hill, on that dusty crossroads where pre-Christian Greek poetry came together with biblical prophecy to offer a unified witness to Christ. Hundreds of classical schools and classical presses are aiming to raise up a generation of young people who embrace and practice traditional virtues and who are equipped to defend the Christian worldview and make it appealing to a fragmented, relativistic society.

Again, read the whole thing — and share it widely. This is how we build the resistance! This is how we light candles against the darkness, and grow them into brushfires! We need more than elementary and secondary schools. We need visionary colleges too — new ones, and established ones who re-engineer their humanities curricula to focus on the classical Western tradition. But this is how we begin.

Rescue and renewal requires just this kind of radicalism, though. Let the dead bury their dead. Those who want to live, and their children to live, have a harder but better road ahead of them — through the past to the future.

If you want to know more about the movement, spend some time on the website of the CiRCE Institute. 

 

Advertisement

Eliminating Talent By Force

In that same book I quoted in an earlier post, From Under The Rubble (which you can read online for free by following the link), there’s an essay on socialism by Igor Shafarevich. In it, he quotes Marx saying that communism aims to “eliminate talent by force.” Equality must be achieved above all things.

Reading the Shafarevich, I thought of the removal and/or relocation of photographs of white males from medical schools, on ideological grounds (I wrote about it here on Monday.) It won’t stop there. That’s just the first step. They begin by removing the images of certain figures, and will eventually get around to removing people like them from the schools, all in the name of equality.

Something like this might be about to happen in New York City. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group has recommended that the city eliminated gifted and talented programs for elementary schools, and stop using academic criteria for admission to middle schools. Why? Diversity, of course. Too many of the kids who get into the better schools and programs are white and Asian, not enough are black and Hispanic, according to progressive dogma. Christine Rosen writes:

All the city’s selective schools are already open to anyone regardless of race. But because the majority of students who gain admission to schools that screen applicants are white and Asian, the panel reasoned, merit-based admissions procedures must be racist. Indeed, the advisory panel describes merit-based testing and other screening procedures used in New York City’s public schools as “exclusionary admissions practices,” not because they found any evidence of racial bias in the screening procedures but simply because the outcome of screening does not perfectly reflect the demographic make-up of the city. According to the New York Times, the panel argued that a screening system based on academic ability “is not equitable, even if it is effective for some.”

The Progressive Caucus of the city council agrees. In a letter to the diversity panel, it urged “caps on the allowable concentrations of high-achieving and low-achieving students in the same schools.” New York City schools chancellor Richard Carranza, who would implement the panel’s recommendations if the mayor approves them, already thinks too many students are labeled “gifted.”

In other words, the progressives’ answer to the problem of racial gaps in educational achievement is a Harrison Bergeron-like downward social leveling that would ensure that excellence and competition are eliminated in favor of mediocrity and “diversity.” Since more than half of the city’s public school students can’t pass the state math and English exams, and only 28 percent of the city’s black students passed the math exam (compared to 67 percent of white students and 74 percent of Asian-American students), the leveling effect will likely be significant.

Punishing excellence by demanding that everyone conform to the lowest common denominator is a recipe for educational failure and societal stagnation. By this logic, schools will eventually have to eliminate grades and other forms of ranking, since outcomes will never match progressives’ diversity requirements.

This is identity politics in action. It will punish, or eliminate, talent by force. It’s the old socialist claim — that hierarchy is always and everywhere the result of injustice — applied to racial politics.

Here’s how The New York Times describes the situation:

For years, New York City has essentially maintained two parallel public school systems.

A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is filled mostly with white and Asian children. The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.

Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these selective programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.

More:

The panel’s report, obtained by The New York Times, amounts to a repudiation of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda, which reoriented the system toward school choice for families, including more gifted and screened schools, to combat decades of low performance.

Some of those policies deepened inequality even as student achievement rose. Mr. de Blasio has been sharply critical of his predecessor’s philosophy on education, but must now decide whether to dismantle some of the structures that Mr. Bloomberg helped to build.

