Rod Dreher's Blog, page 27

In McMinn County, ‘Maus Raus!’

You will have heard about the McMinn County (TN) school board that removed Art Spiegelman’s great graphic novel Maus, about the Holocaust, from the eighth grade history curriculum on grounds that it is inappropriate for kids. Here’s the transcript of that school board meeting. The main objections were that the graphic novel has some curse words in it, and a drawing of a nude figure. The transcript is worth reading, especially these bits:

Steven Brady: When we see something on television that is a direct quote from an actor or a president, something where it has that inappropriate language, they will blur it out or white out parts of it or they will bleep it.

Tony Allman: I understand all that, but being in the schools, educators and stuff we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.

Julie Goodin: I can talk of the history, I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history. Mr. Spiegelman did his very best to depict his mother passing away and we are almost 80 years away. It’s hard for this generation, these kids don’t even know 9/11, they were not even born. For me this was his way to convey the message. Are the words objectionable? Yes, there is no one that thinks they aren’t but by taking away the first part, it’s not changing the meaning of what he is trying to portray and copyright.

Tony Allman: I understand that on tv and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy?

Melasawn Knight: I think any time you are teaching something from history, people did hang from trees, people did commit suicide and people were killed, over six million were murdered. I think the author is portraying that because it is a true story about his father that lived through that. He is trying to portray that the best he can with the language that he chooses that would relate to that time, maybe to help people who haven’t been in that aspect in time to actually relate to the horrors of it. Is the language objectionable? Sure. I think that is how he uses that language to portray that.

Tony Allman: I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel. It’s like when you’re watching tv and a cuss word or nude scene comes on it would be the same movie without it. Well, this would be the same book without it. I may be wrong, but this guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for Playboy. You can look at his history, and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.

Julie Goodin: Even for me Mr. Allman, you know I have an eighth grader and even if you did pull this book I would want him to read it because we have to teach our kids. Are these words ok? No, not at all that is not acceptable, but the problem is that we are 80 years removed from the Holocaust itself. I just think this is a grave starting point for our teachers. I am very passionate about history, and I would hate to rob our kids of this opportunity. Are we going to be teaching these words outside of this book as vocabulary words? No, you know me better than that Tony Allman.

Tony Allman: I know and I am not being argumentative, I am just trying to wrap my mind around because if a student sitting in the cafeteria decides to read this out loud and complete the sentences, what are you going to do? It’s in the book you’re teaching them so what are you going to do?

Melasawn Knight: We can say that the students know what that means, but they know what that means if they have been exposed to it prior to. The B word doesn’t have to mean that unless you have been exposed to it before. It’s not like we are teaching that or exposing them to that. We are trying our best to redact the best we can and follow the law and that is what we felt like we have done to address the concerns of that language, the best we could. We think it is a valuable book and most of the supervisors here have read it.

More:

Jonathan Pierce: I ask that you go back to your Hoard’s Dairy example. Not one time do I see a vulgar word in that paragraph there. My objection, and I apologize to everyone sitting here, is that my standard no matter, and I am probably the biggest sinner and crudest person in this room, can I lay that in front of a child and say read it, or this is part of your reading assignment. I’ve got enough faith from the Director of Schools down to the newest hire in this building, that you can take that module and rewrite it and make it do the same thing. Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history, Mr. Bennett, that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It’s not acceptable today. We’ve got to accept people for who and what they are. I’m just an old country school board member and I think in our policy it says the decision stops with this board. Unfortunately, Mr. Parkison we did not go through the complaint process that’s also in our Board Policies.

But Rob, the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies. If I said on the school bus that I was going to kill you, we would be bringing disciplinary action against that child. Again, I am the biggest hypocrite, but I wouldn’t want to go to court that day. And somebody lay this book down and say look it was taught in the classrooms. Therefore, Madame Chairman I’m going to bring this to a head. I started it so I am going to bring it to a head. I move that we remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching The Holocaust.

Mike Lowry: Second.

The vote was 6 to 4 to remove Maus.

This is shameful. We are a stupid country. My 10th grade daughter read about this story yesterday, and said that she read Maus when she was a lot younger, and she understood that it was about the mass murder of European Jews — and she didn’t even notice the foul language or nudity (nudity of animals: the Jews are drawn as mice, the Nazis as cats). She’s right. The skull-cracking idiocy of this is that the schools of McMinn County are trying to teach eighth graders ABOUT THE MASS MURDER OF SIX MILLION, but six school board members believe that the occasional appearance of foul language in the narrative (the objectionable words were “bitch” and “goddamn”) is too much for their little ears, and nude mice representing the humiliation of human beings before their execution might eroticize their delicate sensibilities. What do these school board members think the Holocaust was? Spiegelman’s drawings are nowhere near the horror of actual photos of what the Nazis did:

‘Someone please put some clothes on these dead Jews before we let eighth graders see them!’

Notice what that one school board member said about how they would not tolerate a kid on the school bus saying “I’m going to kill you,” so why should they tolerate it in literature presented to middle schoolers? Good Lord, where do you even start with that?! In the conservative classical Christian school where my kids attend, the kids read The Odyssey in seventh grade. Odysseus commits adultery with the goddess Calypso and the witch Circe as part of his ten-year journey home. Teachers handle these themes with care and attention. Besides, in our hypereroticized culture, kids can and do learn far more about sex and sexuality (to say nothing of foul language) every day. It’s crazy that grown-up school board members are so prissy that they want children to learn about the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis, but to do so without seeing four-letter words or the suggestion of naked mice.

Do you want more information on how thick this board is? Look at this, from the transcript:

Mike Cochran: It doesn’t matter, it’s in the curriculum, all this stuff keeps popping up. So, I want to read it, you guys can fire me later, I guess.

I’m just wild about Harry,

and Harry’s wild about me

The heavenly blisses of his kisses,

fill me with ecstasy

He’s sweet just like chocolate candy

Just like honey from the bee

Oh I am just wild about Harry,

and he’s just wild about me

One of the discussion questions is define what this word “ecstasy” means. My problem is, all the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity. You go all the way back to first grade, second grade and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull. It’s not vulgar, it’s something you would see in an art gallery, but it’s unnecessary. So, teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys butts so the kids aren’t exposed to it. So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.

School board member Mike Cochran thinks “I’m Just Wild About Harry” — a foxtrot written in 1921, one century ago, for a Broadway show! — is a subversive plot to eroticize the innocent schoolchildren of McMinn County.

The whole thing is utterly humiliating. Shame on the McMinn County school board.

But look, this kind of thing happens all the time, in liberal places. They’re not objecting to four-letter words in Maus, or rodent ta-tas, but to equally ridiculous ideas, concepts, art and literature that offend progressive sensibilities. I’ll happily trade you the McMinn County school system for Yale, Harvard, and the pantheon of woke US universities. Just last week in Seattle, a progressive school board removed Harper Lee’s antiracist classic To Kill A Mockingbird from the required reading list because it upset some progressive parents. Idiocy. Total philistine idiocy.

Back in the year 2000, I wrote a piece (no longer online) about how in my home state of Louisiana, the Catholic diocese of Lafayette had banned the work of Flannery O’Connor because black students and parents objected to her using racial epithets in her stories, which were set in the Jim Crow South. I wrote:

The Catholic Church teaches that our moral and intellectual failures may sometimes be excused by something it calls “invincible ignorance” — an absolute incapacity to understand that what we’re doing is wrong. The plea of invincible ignorance seems just about the only hope for Catholic parents in a southern Louisiana town who succeeded this summer in banning from a local Catholic high school the work of the woman widely held to be the greatest Catholic fiction writer of twentieth-century America.

