Rod Dreher's Blog, page 227

Vatican Diplomat’s Indelicate Situation

Archbishop Luigi Ventura, accused of grabbing Gallic male buttocks (Lozère-Nouvelle/Screengrab)

A Catholic priest e-mails to say:

The Holy See has stripped Archbishop Luigi Ventura of his diplomatic status for accusations of having made homosexual advances/assaults on young men.

Yet the irony is that during his tenure as nuncio to France, there was a whole hoopla about the French government wanting to appoint a practicing homosexual as ambassador to the Holy See.

I realize that it is stretching the analogy a little as the nuncio was not openly homosexual (and the accusations from his time in France and Canada have not been tried in a court of law). But what are we to make of the fact that France could not appoint a gay man as ambassador to the Holy See at the very time that the serving ambassador from the Holy See to France is a gay man?

At the very least, it is another indicator of the credibility problem of the official Catholic Church and the idiotic view that we can turn a blind eye to homosexual clerics and think that they their homosexuality does not impinge on their ministry.

According to the story, the accusations against the nuncio in both countries is that he grabbed a couple of Gallic male butts. Not exactly “assault” (though perhaps it meets the legal definition), but the more important point is the hypocrisy of the Vatican refusing France’s gay ambassador, while shipping its handsy homosexual nuncio to its French embassy.

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Woke Capitalism: Neutrality Is Not An Option

A reader sends the above image, and writes:

Long time reader of the blog. I’ve been very interested in what you’ve had to say lately regarding corporate totalitarianism on the LGBT issues. As a 30-something employee in the corporate world, who attended an elite graduate institution, all of this is entirely unsurprising to me and I only expect it to continue apace. Nonetheless, even I am a bit jarred when I encounter images like the one above, taken at the London Pride parade. This comes from the social media presence of one of the world’s preeminent law firms.

Some Christians think we can reason with the other side. That’s a cute thought. In the very near future there will be swift and severe professional repercussions for those who deviate from the party line, whether inside or outside the office.

I am convinced the same will begin to happen to corporations as a whole.

My company oversees a plan with hundreds of millions of dollars. I attend the annual conference put on by our plan administrator (one of the largest investment firms in the country). There was a breakout panel this past year regarding ESG funds – Environmental, Social, and Governance funds. Basically, they’re funds geared toward investors who don’t want to own shares in “bad” companies. This is probably far too simplistic a view, but in my opinion, it’s a rating system used to separate the wheat from the chaff – the wheat being the companies whose policies align with the current progressive dogma and the chaff being those that don’t.

If I had to bet, I’d say within the next two decades, ESG ratings will become even more mainstream and politicized than they are today. It will be a financial way to punish a company, writ-large, for taking unpopular positions on important issues of the day.

Be it a person or a corporation, there will be no more neutral. They want to eradicate all wrong-think and make sure deviants are punished.

If you choose to use any of this, please leave out some details to adequately protect my identity. I’ve got mouths to feed.

Yesterday, when interviewing Zofia Romaszewska, the longtime Solidarity activist now in her 80s, we were talking about this kind of thing. She told me, with great force in her voice, that Christians and other “deplorables” (in the eyes of the Great and the Good), had better organize now, and exert pressure. (Come to think of it, when is the last time you heard a prominent bishop, pastor, or other Christian leader speak out on behalf of ordinary Christians who stand to be punished under schemes like this.

Romaszewska said, “You have to have a strong state to protect you from these kinds of companies.” That is quite a statement to consider as a conservative, coming from a conservative.

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The Soviet Empire’s Worst Nightmare*

That’s Zofia Romaszewska, a hero of Poland. She was long involved in the fight for a free Poland. I interviewed her for my forthcoming book today. Let me just tell you this: there is no way that the Soviet Empire ever had a chance in the face of this woman. She was not willing to hear my moaning about how scattered the opposition is, and how daunting our prospects are. Organize! she ordered. Take the fight to the enemy! Stop playing defense!

I’m telling you, spending just a few minutes in the company of this extraordinary lady was enough to stiffen any cultural pessimists spine. Here’s what she did for her country in a time when she could have been thrown in prison for it — and finally was:

In 1963, she graduated in Physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Warsaw. In 1967, she was a co-initiator of the action of collecting signatures of scientific employees in defense of Adam Michnik, suspended in the rights of a student of the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw. After March 1968, the Romaszewscy couple’s apartment became a place for regular meetings of dissidents. From 1976, she participated in the campaign to help workers who were repressed after the June protests in Ursus and Radom , and from October 1976 managed together with her husband a helping group in Radom. She was a co-worker of the Workers’ Defense Committee. In May 1977, together with her husband, she became the head of the Intervention Bureau of KOR, which coordinated the assistance to people repressed by the authorities of the PRL. In September 1977 she signed the Declaration of the Democratic Movement – a program document of the “Korowska” opposition. After the uprising in September of the Social Self-Defense Committee, “KOR” continued to manage together with her husband the Intervention Bureau of KSS “KOR” . In the Information Bulletin of KSS “KOR”, she edited the “Law and Order” section. In the years 1980-1981 she managed with Zbigniew Romaszewski, based on the experience of the Intervention Bureau, the Intervention and Law Governance Committee of the Mazowsze Region of NSZZ “Solidarność” (she joined the union in September 1980).