You can have excellence, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. De Blasio seems to be aiming for equality by denying the concept of “good schools”:

Though Mr. de Blasio has vowed to create a school system where the idea of “good schools” and “bad schools” becomes obsolete, dozens of schools are extremely low-performing, and many more are struggling.

As the city has tried for decades to improve its underperforming schools, it has long relied on accelerated academic offerings and screened schools, including the specialized high schools, to entice white families to stay in public schools.

But at the same time, white, Asian and middle-class families have sometimes exacerbated segregation by avoiding neighborhood schools, and instead choosing gifted programs or other selective schools. In gentrifying neighborhoods, some white parents have rallied for more gifted classes, which has in some cases led to segregated classrooms within diverse schools.

Progressives don’t allow one to ask why white, Asian, and middle-class families are avoiding those schools, or that gifted classes lead to segregated classrooms within diverse schools. The progressive mind can only imagine that these outcomes are racist, and therefore must be eliminated so New York City can build a pedagogical heaven on earth.

One more note:

Still, the so-called School Diversity Advisory Group acknowledged that the city would have to take pains to prevent middle-class families from fleeing the system.

If those students decamp to private schools or to the suburbs, “it will become even more difficult to create high-quality integrated schools,” in New York, the report said. The panel wrote that “high-achievement students deserve to be challenged,” but in different ways.

Right. Here’s a link to the full School Diversity Advisory Group report. 

The panel blamed the failure of G&T programs in schools serving poor neighborhoods on economic privilege:

The reforms of the early 2000s brought over 20 new G&T programs meant to cater to underserved communities, in further hopes of expanded enrichment opportunities for a more diverse group of children. Three years later, most of these new programs were unable to fill a single spot in their incoming classes, because the majority of students in these neighborhoods and districts were low-income and not able to invest in equitable test-prep resources. Since the mid-2000s the number of G&T programs has nearly halved, with most surviving offerings operating in affluent white neighborhoods.

There’s no doubt that well-off parents have the resources to help their children prepare for tests. But the panel does not consider the role of culture — within the family, and the students’ communities — in affecting the outcomes. It’s widely known that Asian families put a premium on education, and that that means Asian kids generally study more and work harder to achieve. Why should they be punished for that?

NYC is a left-wing town, as we all know, but it’s also the case that middle-class progressives get real protective of their own children, and may find some rationale to fight this proposal, at the expense of their own stated principles. But perhaps not. Because left-wing identity politics demonizes achievement by people of the “wrong” ethnicity, it might not be possible to fight this — not if the price of resisting it is bearing the cost of being publicly condemned as racist.

It’s down to the Asians to lead the resistance, if there is any resistance at all.

UPDATE: Reader Another Dave comments:

I live in NYC and have kids in the public school system. Asians are already pushing back hard, and have attended several public forums en masse to jeer at and heckle Carranza, and openly call him a bigot, which he clearly is.

Both DiBlasio and Carranza are loathsome midwits, and deserve whatever vitriol is directed at them.

The NYPost has covered most of this in detail, but a number of Asian community groups have formed activist committees, and are making as much noise as humanly possible, and then some.

I could go into much greater detail about my own experiences with the public school system here on the UES, but it would take up too much space and potentially bore everyone.

I socialize with several people, all of the black and Latin, who have worked in education in NYC for decades, and have had whatever remained of their progressive rose colored glasses shattered by dealing directly with poor black and Hispanic communities. Suffice it to say, poor black and Hispanic communities, outside of some individual exceptions, simply don’t place a premium on scholastic excellence and academic rigor.

Again, there are exceptions, and there are certainly students with parents from Africa or the Caribbean who do not fit into this category, but generally speaking, no matter what the racial ideologues and the woke activists say, poor and working class blacks and Hispanics just don’t have the same regard for academic achievement. The parents will tell you to your face that they do, and then you see how they raise their kids and how they approach homework and test prep, and it just doesn’t compare to what Asian and white parents do with and for their kids. It’s two different worlds.

