Rod Dreher's Blog, page 213

August 27, 2019

Ressentiment As Religion

Here’s the definition of the word ressentiment — the French version of the word “resentment,” but one that has a particular meaning in philosophical and political discourse:


In philosophy and psychology it is a concept that was of particular interest to the existentialist philosophers. According to the existentialists, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one’s own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.


I’ve been thinking about this concept this morning, after reading some of the comments on my post yesterday on “Moralistic Therapeutic Med School.”In that post, I wrote about the move in medical schools to take down and relocate photographs of distinguished alumni, including Nobel Prize winners, and past leaders of the schools, because those people are overwhelmingly white males. I said this is a racist, sexist attempt to rewrite history to bring it more in line with contemporary left-wing political ideology, which is based on soothing emotional distress in women and people of color. The idea is that being reminded of white male achievement does violence to non-whites and non-males.


Dr. Jeffrey Flier, a past dean of Harvard Medical School, protested very mildly against this kind of thing on his Twitter account. How mildly? Dr. Flier featured a photo of a hospital auditorium that used to have photos of past medical luminaries — white men — that have now been taken down. His comment on it was simply: “Connecting to a glorious past. Now all gone. Hope everyone is happy. I’m not.”


I encourage you to click on that link and read the responses to his post from doctors and others in the medical field. It’s like looking into an abyss of ressentiment. It’s deeply unsettling to see the extent to which this malign ideology has conquered the field. As near as I can tell, it’s based on these principles:



Historical achievements by white males are tainted because they occurred in a social context in which women and persons of color were not offered the same opportunities to excel.
Righting this historical wrong requires diminishing white male achievers, because in some sense, their achievement came at the expense of women and persons of color.
Evidence of white male achievement — such as photographs honoring those whose deeds embody excellence — must be removed from public prominence, because it might hurt the feelings of women and persons of color.

In the comments under my blog post, some readers defended the new ideological moves by saying — I’m summarizing — that those achievements cannot be understood apart from the injustice of the society that produced the white men who accomplished them. Someone suggested that a plaque should be installed pointing out that such-and-such achievement occurred during a time in which women and people of color were not allowed to study at that institution, or in some other bigoted way were not given the chance to succeed.


It can’t be denied, nor should it be denied, that these obstacles to female and ethnic minority achievement existed. Removing them has been a moral achievement — a moral achievement, let’s acknowledge, of liberal democratic thought. We should celebrate this!


But that is not enough for our progressives today. Driven by ressentiment, they seek to impose their own egalitarian ideology on history by tainting the achievements of those not like them. Never mind the fact that no society has been completely egalitarian, and that we will never know about the white men of scientific genius who spent their lives pushing a plow because rigid class inequalities, or other obstacles, prevented them from rising as far as their talents would take them. Once you go down that historical hole, you will never come out. You’ll end by affixing a warning label to Newton’s Principia Mathematica, cautioning that it was produced in an era that denied educational opportunities to women, Jews, and so forth.


Actually you won’t end there. There is no end to this neurotic exercise. But note well: it is very close to the two German Nobel Prize winning scientists who denounced Einstein’s theory of relativity as “Jewish science.”It is not far at all from Stalin and Lysenkoism, which denied the universality of science for political ends. Frankly, it is incredible that we are not yet two decades away from the 21st century, and one of its nastiest evils is reasserting itself in a new guise.


This quasi-Marxist view of history is a miserable way to live. I struggle to understand the mindset of the person who looks at, say, the Empire State Building, and only thinks, or thinks at all, of it as a monument to white male privilege, because of all the female and ethnic minority architects who weren’t offered the opportunity to study architecture in the early 20th century, and to participate in its construction. What sort of person visits a museum and leaves agitating for the removal or diminishment of the presence of Italian Renaissance masterpieces because women were not permitted or encouraged to take up painting in 15th-century Italy?


What sort of person interprets the world as a rebuke to themselves and people like them? Earlier this month, I heard a story on NPR (naturally) about Mexican brothers who had excelled playing classical music, and who decided to make an album of roots-influenced music. That’s an interesting idea! But look:


On his end, Alberto says that he had previously felt conflicted devoting his time to music by mostly white, male classical composers. “I didn’t see myself represented,” he says.


Oh for pity’s sake. Classical music, in the common sense of the term, was a European phenomenon of the 15th through the 19th centuries. Does this guy think that a white male boilermaker in Pittsburgh listens to Mozart and sees himself “represented,” because hey, that pale penis person Austrian who died in 1791 is just like him? It’s absurd.


But this is how progressive people think. They judge others not on the content of their character, or the quality of their achievements, but on the color of their skin and the character of their genitalia. This is progress, don’t you know.


I am not especially enamored of classical music, but when I listen to it, I don’t undertake to see a reflection of myself in it. I want to encounter something beautiful, something that tells me something truthful about the world and everything in it. In the best music, and art, I do hear (see) myself reflected in it, insofar as I encounter something human there.


I wrote a book about how going on a literary journey guided by a 14th-century Tuscan — Dante Alighieri — pulled me out of a dark hole of depression, and gave me a new perspective on life. I traveled to Ravenna, Italy, to the grave of Dante, and prostrated myself on the ground in thanksgiving to him for the gift of his Commedia, which saved my life. What an extraordinary thing, for a man who lived seven centuries earlier, on the other side of the ocean, to reach into the life of a broken middle-aged American and give words of comfort and liberation! It turned out that by looking hard enough, I did in fact see myself in this work. I saw the man I was, and the man I could become.


I gave a speech about this once, in Kansas, and a young woman who appeared to be a graduate student, stood during the Q&A and asked why I thought anybody today should study Dante, given that he came out of a culture that was racist and sexist. Honestly, I thought it was a joke. What kind of nitwit would ask such a question? But it was no joke. That was all Dante was to this young woman: a representative of a sexist, racist culture. She had nothing to learn from him, in her mind, because he was tainted by the sins of his time and place.


It must be exhausting and dispiriting to go through life searching for bigotry and bias at every turn. How can you enjoy anything, or learn from anything? Must every classical music concert be preceded by a formal statement acknowledging that the music was composed by white males, in a culture that privileged them? How would these progressives feel if a white supremacist society preceded classical music concerts with statements saying that this music was composed by white males, and let us all take pride in that fact?


Are the sons and daughters of Pittsburgh boilermakers to be discouraged from studying Chinese and Japanese brush painting because they don’t see themselves in it? Are Swedish children with musical talent to be put off of studying jazz because jazz was invented by black Americans, and the greatest jazz musicians are almost all black Americans? Yes, according to progressive ideology, these white kids probably are to be discouraged from doing that, because learning to play a musical form created by and dominated by black Americans is “cultural appropriation.”


Again: what a miserable, miserly way to go through life. And what a guarantee of generating more ressentiment. The New York Times‘s 1619 Project is not simply a deep dive into the history of chattel slavery in America, and its lasting effects. As one of the paper’s editors put it in a tweet:



In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery. https://t.co/3OXXRhmpbI @nytimes


— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) August 13, 2019


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


If you don’t think that this is laying the groundwork for delegitimizing the Founders and their achievements, you’re naive. And if you don’t think that’s going to have major political consequences for us today, by stoking white ressentiment, you’re dangerously naive.


As regular readers know, I’ve been immersed this summer in reading about the communist era in the Soviet Union and the European nations it took captive after World War II. It’s ressentiment all the way down. Here, in our decadent liberal democracy, left wing radicals are instituting their own version of this very thing. They are trying to create utopia in part by controlling historical memory. This is how it is always done. They are trying to make it impossible to remember history, and historical achievement, according to any other narrative but their own, suffused as it is by egalitarianism and bigotry.


In the current issue of National Affairs, Georgetown University political theorist Joshua Mitchell writes about why conservatives struggle with identity politics. Excerpts:


Just as Adam and all his progeny carry the stain of original sin, the transgressor is permanently marked. He himself may have done nothing to contribute to transgressions that predated him by decades or even centuries. But it makes no difference. He stands for the sum of the transgressions linked to his identity. Pressing Christian imagery further while at the same time distorting it considerably, the transgressor, like Christ, also stands in for those who are purportedly innocent and covers over their stains, so no judgment against their identity may be rendered.