Avoided internment after the announcement of martial law, she acted in hiding. Together with her husband, she organized the underground Warsaw Radio “Solidarity” . She acted as an announcer in the first radio broadcast on April 12, 1982. She was arrested on July 5, 1982. On February 17, 1983, she was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, released on amnesty in July 1983. From 1986 to 1989 she was a member of the Intervention Commission. The Rule of Law of NSZZ “Solidarność” led by Zbigniew Romaszewski.

If you speak Polish, watch this:

If you don’t, watch this interview with her and her late husband, done by the George W. Bush Presidential Library. It’s subtitled:

I’m telling you, Pani Romaszewska is not interested in hearing your whining about how bad things are. All she wants to know is what you are going to do about it. She’s basically General Patton in that famous (NSFW) clip. I’d follow her to the barricades without a second thought. Man, this is going to be a good book. Just you wait.

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Jessica Hooten Wilson FTW!

Y’all! Look at this! Jessica is an old friend of Walker Percy Weekend, and speaks there every year. She has won this $50,000 prize for excellence in the humanities. I’m so proud of her, and thrilled to be her ally. If you’ve heard her presentations at the Weekend, you won’t be a bit surprised by this. Learn more about Jessica’s work at her website.

This is the second Hiett Prize winner that I know. Poet James Matthew Wilson won in 2017. Clearly, drinking bourbon with moi must be the key to literary honor. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

More people should know about the Dallas Institute, a terrific institution.

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Amazon Aids & Abets Theft From Writers

I am stunned to learn that Amazon has been selling counterfeit version of Tish Harrison Warren’s great book “The Liturgy Of The Ordinary”(buy it here from Barnes & Noble). Look:

Here are some indicators that your copy of 'Liturgy of the Ordinary' may be a counterfeit copy. pic.twitter.com/607aqVi4cO

— InterVarsity Press (@ivpress) July 8, 2019

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

Here’s the story from Christianity Today:

It took Tish Harrison Warren nearly three years to publish her first book. It was more than 18 months of arranging childcare and carving out time to write before she had a manuscript—11 chapters chronicling details from her day-to-day life paired with the rhythms of church ritual.

By the time Liturgy of the Ordinary debuted in December 2016, she and her publishing team had gone through the process of selecting a cover (an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich against a bright green backdrop) and editing the page proofs to check every dot and detail.

But over the past year, thousands of readers ended up with copies that didn’t quite look like the book she and InterVarsity Press (IVP) had finalized three years ago. The cover was not as sharp. The pages were a bit off-center.

These were not IVP’s books at all. They were counterfeits.

More:

IVP estimates that at least 15,000 counterfeit copies of Liturgy of the Ordinary were sold on the site over the past nine months, their retail value totaling $240,000. That nearly cuts sales of Warren’s book in half; IVP reported 23,000 legitimate copies were sold over the past year. IVP also found evidence of counterfeiting on a smaller scale for one other title, Michael Reeves’s Delighting in the Trinity, which came out in 2002.

“I’ve been constantly thinking of the verse about, ‘Do not store up treasures where moths and rust can destroy, and where thieves can steal, but store up your treasures where moths and rust cannot destroy and thieves cannot steal’ (Matt. 6:19–20), and it’s really hard to process,” Warren told CT last week, a day after she learned about the scope of the fraud when IVP officials called her at her home in Pittsburgh.

“It’s a huge loss of money for my family. Percentagewise of what I make as a writer, it’s an enormous amount of that.”

Read it all. The story explains how this happened.

Tish — who is a friend of mine — has issued a statement about the matter on her blog. Excerpts:

Here is what you should do if you suspect your book is a counterfeit copy:

1. If you believe you have received a counterfeit edition, please return the book to Amazon and ask for full credit.

2. Please note the seller from whom you purchased the counterfeit edition and send that information to AuthenticEditions@ivpress.com. We are attempting to stop the sales of these editions through Amazon’s marketplace re-sellers.

3. Please rate the seller experience low on Amazon. This will help decrease the visibility of the re-sellers who have made counterfeit editions available.

4. If you desire to ensure you are buying authentic editions, visit the following URL: www.ivpress.com/real-liturgy. This will allow you to buy from InterVarsity Press at 40% off plus free shipping for all addresses in the U.S.

5. If Amazon refuses to grant a full refund for the purchase of the counterfeit edition, please email AuthenticEditions@ivpress.com and IVP will be in touch with you on a special price for us to replace the counterfeit editions at the best possible price.

Also, if you bought a counterfeit book, can you let me know through twitter or the comments section of this post and tell me when you purchased your copy (and, if you remember, the name listed as “sold by” on Amazon).

D). If you pray, I’d ask that you pray in a couple of ways.