Black and Hispanic parents obviously love their kids, and do what they think is right, but they simply lack the same degree of focus and stick-to-it-iveness, and yes, even intellectual horsepower, that Asian and white parents have.

This is an important story, because it reveals just how far racial activists intend on going to achieve parity. They will detonate the entire system to do so, and this doesn’t really bother them in the least. To them, the disparities prove the system is not just broken, but evil, and must be overturned. Asian and white excellence is a continual slap in the face, and it cannot be allowed to stand, no matter the consequences.

The mayor, his attack dog Carranza, and all of the racist black and Hispanic activists have a deep, emotional commitment to their utopian vision, and reason will not be allowed to prevail, up to and including chasing the highest performing whites and Asians right out of the entire system and into private education.

This is a microcosm of a larger societal drama, and all of Rod’s self deceptive liberal commenters would do well to acquaint themselves with the details, because this is where our entire society is headed if we don’t put the brakes on.

UPDATE.3: Reader Joshua Xanadu comments:

Rod – Asians ARE leading the resistance against de Blasio and his anti-Asian education commissar Richard Carrenza, but white writers — both progressive and conservative — are ignoring coverage of Asian responses, although for the different reasons. The former because Asian Americans have always complicated their oppression/victim narrative, while the latter because they probably just don’t communicate with any Asians. If you want to know what we’re thinking and doing, follow Asians Against Affirmative Action on FB or @AsianAmProject on Twitter. Interview writers like Kenny Xu or Ying Ma, or an activist like Swan Lee (@swanlee99), who started Asian American Coalition for Education. If Asians are mentioned at all, it will be under some assumptions that Asians overachieve because they are wealthy and have paid test-prep advantages (they’re NOT… actually Asians in NYC attending public schools are the poorest demographic, with immigrants parents in menial labor while growing up in families who don’t speak English). Moreover, the underlying stereotype of Asians as robotic test-takers is also not far behind — itself used to denigrate the sacrifice and hard work of individuals who happen to be Asians.

I like to see the actual demographic breakdown on Asians vs. Whites in the NYC gifted student program, but I suspect it’s actually vastly represented by Asians, which is true for the demographics of magnet high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech. White students are a much smaller minority, so that the impact of Bill de Blasio/Carranza regime is to specifically discriminate and reduce Asian Americans. If you are against these diversity fascists, I’d advise you not to confuse the matter by talking about white students as well — that only plays into the SJW narrative.

Advertisement

How To Live Not By Lies

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in a 1970s essay collection called From Under The Rubble, wrote that the worst thing about the Soviet system was not its material oppression. “A man can live in such conditions without harm to his spiritual essence,” said Solzhenitsyn. Rather, the Soviet system is “unique in world history” because it compels everyone to participate “in the general, conscious lie.” He went on to say that the most essential task is not achieving political freedom, but winning one’s “inner freedom” from entanglement in the lie. Those who “voluntarily run with the hounds of falsehood” will not be able to justify themselves to the living, to history, to their friends, or to their children.

Solzhenitsyn goes on:

Which is the sacrifice? To go for years without truly breathing, gulping down stench? Or to begin to breathe, as is the prerogative of every man on this earth? What cynic would venture to object aloud to such a policy as non-participation in the lie?

Oh, people will object, at once and with ingenuity: what is a lie? Who can determine precisely where the lie ends and truth begins? In every historically concrete dialectical situation, and so on — all the evasions that liars have been using for the past half century.

But the answer could not be simpler: decide yourself, as your conscience dictates. And for a long time this will suffice. Depending upon his horizons, his life experience and his education, each person will have his own conception of the line where the public and state lie begins: some will see it as being altogether remote from him, while another will experience it as a rope already cutting into his neck. And there, at the point where you yourself in all honesty see the borderline of the lie, is where you must refuse to submit to that lie. You must shun that part of the lie that is clear and obvious to you. …

What does it mean, not to lie? It doesn’t mean going around preaching the truth at the top of your voice (perish the thought!) It doesn’t even mean muttering what you think in an undertone. It simply means: not saying what you don’t think, and that includes not whispering, not opening your mouth, not raising your hand, not casting your vote, not feigning a smile, not lending your presence, not standing up, and not cheering.