This second understanding of identity is more often what we mean today when we speak about identity politics. Identity politics has no single progenitor or champion; it is less a single theory than a large genus within which nearly all modern theories of victimhood are species, because all of them invoke the relationship between transgression and innocence. Identity politics began penetrating our vernacular in the 1990s, but since that time, and at an ever-escalating pace, more and more groups have self-consciously claimed that they, too, have an identity — with a view to revealing to an unseeing, scapegoating society the transgressions that they, the innocent, have endured.


In this quasi-religious arena, innocent victims alone are hallowed; they alone receive what could be called “debt point” recognition. The rest — however much their legal, economic, or social status might indicate otherwise — have no legitimate voice. Indeed, their penance as transgressors is to listen to the innocents, and their lay responsibility in the liturgy of identity politics is to assent to the right of the innocents to tear down the civilizational temple their transgressors have built over the centuries — paid for, as it has been, not simply with money, but with the unearned suffering of the innocent scapegoats.


Whatever the innocents want to accomplish in politics is legitimate because the basis of political legitimacy is innocence. The past belongs to the transgressors, who today are an archaic holdover and an embarrassment. The future — politically, economically, and socially — belongs to the innocents. Little wonder that the prime transgressors — white heterosexual men who, in the world identity politics constructs, can have nothing important to say — eventually wonder if they too have been victims, and begin cataloging their wounds.


The logic of this still-novel political and moral framework is not obvious on its face. But it is essential that we come to know it, because it is already transforming the character of American politics. For the rising generation in particular, it offers something like a new default conceptual vocabulary for American life. Conservatives in particular have struggled to answer it because they have failed to understand it.


This is true. This is profoundly true. Mitchell goes on to say that conservatives — both the libertarian, market-oriented ones, and conservative traditionalists — respond to the identity politics challenge as if they were responding to standard Marxism and progressivism. This is a serious mistake, says Mitchell. More:


Identity politics, too, overturns the existing state of things, but it poses a much more aggressive and complicated challenge to tradition. Tradition is not an inheritance through which civilization is sustained; it is the tainted resume of transgressions perpetrated. Slavery in America, European colonialism in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia — these are the real meaning of the celebrated historical inheritance of the West. The hallowed past that traditionalists celebrate was purchased with the blood of the innocents. That is all we need to know to pass judgment. Progressivism thought tradition was an obstruction to the future. So too did Marxism, though on different grounds. Neither thought of tradition as identity politics does — as a stain that delegitimizes inheritance altogether. Tradition, in this sense, does not so much obstruct the future as deform the present, and so it must be rejected.


How have conservatives responded to the indictment of the Western inheritance in toto that identity politics pronounces? Among themselves, they offer confident, full-throated endorsements of the inheritance of the West and the American founders. But when their political opponents publicly charge that the blood of the innocents has indelibly stained the Western tradition, conservatives grow silent, fearful that they will be scapegoated and crucified for what they believe or say. The nails that hammer them to the cross of humiliation are words like “racist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “hater,” and “denier.”


Mitchell has just described the Republican Party.


Here, he makes his overall point very sharply:


The indictment that identity politics levels at the Western inheritance is comprehensive. The stains of slavery and colonialism are the “original sins” that taint the entire inheritance of the West, no less than Adam’s sin taints all of his heirs, irrespective of what his heirs might achieve. The accomplishments in science, philosophy, art, theology, politics, and economics that are the inheritance of the West subtract nothing from the debt that transgressors never can repay.


The comprehensive project that remains, now that the long history of transgression is nearing an end, involves recovering the silenced traditions of the innocents. The project began when multiculturalism equalized all traditions, and soon will end as identity politics scapegoats and delegitimizes the tradition of the transgressors. Conservatives have not dared to challenge this repudiation of the Western tradition directly because they have not yet grasped the breathtaking aspiration of identity politics, which is to cleanly distinguish between the transgressors and the innocents, silence the former, and listen to the “voices” of the latter.


Read the whole thing. Mitchell doesn’t provide an answer to identity politics, but he does say that if conservatives are to come up with an answer, they are going to have to stop thinking that they are arguing with Marxists or progressives, and understand that instead, they are confronting a militant new religion — one that looks a lot like Christianity without mercy. Mitchell says Jesus Christ’s Parable of the Wheat and the Tares is a good place to start coming up with a response:


The parable tells us that the world is always mixed; good and evil interpenetrate. The transgressors (the tares) and the innocents (the wheat) are never completely separable. That separation will happen at the harvest, the time of which no one can anticipate. Man (the servant) does not wish to live in this mixed world, and conceives of a plan to distinguish and separate the wheat from the tares. Identity politics is that plan.


But in this parable is also the beginning of an answer to the logic of identity politics. The parable tells us that man cannot purify the world. Because the world is broken, tradition, too, is mixed, no matter whose tradition we consider. Repudiating one tradition in favor of another — say, by rewriting the history books so they depict the “marginalized” innocents as pure and without stain — will not redeem a broken world.


The kind of people who remove photographs of a medical institutions past greats because those greats are white men are making a fundamentally religious decision. They are purifying the temple. The problem is, the temple of the world can never be fully purified. It will not stop with the photographs removed. The cycle of purgation and purification will continue, until they have built Utopia — which, of course, is an impossible goal.


The pseudo-religious madness will not be stopped until those who recognize it for what it is put a stop to it. They will destroy every institution, until they are stopped. As Mitchell has clearly understood, the end game is not finding a more just way to live together amid our common human brokenness; it is about identifying and purging the body politic of the transgressors.


And if the only ones who are prepared to fight them from the Right are white supremacists, we will destroy ourselves. The cowed silence of the decent Right on these matters passively empowers the indecent, racist Right. Similarly, the cowed silence of the old-fashioned liberal Left — those who know that the abandonment of liberalism and the embrace of identity-politics leftism is wrong — only makes things worse.


 


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Published on August 27, 2019 13:22

‘Good Boys’ & The Culture Of Death

Here’s a trailer for the hit R-rated film Good Boys. There’s no profanity or nudity in the trailer, but I would be careful about watching it at work. Universal Pictures is the studio behind it:



All of this was filmed with tweens. Here’s a link to an alternate trailer that is far raunchier, and is definitely NSFW.


Twelve year olds. Children.


This culture has a death wish, and deserves to die. Turn your back to it, and head toward Subiaco.


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Published on August 27, 2019 10:35

Putin & The Patriarchs

I don’t write much about Orthodox Christianity chiefly because there are so few Orthodox Christians in the West, and because we (therefore, I suppose) get very little news coverage about the Orthosphere. But the Financial Times last week did a big piece about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople (that is, the Ecumenical Patriarch), and its roots in Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical strategy. A reader sent it to me last week, and it’s really fascinating. Unfortunately, it’s also behind a paywall, though that paywall is inconsistent; I couldn’t get to the piece on my own a couple of days ago, but this morning, it was free. In case you can’t get to it, I’ll quote limited parts of it.


I’ll start by noting that even though I am an Orthodox Christian, I can genuinely say that I don’t have an opinion about any of this. As a general rule, I tend to sympathize with the Russian church on internal Orthodox matters, and am especially grateful to Russian church leaders for speaking out clearly on moral issues about which Western church leaders have seemingly lost their voice. But in this case, the details of the schism and everything that led up to it are so, well, Byzantine, that I honestly don’t know what to think of it all — except to say that schism is always to be grieved. I have Orthodox friends who have very strong opinions about all this, but having learned painful lessons about involving myself, if only mentally, in church politics, I am not eager to be drawn into this family feud.


OK, so here’s some background, on the story.


Orthodoxy has no pope. The closest we come is the Ecumenical Patriarch, based in the former Constantinople, but he is a figure much more like the Archbishop of Canterbury than the Roman pontiff. His position within global Orthodoxy is more one of honor than actual power and authority. Generally speaking (this is not true for the United States, which is in an unusual situation), Orthodoxy is a confederation of national churches, e.g., Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Antiochian (Syria Arab) Orthodox, etc. The Ecumenical Patriarch is always Greek, and lives within a tiny Greek community in Istanbul, which is all that remains of the once-Greek imperial capital of Constantinople.


There has been a longstanding rivalry between Moscow and Constantinople (the term Orthodox use to refer to ecclesiastical Istanbul). After the Muslim Turks took the city in 1453, and the Greek Church fell under the Muslim yoke, the Russians began to think of Moscow as the successor to Constantinople. There has been tension between the two great Orthodox sees for centuries. More recently, Bartholomew, the current Ecumenical Patriarch, has been within Orthodoxy a more liberalizing, Westernizing force; Kirill, the current Moscow Patriarch, has pushed back.