I. Pray for the “bad guys.” Our two kids overheard my husband and I talking about this situation last week, so we had to explain to them about how some “bad guys” stole from our family. They were full of good questions. And we talked to them about how we need to pray for and forgive the people who committed this crime. We prayed together for their blessing and for their repentance, and my six year old—whose heart is 97% gold and 3 % cotton candy—prayed that the “bad guys” would “read Mama’s book and become Christians.” I would love for all of us to join her in her good, kind prayer and ask God for a redemption story out of this. Maybe it will be a dramatic—a Jean Valjean “I have bought your soul for God” with these candle sticks situation. Crazier things have happened in the kingdom of God. Maybe it is a more subtle story of redemption. Either way, pray for God to use this situation for good and for His glory. It would make it worth it.

II. Pray for wisdom for IVPress, Amazon, and me. We each have decisions to make about how best to proceed now that we know that there are counterfeit books out there. This is a situation that IVP has never faced before and they in particular need prayer for wisdom about how to respond.

I also have never faced this before and need wisdom about how to most wisely respond moving forward.

Amazon executives and decision-makers also need wisdom and motivation about how to respond to improve their systems. Please pray for all involved.

Read it all. It’s important.

This really gets to me, and not just because I love Tish, and know how much her family — a clerical family, which means they are not well off — depends on her income as a writer. It gets to me as a professional writer whose family also depends on his income. Many people think that if you have a published book, you must be rich, or at least doing well. It’s not remotely true. I have done reasonably well with my books, but unless you’re Brad Thor-level, you’re not getting rich off of writing. Just today I met with a publisher in Poland that’s eager to publish my next book. It’s one of the most prestigious publishers in the country, but when I asked them how many copies of their books count as a best-seller, I was shocked. The market is really small. The US market is much bigger than Poland’s, of course, but the profit margin on books is minuscule. If you want to get rich, being a writer of books is not the way to do it. Counterfeiting books like Tish’s (and mine, and all of the non-blockbuster writers you read) is stealing from people who don’t have much.

I’m furious at Amazon.com. It claims to be vigilant about this stuff, but what happened to Tish’s book shows that this is nonsense. As Tish points out:

C. If you buy books from Amazon, make sure you notice who the seller is.

Stealing is stealing. True confession: I have watched pirated TV shows before, knowing they were pirated. In light of what has been done to Tish, I am embarrassed by that fact. I justified it by saying that it’s a big company, and nobody will notice, but that’s nothing but a cheap rationalization. If I had been stealing from a “little guy,” I would not have been able to justify it. It’s no less an act of theft when it is from a major distributor. If you’ve done this, I ask you to repent of it, as I am doing right now. There’s no excuse. It’s taking property without paying for it, and it hurts people who create it, and those like IVP who depend on the honesty of sellers and consumers to make their daily bread.

I hope there’s a class-action lawsuit to force Amazon to clean up its act. The retail giant is a veritable monopsony on the US book market. It doesn’t control the market, but it’s so big that everybody has to do what they say. They get rich from writers like Tish Warren, but they don’t do enough to protect us from counterfeiters. And they don’t protect you consumers, either. Nobody who buys books wants to benefit thieves. Amazon’s negligence has made honest book-buyers party to theft.

Lawmakers, are you listening?

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Leszek Kolakowski’s Warning

One of the great discoveries I’ve made in researching my next book is the work of the late Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009). He was an ex-Marxist who became one of the greatest critics of Marxism. He is also a hell of a writer. I’m now reading Is God Happy?, a collection of his selected essays, and strongly recommend it to you.

I also recommend this essay from The Nation by a scholar named John Connelly, who respects Kolakowski, but is greatly bothered by his turn from Marxism to being an ardent supporter of the “reactionary” Pope John Paul II. Connelly tries to answer the question: Did Kolakowski abandon his youthful atheism and become a believer? He never really does, but there are interesting passages, such as:

Now calling his positions conservative, Kolakowski forged a new social critique in a lecture in Geneva called “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture” (it is not included in Is God Happy?). What he abhorred about secularism was not so much its negation as its universalization of the sacred, a development that affected even the church. Liberal Catholics blessed all forms of worldly life, creating a mode of Christian belief lacking a concept of evil—that is, the understanding that evil is not the absence or subversion of virtue but an irredeemable fact—and leaving the church no reason or means to stand against the secular. The dissolution of the sacred from within and without had observable effects on the culture as a whole, contributing to a growing amorphousness and laxity in making distinctions. This was dangerous, Kolakowski argued, because the sacred gave to social structure its “forms and systems of divisions,” whether between death and life, man and woman, work and art, youth and age. He advocated no mythology in particular, and would admit only that a tension between development and structure was inherent in all human societies. Yet it was clear that certain developments troubled him deeply, and if the liberation movements unleashed in the 1960s continued, he feared the outcome would be “mass suicide.”