We all work in different fields and move in different walks of life. Those who work in the humanities and all who are studying find themselves much more profoundly and inextricably involved in lying and participating in the lie — they are fenced in by layer after layer of lies. [!!!!! — RD] In the technical sciences it can be more ingeniously avoided, but even so one cannot escape daily entering some door, attending some meeting, putting one’s signature to something or undertaking some obligation which is a cowardly submission to the lie. The lie surrounds us at work, on our way to work, in our leisure pursuits — in everything we see, hear and read.

And just as varied as the forms of the lie are the forms of resisting it. Whoever steels his heart and opens his eyes to the tentacles of the lie will in each situation, every day and every hour, realize what he must do.

More:

Yes, it is a terrible thought! In the beginning the holes in the filter are so narrow, so very narrow: can a person with so many needs really squeeze through such a narrow opening? Let me reassure him: it is only that way at the entrance, at the very beginning. Very soon, not far along, the holes slacken and relax their grip, and eventually cease to grip you altogether. Yes, of course! It will cost you canceled dissertations, annulled degrees, demotions, dismissals, expulsions, sometimes even deportations. But you will not be cast into flames. Or crushed by a tank. And you will still have food and shelter.

This path is the safest and most accessible of all the paths open to us for the average man in the street. But it is also the most effective! Only we, knowing our system, can imagine what will happen when thousands and tens of thousands of people take this path — how our country will be purified and transformed without shots or bloodshed.

But this path is also the most moral: we shall be commencing this liberation and purification with our own souls. Before we purify the country we shall have purified ourselves. And this is the only correct historical order: for what is the good of purifying our country’s air if we ourselves remain dirty?

People will say: how unfair on the young! After all, if you don’t utter the obligatory lie at your social science exam, you’ll be failed and expelled from your institute, and your education and life will be disrupted. …

Unfair on the young? But whose is the future if not theirs? Who do we expect to form the sacrificial elite? For whose sake do we agonize over the future? We are already old. If they themselves do not build an honest society, they will never see it at all.

Emphases in the original. I thank the New Zealand reader who sent this along.

Part of the Benedict Option for Christians, and part of the general resistance for all of us, is training ourselves to identify the general, conscious Lie, and to steel ourselves to resist it.

Think hard about this, in your own life — how to integrate it into your own life, I mean. How to teach Solzhenitsyn’s principle to your children. If you’re a churchgoer, think about how to form your own congregation in this principle. If you don’t do it now, you will not be able to resist when you are put seriously to the test. It is quite clear where this society is headed. We will all have to live by lies, or pay a price for resisting. As Solzhenitsyn says, the price you pay by not resisting the culture of the lie is nothing less than your soul.

Here’s something I wrote back in 2015, about Solzhenitsyn’s dictum applied to a post-Obergefell world.

Advertisement

The Falwell Family Fief

It’s becoming clear that if you want to do well in real estate, you need to be a young man involved in servicing Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Falwell Jr. You can be their pool boy, like the lucky dude in Miami, or, as Reuters reports, you can be their personal trainer. Look:

Evangelical leader and prominent Donald Trump backer Jerry Falwell Jr personally approved real estate transactions by his nonprofit Christian university that helped his personal fitness trainer obtain valuable university property, according to real estate records, internal university emails and interviews.

Around 2011, Falwell, president of Liberty University in Virginia, and his wife, Rebecca, began personal fitness training sessions with Benjamin Crosswhite, then a 23-year-old recent Liberty graduate. Now, after a series of university real estate transactions signed by Falwell, Crosswhite owns a sprawling 18-acre racquet sports and fitness facility on former Liberty property. Last year, a local bank approved a line of credit allowing Crosswhite’s business to borrow as much as $2 million against the property.