About one-third of the world’s Orthodox Christians are Russians, which makes the Russian church the biggest of the world’s 14 Orthodox jurisdictions, and the more powerful party in the Moscow-Constantinople rivalry. The privileges and funds that post-Communist Russian governments — especially Putin’s — have given to the once-persecuted Russian church has magnified its power and influence relative to Constantinople’s. The Putin government has promoted the Russian church’s fortunes. Depending on where you stand, this is either a great thing (the Russian state supports the restoration of Orthodox Christianity, and understands that Russia cannot be strong without a strong faith) or a terrible thing (Putin has cynically used the Church to advance his political power, and the Church has become a puppet for the State). I have friends passionately on both sides of this question. I have friends who think both things are true at the same time.


That gets us to today. The breakup of the Soviet Union occasioned the political separation of Ukraine from Russia. Ukrainian Orthodoxy remained united with Moscow, though the hierarchy in Ukraine pretty much ran its own show. Then, when Ukraine began to flirt politically with the West, Vladimir Putin got involved. Eventually he annexed Crimea. Russian-backed separatists started a war in eastern Ukraine. Relations between Ukraine and Russia became very, very fraught.


Last fall, Bartholomew granted Ukrainian Orthodox who broke with Moscow a tomos, an ecclesiastical term meaning that he recognized them as an independent church. This separated Ukrainian Orthodoxy from Moscow for the first time since 1686. In response, Moscow severed all ties with Constantinople (which is to say, with Greek Orthodoxy and all the churches under the EP’s authority), causing the greatest rift within Orthodoxy since the Great Schism of 1054, which separated the Latin West from the Byzantine East.


This is not just a theological matter, not in the least. As the FT writes:


Far from being an arcane squabble over centuries-old church doctrine, Patriarch Bartholomew’s decision had geopolitical significance. The fallout has affected the lives of priests and politicians, of ordinary worshippers and oligarchs. But most importantly, it was a blow to Vladimir Putin, for whom the Russian Orthodox church had come to symbolise Moscow’s sphere of influence in its near abroad. While Ukraine hailed the tomos as “an event no less substantial than our goals to join the EU and Nato”, Putin convened his security council in the middle of the night to discuss a response.


More:


“Why would you summon the security council over a church in a neighbouring country? It shows Ukraine that Russia is interfering,” says Evgeny Nikiforov, head of Radio Radonezh, a state-funded Orthodox station in Moscow. Still, losing what remains of a former imperial dominion is like having a “phantom limb”, he adds. “Ukraine is so much a part of Russia that people don’t understand how to live without it.”


It is hard to overstate the matter. Kiev was where Russian Orthodoxy was formally born in the year 988. If the Orthodox Church in Ukraine is separate from Russia, it feels to the Russians like they have lost their heart.


The FT piece, written by Max Seddon, explains that outwardly Putin and Patriarch Kirill have “presented a united front.” Seddon notes in detail that a number of Russian oligarchs and politicians have in the post-Communist period become deeply involved with Orthodoxy. More:


At some point in the 1990s, Putin became close to Father Tikhon Shevkunov, who ran a monastery down the street from the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, that was frequented by its top brass. Neither Putin nor Shevkunov have confirmed persistent rumours that the monk brought him into the Orthodox faith when Putin ran the FSB, and became his confessor, though Shevkunov once told a newspaper that Putin “makes confession, takes communion and understands his responsibility before God for the high service entrusted to him and for his immortal soul”.


The monk has accompanied Putin on several foreign trips during his presidency, while Kremlin-run firms fund his charities and educational projects.


After Putin came to power in 1999, many of his close confidants were part of an Orthodox elite that would exert significant influence over Russian politics. Former KGB agents now in charge of state companies began to donate their new-found wealth to church causes: Yakunin, while head of Russian Railways, helped to bring holy relics from Athos to Moscow and ferried the Eternal Flame from Jerusalem each year in special canisters bought from Nasa.


Until reading this FT piece, I had no idea how deeply Russian oligarchs and the Russian government were involved in building (and re-building) the Russian church, and Orthodox institutions elsewhere, like on Mount Athos. To be clear, I don’t think this is necessarily a problem. In Europe, the reason there exists so many beautiful Catholic churches, monasteries, and religious art is because of the generosity of wealthy Catholic laymen over the centuries. Did they give out of pure hearts, or for self-aggrandizement, or both? Does that really matter today? The point is, any Western Christian who is going to condemn newly wealthy Russians for donating heavily to the Church had better be prepared to condemn most of the historical Christian architecture in the West.


It is hard to overstate how much the Russian government, under Putin, has spent on building new churches and restoring those destroyed by the Bolsheviks. This is a very good thing, in my view, and something for which we Christians should be grateful. That said, you’d have to be terminally naive to think that rich men and governments always give to the Church — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant — expecting nothing in return.


So. Ukrainian Orthodoxy, in the post-Soviet period, began to fracture. The FT piece has some fascinating background, none of which I knew, but all of which indicates that none of the churchmen involved in this controversy are without fault. By 2016, it was a real mess, with the geopolitical stresses between Russia and Ukraine also fracturing the Ukraine church. In the summer of 2016, the world’s Orthodox patriarchs were schedule to meet in Crete, in an “Ecumenical Council” — the first such meeting since the year 787. It was Patriarch Bartholomew’s special project. But just before the meeting convened, Patriarch Kirill pulled out.


Without Moscow’s participation, the meeting could not be a true Ecumenical Council. It was a complete waste of time. Patriarch Bartholomew was deeply insulted.


Fast-forward to 2018. Ukranian president Petro Poroshenko was in political trouble. He decided to play the church nationalism card. Next thing you know, Bartholomew stuck the shiv into the back of Russian Orthodoxy by granting breakaway Ukrainians a tomos. Until I read the FT piece, I hadn’t realized how disgracefully Filaret, an elderly, King Lear bishop in Ukraine, had behaved in all this. Like I said, nobody has clean hands.


And this past spring, Poroshenko still lost his election.


The tectonic shocks from the schism continue to roll across the Orthodox world. Ultimately, all the churches will likely be forced to side with either Moscow or Constantinople — and that means not being able to receive communion at each side’s churches. It is a terrible, terrible thing. And Ukrainian Orthodoxy remains a hot jurisdictional mess. An Orthodox theologian tells the FT that the schism “could drag on for decades.” Which is to say, long after the patriarchs, bishops, and politicians who caused it have died and gone on to their reward.


Here’s something I did not know until read the FT piece (which, again, you can try to access here): fallout from the schism has damaged the relationship between Putin and Kirill. Putin is said to fault the Patriarch for not preventing the schism, and the Patriarch is said to blame Putin for forcing it with his clumsy geopolitical strategery.


What if they’re both right? What if the symphonia between Church and State under Putin has ended being disadvantageous for both Church and State?


As I said: I am not well informed enough to take a position on this matter, except to say that it grieves me that the Orthodox Church suffers like this from the sins and failings of men. One must pray that charity and humility ultimately prevail, and the schism is healed. In the meantime, I commend Max Seddon and the Financial Times for their thoughtful attention to the role theology and ecclesiastical history play in the monumental geopolitical events of our time.


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Published on August 27, 2019 09:23

August 26, 2019

Moralistic Therapeutic Med School

If it’s [any day of the week], our Very Woke Media is going to find some new way of telling the story about how white people, especially white male people, are the worst people in the world, and need to be Otherized for the common good. Yesterday it was NPR, bringing to us this “health news,” as they call it. The story starts like this:


A few years ago, TV celebrity Rachel Maddow was at Rockefeller University to hand out a prize that’s given each year to a prominent female scientist. As Maddow entered the auditorium, someone overheard her say, “What is up with the dude wall?”


She was referring to a wall covered with portraits of scientists from the university who have won either a Nobel Prize or the Lasker Award, a major medical prize.


“One hundred percent of them are men. It’s probably 30 headshots of 30 men. So it’s imposing,” says Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist with the university and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.


“I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending?’ ”


Vosshall says Maddow’s remark, and the word “dude wall,” crystallized something that had been bothering her for years. As she travels around the country to give lectures and attend conferences at scientific institutions, she constantly encounters lobbies, conference rooms, passageways, and lecture halls that are decorated with portraits of white men.


“It just sends the message, every day when you walk by it, that science consists of old white men,” says Vosshall. “I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending with these oil portraits and dusty old photographs?'”