This is something that I’ve picked up in the Kolakowski essays I’ve read so far: a deep current of fear that without God, we are going to destroy ourselves. Here’s an insightful passage from “On Our Relative Relativism,” a 1996 essay collected in Is God Happy?:

If we are to single out a particularly powerful cultural factor that has contributed to the progressing collapse of standards, we are tempted to point to the enormous increase in mobility, both spacial and social. The virtual extinction of village life in the developed areas of the world has destroyed the spiritual organization of space as a guarantor of stability and eroded trust in tradition, which formerly provided people with a number of basic moral norms and a belief in an order of things that bestowed meaning on life. This is not a new observation. Many people have seen uprootedness as a distinct mark of our times; this widespread feeling of insecurity, of the absence of spiritual shelter, naturally found ideological or philosophical expression. We shed our archaic “irrational” habits of mind not to enter the glorious kingdom of rationality but, on the contrary, to adopt new habits which disregard the idea of rationality altogether.

Funny, but on Saturday I was talking to the Polish tech entrepreneur Krzysztof Zdanowski, who discoursed casually on how technology, especially the Internet, has dis-placed all of us today. I understand his observation more deeply having read tonight Kolakowski’s quote.

Here, from the website Monergism.com, is an excerpt from an interview Nathan Gardels did with Kolakowski not long before the old philosopher died. In it, the Pole says that religion is the only thing strong enough to keep us from destroying ourselves. Read on:

Kolakowski: As a whole, mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

Gardels | The cultural catastrophe being that without a set of rules that comes from religious tradition there are no moral brakes on man, particularly on the gluttony of homo consumptus?

Kolakowski | Yes, no moral brakes. When culture loses its sacred sense, it loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposes limits on the perfection that can be attained by secular society, one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization arises—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes we can undergo, that society is an endlessly flexible thing subject to the arbitrary whims of our creative capacities.

In the end, as I have written in the essay “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture,” this illusion sows disastrous despair. The modern chimera, which would grant man total freedom from tradition or all pre-existing sense, far from opening before him the perspective of divine self-creation, suspends him in a darkness where all things are regarded with equal indifference.

To be totally free from religious heritage or historical tradition is to situate oneself in a void and thus to disintegrate. The utopian faith in man’s self-inventive capabilities, the utopian hope of unlimited perfection, may be the most efficient instrument of suicide human culture has ever invented.

To reject the sacred, which means also to reject sin, imperfection and evil, is to reject our own limits. To say that evil is contingent, as Sartre did, is to say that there is no evil, and therefore that we have no need of a sense given to us by tradition, fixed and imposed on us whether we will it or not.

As you put it, there are thus no moral brakes on the will to power. In the end, the ideal of total liberation is the sanctioning of greed, force and violence, and thus of despotism, the destruction of culture and the degradation of the earth.

The only way to ensure the endurance of civilization is to ensure that there are always people who think of the price paid for every step of what we call “progress.” The order of the sacred is also a sensitivity to evil—the only system of reference that allows us to contemplate that price and forces us to ask whether it is exorbitant.

More:

Gardels | At the end of the last modern century, can secular man reintroduce the sacred? Can we base ethical values on reason instead of revolution? Must personal responsibility be rooted in transcendent beliefs?

Kolakowski | It is obviously possible for individuals to keep high moral standards and be irreligious. I strongly doubt whether it is possible for civilizations. Absent religious tradition, what reason is there for a society  to respect human rights and the dignity of man? What is human dignity, scientifically speaking? A superstition?

Empirically, men are demonstrably unequal. How can we justify equality? Human rights is an unscientific idea. As Milosz says, these values are rooted in a transcendent dimension.

[Emphasis mine below — RD]

Gardels | It strikes me that totalitarianism of a different kind could emerge from the new global capitalist order—a totalitarianism of immediate gratification in which reason is conditional to self-interest.

What is to defend dignity and human rights from total commercialization?

Kolakowski | The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens this social contract in which each supposedly limits his or her freedom in order to live in peace with others. 

Such universalism of interest is another aspect of the modern illusion. There is no such thing as scientifically based human solidarity.

To be sure, I can convince myself that it is in my interest not to rob other people, not to rape and murder, because I can convince myself that the risk is too great. This is the Hobbesian model of solidarity: greed moderated by fear.

But social chaos stands in the shadows of such moral  anarchy. When a society adheres to moral norms for no other reason than prudence, it is extremely weak and its fabric tears at the slightest crisis. In such a society, there is no basis for personal responsibility, charity or compassion.

Now, with the ecological imperative, a new ethos of species self-preservation is being discussed. To some extent, it may be true that we are instinctively programmed for self-preservation of the species. But the history of this last modern century has certainly demonstrated that we can destroy members of our own species without great inhibitions. If there is species solidarity at some deep biological level, it hasn’t saved us from civil destruction.

Thus, we need instruments of human solidarity that are not based on our own instincts, self-interest or on force. The communist attempt to institutionalize solidarity ended in disaster.

Seems to me that Gardels has succinctly identified a core aspect of the new totalitarianism coming at us — and Kolakowski has articulated our only hope to resist it. By the way, there’s a version of the entire interview, translated into German. Here’s a passage I had retranslated back into English:

A Technologically Advanced Brave New World, in which humanity has forgotten its religious heritage and historical tradition – and thus no longer grounds for moralizing its own life – would mean the end of humanity. It is highly unlikely that humankind, deprived of its historical consciousness and its religious traditions because they are technologically useless, could live in peace, content with its achievements. In fact, I would assume the opposite, because it is in the human being that our desires have no limits. They can grow incessantly, in an endless spiral of greed.