But for their bishop, the head of the Diocese of Lafayette, who set aside common sense, basic fairness, and intellectual integrity to crumble to the parents’ bullying — well, in his case it looks more like willful ignorance, and that leaves him with a whole lot of explaining to do. Thanks to Bishop Edward J. O’Donnell’s abject surrender to the forces of political correctness, a southern Catholic school — Opelousas Catholic High — has the dubious distinction of being the first recorded school in America to ban the southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.

In fact, the bishop’s edict goes further. The parents of black students at Opelousas Catholic had demanded that O’Connor’s collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, be removed from reading lists because it contains characters who use the words “nigger” and “pickaninny.” And Bishop O’Donnell, in ordering the elimination of O’Connor’s volume, directed that “no similar books” replace it: All books containing those racial epithets are forbidden, regardless of context.

Mark Twain? Gone. William Faulkner? A dead letter. Black authors Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, even local writer Ernest J. Gaines? Banished without reprieve.

“Basically, anything that has to do with race is off-limits,” said Arsenio Orteza, the teacher whose assigning of O’Connor to his eleventh-graders sparked the furor. “Think of how much American literature that leaves out. Maybe The Scarlet Letter is the way to go, and I’ll have to hope there aren’t any adulterers who object in the community.”

I hardly need to list here examples of contemporary progressives being just as pigheaded and blind as the McMinn County school board.

What is wrong with us? Seriously, the childish urge to censor without any understanding of context is baffling. This comes from the zero tolerance movement, which says that anything that raises the slightest objection, or is even the tiniest bit deviant from the straight and narrow, must be banned. This arose when the public lost confidence in authorities to use their own discretion in punishing infractions. This quickly led to the death of common sense.

It’s a hard problem to solve today. We plainly cannot trust teachers in every instance. We have far too many recent examples of activist teachers trying to mainstream Critical Race Theory and gender ideology without parents knowing, thus abusing their authority. On the other hand, is the alternative really to have school board members showing themselves to be prisspot ignoramuses, denouncing hundred-year-old show tunes and a highly acclaimed illustrated story about the Holocaust on grounds that seem more like the Saudi morals police than men and women of the West?

I really don’t know how to fix this. Nobody trusts anybody else. If my kids were in McMinn County public schools, I would be mad as hell (sorry, “mad as heck”) over the Maus imbroglio. But does that mean I believe the judgment of teachers is always to be trusted? Not remotely. A combination of the zero tolerance mentality, hysterical sensitivity to offense, and the loss of a common culture with common standards, all brought us to this point. What’s going to get us out of it? No clue.

One good thing that could come out of it: if you haven’t read Maus, or shared it with your older children, please do.

The post In McMinn County, ‘Maus Raus!’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Secret Activists Queering Evangelical Churches?

Earlier today, I was interviewed by a Christian television show. The reporter asked me how the churches have received Live Not By Lies. I told him we had sold over 150,000 copies in just over a year, and that I hear anecdotally about individuals and churches preparing, but that overall, it seems that most American churches, and American Christians, prefer to console themselves with the idea that everything is going to be just fine if we keep doing what we have been doing, only with more heart. This, I said, is dangerously naive.

Well, late this afternoon, I had an extraordinary telephone conversation with a friend who is a senior state leader in a nationally prominent Evangelical denomination, one that skews conservative on LGBT issues. He just returned from a conference, and said, “I think you need to know what the next front in the culture war is.”

My friend told me that pastors in five different churches in the southern region of his state reported at the conference the same phenomenon. They have had strangers come and join their congregations, and six months or so later, come out as transgender, and demand their rights as official members of the congregation. It has happened to so many of these churches, in the same period of time, that they believe it is part of a concerted effort to undermine those churches. I don’t have permission to give identifying details of the denomination and the particular state, but my friend told me that there is serious concern among the denomination’s lawyers that these undercover trans activists have found a legal way to force these congregations to capitulate on trans issues, or face ruinous lawsuits.

“There are a lot of churches in our denomination that don’t have a lot of money,” my friend said. “If they get sued, they won’t have enough resources to even defend themselves.”

My friend said he just met with the pastors of this region, who have all been poleaxed by this. Many of them are barely able to understand gender fluidity as a concept, much less figure out how to deal with it from a faithfully Christian point of view. They are sitting ducks, according to my friend. He said that on the advice of lawyers, the congregations are rewriting their bylaws to protect themselves from this kind of sneak attack.

He went on to say that most of the people in his denomination believe that being a Christian is mostly about holding certain cultural beliefs (including politics) and being nice. “They can’t understand why people don’t like them, and they think that if they’re nice, they’ll win people over,” he said. “I have tried to explain why this isn’t true, but most of the leaders in [my denomination] don’t want to believe it. In ten years, this church is going to look very, very different.”

My friend and I talked further about how diabolical this strategy is by trans activists. It sounds crazy, because it is crazy. If I did not know the man I was talking to, I would have trouble believing it. But look, this is not a rumor: again, this man I talked to today spent the last few days talking face-to-face with the pastors who are dealing with this, trying to help them understand what’s happening. My friend is pretty savvy about this kind of thing, but this left him shaken.

This is the reality that traditional Christians in this culture have to face today. We know that Generation Z is likely to be the first generation in American history in which a majority will not be affiliated with a church. We also know that Generation Z is far more liberal on sexual morality, and far less liberal when it comes to tolerating dissent. I suggested to my friend that it is going to take most of the Boomers dying off for church leaders to have a clearer picture of the peril that conservative Christianity is facing. He agreed. He told me that he is deeply discouraged about the future of traditional Christianity in his denomination and in his state, saying that the leadership in so many churches prefer to keep their heads buried in the ground, because they can’t emotionally accept the reality of what is happening.

You have been warned. If you are a leader in a traditional/conservative congregation, denomination, or Christian school, I strongly urge you to contact Alliance Defending Freedom and get information on how you can protect yourselves legally. And if you have the financial resources to help ADF, please give generously, so they can help imperiled churches, religious schools, and individuals.

And please, prepare yourselves, your families, and your churches. Do not wait for your congregation’s or denomination’s leaders to take the initiative. It’s not likely to happen. Father Kolakovic faced the same indifference from the Slovak Catholic bishops in the pre-communist years. They didn’t think persecution of the church could happen in their country. Father Kolakovic knew otherwise, and built a network of resilient believers — and when the Iron Curtain fell, they were ready. If you’ve read Live Not By Lies, or plan to read it, here is a free downloadable study guide for your group. 

UPDATE: An experienced religious liberty lawyer e-mails to urge churches to join the ADF Church Alliance. 

The lawyer says that every church absolutely must have updated their Statement of Faith and related bylaws for the post-Obergefell era. If churches do not have detailed, clear “theologies of the body” that are written down, they will be vulnerable. You cannot wait until you get sued or challenged to address the issue. Do it now. Contact ADF for more information.