Leslie Vosshall is in most respects vastly more intelligent than I am, but she is a racist, sexist nitwit. What kind of crazy person looks at portraits of a medical school’s Nobel Prize winners and other alumni who have great achievements to their name, and only sees … white men. Who are (therefore) bad people who need to be erased from public life and the institution’s memory?


She is not alone. More:


At Yale School of Medicine, for example, one main building’s hallways feature 55 portraits: three women and 52 men. They’re all white.


“I don’t necessarily always have a reaction. But then there are times when you’re having a really bad day — someone says something racist to you, or you’re struggling with feeling like you belong in the space — and then you see all those photos and it kind of reinforces whatever you might have been feeling at the time,” says Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a medical student at Yale.


He grew up reading Harry Potter books, and in that fictional world, portraits can talk to the characters. “If this was Harry Potter,” he muses, “if they could speak, what would they even say to me? Everywhere you study, there’s a big portrait somewhere of someone kind of staring you down.”


Good grief! So all the achievement of those men in the institution’s past must be suppressed because a black student there is a neurotic. Why can’t he look at that wall and think, “In the future, I will work hard enough so that my face hangs from that wall”? No, instead these egalitarians will have to deny the achievements of these past physicians and educators, because it doesn’t suit current ideology.


This is racist and sexist. But this is what the egalitarians are telling themselves to cover up their despicable deeds. Ally Cara is a PhD student at the University of Michigan:


The photos are now in a less noticeable spot: the department chair’s office suite. And the seminar room will soon be decorated with artwork depicting key discoveries made by the department’s faculty, students, and trainees.


“We really want to emphasize that we’re not trying to erase our history,” says Cara. “We’re proud of the people who have brought us to where we are today as a department. But we also want to show that we have a diverse and inclusive department.”


“We’re not trying to erase our history,” she lied.


That’s exactly what all these people are doing: erasing history, because it is ideologically offensive to them. The presence in the historical record of white male achievement is intolerable. These men did not fight for the Confederacy; they did great things to advance medicine, the science of human healing. But the deeds and accomplishments of these men, in the minds of these fanatics, detracts from women and people of color. So, to the broom closet with them.


The story features exactly one voice, a tentative one, of a dissenter. Dr. Jeffrey Flier is a former dean of Harvard Medical School. He tweeted this about a recent visit to a lecture hall at one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals:



When I last lectured in ⁦@BrighamWomens⁩ Bornstein auditorium, walls were adorned with portraits of prior luminaries of medicine & surgery. Connecting to a glorious past. Now all gone. Hope everyone is happy. I’m not. (Neither were those I asked- afraid to say openly). Sad. pic.twitter.com/Bsz89r2SBB


— Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) April 12, 2019


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


“Afraid to say openly” — because they’re intimidated by the commissars. I keep hearing this, over and over: that people see injustices like this, and they hate it, but they keep their mouths shut because they’re afraid. Guess what, people: this is how bigotry and oppression takes root. In part because of your cowardly silence.


You know that “deep and boiling anger” that the NBC/WSJ poll found in America today? This is one reason for it. The American elites are taking up a racist, sexist ideology, and using it to suppress historical memory, and to disempower people on the basis of their sex and ethnicity. It was wrong when it was done in the past, and it’s wrong to do it today.


Gosh, medical school elites, and media elites, I can’t imagine why teenage white males hear or read stories like this, and conclude that the system is stacked against them, solely because of their sex and skin color. I can’t imagine why the rancid appeals of the racist alt-right appeal to them. (Sarcasm off.)


“We’re not trying to erase our history.” Liar. Bigot.


And you watch: if Trump gets re-elected, these people at the medical schools, and in the newsrooms, will be shocked and grieving, with no comprehension at all about their own role in bringing that about.


Let’s say we were talking about the Berklee School of Music, and most of the high-achieving graduates in jazz in the school’s history were black men. If there were a move to remove or relocate portraits of those men because it would make white students feel unwelcome or ill at ease, we would know exactly what was going on here: a racist attempt to deny history, and human achievement. But in this case it’s happening to white males, who, in the eyes of American elites, are demons.


There will be a terrible price to pay for this, you progressive trolls.


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Published on August 26, 2019 14:18

Mutilation Or Liberation?

Is this mutilation or liberation?



Sex change surgery (Transsexed). pic.twitter.com/W5jQk5dMqO


— Learn Something (@EarnKnowledge) August 14, 2019


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


The federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that the State of Idaho must provide this surgery for a gender-dysphoric male sex criminal imprisoned for sexually abusing a 15 year old boy. Now the Idaho taxpayer is going to have to provide this man with the surgery, then transfer him to a women’s prison. Beautiful. The court, and NPR, in its report, call this man “she.” Because all a trans person has to do is claim to be the opposite sex, and voilà… .


What if a man said that having his legs surgically removed was necessary to his well being. So that he could be his True Self? This is an issue the medical community is facing. Excerpts:


In the late 1990s, the Scottish surgeon Robert Smith performed elective, above-the-knee amputations on two people. (The hospital he was affiliated with eventually compelled him to stop.) Smith’s patients are just two examples of people who have body integrity identity dysphoria, also known as being transabled: They feel they are disabled people trapped in abled bodies. Some people feel that they are meant to be amputees and will even injure themselves in order to create the desired amputation or make it medically necessary for a surgeon to perform it. Other people feel that they were meant to be blind or deaf.


Anthropology scholar Jenny L. Davis writes about how transabled people construct their identities. Not all transabled people express what Davis refers to as “impairment needs” in the same way. She writes:


The term wannabe refers to those who want/need to have a physical impairment. Pretenders act out their impairment-needs by, for example, folding an appendage, inserting ear plugs, wearing opaque contacts, walking on crutches, wheeling themselves in a chair, or wearing neck/leg/back braces. Devotees experience fetishistic attractions toward the physically impaired bodies of others…


More:


Philosophers Tim Bayne (Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia) and Neil Levy (University of Oxford, in England, and Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia) make the case that transabled people who seek amputations should be allowed to get them from reputable surgeons. They write:



Given that many patients will go ahead with amputations in any case and risk extensive injury or death in doing so, it might be argued that surgeons should accede 
to the requests, at least of those patients who they (or a competent authority) judge
 are likely to take matters into their own hands.


They also cite the issue of autonomy. If people can choose to reject life-saving treatments, the authors ask, why shouldn’t they be allowed to elect a surgery that will leave them disabled? If a person can elect to have plastic surgery, which is often used to make the body conform better to social ideals, why shouldn’t people also be allowed to change it in ways that society is less comfortable with? Lastly, they argue that according to the limited data available, people who seek and achieve their desired amputations feel relief from their suffering, a relief that they are unable to get by other means.


If transgender surgeries are not only permitted, but under certain conditions can be ordered as medically necessary (as in the Idaho inmate case), on what grounds do we refuse to allow the “transabled” to have the surgeries they want? Because it’s weird? That won’t fly.


So why then? Because such surgery takes a healthy, functioning part of the body and renders it non-functional (or non-existent)? What do you call what that video above demonstrates sex-change surgery does to the penis and testicles?


If individual autonomy trumps all other considerations, and “health” (an objective state) is defined as “well being” (a subjective state), then why would you tell a “transabled” person that they can’t lop their legs off it they want it badly enough?


Why is one liberation, but the other mutilation?


UPDATE: A reader writes, snarkily:


If we don’t allow the surgeries, people will just travel to unsafe countries for the procedures, or they’ll go to back-alley amputationists.


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Published on August 26, 2019 11:56

August 25, 2019

France’s Master Of ‘Materialist Horror’

Regular readers know that I’m enamored, in a bittersweet way, with the novels of Michel Houellebecq. Bittersweet, because Houellebecq’s novels are extraordinarily bleak, but they are also extraordinarily insightful about the way we live now. I’d call them prophetic.


Houellebecq (pronounced “well-beck”) is not a religious believer — he has described himself as atheist, but more recently as agnostic — but according to Louis Betty, a scholar of French literature and a specialist on Houellebecq’s work, the misanthropic French novelist is “a deeply and unavoidably religious writer.”


In his 2016 book Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror (Penn State), Betty calls Houellebecq’s novels “keen examinations of the lives of men and of societies that no longer lie beneath a sacred canopy.” The novels, Betty says,


represent a kind of fictional experiment in the death of God. And this experiment is best understood as a confrontation between two radically opposed domains: the materialism of modern science and the desire for transcendence and survival, which is best expressed in and through religion.