Why is this not like the Pool Boy brouhaha? Reuters:

When Falwell helped Crosswhite, he used the assets of Liberty, the tax-exempt university he has led since 2008. Among the largest Christian universities in the world, Liberty depends on hundreds of millions of dollars its students receive in federally backed student loans and Pell grants.

According to the piece, it seems quite clear that Falwell directed the university to go against its own financial interests to offer a sweetheart deal to his personal trainer. More from the story:

Falwell has “tried to be a business mentor” to Crosswhite, the university statement said, but that effort did not “cause him to abandon his fiduciary duties” to Liberty.

As Liberty’s leader, Falwell draws an annual salary of nearly $1 million, and is obligated to put the university’s financial interests before his own personal interests when conducting Liberty business.

“The concern is whether the university’s president wanted to do his personal trainer a favor and used Liberty assets to do it,” said Douglas Anderson, a governance specialist and former internal audit chief at Dow Chemical Co, who reviewed both the transaction and Liberty’s explanation of it at Reuters’ request. That would be bad governance, he said. “At a minimum, the terms suggest the buyer got a great deal and Liberty got very little.”

Read the whole thing. 

The Liberty University board of trustees has to decide if they’re running a university, or a Falwell family fief.

Advertisement

Lord Of The Flies Letter From Sweden

A reader in Sweden writes:

I have been reading your blog since the post “No Sympathy For The Devil”. It found its way to a Swedish Christian-democratic blog, and then to me. I read the whole piece aloud for my wife and her friend when visiting Germany, and we were captivated. (Our friend is an Indian-American young woman who grew up in Christian small-town Midwest, and experienced quite a crushing amount of racism. She said she would leave the U.S. if Trump became president. He did, and she did.) Since you seem to appreciate letters, I will take the opportunity to put ink to some thoughts. I have been thinking a lot about the insanely daunting task of raising children in Christ, in this place.

I know I have encountered “The Benedict Option” before. I discussed and thought about how Swedish Christianity needs this concept, and the clarity to see how it could be played out in the Swedish context. The principles are the same, of course, but the playing field is different, and especially constrained when it comes to having children of school age.

Here’s a brief description of my schooling concerns: The educational system is overwhelmingly secular (and in chaos), and the few Christian schools are heavily besieged by media and politics. The governing Social Democrats want to shut them down. (As a political compromise, the already established ones are allowed continued existence for now, under strict conditions.) No homeschooling is allowed since 2011, especially not for religious reasons! Disobedient Christian and Orthodox Jewish families have been punished alike with sell-your-house sized fines. At least 40 families have moved to Swedish-speaking parts of Finland, where they have set up a home-schooling organization. These include friends of my family. Others have moved to the U.S.

Now, I thought I might share a recent piece of news with you, and explain why it touched my heart. It was published this weekend as an in-depth interview with a family, by Svenska Dagbladet (a major Swedish newspaper, moderately conservative — here’s the link, though it’s behind a paywall). It’s about how the adult world has abdicated to let gang-like teenage terror rule on upper-elementary schools. I will retell the recent history of well-off parents Michael and Maria, with academic careers at Uppsala University, and their 13-year old son, Filip. (The names have been changed.)

Filip’s parents were invited for a baptism to Stockholm over the Saturday, but Filip chose to remain home to meet friends. However, while Filip is still alone, an univited “friend” (Stefan) and a girl from his school shows up seemingly somewhat drugged. They semi-force their way into their house, and steal liquor from Filip’s parents. Filip rounds up his friends to help out, and together they make Stefan leave. By that time he is heavily intoxicated. Filip’s parents come home in the early evening, but Filip is too ashamed to tell anything. He gets a call related to Stefan, and goes out to find him, out of feelings of guilt.