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Rapaport’s Doomed Rite-Aid

The actor Michael Rapaport has been chronicling on his Instagram open shoplifting in a Rite Aid store in his neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Now it is reported that that particular Rite Aid is closing because the thievery makes it too expensive to do business there. Now in that neighborhood, which is not poor at all, will be down a drugstore. All the people who get their prescriptions there will have to find somewhere else — and they had better hope that the owners of other drugstores in the neighborhood don’t also decide to shut down because it’s too expensive to do business there, sustaining high levels of shoplifting.

The shoplifting sprees have been happening in other cities too. I’ve seen lots of videos of them, and all of the videos I have seen feature black thieves. I can’t say that these incidents entirely involve black people, or mostly involve black people. All I can tell you is that the videos I have seen show shoplifters who are black, exclusively.

This reminds me of a conversation I had about ten years ago after I moved back to Louisiana. I had gotten to know a man who was a senior executive at a large grocery store chain here. I had been reading about food deserts — neighborhoods without supermarkets — in poor black neighborhoods, and when I learned what my new friend did for a living, I mentioned to the man, who is white, that this phenomenon seemed unjust to me.

He responded by asking me if I thought that grocery stores made a habit of declining opportunities to make money. Well, I said, I guess not. So, he said, the reason there are so few grocery stores in poor black areas is because it is not cost-efficient to open them there, on account of high levels of shoplifting. Nobody in his company wants to deny poor people, especially poor black people, the opportunity to spend their money buying food from them. But they have had to shut down some stores in poor black areas, and have decided not to open new ones in others, because the rampant shoplifting made it too costly to operate.

But, he said, nobody can say that out loud. They would be accused of racism, and blaming the victim, he explained.

Watching these black shoplifters on video ransacking drugstores and other businesses over the past year brought that supermarket executive’s statement back to mind. Readers, can you point to any data that either back up or knock down what this executive told me? I’m not having much luck finding any. Whatever the case, the neighborhood where Rapaport’s doomed Rite Aid sits — E. 80th Street at First Avenue — is predominantly white, and like I said, not poor. But now the residents are going to have to live through what honest poor black people live through, because of the thieving minority making life harder for everybody. And though I can’t possibly know the ethnic makeup of the staff at that particular Rite Aid, when I lived on the East Side of Manhattan in the late 1990s, drugstore staffs were mostly black and Latino. Now, all the men and women who work at that store hard-hit by thieves are going to be out of work. I’d bet money that they are mostly, and maybe entirely, black and brown people — working folks who are trying to support themselves and their families, but who are being made to suffer because of these petty criminals, and a government that has decided that their jobs, and the quality of life of people in that neighborhood, are not worth defending.

Must be awesome to live in a city governed by progressives.

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Dickety-Dee, RIP

Y’all know I am a sucker for pop culture trash. Over the weekend, some visiting friends introduced me to Mr. Delicious, the short-lived cartoon spokesman for Rax, a fast food chain whose business was declining in the early 1990s when it tried to turn things around with a bizarre ad campaign featuring “Mr. Delicious,” a middle-aged animated loser who spoke of how eating at Rax helped him deal with his various crises.

Mr. D was a deeply weird dude. Nathan Rabin writes:

It only gets darker, sadder and weirder from there. In another radio spot, Mr. Delicious regales us with the details of his “bout with midlife crisis in 89.” He goes on to explain, with the perfect note of soul-deep self-loathing. “Fortunately (Mr. Delicious) was able to sell the Porsche back to the dealer. But much to his chagrin, he discovered that custom-designed hair weaves are non-refundable. Same for the rotating glitter disco ball he installed in his basement and that vacation to Bora Bora he took with those two young “friends” that left Mr. Delicious feeling empty and unfulfilled, unlike the robust sandwiches baked potatoes and refreshing drinks on the Rax menu for only 99 cents each.”

In another spot, Mr. Delicious alludes to the pain of his vasectomy. This, to try to sell fast food. What’s he got in that valise? Parts of Mrs. D’s torso? You wouldn’t be surprised — Mr. D is bizarre, man.

Here is a four-minute rundown of the psychotic management of the Rax brand, culminating in the Mr. Delicious character.

If you want to know more — and of course you do! — here is a 13-minute mini-documentary Rax corporate made to get its franchisees and employees excited about Mr. Delicious. I beg you to watch this, and imagine the mindset of the geniuses who thought this would work:

Shortly after the Mr. D campaign launched, Rax filed for bankruptcy. As Mr. Delicious says, “Dickety-dee!”

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Joe Rogan Vs. Censorious Boomer Gods

Neil Young now has an ally in his fight against Spotify over Joe Rogan’s show:

On Friday, the singer-songwriter posted a statement, titled “I Stand With Neil Young!”, to her website announcing the decision.

“I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

That Mitchell would openly support Young’s stand against the streaming giant should come as no surprise; the singers, who both got their start in the Canadian folk scene, have been friends for nearly six decades.

The move comes just several days after Young first demanded Spotify pull his catalog over claims that the company was actively promoting the spread of misinformation about vaccines and the Covid-19 pandemic — particularly via the massively popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” the “Southern Man” singer wrote Monday in a since-deleted post on his website. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify can survive the loss of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, two past greats who have not been relevant to popular music for many years. But if this becomes a trend in showbiz, Spotify will be in trouble.

On the other hand, Joe Rogan’s podcast draws over 11 million listeners monthly. His is the most popular podcast in the English-speaking world. It’s easy to see why when you listen to it. He actually listens to people, and is not keen on following the herd. You don’t have to agree with Rogan to find him interesting and important. It’s really ironic that these leading voices of Sixties culture — Young and Mitchell — have decided that Joe Rogan needs to be silenced, and that they’re going to do whatever they can to shut him up.

I’m not a regular listener to anybody’s podcasts, but boy, it chaps my a*s that these Boomer censors are trying to force Rogan off of Spotify. This is how the Left rolls these days: silence the heretics. They don’t even care if they know what they’re talking about. Here is Chloé Valdary calling out Trevor Noah for faulting Rogan and his guest Jordan Peterson for saying something Bad, even thought they actually were agreeing with Noah’s point of view!

My God, Did Trevor not realize that this was precisely Rogan and Peterson’s point, that this rule is stupid, and that blackness and whiteness are made up things? Did the Daily Beast not realize it either? Are all ya’ll just doing things for clicks??

Sighhhh. https://t.co/btqKuLB0Jx

— Chloé S. Valdary (@cvaldary) January 28, 2022

I’m only an occasional listener to Rogan’s podcast, and any podcast, but seeing the enemies the man has made, and that they oppose him by trying to get him cancelled, makes me eager to defend him, even though I strongly disagree with him on some things (e.g., drugs, porn, Bernie Sanders). Joe Rogan has a right to be wrong, and I have a right to hear him and his guests be wrong, if I want to. Of course Young and Mitchell have the right to pull their music from Spotify, but do they really want to start this war? As artists, do they really want to put themselves in the position of playing self-righteous censors (because that’s what they’re trying to do: compel Spotify to cancel Rogan’s show).

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell once dwelled in the pop culture niche now inhabited by Joe Rogan. I wonder how they would have reacted had Bing Crosby and other top crooners of the previous generation tried to get their record labels to throw them off because he believed they were a bad influence on society. Well, they have become hypothetical Bing Crosby. I don’t care if younger musicians love or hate Joe Rogan, but I do hope that they don’t follow these crotchety, censorious Canadians’ lead in using strategic self-cancellation as a new weapon in the culture war. This will not end well for any of us.