Without God is written by a scholar — Betty is an assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater — but is miraculously free of lit-crit jargon. It is an ideal introduction to the works of Houellebecq for the reader who is interested in religion, philosophy, and political theory.


Betty agreed to answer a few of my questions about Houellebecq via e-mail. Our interview is below.



RD: When we think of totalitarianism, our models are Nazism or Communism. Happily, the rebirth of either seems very unlikely. That said, many of the cultural and social factors that Hannah Arendt said opened the door for 20th century totalitarianism are also present today — especially radical atomization and loneliness, and the discrediting of familiar hierarchies. Unlike in the last century, liberalism seems not nearly so robust an alternative. What do most people on the left and the right today miss that Houellebecq sees?


LB: One of Houellebecq’s most remarkable qualities is his consistent anti-liberalism—“liberalism” meant here in the classical sense as an idea about human moral and


Louis Betty


economic freedom that emerges from the Enlightenment (I’m not referring to left-liberalism in the US). On the one hand, his novels paint a gloomy portrait of the consequences for family and community of the sexual revolution; essentially, they expose the underbelly of a social movement, championed by the modern left, that fancies itself sacrosanct and morally unassailable. So, in the moral sense, and especially vis-à-vis moral concerns surrounding sexuality, his treatment of the sexual revolution has a way of shocking left-liberal sensibilities.


On the other hand, MH is no great advocate for unfettered economic freedom. His novels suggest (or even demonstrate, if that’s a proper term for describing the work fiction does) that moral and economic liberation go hand in hand, and that it’s the very ideas and conditions that allowed for human economic emancipation centuries ago that eventually gave us the sexual revolution and the moral dissolution that arguably followed it (i.e., an increase in the divorce rate, more children born outside of marriage, etc.). The modern right, which likes to sing the praises of the free market but tends also toward moral and religious conservatism, isn’t primed to appreciate this rapprochement of material and moral license.


Ultimately, Houellebecq’s fiction points to a fundamental incoherence in modern, liberal political thought. You don’t get sexual freedom without the sort of economic emancipation free markets allow (it’s hard to multiply sexual partners when, say, you’re totally beholden economically to a spouse. That is, at least not without significant danger to yourself—just read some 19th-century social novels and you’ll see what I mean!). At the same time, you don’t get economic freedom and self-determination without a loosening of the moral constraints that material necessity used to hold in place. In any case, whatever side you’re on politically, the most important thing to understand as far as reading MH is concerned is that both of these visions—human flourishing understood either as economic or moral-sexual liberation—are materialistic and reductive.


And, rather obviously, they also fail adequately to address human beings’ metaphysical needs, which liberalism is content to leave up to the individual. Religion’s purpose, as I see it, is to order collective life sub specie aeternitatis, but you don’t get that when the hard work of metaphysical consolation becomes a private affair. In the vacuum, alternatives inevitably arise, some of the most pernicious of which we see today: ethnic and racial identitarianism, religious extremism and terrorism, and a tolerance and even embrace of totalitarian rhetoric across the political spectrum. I’m synthesizing a bit on Houellebecq’s behalf, but I think this vision can help us make sense of much of the tension we’re seeing today.


RD: Though he’s not a religious man, Houellebecq believes as a matter of sociological fact that no society can endure without religion. By “religion,” let’s use a broad definition that means “metaphysical framework” — though as you point out in your book, Houellebecq believes that transcendence itself is not enough; a resilient religion also has to offer some form of immortality. Is his case persuasive to you?


LB: Here it’s important, I think, to distinguish between religion as a human phenomenon and the specific case of Christianity in Europe. I don’t think such a thing as a “society without religion,” in the sense of having a metaphysical framework, really exists; to me, that’s akin to imagining a society without a language, or some notion of kinship, or ways of preparing food. I’m not an anthropologist, but it seems clear that any human society worthy of the adjective “human” is going to articulate some metaphysical system that makes sense of reality and offers consolation and a sense of meaning in the midst of natural vicissitude.


In the case of Christianity in Europe, I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I. This isn’t a political or polemical point. Imagine taking as an anthropological platitude the claim that human beings will be religious and, moreover, that civilizations are built upon the metaphysical systems they create (or which are revealed to them, to give credit to the metaphysical on its own terms). It’s obvious from such an assumption that the collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else. This should be deeply alarming to anyone who cares about the West’s tradition of humanitarianism, which emerges—and it would be wonderful if we could all agree on this—out of the original Judaic notion of imago Dei and later from Christian humanism. Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.


Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here; I just happen to have the intellectual conviction that the analysis of human society begins with religion. If you incline toward Marxian thinking, which looks at things in the diametrically opposed way, you’re going to hate what I’m saying. But that’s how I see it.


As for your question about immortality: it’s clear to me that religious systems holding out a promise of survival are going to do better than those that don’t. There are many reasons Christianity overwhelmed Greco-Roman religion in the early centuries of the first millennium, but part of it has surely to do with the relative weakness of the Stoic understanding of immortality, which involved a figurative incorporation into the cosmos, compared with the personal immortality Christianity promises. In this respect, I think Christianity will always be a powerful metaphysical player, even if the present situation in much of Europe seems to point in the opposite direction.


Mortality is too overwhelming a fear and the difficulties of life too great for whole populations to go on without remedies to them for very long. I read a few months ago that religious practice in Venezuela has increased as the country becomes more and more disordered. Perhaps all it would take in Europe is a little upheaval—not that I wish it—for young people to start, say, making a habit of going to Mass. In any event, this is just my own somewhat-less-than-scholarly speculation. Ultimately, the future is opaque.


RD: What do you mean by “the transition from a theological to an economic understanding of the human being”? Does this have to do with what you call Houellebecq’s “ontology of materialism”?


LB: Rereading that passage in my book, I realize I ought to have been a bit clearer. The way you interpreted it on your blog cleaned the imprecision up nicely. I should have used the word “materialist” rather than “economic”; my point, after all, is that a purely economic understanding of the human being, in which we are reduced to consumers and consumed, can only follow upon a deeper ontological shift from a theological (and, in the case of Houellebecq, Christian) worldview to a materialist one. If there is no soul, no inviolate and irreducible part of our identity that both escapes all material and social determination and is of equal value regardless of circumstance, the door is opened, at least in argument form, to whatever dehumanizing forces one cares to imagine.


More concretely, you don’t get white supremacy if you believe that every human being has a soul fashioned in God’s image. Neither do you get far-left racial and ethnic identitarianism. Both are symptoms of a metaphysical deficit. It’s very easy to start dividing people up into tribal categories; after all, humans vary massively in just about every imaginable quality. It’s really something of a miracle that we ever came up with a notion of common humanity at all! We have the Judeo-Christian heritage to thank for this in the West. This is something secular people ought to consider before making glib criticisms of traditional religion.


RD: I’ve been doing reading lately about what the business professor Shoshanna Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Without going into detail here, her basic thesis is that Google, Facebook, Amazon and others have created an economic model based on “data mining” — that is, learning as much as possible about our private lives and personalities, and using that information to sell us things. It goes far beyond mere marketing, though, to deep behavior modification. It sounds like something from a Houellebecq novel, but it’s really happening. From a Houellebecqian perspective, can you foresee some kind of therapeutic totalitarianism emerging out of the radical atomization of society, and the commodification of every aspect of our personalities?


LB: The best novel to consult on this point is Houellebecq’s first, Whatever (a bizarre choice for a title in English—the original French version is Extension du domaine de la lutte, or Extension of the domain of the struggle), whose narrator-protagonist is a computer programmer working in the incipient digital environment of the early 1990s. The narrator has a colleague named Jean Yves-Fréhaut who is obsessed with the “connectivity” (he refers to it in terms of “degrees of freedom”) that the emerging world of the early internet offers. Here’s a key—and incredibly prescient—passage from the novel:


If human relations become progressively impossible this is due, precisely, to the multiplying of those degrees of freedom of which Jean-Yves Fréhaut declared himself the enthusiastic prophet. He himself had never known any intimate relationship, of that I’m sure; his state of freedom was extreme.


This is a pretty damning critique of social media culture, all the more so since it comes from a time when AOL chatrooms were barely getting off the ground. As far as I’ve been able to discover, living a fulfilled life means finding a balance between one’s emancipatory instincts and the need for embedding ourselves in communities and institutions, which give us a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves. This is a question of simple maturity. If our culture is dimwitted enough to imagine happiness in Fréhaut’s adolescent terms, then we will have merited our descent into what you call therapeutic totalitarianism.