During the last decades of rapid economic growth, we have become accustomed to the idea that we moderns can have everything and, indeed, earn everything. But that’s just not true. As there are natural limits on our planet – ecological and demographic limits – we will be forced to limit our desires.

But without an awareness of boundaries that can only come from history and religion, any attempt to curtail our desires will end in terrible frustration and aggression, which could be catastrophic. The degree of frustration and aggression does not depend on the degree of absolute satisfaction, but on the gap between wishes and their effective satisfaction. The religious tradition has taught us limitation. All the great religious traditions have taught us for centuries not to bind ourselves to one dimension alone – the accumulation of wealth and the exclusive concern with our present material life. Should we lose the ability to maintain this distance between our desires and needs, that would be a cultural disaster. The survival of our religious heritage is the condition for the survival of civilization.

A Polish tech entrepreneur with whom I spoke over the weekend told me about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to radically alter the human experience, to the point where “natural selection” yields to “artificial selection.” He wasn’t celebrating this, mind you, just observing what’s going on. He said AI is changing so fast that it will learn to present the world to us as we desire to see it, even before we know that we desire this or that particular thing. The more integrated we are with technology, the more our interface with the real world will be mediated through technology — a technology that construes the world as we wish it to be.

George Orwell, from 1984:

“If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

Do you get it? Without confidence in a transcendent dimension — a really real reality outside ourselves — we become our own Big Brother. Technology is getting us there very rapidly. We think of it as utopia. It will include “teledildonic suits” and the destruction of any sense of biological reality unchosen by the self. And lo, it will be paradise. I read about it in The New York Times:

Among the voices of the young, there are echoes and amplifications of Jacobs’s optimism, along with the stories of private struggle. “There are as many genders as there are people,” Emmy Johnson, a nonbinary employee at Jan Tate’s clinic, told me with earnest authority. Johnson was about to sign up for a new dating app that caters to the genderqueer. “Sex is different as a nonbinary person,” they said. “You’re free of gender roles, and the farther you can get from those scripts, the better sex is going to be.” Their tone was more triumphal: the better life is going to be. “The gender boxes are exploding,” they declared.

This is part of the “totalitarianism of immediate gratification in which reason is conditional to self-interest.” The only people left to defend reality, to defend humankind, will be the traditional religious believers — those that survive the Great Transition, that is. Read Kolakowski.

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Woke Capitalism’s Cultural Imperialism

It was a beautiful summer afternoon today in Warsaw. Sitting on a terrace in one of the city’s squares, I found myself talking to an executive who works for a local branch of a US-based multinational company. When he found out that I’m working on a book about “soft totalitarianism,” he told me about the culture inside his corporation.

Like most American and Western European corporations here, he said, his firm pushes LGBT Pride heavily inside its corporate culture. It is very difficult to resist if, like him, you have religious or moral qualms about it. It is getting to the point where silence is not sufficient: you must affirm.

He said that lots of Poles either now, or soon will, face a stark choice: deny their consciences, or lose their jobs. “What do you do if you need that job to support your family?” he asked. “It’s a hard thing to ask people to do, to quit their jobs over this. Here in Poland, we have permanent employee records. You can’t just quit and go find another job. The terms you left your job under are written down. If you resign over this, and you can’t cover it up, that will follow you everywhere. It could hurt your career permanently.”

I told him that in the US, in this way, Woke Capitalism has been arguably the strongest force against religious liberty. At least in Poland the state, under the ruling Law & Justice Party, has stood up for Polish workers and businesses punished for dissent. A couple of weeks ago, a Catholic man who works for IKEA was fired for objecting to IKEA’s Pride push on the company’s internal Internet. Story here. Excerpt:

Ikea had asked workers to join in celebrating the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia on May 16 and “to stand up for the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender plus people of all sexual orientations and gender identities”.

The company’s head of equality, diversity and integration, Sari Brody, wrote a follow-up post requesting that employees “ask for the transgender person’s preferred pronoun (hers, theirs, etc.)” and “engage LGBT+ people in conversations about their partners and families”.

Mr Tomasz wrote under the post that “acceptance and promotion of homosexuality and other deviations is a source of scandal”, quoting two Bible passages.

“Woe to him through whom scandals come, it would be better for him to tie a millstone around his neck and plunge him in the depths of the sea,” (Matthew 18:6) and, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them,” (Leviticus 20:13).

Mr Tomasz said he made the post because he signed a contract to sell furniture, not implement “so-called LGBT values” or promote “ideological propaganda”. “It upset me,” he told TVP Info.

“I do not think it was my duty. I put my entry, in which I expressed that it is unacceptable, and quoted two quotations from the Holy Scriptures — about stumbling and about the fact that intercourse between two men is an abomination.”