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Swinger Judges Are Only Human, Baby

News from the world of Kansas jurisprudence:

The Kansas Supreme Court accepted a disciplinary panel’s ruling that a county judge violated rules of judicial conduct when he shared nude photos of himself on a site called “Club Foreplay,” but declined Friday to take any additional action affirming or rejecting the finding.

In March, the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct determined that Russell County Magistrate Judge Marty Clark breached ethical standards when he shared nude photos of himself with another couple on “Club Foreplay,” an online dating site for swingers.

Clark resigned from the bench in May. Because he had already stepped down, the court said that it would accept the commission’s decision and take no further action.

I commend to you the opinion of Kansas State Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall, a friend of mine for almost twenty years, and one of the original crunchy cons. Caleb is a staunch religious conservative, but he comes out defending the disgraced magistrate. Justice Stegall’s commentary begins on Page 13 of the Court ruling. In what is surely a first in the annals of legal history, the Justice cites both René Girard and Austin Powers. Justice Stegall uses the ruling in part to discuss how technology and norms around surveillance (including self-surveillance) are wreaking havoc on the idea of privacy.

Here is an excerpt:

Today’s case illustrates that one consequence of elevating judges to the “supreme” arbiters of society is that we will endure bizarre replays of age-old religious controversies concerning the qualifications of priests to administer religious rites. See Cardman, The Praxis of Ecclesiology: Learning from the Donatist Controversy, 54 Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Soc’y of Am. 25, 26-27 (2013) (detailing the history of the Donatist sect which looked to the “moral worthiness of the minister of a sacramental action,” explaining that some bishops became “unworthy to minister” sacraments once they were determined to have “tainted” themselves).

Or consider another, more mundane example—the panel’s finding that Judge Clark’s picture project was “public” simply because those pictures could one day be made public. This definition of “public” cannot withstand the application of either common sense or the law. See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6101(f) (defining a “‘private place'” as where one may reasonably expect to be safe from uninvited intrusion or surveillance). In fact, what happened here looks a lot like what our Legislature has recently outlawed as “revenge porn” or “nonconsensual pornography.” See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6101(a)(8) (prohibiting dissemination of “any videotape, photograph, film or image of another identifiable person 18 years of age or older who is nude or engaged in sexual activity and under circumstances in which such identifiable person had a reasonable expectation of privacy, with the intent to harass, threaten or intimidate such identifiable person, and such identifiable person did not consent to such dissemination”). It appears to me that the Examiner and the Commission have unwittingly made themselves accomplices in one man’s effort to exact revenge against Judge Clark by “disseminating” his nude photographs and images of his sexual activities in which he had an expectation of privacy. See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 21-6101(a)(8).

Would the Examiner and panel ever have used such disparaging and salacious terms along with such intimate and detailed descriptions to characterize the lives and practices of other, more socially accepted, sexual minorities? Would the Examiner file a case on such questionable legal grounds, for example, based solely on intimate photographs of a Kansas judge handed over by a spurned homosexual lover? What about photographs of consensual but unconventional sexual practices engaged in by a heterosexual married couple given to the Examiner by one of the spouses after a nasty divorce? Or is this simply the age-old game of the powerful scapegoating people who have no real constituency or friends in high places?

I may be an unexpected defender of “consensually non-monogamous” judges— and I have no difficulty condemning adultery as morally destructive—but above all else, the rule of law condemns the arbitrary and unaccountable power of the state to pick winners and losers, reward friends and punish enemies, and protect its own interests above the public’s. Such abuses and the hypocrisy they reveal are the real threat to the legitimacy and integrity of the judiciary. The rule of law is not so weak it will collapse in the face of a few bedroom peccadillos or the occasional clownish, embarrassing episodes of official misadventure. But it is not so strong it can long endure the misrule of arbitrary double standards—which amount to a special kind of breach of the social contract.

An objection may be quickly raised that the moral content and quality of the personal character and integrity of our public officials matter. And more, that if a person becomes a public official like a judge, that person has agreed to make his or her private life a matter of public interest. There is real truth to this. But it is a grave mistake to think that either the Commission, the Examiner, or this court represent the mores of the public—mores which, as every honest political observer would admit, prove to be inscrutable at times. Indeed, even if such mores were knowable, by what right would we claim the authority to enforce the moral qualms of the public of its behalf?

None of this means that within our system of government public officials are immune from either criticism or sanction for their private behavior and personal character. They are not. Judges are not. There are two clear and available political means for the public to express its own moral qualms about a public official’s private behavior and character—sexual or otherwise. At the ballot box [in Kansas, magistrate judges are elected — RD] and in an impeachment proceeding.

… Nothing in my opinion today should be read to conclude that I think Judge Clark should have remained a judge. My judgment is more limited—if a public official is to be removed from office or otherwise sanctioned for lawful private conduct unrelated to the performance of his or her public duties, that sanction must be procured through political means. It is not our role to decide for the public what counts as sufficiently acceptable character for the job.

I never would have expected Caleb Stegall to defend a magistrate who is a swinger in his off-hours, but this ruling seems principled and important. Judge Marty Clark disgraced himself, and his resignation was in right order. But Justice Stegall raises vital questions about privacy, and the nature of the judiciary. In standing up for a sad-sack swinger whose conduct was not illegal or related to his role as a magistrate, the justice is standing up for the right of privacy, and for the principle that judges are human beings.

The post Swinger Judges Are Only Human, Baby appeared first on The American Conservative.

For Neocons, It’s Always Munich

Twenty years ago, neocons denounced as traitors to America those Americans, like Pat Buchanan, who opposed the Iraq War. Today, they’re denouncing us on the Right who oppose war with Russia as Neville Chamberlains. Here’s Matt K. Lewis in The Daily Beast, criticizing “MAGA tough guys”:

Donald Trump has conquered the GOP as a cult of personality, but the body politic is still trying to reject the foreign objects of Trumpism. As Russia masses troops on Ukraine’s border, an unresolved schism on the right has been exposed: the Russian bear.

In one corner are the Reagan Republicans who don’t trust Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB agent, and who believe it’s dangerous to allow regimes to invade their neighbors. In the other corner are the America Firsters who would sit on their hands if Russia invaded and occupied Ukraine.

Ah, see what he’s doing here? When did it become America’s responsibility to decide which nations are “allowed” to do what? An notice the sleight of hand here: To believe that the US has no business getting involved in this particular dispute between Russia and Ukraine is, in Matt Lewis’s view, to be universally in favor of regimes invading their neighbors. There might be some of us on the Right who are universal anti-interventionists, but I can’t think of any of them. Speaking for myself and those I know among the right-wing critics of US aggression in the Ukraine case, we think that putting America between Russia and Ukraine is unwise. But if these neocon hawks can successfully brand us all as global appeasers, they don’t have to make the case for intervention in a dispute that most Americans don’t believe is our business, or at least not worth risking war over. 

More:

More recently, [Tucker] Carlson suggested NATO was to blame for Russia’s actions. “Imagine if Mexico fell under the direct military control of China, we would see that as a threat of course,” Carlson explained. “That’s how Russia views NATO control of Ukraine. Why wouldn’t they?”

It’s ironic that this isolationist strain is gaining traction (according to Gallup, the number of Republicans calling Russia an ally or friend rose from 22 percent to 40 percent between 2014 and 2018), even as the right increasingly fetishizes political machismo.