RD: You write in Without God that for Houellebecq, “the decline of Christianity [is] the central even of Western modernity.” Relatedly, you say that Houellebecq is often denounced as “reactionary,” but perhaps, in your words, “the true reactionary has all along been Enlightenment culture, which insists on an unsustainable assortment of freedom largely inimical to human happiness.” Explain.


The crushing majority of human history has been religious and dualistic (in the metaphysical sense) in one way or another. Most of the world today is very religious. It’s only Western Europe and, increasingly, the secular geographical bookends of the US that depart from the human norm. Enlightenment thinking of the more materialistic, philosophe sort, of which the West is the principal inheritor, represents, from this perspective, a striking deviation. By using the term “reactionary,” I wanted to highlight the objective strangeness, in the scope of human history, of the secular westerner. Of course, I don’t advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater—I’m not some kind of medievalist!


As to the point about freedom, here’s a passage from a peer-reviewed article I published this January in Modern and Contemporary France that should hit the nail on the head:


From a Houellebecquian perspective, today’s partisans of continued emancipation—in whatever context one discovers them—are simply reacting against the unfulfilled promises of previous progressive causes. Freedom has not produced the expected results, and thus one must seek to imbibe it in greater and greater quantities, lest the emancipatory quest reveals itself for what it truly is: not a moral mission but an existential addiction, which can only be cured by recourse to religion.


Today’s ever-multiplying demands for individual recognition—our current “obsession” with identity—are obviously useful to the capitalist enterprise, but they strike me more deeply as the search for an apotheosis for liberalism as well as, paradoxically, an unconscious rejection of it. If we can just achieve one more liberation, the implicit thinking goes, if we can take one last step down the glorious road to total emancipation, then perhaps, finally, the New Jerusalem will descend from the heavens. The trouble is that we moderns no longer really believe this is true, and what we seem really to want is to escape ourselves and our oppressive individuality. This is what many of Houellebecq’s protagonists are after in their mad quests for ego-annihilating sex—there’s a reason the French refer to orgasm as la petite mort [the little death — RD]!


Similarly, the contemporary appeal of various forms of identitarianism speaks to a broader exhaustion with the false promise of salvation through liberation. The modern emancipatory process isolates the individual just as it affirms it—and because it affirms it. I remember hearing a sermon at Mass when I was a teenager in which the priest told the congregation that Hell isn’t lakes of fire but rather eternal separation from God and from others. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to equate late-liberalism with a journey into perdition, but, at least from a psychological point of view, the parallel is strong enough to be alarming.


The solution, I suppose, is to find forms of collectivity that suit the greatest number and properly balance the tension between freedom and tradition. For you, Rod, that’s Christianity. For others, it’s social justice or some other political movement. As the French say, c’est de bonne guerre.



Louis Betty’s book is Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror (Penn State University Press, 2016). For newcomers to Houellebecq, I recommend starting with either The Elementary Particles (2000) or Submission (2015).


Readers should be aware that Houellebecq writes very frankly about sex, because sex without love is central to his philosophical concerns. Some have described Houellebecq’s work as “pornographic,” but that word is imprecise and misleading. Yes, there are detailed descriptions of sexual acts in his books — much more so in The Elementary Particles than in Submission, by the way — but they are in no way presented as erotically exciting. Houellebecq’s characters experience sex in a soulless, desolate way, as a futile means of escape from meaninglessness. Houellebecq is certainly not a prude, but the very last thing a Houellebecq reader would take away from his novels is the idea that “sexual liberation” is attractive, or offers a viable way of living.


I bring the topic up here because religious and culturally conservative readers coming to Houellebecq for the first time should know what they’re in for. Houellebecq is one of the most important novelists of our time, and I believe he’s vital reading for cultural conservatives, including religious ones, who want to understand the crisis of our time. But his writing is not to everyone’s taste.


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Published on August 25, 2019 19:41

America’s Future: Childless, Godless, Unpatriotic

It is the summer of our discontent, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Excerpts:



The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that — despite Americans’ overall satisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy and their own personal finances — a majority say they are angry at the nation’s political and financial establishment, anxious about its economic future, and pessimistic about the country they’re leaving for the next generation.


“Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted this survey in partnership with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. “Four years later, with a very different political leader in place, that anger remains at the same level.”



The poll finds strong pessimism about the future of the country, even though the economy is strong. Just wait till the next recession! And look at this:



As reader Sean P., who sent me the link to the news story about the poll, said:


So to sum up: we have an angry, young, rootless generation with little love for their country, no adherence to any higher moral authority, and little interest in investing in future generations.


Yep, bright days ahead for the American republic!


Cheer, up, Sean P.! We have The New York Times and the elites running the cultural and educational institutions of this country teaching the next generation that the real founding of America was on slavery.


Those under 40 don’t believe in God, their country, or having children (which is to say, the future), but they do believe in fulfilling themselves. They have nothing to live for except themselves and their jobs. Here we see the fulfillment of sociologist Christian Smith’s diagnosis of the beliefs of young Americans from his own data (quoted in The Benedict Option):





“All that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”


A nation cannot survive on that. America is not going to make it without radical change. Those who don’t believe in anything beyond themselves aren’t going to have what it takes to endure. Those who don’t believe in God, in the nation, or the family aren’t going to have a future.


Those who do believe in God, the nation, and the family just might — but they’ve got to prepare to fight for these things. And not — please pay attention here — simply by resisting enemies Out There. The greatest enemies are within ourselves and our own communities, especially our unwillingness to see what’s happening around us, and take action.


If you think politics alone are capable of addressing this crisis, ask yourself why after three years of Trump, people are just as angry on balance today as they were three years ago. If you think four more years of Trump, or a Democratic president, is going to make a big difference, you’re dreaming.


If you think the go-along-to-get-along middle-class churches are giving Christian people what they need to endure this current crisis, which is only going to worsen, you’re beyond naive. We can’t just blame failed church leadership; there’s a problem of followership too. I hear from pastors who tell me that their congregations are afraid of the decline-and-fall happening all around them, but are even more afraid of the idea that they have to change their way of living to meet the grave challenges. They don’t want responsibility. I also hear from Christians who are taking risks to stand up to the spread of anti-Christian bigotry, and institutional wokeness, in the name of old-fashioned liberal democratic standards. You know what discourages them? The fact that so many others see the wrongdoing and injustice, but will not risk their comfortable lives to take any kind of stand.


In some cases, these Christians are living on the junk food of #MAGA fantasy. And look, if you think cheap, tinsel-and-pasteboard #MAGA patriotism is going to be enough to counter the assault on the meaning of America by liberal elites, you’re bringing firecrackers and Roman candles to the battlefield. This past week, thinking about the Times‘s radical slavery project, I’ve been reconsidering my own criticism (from the Right) of our liberal democratic constitutional order. The foundational flaws in that order haven’t disappeared, but I’ve been thinking that I’m probably guilty of ingratitude for it. Given what human beings are, it’s kind of a miracle that the Founders were able to create this system, and make it so durable. John Adams famously warned: “Human passions unbridled by morality and religion…would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” He meant that ordered liberty and self-government depends on a people bound by shared beliefs that transcend self-interest, and anchor the individual in a framework of meaning.


What do you think John Adams would say if he saw the results of that NBC/WSJ poll, and what it says about the future of the Republic?


Fewer than one in three Americans under 40 say belief in God is important. What a colossal failure by the church (the institutions, as well as families)! And fewer than one in three Americans believe it’s important to have children. What has happened to us? If we lose the church and the family, the nation is lost too. An America that is devoted to nothing but preserving the ability for autonomous individuals to enjoy their lives will not be able to survive.


The future is not determined in advance. But the crisis is upon us. We have clearly become a decadent people — those numbers don’t lie — and it may be too late to turn things around. We may be at the point where the people who believe in the old virtues need to follow what Alasdair MacIntyre said that the early Benedictines did in the ruins of the Roman Empire. In the philosopher’s take, they


turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.


That is to say, they figured the Roman Empire for lost, and instead focused on building up the kinds of communities that could survive the waves of violence and chaos to come. We shouldn’t imagine that the early Benedictines lived comfortable lives behind their monastery walls. They suffered the violence that was general in early medieval Europe — including bloodshed. But they had built into their communal lives the faith and the practices that enabled them to endure the worst that the world have to inflict. And because they created these things for themselves, they were able to share the fruits of their prayer and their labor with those who lived around them.