Now, word has gone that Filip has drugged Stefan. He has put something in his drink, and Stefan’s sorry state is Filip’s fault. A mob of teenagers beats him up, they threaten him, steal his sweater and put it up for sale on the web. On the way home another mob, which he does not recognize, attacks him, because “they know what he’s done”.

Filip turns inward and hides almost everything, but after a few days of gloomy and worrisome family vacation, they go to the children’s psychiatric care (CPC), where Filip opens up and tell the story, and his parents forgive him. What to do next? The CPC is closely tied to the Social Services Department. Perhaps they can help with a mediation, where Michael and Maria can meet parents of the bullies.

It’s not possible. The Social Services knows about these kids. One mother is gravely ill. Others have protected identities, we can’t give you any details. They have problems. It won’t help. Even pressing charges against the perpetrators is strongly discouraged. “You will unleash chaos and Hell if you go to the police. For the sake of your child, just back away from this, slowly.”

But the family thought that going for justice still would be the right thing to do. If not they, who would? They file a complaint. The word spreads. And things get worse. Filip loses friends. He is a squealer. He will be punished, as will anyone hanging out with him.

Michael and Maria talks to other parents. They hear about several who previously have retracted charges, because of threats and pressure. Sam, a large 14 year old guy from another school, shows up with a death threat. He’s looking for Filip and beats up other kids on his path. Michael and Maria files all major incidents to the police, but they get almost no response.

Filip’s best friend gets beaten up and threatened. The situation has become so nasty that Maria almost stops working. She is driving Filip and picking him up wherever he goes. On a birthday picnic in a park, Sam and his mob scatter Filip and his friends and takes all their stuff and bicycles. The friends call the police, from hiding places in the bushes. After 45 minutes the police shows up. They tell the rascals to stop messing about, then they leave. Filip barely escapes.

The family goes on vacation again. The threats come on the phone, directly and through friends, so that the parents can overhear. “We will shoot you in the head. We will drag you out into the forest with your friend and kill you both. We will crack your skull open with rocks.” The family is now breaking down. The father calls the police, weeping: “We cannot do this anymore. I’m on the brink of turning to violence to protect my family. We will move out of town.” Police: “Yes, moving seems to be the best solution.”

As the interview is published, the family is breaking up from Uppsala, packing their things. They changed their minds again about the charges; they are still in the system, but it’s dubious that it will lead to anything. When the perpetrators are under 15, the age of liability, the case will be handed over to the Social Services, who will seek a meeting with the parents, and perhaps involve the Child Psychiatry. This is likely nothing new under the sun for the families involved.

The story has resonated with a lot of people the last few days. Everyone can recognize the

characters, the attitudes; the elements of this unfolding fate have been in place for some time, throughout Sweden. The story has been commented on by the leading politicians. More resources to schools, more money to the police. The chairman of the justice department calls for better proactive measures for youth and families in the risk zone of developing criminal behavior. But a weathered journalist observed the situation, currently: “The schools are like prisons – under gang rule.”

 

Personally, I think this is what has happened in Sweden: Children have been overprotected from their would-be authorities, which have stepped back, leaving them with no protection whatsoever from each other.

The very same newspaper I was holding provided a case in point. Just three pages on, it was reported that a case would be taken all the way up to the Supreme Court of Sweden. The case: A student placed himself in a sofa, blocking the way into the classroom. He wouldn’t move, wouldn’t reason. A teacher, with a wrestling background, took a solid grip, and lifted him aside. For the court to decide: Did the teacher physically violate the integrity of the student?

The teacher’s way of solving the problem gave him years of legal conflict and quite possibly liability to damages. What will he do next time? How about nothing? In this enlightened country, the only socially accepted, legal, and safe way to handle an unruly minor as a parent, teacher, adult, even police, is by talking. Reasoning. It should always work, if you do it right. Except it won’t. What more can you do? Nothing.