For years, foreign policy hawks invoked the icon of appeasement, Neville Chamberlain, to emasculate their more dovish liberal opponents. Today, the macho men on the right are arguing that an illegal incursion by an authoritarian regime into a European nation-state isn’t our business. It’s Chamberlain’s folly delivered with a confident Churchillian swagger.

But why is this happening now? There are multiple reasons, including either grudging or explicit admiration for Vladimir Putin, whose dictatorial strongman persona exhibits many of the stereotypical attributes of masculinity.

This is childish. The idea that the only reason American conservatives would oppose putting the US on a war footing with Russia over Ukraine is a desire to suck up to macho Vladimir Putin is as stupid as it is offensive. Did Matt Lewis not observe the catastrophic foreign policy and military failures of the US in the past 20 years? Does he not get that many of us do not trust the judgment of our foreign policy and Pentagon elites? Might it just be the case that we have the sense to look at the regional map, and our history books, and understand that Russia and Ukraine’s connections are ancient and intimate, and that Russia has vital interests there that we do not?

More:

Among the “America First” isolationist right, there’s also the argument that Putin is fighting for Christian values, while our “woke” U.S. military is the “armed wing of the Democratic Party,” part of a leftist cabal indoctrinating our young people into godless Marxism.

Consider a recent essay by Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), arguing that Russia’s 2013 gay propaganda law caused American progressives to turn against Russia. “Russian opposition to LGBT triggers American elites more than anti-gay laws and practices elsewhere because Russia is a white nation that justifies its policies based on an appeal to Christian values,” he wrote.

According to this worldview, hostility towards Russia is a proxy war against Christian conservatives in America (and it would be disproportionately fought by Christian conservatives from America). As conservative writer (and avowed fan of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban) Rod Dreher writes, “Hanania is right—this cold war with Russia is an extension of the culture war within American society, waged by elites against the American people. Once you understand that, and once you understand which class the American soldiers who would fight this war if it ever went hot come from, you are in a much better position to grasp the pro-war propaganda in our media.”

In other words, to support Putin is to support Christianity, and to support America is to support secularism and sin and leftism.

Again, this is not only offensive, it’s stupid. First of all, to call Orban a “Hungarian strongman” is telling. This is propaganda-speak. Orban is the elected leader of a democratic country. He is facing re-election prospects this spring, against a strong opposition. If he loses, he will go into opposition. Only in the minds of Western liberals and neocons is Orban a “strongman”. Do not listen to these people. They lie.

Second, Hanania’s point, which I support, is that Western elites have a particular hatred for Russia because it is a historically Christian, European (or semi-European, depending on your point of view) great power. As I wrote in the piece to which Lewis links, western European governments came down like a ton of bricks on Hungary last summer, after the Parliament there passed a law restricting LGBT media aimed at minors. French president Macron made a statement characterizing Hungary as defiling European values — even though same-sex marriage rights were unknown in Europe until the Dutch became the first country to grant them, in 2001. There really is something about the LGBT issue that drives Western elites to the extremes. Back in 2016, under the Obama administration, a friend who received a Fulbright scholarship sent me documents from the State Department orientation for Fulbright recipients, in which they were instructed that they were to be ambassadors for LGBT rights abroad. This, even though the Fulbright scholarships are meant for research. This, even though some of the Fulbright scholars were headed to countries that are far more conservative about such matters than the US, and that the US generally expects Fulbrighters to respect the values of their host countries. But not on LGBT. Why do you suppose that is? Some of those same countries do not have US-style protections for religious liberty and other core liberal values. The State Department doesn’t expect Fulbrighters to become ambassadors for religious liberty (nor, in my view, should it). But LGBT folks are a Very Special Privileged Minority in the eyes of Western elites.

Lewis is lying like a second-rate propagandist when he characterizes my view as “to support Putin is to support Christianity, and to support America is to support secularism and sin and leftism.” I am neither a supporter nor an opponent of Vladimir Putin as a general matter, nor would I call him a defender of Christianity per se. Sometimes he is, sometimes he isn’t — but that is beside the point. I have written that I hope Russia does not invade Ukraine, and that this dispute should be worked out diplomatically. I think Russia’s demand that Ukraine not enter NATO is a reasonable one, given the strategic realities of the region. NATO should give written guarantees to Russia on that point as a way of defusing this conflict. And Russia should stand down and stop threatening Ukraine. The Finlandization of Ukraine is not ideal, but as I see it, it is the best realistic outcome to avoid war.

My point in that earlier post, the one criticized by Lewis, is that our elites can’t see Russia (or Hungary) as a normal country with normal interests — interests that may diverge from our own, but that does not make them uniquely evil, or worthy of our contempt. In the European Union, Viktor Orban doesn’t expect the rest of the EU to follow Hungarian policies, which were decided by a democratic vote of democratically elected representatives of people whose views are somewhat more conservative than, say, the average Belgian’s. But the EU demands that Hungary change its laws to abandon a standard that was held throughout Europe until 2001. What sense does that make? For that, the Dutch prime minister has said he wants Hungary kicked out of the EU. I certainly do not believe that being a conservative Christian obliges one to support Vladimir Putin’s attitude toward Ukraine, or Vladimir Putin’s policies at all. However, you would be naive to fail to understand the contempt most American elites have towards socially conservative governments of Central and Eastern Europe, because of their stances on LGBT issues. It’s part of the overall demonization of those countries by government, policy, and media elites.

As it turns out, Lewis does nod slightly towards the effect that the quagmires the neocons led us into having an effect on the Russia doves among us (like me):

To be sure, in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it is understandable that many Americans are afraid of being drawn into another quagmire. But the opposite impulse—the desire to retreat from the world (or looking the other way while bullies dominate other countries)—is equally dangerous and provocative.

As Neville Chamberlain belatedly learned, Munich was an illusory, temporary fix. Bullies have to be confronted at some point.

Again, I’m not suggesting that Ukraine’s border is an existential threat to America. But the notion of favoring Vladimir Putin, who is cynically using the Russian Orthodox Church for political purposes, over your own country, is absurd. Looking the other way at an authoritarian aggression will only invite more aggression.

And the urge to do so is turning America First elites into today’s Neville Chamberlains.

When these people start bleating “Munich!” and “Neville Chamberlain,” you should know that your pocket is being picked. They said the same damn thing about Iraq — and they still are! As Andrew Bacevich wrote last year here at TAC on the 20th anniversary of 9/11:

The temptation to weigh in proved too much for former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to resist. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he seconded the call for persistence. Wolfowitz looked forward to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 as “an occasion for defiance, and for pride in the Americans who fought, sacrificed and successfully protected our country for two decades from further mass-casualty attacks,” something that twenty years ago had “seemed impossible.” Viewed from this perspective, the Afghanistan War had contributed to a larger strategic success.

Even so, there is more armed conflict to come. The war on terrorism will continue, Wolfowitz believes, and it “is going to be very long.” As an incident in that long war, Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan compared with Neville Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. To drive home the point, Wolfowitz quoted Winston Churchill, implicitly suggesting that with a dose of Churchillian leadership from the White House, all would be well.