You know this story from me. I’m not going to bore you with it again. I’m going to say this, though: the American order has not fallen. If it is going to be saved, it will have been saved by those whose hearts and minds were formed by strong religious faith, strong families, and strong communities of families.


One more quote from the NBC/WSJ poll story:


“There is an emerging America where issues like children, religion, and patriotism are far less important,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies. “And in America, it’s the emerging generation that calls the shots about where the country’s headed.”


America’s future is going to be childless, godless, and unpatriotic. Which is to say, there won’t be a future for that kind of America. Changing political leadership will not cause people to believe in God again, or desire children, or love their country more. These things go much deeper than politics. However, you can be quite sure that some political leader will come along — a man of the Left, perhaps, or of the Right — who will speak powerfully into the vacuum in the hearts of the emerging generation. He will promise them relief from their despair, and faith in the future, without having to do anything other than trust him and his vision. We know where this leads, because we saw it emerge in the previous century, in Europe.


The American liberal elites are destroying the country’s ability to sustain itself, and the conservative elites — including Donald Trump — are either utterly clueless about the nature of the crisis, or are flailing ineffectively in the face of it.


It is time for churches, families, and communities of faith to have some very serious conversations among themselves. The signs of the times are written in flashing neon.


UPDATE: In his comment on this thread, reader Jonah R. said that this poll confirms his biases, but he suspects that had his parents been asked these same questions when they were in the 18 to 38 age range, they would have scored about as low as the Millennials and Gen Z respondents. I was able to go to the granular data on the NBC/WSJ poll (so you can you, here), and to see a comparison with those polled in 1998. These numbers aren’t broken down by generational demographic, but there has clearly been a substantial overall decline in Religion and Having Children, and a meaningful decline in Patriotism. Notice, though, that Community Involvement is way up in terms of importance today over 1998, and Hard Work has also climbed significantly:



UPDATE.2: From a 2004 address Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger delivered in Italy. First Things published it in 2006, after Ratzinger became Benedict XVI:


At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.


Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen—at least by some people—as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today’s situation with the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice its vital energy had been depleted.


America is not Europe, in this sense, but we’re getting there.


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Published on August 25, 2019 16:43

August 24, 2019

Wokeness Rots Woman’s Brain

O Fortuna! It’s showtime at the Prytania!:





She drove away all her friends — the friends who “would have done anything for” her. Except join her cult.


This is not a parody account, by the way. Saira Rao is a Colorado Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year. 


She lost in the Democratic primary by more than a two-to-one margin, after which she said that she is “giving up on white people.” Even though she considered herself one … but also, in a 2017 “open letter to the Democratic Party,” called herself “brown.” She said in that open letter that she was “breaking up with the Democratic Party,” but a few months later, she entered the Democratic primary. Which she lost bigtime, then turned green with envy of the white woman who beat her.


Perhaps it’s uncharitable of me to say so, but I get the feeling that Saira Rao might not be the most mentally stable Social Justice Warrior in the ranks.


(Wondering what the Prytania joke is? Look here.)


UPDATE: Ooooh! Ooooh! Here’s a great one going around Twitter tonight:



it’s so good pic.twitter.com/7BHzI7pyrn


— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 24, 2019


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The author of these tweets has taken her Twitter account down. For the record, she’s a white woman whose last name is Fitzgerald. More:



Oh and just in case it got confusing when I called her kid white — her kid is white. She used ‘swarthy’ to “denote a difference in performances of feminitiy” (?????????) pic.twitter.com/WzhL97R8cl


— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 24, 2019


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Have you tickled a swarthy genderfluid child today?



I just tickled the belly of my swarthy genderfluid dog. Well, he’s not really genderfluid; he just doesn’t have testicles. But he’s not woke, so he welcomed the gesture. pic.twitter.com/uhM6fHZr2X


— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) August 25, 2019


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UPDATE.2: Reader Leif:


To emphasize the degree to which the doctrines of wokeness are totally riped-off from the Biblical doctrine of sin, I’d like to take this opportunity to re-publish this delightful gem of a tweet-storm under the title:


“Notes From a Self-Absorbed Christian Woman Hurt by Her Unbelieving Friends”


Quite a few women have recently asked me how they can help their sinner friends understand sin, in the hopes that they’ll start their journey towards God. In the hopes that their sinner friends can become trustworthy.


Here’s what I’ve learned: sin is the most powerful drug on the planet. And if you, yourself, don’t want to wean yourself off of sin, it can’t and won’t happen.

You have to not just want to wean yourself, you have to *desperately* want to wean yourself.


I was a sinner until 2016. I was deeply self-loathing and internally oppressed. Nearly all my closest friends were sinners. These women were in my wedding, and I in theirs. They cradled me when I wept for my dead mother. They would have done anything for me.


EXCEPT GIVE UP SIN.

I spent one full year meeting them for coffee, drinks, lunch, dinner. I sent them articles. I wrote articles. I sent them those. Rather than show an interest in repentance, nearly ALL of them, dumped me.


Dumping has involved a pinch of ghosting, a dash of “I’m really worried about you, WE are really worried about you.” It’s involved leaving me and my family out of group plans – and pretending it was an accident.


It’s involved leaving me out of group plans – and not pretending it was an accident. Some of these women weren’t really even friends before, but have bonded over their mutual disdain for me and my “craziness.”


They’ve bonded around SIN.


I no longer harbor anger towards them. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad from time to time, because it does.


But the overarching feelings I have are (a) UNDERSTANDING. Understanding how they are all just reading from their Sin ScriptA script they received before they were born and (b) FEAR.


Fear that if the intense love they had for me and my family wasn’t enough to reflect on their own sin, what hope do we have.


Those who love us still love sin more. By a long shot.


The most powerful drug on the planet.


As for that advice: save your time, save your energy, save your heart. Until and unless they themselves want to eradicate the toxic sin embedded in their DNA, it’ll never happen and you’ll be crushed trying.


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Published on August 24, 2019 16:40

Anti-Christian Persecution In Finland

A reader writes:


I am a non believer who follows your writing with some interest. In the past I have thought that you are a bit of an alarmist when it comes to secular attitudes towards conservative christians, but no longer.


In my home country of Finland, where 80% of the population are registered christians (with means paying about one percent of your income as church tax) police have started an investigation against a member of parliament for quoting the bible!


Mrs Päivi Räsänen , MP for Christian Democrats, commented critically on the fact that the church was a co-sponsor of Helsinki’s gay pride march. She said: “How does the church’s teaching align with being a proud sponsor of something that is according to the Bible both shameful and a sin.”


This comment lead to a criminal complaint, and is being investigated by the police under the charge of “inciting hatred” which under Finnish law can lead to up to two years in prison.


This case is exceptional in many ways, not the least because under Finnish law the freedom of speech -even outrageous speech- for parliamentarians has previously been considered sacrosanct, as it has been considered a necessity for democracy. Apparently PC can overrule even that.


Mrs Räsänen remains unrepentant and says she will interpret the Bible the way she sees it despite the consequences.


Thankfully the likelihood that she will be convicted is small as there needs to be a 5/6 majority in Parliament to waive her immunity, and this is highly unlikely.


All the same, even for a non church member such as I, this is shameful day in what I thought was one of the finest democracies in the world.


Here’s the tweet that got the MP into trouble:



#kirkko on ilmoittanut olevansa #seta n #Pride2019 virallinen partneri. Miten kirkon oppiperusta, #raamattu sopii yhteen sen kanssa, että häpeä ja synti nostetaan ylpeyden aiheeksi? pic.twitter.com/cnjAQCrOc2


— Päivi Räsänen (@PaiviRasanen) June 17, 2019


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Here’s a news story about it (in Finnish). The newspaper account points out that the Lutheran archbishop of the country stands behind the church’s embrace of gay Pride.


Stand strong, Päivi Räsänen! It is not permitted to disapprove. You. Must. Submit. In the US, the First Amendment will protect this kind of dissenting Christian commentary from legal action, but that same First Amendment will likely protect the rights of organizations and individuals to punish dissident thought in effective ways. For example, an American business executive who tweeted something like that would have to worry about his job.


As I work on my new book, I’m getting in touch with people all over the US who emigrated from Communist countries. This week I interviewed one who came not long after Communism fell in her country. Like so many others, she’s been made deeply uneasy by things she’s seen emerge here — things that remind her of the old country.