He was summoned into an interview where he was asked to explain himself and told to remove the posts — but he refused. “As a Catholic, I cannot censor God,” he said. “I was told there would be consequences.”

The Polish Justice Minister immediately spoke out in defense of this guy, and said he was going to launch a state investigation into IKEA’s practices. It is impossible to imagine a US Attorney General doing remotely the same thing, isn’t it? Another contact in Poland elaborated in an e-mail:

In another recent case, the country’s Constitutional Court (Poland’s Supreme Court) ruled in favor of a printer who declined to print a poster for an LGBT event, overturning a lower court ruling on religious liberty grounds. Reuters writes:

Adam J. was convicted of refusing to provide a service without a justifiable reason in 2017, provoking the ire of Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro who referred the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling. Ziobro also referred the case to the Constitutional Tribunal.

The Tribunal ruled on Wednesday that the law the printer was convicted under was unconstitutional, because punishment for refusing to provide services on the grounds of beliefs interfered with the service providers’ rights to act according to their conscience, PAP news agency reported.

“I am glad that my views and arguments were shared by the tribunal,” said Ziobro.

“I would like to say that everybody is entitled to freedom and nobody, using slogans of tolerance, should use the apparatus of the state to force others to violate their own freedoms, be it freedom of conscience, freedom of religion or economic freedom.”

Another Polish contact points out that the European Union accused the Law & Justice Party of stacking the courts, “despite the fact that many judges carried over from Communist time or were later appointed via those deeply embedded within that system.”

The point is, despite valid concerns about Poland’s slide away from religious and cultural conservatism — see my post from earlier this weekend — this is still a country where the government is in the hands of a party that will stand up to Woke Capitalism on behalf of ordinary people being forced to choose between their jobs and their God. That is something worth celebrating, and defending.

It is long past time for socially conservative US Christians, and fellow travelers, to rid themselves of reflexive free-market fundamentalism, and to understand that Woke Capitalism is the enemy. The Polish government is standing up to multinational cultural imperialism. Good for them. Contrast the Law & Justice Party to our own mute and gutless GOP, which values Big Business over a category of citizens who are increasingly despised by cultural and corporate elites, who will not rest until they have ramrodded their cultural politics into every sphere of life.

I don’t know how long they can hold out, though. There’s an election this fall, and an American friend who traveled to this country earlier this year e-mails, the cracks in Polish society are showing:

I visited Krakow one weekend just this past May. I was quite surprised at what I saw. I, like you, had preconceived notions that Poland was a bastion of traditional Catholicism within Europe. But what I saw was quite different.

On my recent visit to Krakow, there was a modest gathering of Nationalists, and they were protesting against the push for gay marriage. There were probably a few hundred Poles at this gathering, and that’s being generous. On the same day in Krakow, there was a pro-LGBTQ parade, which was much, much bigger. I would estimate that there were probably 10.000 people in the pro-LGBTQ parade. The pictures don’t really do justice to how large the “gay rights” parade really was — the attached photo [see above — RD] was just a small segment of it–the stream of people went on and on.

While were were watching the rainbow parade unfold, I was talking with my Polish host about the issue of gay rights. My friend is a young Polish scientist, about 36 years old. His position was in line with the standard Western/American talking points: gay people shouldn’t face discrimination, and people that don’t want gay marriage are backward and ignorant religious fanatics. I agreed with him that no one should face persecution or be singled out for unfair treatment. However I told him that Poland should be careful about what it was asking for.

I then told him about the litigation in the United States, and the case of the baker in Colorado who was fined by the State of Colorado for refusing, on religious grounds, to bake a cake for a gay wedding. My Polish friend was shocked that the State of Colorado would try to force him to, and punish him if he didn’t. But my friend remarked that the same thing would never happen in Poland. I told him many Americans said the same thing years ago.

Exactly! The Law of Merited Impossibility, in Polish, via Google Translate: To się nigdy nie wydarzy, a kiedy to się stanie, bigoci na to zasłużyli (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”).

The British atheist writer Brendan O’Neill says he’s thrilled by gay rights, and encourages people to celebrate gay pride — but he’s sick of the mandatory cheer forced on unwilling people. Excerpts:

Fast forward to 2019, and that historic human instinct to be left alone in liberty has been replaced by a needy and therapeutic politics of recognition. Now gay-rights activists don’t demand autonomy — they want validation. Everyone has to wave their flag and celebrate their lifestyle and embrace the strange new idea that trans women are literally women, and if you don’t it’s off to the metaphorical gulag with you.

It’s no longer enough to leave homosexuals alone to live however they choose and to inflict on them no persecution or discrimination or any ill-will whatsoever on the basis of their sexuality, which is absolutely the right thing for a civilised liberal society to do. No, now you have to validate their identity and cheer their life choices. You must doff your cap to that omnipresent bloody rainbow. Today it isn’t homosexuals who are persecuted; it’s their critics, whether it’s Ann Widdecombe or Tim Farron, with their well-known aversion to gay romping, or those Muslim parents in Birmingham who don’t think six-year-old Muhammad needs to know that some men sleep with men.