What Kagan, McMaster, Petraeus, and Wolfowitz share in common is an aversion to data. The costs incurred by the United States in its Global War on Terrorism—upwards of $8 trillion expended, thousands of U.S. troops dead, tens of thousands more wounded—go simply unmentioned, as does the fact that those costs will continue to accumulate.According to one authoritative estimate, by 2050, the expense of caring for post-9/11 U.S. veterans will reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion.

Though the execution of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was a total botch, Biden’s decision to stop America’s bleeding there was a correct one, and a courageous one. But Wolfowitz, one of the Iraq War’s architects, is calling Biden a neo-Neville Chamberlain. These people, the neocons, are shameless.

What does it mean to “favor Vladimir Putin over your own country”? Is this how the neocons characterize opposition to US militancy over Ukraine? How disgraceful. This is like the woke accusing anyone who criticizes the madness of Ibram Kendi of being racist. This is attempting to close off debate about an issue of extreme importance to our war-exhausted country by tarring as cowards those hesitant to worsen the conflict, and skeptical about Washington’s aims. Natalie Dowzicky, writing in Reason, says:

With a little less hubris and a little more realism, the escalation of the Ukraine affair could’ve at least been mitigated. But the foreign policy establishment seems to have forgotten how to do a cost-benefit analysis. The risks of this conflict simply outweigh Ukraine’s importance to U.S. foreign policy.

Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) wants “the sorts of sanctions that we use to bring Iran to the table.” But Russia controls a significant portion of global energy markets—nearly 40 percent of Europe’s gas imports—so permitting Iran-like measures against it would have disastrous effects. Economic sanctions on Russia were futile in 2014 when it invaded Crimea, and there’s no reason to believe that they would provide a deterrent effect now. More often than not, U.S. sanctions hurt American economic interests without changing the target’s behavior in the slightest.

Meanwhile, American military aid worth more than $200 million has reached Ukraine. This weapons dump has been justified a few different ways, ranging from the idea that it will change Putin’s mind to the notion that it will give the Ukrainian military a real chance against potential invaders. In 2021, the U.S. sent $650 million worth of weapons and military equipment to Ukraine—the most since 2014—and it clearly didn’t deter Putin from surrounding Ukraine on three fronts. It’s hard to believe that sending even more equipment into Ukraine will do the trick.

Defending Ukraine has never been about Ukraine, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues in National Review, but about defending “liberal world order.” The chief argument of the Russia hawks, like former President of the World Peace Foundation Robert Rotberg, is that failing to protect Ukraine from Russia would mean the U.S. is dishonoring those who fought in World War II. That the U.S. would be putting its hard-earned “superpower” status at risk. This is an exaggeration of disastrous magnitude.

“The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics,” writes Harvard University’s Stephen Walt in Foreign Affairs. Russia sees Ukraine as a strategic imperative. Ukraine will never be as high on America’s list of foreign policy priorities as it is on Russia’s. And the situation in that region will never become a fight to crown the next global superpower.

People who throw out slurs like “Munich” and “Neville Chamberlain” at realists over Ukraine are not interested in a cost-benefit analysis. We should have known that twenty years ago, before we went into Iraq. Today, there is no excuse for any of us not to know that these people cannot be trusted. Recognizing that does not make Putin a hero, or even a good man. But then, moralizing foreign policy (as with the infamous “Axis Of Evil” speech neocon David Frum wrote for President G.W. Bush) is often the enemy of clear thought and reasoned discourse.

The post For Neocons, It’s Always Munich appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Transwoman’ Child Molester Is Going To Girls’ Juvy

From Los Angeles, news from the Chosen People (I speak, of course, of the Transgendered):

A Los Angeles County judge on Thursday ordered Hannah Tubbs, a transgender California woman, to serve two years in a juvenile facility after she pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in 2014.

Before doing so, the judge criticized far-left District Attorney George Gascon, whose office declined to prosecute the repeat offender as an adult.

Tubbs, 26, recently pleaded guilty to molesting the girl in a women’s bathroom eight years ago when Tubbs was two weeks away from turning 18. At the time of the crime, she identified as male and went by James Tubbs. She did not identify as female until after she was taken into custody, according to prosecutors.

“Tubbs is 26 years old. Unlike George Gascon’s false narrative, she is not a ‘kid,'” L.A. Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami, assigned to the Complex Child Abuse Unit, told Fox News Digital.

“There was evidence presented at the juvenile proceedings which showed that Tubbs sexually assaulted two young girls in different incidents in the past. The child victims will suffer lifelong trauma. Tubbs also has prior violent convictions and conduct as an adult.”

Prosecutors say Tubbs walked into the bathroom of a Denny’s in 2014 and grabbed the 10-year-old by the throat, locked her in a stall, and put her hand down the girl’s pants. Tubbs stopped when another person walked into the restroom, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Because Tubbs began identifying as female after she was taken into custody, and Gascon refused to try her as an adult, Tubbs was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility.  In L.A. County, juvenile facilities can house both females and males, but in separate areas. Tubbs will be housed with the females.

More:

“Because of George Gascon’s blanket policy against transferring any juvenile to adult court, even if the 17-year-old rapes or murders an innocent child, James Tubbs will not have to register as a sex offender, will not spend any time in county jail or state prison, will be 26 and housed with juveniles for a very short period of time, and will be released with no probation or parole monitoring. The victims will get no justice. The public will get no safety,” Hatami said.

This 26-year-old penis-having sex criminal lummox will be housed with juvenile females, because the judge’s hands have been tied by the woke DA, and the laws of the crazy liberal state of California. How long will normal people put up with this insanity? Hannah Tubbs is a man. “She” was born a man, and a man “she” will always be. And “she” — he — is a child molester. A child molester who is coddled by the Soros DA of Los Angeles, voted into office by liberal Los Angelenos.

Meanwhile, as if it didn’t have enough to worry about, the Catholic Church now has to watch out for transgendered pseudo-males applying for seminary. From Catholic News Agency:

Bishops should consider requiring DNA tests or physical examinations to ensure that all seminarians are biological men, said Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki in a recent memo sent to the members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

“Recently, the Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance was made aware of instances where it had been discovered that a woman living under a transgendered identity had been unknowingly admitted to the seminary or to a house of formation of an institute of consecrated life,” said the memo. Listecki is the chairman of the USCCB’s canonical affairs committee.

In one case, said Listecki, “the individual’s sacramental records had been fraudulently obtained to reflect her new identity.”

“In all instances, nothing in these individuals’ medical or psychological reports had signaled past treatments or pertinent surgeries,” he added. None of the biologically female seminarians received Holy Orders, said Listecki.

A reader who teaches at a major American seminary, whose name I am withholding, writes to say:

The issue of transgendered biological women applying, gaining entrance to, and attending seminaries in the US is back in the, or a, spotlight. A google search makes it apparent that primarily, if not exclusively, conservative Catholic sources are reporting it. It would seem easy, at a glance, to pick out the suspicious characters, the “Pats” if you will.

Julia Sweeney as “Pat”

We have, for example, about [100-150] students in our seminary program and I am 99% certain that none of them are biologically female, though a handful, at least, are fairly odd characters. Sometimes being a weirdo–not fitting in–which may include a natural effeminacy, can lead someone to consider the priesthood who otherwise wouldn’t. And that man can become a good and holy priest, even if he remains an awkward person at the far end of seminary formation. Something similar could be said for men with homosexual tendencies successfully struggling to manage their urges, which is probably a significant slice of any Catholic seminary population today.