This scientist-professor told me a detailed story about being at a high-level academic conference not long ago in which colleagues — all scientists — stood around after the day’s sessions speculating on the conditions under which political undesirables ought to be eliminated — killed — for the greater good. The academic said this wasn’t a joke to them. She said she remarked that she had actually lived in a country in which this was the practice, and it was a bad thing. The group turned on her, and began defending communism. She then retreated into her shell — a habit she learned in her life under Communism.


The scientist-professor told me that this is not unusual in her world. Academics are so uniformly on the Left that they can’t imagine anybody they esteem — certainly not a fellow professor — could possibly disagree. She said that the uncomplicated hatred for political and religious conservatives she’s observed among academic science types over the years she has been in America is bone-chilling. She said it has pushed her deep into the closet in her university, and within her profession — this, even though she works in science, which you’d think was apolitical. And it has made her afraid for what would happen to her adopted country, the United States, if people like her academic colleagues came to hold power.


“If feels like at some point if [my colleagues] discover that I don’t agree with the things they’re talking about, my career will be over,” she told me. “Everybody is so open, they’re talking in front of me like I’m really one of them. It really looks like this is what’s normal within that community.”


Now, that scientist lives in the United States, and has the protection of the First Amendment. I have no idea what her feelings are about gay Pride parades, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that she tweeted out something like what the Finnish MP did, what would happen to her career? Based on our conversation (which was much more detailed than what I’m revealing here), she is absolutely convinced it would be over. She would be persona non grata in her department, and within her field.  So she remains silent, closeted, afraid. The First Amendment is cold comfort to her. It’ll keep you out of jail, which ain’t nothin’, but it won’t protect your job, your reputation, or even your safety.


This morning I was talking to an academic friend who teaches on the East coast. When he called, I told him that I was working on this post. He and I discussed the ways it is possible to destroy the professional and personal lives of your political enemies without breaking the law. His work also has to do with the STEM field, and he was telling me how terrifying it is to discover how much power companies like Google have over our lives — without being accountable to anybody. It’s not only that Google (Facebook, et al.) have the power to control the information they know about us; it’s that they gather this information, and it’s available to all kinds of people, including bad actors. We are all far more vulnerable than we think.


In Finland, if you so much as question whether or not a Church ought to be approving of a gay Pride march, you can be investigated by the police. In the US, if you did that, the police won’t bother you, but depending on what you do for a living, you could still have your job taken away and your career destroyed. So you tell me: with that kind of social control in place, how free are we, really?


Once again, if you are any kind of Christian, I encourage you to read The Benedict Option. We have to prepare ourselves for the present, and the future. Or if you don’t like the Benedictine idea, then consider it in terms of the Kolakovic Option, named after a heroic Croatian Jesuit who escaped the Gestapo in 1943, and hid in Czechoslovakia. He warned Slovak Catholics that when the war ended, the Communists would likely rule their country — and that Christians needed to be ready for it. He established underground circles of believers who educated themselves and formed themselves in prayer and spiritual disciplines. Here’s what he accomplished:



What’s happening to this Finnish believer is a sign of what’s to come. Prepare for resistance.


UPDATE: Regarding what the STEM academics were saying to the professor, about what should be done to Deplorables, consider this passage from an Alan Jacobs post from five years back. He’s commenting on a passage from a piece by philosopher Rebecca Roache, in which she’s speculating about the future of punishment. Jacobs writes:


There is a kind of philosopher — an all too common kind of philosopher — who when considering such topics habitually identifies himself or herself with power. Pronouns matter a good deal here. Note that in Roache’s comments “we” are the ones who have the power to inflict punishment on “someone.” We punish; they are punished. We control; they are controlled. We decide; they are the objects of our decisions. Would Roache’s speculations have taken a different form, I wonder, if she had reversed the pronouns?


This is the danger for all of us who have some wealth and security and status: to imagine that the punitive shoe will always be on the other’s foot. In these matters it might be a useful moral discipline for philosophers to read the great classics of dystopian fiction, which habitually envision the world of power as seen by the powerless.


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Published on August 24, 2019 09:18

August 23, 2019

A Pagan Against The God Of ‘Progress’

An Orthodox staretz from the film ‘1612’. Pagan reader is drawn to shared love of mystery and awe she sees in Christians

I really do have the most interesting readers. This came in my e-mailbox. The reader gives me permission to publish it:

For a little while I’ve been meaning to email you to express some thoughts and thanks. First for the thanks: I really enjoy reading your blog! In particular, I enjoy how thoughtful, erudite, and

broadminded your writing is. While we have different religions, values, and politics nonetheless I find myself respecting your position even when I disagree with it. I sometimes post under the name ‘potentilla’ on your blog.


Okay, now on to the thoughts! I’m in my early 30s and for a long time I was stuck in the woke culture you criticize. My involvement in it was while the social justice dogma was only spoken about by folks

on the margins. By this, I mean literally political wonks living in squats and rural queer communities. Around 2013 I noticed that the discourse around identity took on the tone that it has to this day. I

correlate the shift very precisely as the failure of the prophecy of 2012. The New Age narrative shattered on Dec. 21st 2012 and in a few months the identity politic discourse was on everyone’s lip.


From that point on, the discourse only got more and more mainstream. The New Age movement crashed and burned and people desperately looked to fill the God-shaped hole in their soul with something to stave off the emptiness.


After living in a queer community I got a job on an organic farm near a college town. I noticed that my friends who most slavishly parroted the identity politics were those who were from poor families,

often those who used Facebook to make a living.These people often expressed, very secretly mind you, that they had some disagreements with the woke-narrative. Still, they always loudly repeated the

catch-phrases in public, and would loudly bully others who threatened to think heterodox thoughts.


After leaving that community and cutting nearly every tie, I’ve come to understand that those poor souls were trapped. If folks wrote nasty things on their Facebook wall then they would be out of business. Their income was tied to woke communities and if they got dog-piled they would be in deep trouble. Not hurt feelings, but looking at serious homelessness.


Part of the social control the Left exerts, then, is purely economic. And the most vulnerable members of the community are kept in line by the reality that they are already under constant surveillance for

crimethought. That is to say, the Woke Left operates more in the same manner as a cult.


While I am in an extreme minority religion — specifically I’m a Hellenic Polytheist with Neoplatonic and mystical leanings — that said, something that I think is important to note is that the folks

who hate Christianity also tend to hate my religion. In every sense, I have infinitely more in common with sincere theists than the devotees of Progress. Indeed, in my personal life I’ve stood up for

the power and validity, worth and reality of Christ quite a few times and, when it comes up, I encourage my Christians friend to pray and engage in religious ritual. Clearly Christ is a God and deserves the

respect and reverence He is due. From my own faith, to deny that is an act of obvious hubris.


Most of the Social Justice left are actually religious — they worship their version of Progress. To be sincerely theistic is to go against Progress. What do I care more about — social justice dogma or doing

right by my Gods? Obviously I care more about doing right by my Gods. For this reason, I am no fan of Progress, the False Idol that fills the God-shaped hole in people’s souls.


What does the Social Justice orthodoxy adhere to but the ideal of Progress? The idea that we *must* be better than our forebears? That we are smarter and more moral than our forebears? This is part of why

the Woke seek to destroy the legacy of the past, they must bulldoze it and replace it with the Chromium-plated, antiseptic, and bland idol of Progress they worship.


Tradition, legacy, awe, and terror of Divine Mystery all stand starkly opposed to the Myth of Progress. That is to say, theistic religion and Progress are utterly incompatible. Indeed, looking over the

spiritual, ecological and ideological waste left by the Works of Progress I would posit that Progress is likely demonic in the literal sense. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Part of what informs my

strong opinion on this matter is that I’ve noticed a trend of ‘atheistic’ leftists actively engaging in demonolatory. To my mind, this is the last word in the idiocy of evil, but nonetheless I can’t help but be reminded of CS Lewis having Screwtape say that type of human demons prefer the most is “the materialist magician.”


And to my mind, having communities of Christians band together to continue their veneration of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Saints is a very good thing indeed. In my own work situations I tend

to have much more in common with sincere Christians than the Woke since we both come from a place of accepting the reality of Divine Mystery. And so I sincerely wish you the best in the work you’re

doing and will continue to read your blog with interest.


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Published on August 23, 2019 18:20

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