The new moral majority is pro-gay rather than anti-gay. It consists of the political class, the capitalist class, the media class and the celebrity class. Its flag is the Pride flag. Its branding and messaging are inescapable. If you’re a truly virtuous person, you’ll even wear the new moral majority’s political paraphernalia, in the form of a Pride badge, a Pride t-shirt, or Pride socks on the actual TV news (Mr Snow). Doing so is a way of letting everyone know you’re a good person. You’re on the right side of virtue and the right side of history. You are an insider.

More:

Contrast the chattering class’s reaction to the Pride flag with their reaction to the St George’s flag. Wave that latter flag from your home and they’ll think you’re a racist. Bring it to work and flap it out the window and someone would probably call the police. Get it tattooed on your forearm and the middle-class members of the new moral majority will make an instant judgement about you: ill-educated, hates blacks, loves going mental at the football, probably beats his wife, eats fry-ups too often.

But wave the Pride flag and they’ll love you. That’s because pride in oneself is the only pride that is allowed in our identitarian era. National pride is tantamount to a crime, pride in one’s culture or history is suspect. But pride in one’s own identity? Here, have a newspaper column to tell us more!

Read it all.

It really is difficult for many Eastern European folks to understand how totalitarian this ideology is, especially when Big Brother is your corporate boss. The only way to fight back against it is by electing politicians that wield a bigger stick than Woke Capitalism, and who aren’t afraid to use it to defend the little guy’s liberty not to be coerced into having to choose between his livelihood or his Lord.

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View From Your Table

Warsaw, Poland

OK, I admit it: this is my third meal at the chain restaurant Zapiecek in two days. What can I say? I love this food. This bowl of creamy cold Lithuanian-style borscht is the best thing I’ve had yet in Poland, and that’s saying something. That’s dill and yogurt on top; there’s half a boiled egg swimming in the pink-purply goodness.

It was so good that it inspired me to update the Burt Bacharach classic:

What the world needs now

Is borscht, cold borscht

It’s the only thing

That there’s just too little orscht.

I’ll go away now and sleep off the borscht and the pierogi, like a good Slavic hobbit…

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Alas For Fortress Poland

Today was a very long day, and a rewarding one. I say “rewarding” in the sense that it is always better to know the painful truth than rest in a comforting lie. What happened today, on my first full day in Poland, was that I was slapped hard upside the head by conservative Catholics who told me that this idea Americans have that Poland is a bastion of traditional Christian resistance to liquid modernity is a fantasy that needs to die.

Let me repeat that: I was told this not by secular liberals, but by conservative young Catholics who are deeply concerned about the future of their country.

It’s late here in Warsaw, and I don’t have the time or the energy to listen to the recordings of the interviews I did today. Half of the things I learned were not through formal interviews, but from multiple conversations, in particular with Gen Z folks (college-age people). Caveat: this is only one day, and I expect that I will meet with Millennials, Gen Z-ers, and others who have different views. But I have to tell you, this was profoundly jarring.

I have some notes I took, but without listening to the recordings, I am mostly I am going from memory. I want to get this down now, while I’m thinking about it. What follows is raw. I’m going to write only what I heard today, with a minimum of analysis. I’m going to need to think hard about this. Let me say at the start that as difficult as some of this was to hear today, I am grateful that I heard it. It puts my book project into a certain perspective.

As regular readers know, I’m here in Poland in part to do interviews for my upcoming book. I’m talking to people who lived through Communism, trying to discern what lessons we can learn today for how to resist the soft totalitarianism that is arising today.

In happier news, I had a long, wonderful conversation today with Anna and Krzystof Antoni Zdanowski, both of whom married and raised children under Communism, though their two younger children were born as the Communist era was coming to an end. The Zdanowskis are luminous Catholics — gentle, kind, hospitable, and deeply pious. Krzystof was a member of Solidarity back in the day. I can’t say enough how much they impressed me, and how much it meant to me to hear their stories. Krzystof explained how for him, growing up under Communist rule, the Church meant everything. It was a source of wisdom, of solace, of knowing right from wrong, of standing up for the Truth, and a “safe place” — meaning a haven from the empire of lies. Their testimony was deeply moving. I got from them exactly what I hope to gain from these interviews. It reminded me of the interviews I’ve done in Slovakia and the Czech Republic with members of the anti-communist resistance.

Toward the end of our discussion, their 31-year-old son, also named Krzystof, dropped by their home. We talked for a bit. He too is a devout Catholic, and runs his own tech firm. He was born two years before Communism ended in Poland. He told me he did not feel that it affected his life at all. He was raised in a free country. He speaks excellent English, in part because he does so much business in North America. I started to put some of the questions to him that I had put to his parents, and he couldn’t really answer them. As he explained in our short conversation, he has no memory of Communism, and he’s not interested in politics. For some reason, I had not reckoned with how unmarked by even the residue of Communism that the post-Communist generation would be.