But a biological female pretending to be a man is surely a different…animal. Part of the wider issue is that seminaries experience a significant degree of pressure to please the bishops who send men (?) to them for formation. At the same time, seminaries can (and should) be usually blamed for graduating (= recommending for ordination) deviants, perverts, and sickos that have somehow made it through the five to seven years of intense spiritual and intellectual formation (I would even say scrutinization) that graduation entails. It’s really a tight spot: bishops can choose where they send their men (?) for formation. Given the low numbers of men (?) actually interested in the priesthood, one bishop pulling his guys (?) from your seminary can have a devastating effect. I wanted to bring to your attention this bizarre situation–rare yet revealing another facet of the crisis that is also status quo–seminaries are facing in the US. To my mind it captures well the apocalypsis Western civilization is facing, and traditional Christianity therein.

Can you imagine that it has come to this? And we just sit back and let it wash over us. Seems like Pope Francis’s Vatican might be rolling merrily along with the contemporary currents.  The analysis from the Tablet (UK) is excited by the change of direction:

Pope Francis has not formally “changed” any official teaching but he’s opened the way to a more inclusive and pastoral approach to gay and lesbian people, and his letters encouraging those ministering to them are highly significant.  It is the opening of a more “synodal” approach to this issue, where the Church listens, learns and opens up new pastoral avenues. Personnel changes at the Vatican’s doctrine office, announced on 10 January, also suggest movements are afoot.

Here is a story from the UK’s Daily Mail. Andrew Sullivan says correctly that you won’t see this in American papers, which are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Trans-Industrial Complex. Excerpts:

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.

‘It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,’ one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

 Lia has told her teammates that she dates women.

While Lia covers herself with a towel sometimes, there’s a decent amount of nudity,  the swimmer said. She and others have had a glimpse at her private parts.

She stated that team members have raised their concern with the coach, trying to get Thomas ousted from the female locker room, but got nowhere.

‘Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,’ the UPenn swimmer said. ‘But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there’s nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.’

‘It’s really upsetting because Lia doesn’t seem to care how it makes anyone else feel,’ the swimmer continued. ‘The 35 of us are just supposed to accept being uncomfortable in our own space and locker room for, like, the feelings of one.’

Of course not. Lia Thomas is a total narcissist who, like so many other male-to-female transgenders, expects the entire world — particularly women in the world — to shut up and accept their own humiliation, and the theft of their opportunities to excel in athletics. This should never, ever have been an issue — and wouldn’t be if the United States weren’t governed by a morally corrupt elite.

Meanwhile, the Washington state legislature is working on a bill that would extend abortion rights to transgendered men.

And this from Canada:

Just received this from my son’s school. He also informed me that now with Oh Canada each morning, on the screen there’s a Canadian flag followed by a Black Lives Matter flag and then the trans flag. The level of indoctrination in Canadian schools is absolutely ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/kwDAeGlsTT

— Mia (@_CryMiaRiver) January 26, 2022

The only thing that is going to stop this is parents who finally get sick and tired of the abuse and the craziness, and start speaking out — and filing lawsuits, like this California mom,and like these Florida parents. About the Florida case, the Washington Examiner writes:

The parents of a Florida elementary school student are suing their daughter’s school district after their child attempted to commit suicide following the school’s efforts to orchestrate her secret transition to a male gender identity.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida and claims that the daughter of Wendell and Maria Perez, a sixth grade student at Paterson Elementary School in Fleming Island, Florida, had adopted a male transgender identity at school with the support of administrators, who hid the girl’s gender dysphoria from her parents.

It was not until the Perezes’ daughter, identified as A.P. in court filings, attempted to commit suicide on school grounds for the second time in as many days that the Perezes were notified about their daughter’s male gender identity, the lawsuit says.

“Prior to the [suicide attempt], A.P. had not exhibited any signs of gender confusion or questioning of her biological sex,” the lawsuit says. “In fact, just before the incident she had told her mother that she believed that people who say they are transgender have a problem with their minds because ‘if you’re a boy, you’re a boy, if you’re a girl, you’re a girl.’”

The court filing says that A.P. and the school had sought to keep her parents in the dark regarding her transgender identity due to their Catholic faith, which teaches that sex and gender are immutable.

Folks, it will not stop until we force it to be stopped. This cannot be done painlessly. The woke have established their tyranny not by shedding blood, but by shedding tears. This is what it means for the therapeutic to have triumphed: it means 26-year-old male sex criminals who claim to be women get to live with juvenile females in jail. It means that women’s athletics are being destroyed by biological males, and women must shut their mouths and accept it. It means that the schools propagandize our children to hate their bodies, and then conspire to change their sex and deceive parents about it.

Enough. Enough! Fight the power! If you don’t know what your kid is being told at school, you had better find out. This California woman thought her daughter would be safe from gender ideology at a Catholic school — but she was wrong.Read more:

In May, the Pride Student Union at our daughter’s Catholic school announced that it would have another formal meeting on gender identity, the club president’s favorite subject.

As is the case with all school clubs, a faculty member was required to attend each meeting of the Pride Student Union. Given the number of meetings focused on gender ideology, this faculty member—and therefore the Catholic school—approved of teaching an ideology that is antithetical to the Roman Catholic Church.

I asked the club’s leader to stop emailing my daughter, as we believed that this club was indoctrinating my daughter further into the gender cult.

I met with the school principal, who I’ll call Ms. K, and the school’s chaplain, Father B. I told them my daughter’s story. I begged them to help me. Instead, they simply offered excuses.

Principal K and Father B said that the Pride Student Union’s most recent formal meeting on gender had not been sanctioned by the school, and may have occurred without faculty oversight. But I know that the faculty member was invited to an earlier meeting on gender, so I was skeptical.

Principal K and Father B tried to argue that the club doesn’t “teach” anything. I disagreed.

They went on to say that they couldn’t control what students do on their own time. They went so far as to compare the gender meetings to off-campus parties that weren’t sponsored by the school. It was obvious to me that they wanted to distance the school from the club to protect themselves from possible legal ramifications.

I asked Principal K and Father B to remove my daughter’s address from the club’s email distribution list. That request was denied. Students could join any club regardless of parents’ wishes.

I asked if they were aware of the information being presented at Pride Student Union events, specifically the formal meetings on gender, or whether they had queried the faculty monitor, the club president, or any members.

Neither Principal K nor Father B would answer that question, waving it off as if I had no right to be concerned. Yet, Father B told me that my daughter needed the club. He warned me that she might commit suicide without it, and said she needed a place to make friends.

I asked what Father B knew of my daughter. The school chaplain had never met her.

Father B. is just one step ahead of Pope F., sounds like.

And by the way, even if your kid is in a solid school, don’t think he or she is safe. Central European countries are socially conservative about LGBT matters compared to Western ones, and kids usually don’t hear this stuff in school. But they’re all being indoctrinated via social media. I’ve written before in this space about the Slovenian Catholic father who told me in Ljubljana last summer that his 12 year old daughter was suffering acute psychological distress because some older American teenagers she contacted over her smartphone had convinced her that she had better choose the correct gender. It had not occurred to this father and his wife that by getting their daughter a smartphone, they were opening her up to toxic strangers who would colonize their young daughter’s mind.

How certain are you that this isn’t happening with your kids?