Here’s a story from my close family, that my mother told me about when I was little. Its manifest unfairness infuriated me. My (as it turned out) brother-in-law was bullied in school. He was quite weak, with a congenital disability, and a little tyrant terrorized him. He was selling Christmas magazines for pocket money, I think. One afternoon after school the tyrant took his magazines, tore them, and threw them in the mud. My father-in-law was on his way to meet his son, and saw this happening from a distance. Furious, he caught the kid, held him against the wall, and wanted to give him a hard slap on the cheek. He semi-stopped himself, and delivered a light slap, together with a warning never to bother his son again.

The whimpering boy ran home and told his mother, who filed a

complaint, and voilà, the thing was in court. My father-in-law, a just and truthful man, confessed to a light slap on the cheek, and was declared guilty of child abuse, with fines and damages accordingly.

The bullying continued unabated, and the bully could now add the absolute triumph of his victory in court. Your father is a criminal and he’s my bitch.

Sweden was the first country in the world to ban all corporal punishment of children, both

implicitly, first, later explicitly. My father, who has been politically active all his life, opposed the explicit ban, he recently told me, long before I was born. The law says: “Children are to be treated with respect for their person and individuality and may not be subjected to corporal punishment or any other humiliating treatment.”

The change was carried through in conjunction with a large government-supported campaign to make the people rethink in accordance with the new law, as spanking was actually seen as quite a natural thing among the general populace at the time. There was even propaganda on milk cartons, I hear. Today the only people who spank their children would be first generation immigrants and alcoholics, as some of them might confess, if you swear to carry the secret to the grave.

I also had a rough time in school as a kid. I was quite small, too smart for the taste of some, rule- abiding, and on top of it all, confessed the Christian faith. It was no good place for a 10-year old. Our teacher asked the class once, “How many of you believe in God?”. It was only me, as we already knew. Then he asked about baptism. Everyone but me raised their hands, though one guy was not sure. They looked confusedly at me. At least I could answer with some amount of pride that my parents would let me decide for themselves.

But in general, I really didn’t want to stand out. I craved acceptance from my peers. My parents did not understand the amount of pressure (and sinfulness) I absorbed during those years. It’s a miracle that I was later baptized. And is in the faith.

And now I’m pondering the prospect of raising children by my own. My wife and I are praying for those to come, in spite of it all. How could I raise faithful children in this country? I can see two daunting scenarios; in a bizarre way they are mirror images of each other.

One is that we would have to leave because of a school-system that fails to provide a safe (non-chaotic) day-to-day environment, or that imbues an aggressive secularization. The other is if the authorities would decide that I’m an abusive father, or that we are indoctrinators of fundamentalist Christianity.

I have no plans on becoming an unreasonable and harsh father. (If nothing else, my wife would make sure about that.) But I do believe in the truth of Proverbs 13:24, “He who spares the rod hates his son”, and I do believe that the Swedish utter lack of discipline is a catastrophe and a curse that needs to be intently broken, to find the balance of justice and mercy that pleases God.

I’m reading Chesterton. He’s claiming that virtues on the loose can do more damage than the vices. It’s like we have a distant cultural memory of Christ blessing the children. Virtue: To treat our children as treasure. Children are adorably cute and innocent creatures. All context is gone. Specifically any insight about human fallen nature. The only reason children are mean is to be found in outside circumstances and hardships. We should fix the circumstances and be nice to them, and they will be nice back. The theory can never be disproven, because the circumstances can always be judged deficient. Anyway, I’m not in it.

Filip’s father also had a deep remembrance about how his distant forefathers fought against threats, without systems of justice and law. As he told the police: “We cannot continue this, because it will lead to desperate consequences. I realize the situation is going to a place where I have to use violence against children to protect my own.”

Here the one-man-mob is surfacing. But as an exceptionally decent, educated and law-abiding citizen, following the line of these impulses was not an option, and he decided to move the family. Perhaps he also considered that as things work, he would be the one to face the full apparatus of law, while the reign of terror continued. Isn’t that a half-blind civilization?

[End of letter.]

Advertisement