As we walked back to the train, my interpreter — who I’ll call Maciej — told me that this is totally normal. He is 22, and a student. He is so young that he doesn’t have much memory even of John Paul II. Maciej explained to me that for the Millennials (Krzystof Jr.’s generation) and Generation Z (his generation), Communism is an abstraction. A lot of younger Poles simply don’t listen to their parents and grandparents talking about it, he said, because they can’t relate to it out of their own experience, but also because they have come to think of “Communism” as the thing many in the older generations talk about to avoid having to come to terms with challenges in the world today.

As he spoke, I thought about how US conservatives of a certain age talk a lot about Ronald Reagan that way, and how peculiar that sounds to younger people with no memory of him, or the times that produced him. Some older Catholics are that way about John Paul II.

It was a long day, as I said, and I had a number of conversations with the young. I’m not going to name any of them here, because I wasn’t doing formal interviews. I’m going to find out how to get in touch with them and see if I can quote them later, in the book, if appropriate. For this blog post, though, I’m going to condense the gist of the conversations. Whenever I quote something below, rest assured it’s an actual quote.

I was knocked flat by the anger at the Catholic Church — from the devout! I heard the same anger in Warsaw today that I heard from Gen Z Catholics in Spain earlier this year. If I were the Polish bishops, I would be very, very worried. One young man said:

“Under Communism, the State was against the Church, but Polish society was on the Church’s side. In the future, both will be hostile to the Church. Under Communism, the Church was a nice place to be. Everyone who opposed Communism found a place in the Church. Today, not attending Church is seen as an act of resistance.”

Resistance against what? I asked. The answers: the hypocrisy and self-satisfaction of the bishops, and the feeling that the political class has abandoned their generation. “We all say that in ten years, Poland will be a second Ireland,” said one person.

Someone pointed me to this Pew survey from last year showing that of 46 countries where more of the young (18 to 39) say that religion is not important to them than older people who say the same, Poland leads the pack. There is a 23 percent gap between the young who say religion is not very important to them, and the old who say the same thing. And look at this:

The numbers are about the same in terms of the “daily prayer gap,” meaning many more young Poles do not pray daily than do older Poles. Last year, Sunday mass attendance dipped below 40 percent in Poland for the first time. My interlocutors today told me that that number will continue declining as the old pass away.

The sex abuse scandal finally arrived in Poland, and it’s rocking the church here. The Polish clerical sex abuse documentary movie Tell No One — which you can watch for free, subtitled, on YouTube — has been viewed over 22 million times. One of the Gen Z guys today told me how enraged he and his friends were to see that the disgraced Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, a sex abuser of seminarians who was forced to resign in 2002, was present last October at the Vatican for the canonization of Paul VI. Paetz had been forbidden at the time to present himself in public as a bishop, but he repeatedly defied that Vatican order. In 2016, the Vatican reminded Paetz forcefully that he should not appear in public. But last October, according to my informant, Poles watching the mass from Rome on television saw the Archbishop there in full dress. Said this man, angrily, “My friends and I could hardly believe our eyes.”

My young sources said that the bishops are completely out of touch with society. Even the conservative ones, many of them are living in the past. They still believe that they have authority in Poland, that people will follow them because they are the bishop, and that’s how Poland has always been. A faithful Catholic: “They have no understanding of their real position in our society today.”

Another quote, from a conservative Gen Z Catholic:

“The main problem with my generation is apathy. Most of them don’t even care about the Church enough to hate it. If some people say this isn’t true, or that this is not going to matter in the long run, they are blind. You will hear that from a lot of older people, but they don’t see what’s happening.”

(For the record, I didn’t hear that from the Zdanowskis, who seemed to me to be quite concerned about the future of the faith in Poland. But this was only one couple.)

There was more, including the prediction that faith is going to decline also because the Polish family is falling apart (“That’s in line with Mary Eberstadt’s theory of secularization,” I said.) Talking about politics with these young conservatives, I heard anger and frustration at the ruling Law and Justice Party, but also fear of what the left-wing parties will do to the Church and to causes that social conservatives care about.

I did not expect to hear most of this today. To be honest, I did not expect to hear any of it in Poland. Maciej told me today that he expects to “be buried by a man with a shovel” — as opposed to a priest. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “You think there won’t be any priests around to bury you?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” he said.

Talking with these young Catholics today will change the way I do the rest of the interviews. Like I said, I’m glad I came to Poland. I would never have guessed that these fault lines ran so deep, and so hot, in Polish society — even among believing Catholics! There really is no safe place.

If you’re a Pole who disagrees with any of this I heard today, please let me hear from you. Cheer me up.

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View From Your Table

Warsaw, Poland

I arrived late this afternoon in Warsaw, really sleepy. Had to eat a little something before bedtime, though. Zapiecek is the pierogi-maker down the street from my hotel. Lord have mercy, if I hadn’t been so tired, I would have tried the flavored vodkas too, after which I would have asked the chef to knit a pillow-sized mushroom-stuffed pierogi to let me use in my hotel room.

That’s a cup of delicious borscht, and a mug of only so-so beer.I couldn’t draw it out because the restaurant is so small, and I couldn’t compose a photo without faces of other patrons. Still, my point is, you NEED to go to Zapiecek.

And I need to go to bed. More tomorrow.

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