A reader e-mailed to say that the average member of Generation Z has been raised on social media, with their information regimen carefully curated by Big Tech, and the indoctrination supported by schools, cultural institutions (high and low), and every entertainment source. With the woke controlling all the institutions, the question isn’t how could that generation be so far to the Left, but rather, how could it not?

 

 

The post ‘Transwoman’ Child Molester Is Going To Girls’ Juvy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Control And Enchantment

Yesterday I listened to Jordan Peterson’s podcast interview with Chloé Valdary, the antiracism educator whose program is called “Theory of Enchantment.” I have been following her for some time on Twitter, because she always seems humane, compassionate, and wise. After listening to her explain her worldview and program on JBP’s podcast, I realized that as much as I hate everything about DEI, I would actually like to take Valdary’s course. Why? Because from what I can tell, Valdary builds her antiracism approach not on resentment and power dynamics, but on encouraging people to find ways to love each other. Her approach also confronts people with the fact that no matter what their race, sex, or whatever, they too have the capacity for evil. She goes at this by looking at people not as bearers of group identity, but as individuals. It is through individual hearts, not between groups, that the line between good and evil passes. I hate standard DEI because it is moralistic politicized hatred. That’s not what Valdary does. When she tells JBP that some companies call in her consultancy to repair the damage done by standard Kendi/DiAngelo-style DEI, I believe her.

Another reason I listened to the podcast episode is to find out what Valdary means by “enchantment.” As you may recall, I have just begun working on a book about re-enchantment. I wanted to discover where our insights overlap. Some of what she has to say reminded me of a book I read last weekend by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa: The Uncontrollability of the World. Carl Trueman recommended it to me, and I put off reading it for a while, because the idea of reading German sociology did not really appeal. I finally got around to it last weekend, and boy, was I ever wrong to put it off. Rosa writes beautifully, and the book is short and easy to digest. And it lands perfectly with the work I’m doing now.

Because listening to the Valdary podcast has me thinking hard about the idea of enchantment, and why it’s so important today, I’m going to repost for you here most of a Substack post I wrote the other day about Rosa’s work. Normally I don’t reproduce my Substack writing here, but I think this one makes a good crossover. Here goes:

Here is Rosa’s diagnosis of our disenchantment. I marked out these quotes on my Kindle, which doesn’t allow you to see where the breaks are. I’m just guessing. Rosa writes:

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.

More:

The first guiding thesis that I would like to develop in this essay is that, for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression. Everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.

A modern society, as I define it, is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.

This game of escalation is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but by the fear of having less and less. It is never enough not because we are insatiable, but because we are, always and everywhere, moving down the escalator.

Our life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach: this is the mantra of modern life, unspoken but relentlessly reiterated and reified in our actions and behavior. As I would like to demonstrate in this essay, the categorical imperative of late modernity—Always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased—has become the dominant principle behind our decision-making in all areas of life and across all ages, from toddlers to the elderly.

This really resonates (no pun intended) with McGilchrist’s writing about how we in the modern West have become slaves to the left-hemisphere view of reality. As you will recall from my past writing about McGilchrist, the left brain is where our capacity for analyzing our experience of the world and construing it for the sake of control is located. To refresh your memory, McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, believes that this faculty is necessary for a full human life, but if we give it dominance — as we have, on a culture-wide scale — we will live in unreality, and lose our capacity for a healthy, reasonable life. We only thrive when the insights of the left hemisphere are returned to the right hemisphere — which is the part of our brains where our intuitive, noetic faculties are located — for integration into the broader picture.

As you will see, what McGilchrist holds as the ideal state is pretty much what Rosa means by resonance.

What does Rosa mean by expanding our share of the world? He’s talking about processing experience in such a way that brings it as a phenomenon under our control, or at least potentially so. He says that the experience of being able to communicate with many people globally, instantly, via smartphones is an example of this. More:

Not only are all our friends and acquaintances, our loved ones and our not so loved ones, now always just a “click” away, we also have all the knowledge in the world—every song, every film, every image, every bit of data that has been digitized—in close proximity at all times. We literally carry it on our person. The world is now at our fingertips in a historically unprecedented way. The idea, or rather the conviction correlated with these processes —that life comes down to bringing the world within reach—is inscribed in our bodies and in our psychological and emotional dispositions.

Reading this, I recalled how when I was a young teenager, I wrote off to a penpal agency asking for a penpal in Europe. They connected me to a teenage girl in the Netherlands. We struck up a wonderful epistolary friendship. At one point, we decided to connect by telephone (this was the early 1980s). I can still recite from memory her family’s phone number, because I pondered it anxiously for a long time before I mustered the courage to call it. Talking on the phone with Europe back then was such an exciting thing! It wasn’t cheap, and I paid my parents back for the cost of those calls. But it was glorious, at least to me. It was entering into a mystery.

Today, my kids can FaceTime or WhatsApp the kids of my Dutch friends, like it’s no big deal, not only speaking, but communicating with visuals too! All the mysterious pleasures of those friendships with faraway people no longer exist. Do I wish we didn’t have the technology to make that ease of communication possible? No, I am grateful for these technological developments. But it has come at a cost, as Rosa helps me to understand. It is no longer a special thing. Europe — and really, anywhere in the world — is not as much the mysterious Other, not like it was. And therefore, it is, and cannot help being, less enchanting.

More Rosa:

The sociocultural formation of modernity thus turns out to be, in a way, doubly calibrated for the strategy of making the world controllable. We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things—segments of world—within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controllable.

Making the world controllable means, first, making it visible, that is, making it knowable, expanding our knowledge of what is there. Making the world controllable means, furthermore, making it physically reachable or accessible.

Inextricably linked with this is the third dimension of bringing the world under control, namely by making it manageable.

… Distinct from this mode of conquering the world technologically and politically, at least in analytical terms, is a fourth dimension of making the world controllable, namely by making it useful, pressing it into service. Here the point is not simply to bring the world under our control, but to make it into an instrument for our own purposes.

So, the four parts of this process:

Make the world visible. Make the visible world accessible. Make the visible, accessible world manageable — meaning, increasing our control over it. Make the visible, accessible, manageable world do what we want it to do.

Reading this, I thought, “He’s talking about how we disenchant the world.” And then, lo:

Max Weber, the other great “founding father” of modern sociology, likewise finds it highly irrational that human beings do not work in order to live, but live in order to work and accumulate (in my terminology, to grow, accelerate, and innovate). Yet he understands this relation to the world as part and parcel and the result of a great “western process of rationalization” that unfolds over the centuries and the core of which consists in making life and the world calculable, manageable, and predictable—scientifically, technologically, economically, legally, politically, and finally also in everyday life. This means nothing less than making the world controllable… .

Weber identifies this as the flipside of rationalization as a process of progressive alienation, of the world’s falling mute, which he describes as a “disenchantment.” Weber’s at times deeply pessimistic diagnosis is that the world made manageable and predictable has lost not only its color and its magic, but also its voice, its meaning. It has “cooled” into a dull “steel-hard shell,” within which economic and bureaucratic reason blindly and soullessly advance escalatory processes to the point where human beings have become “nonentities” who “imagine they have attained a stage of humankind never before reached.”

Yes! McGilchrist says the same thing. The left brain is performing its natural function when it engages in this process — and this is not necessarily a bad thing. It turns bad, though, when we allow the left brain to triumph over the right, and convince ourselves that the left brain has figured out the truth of the world, and that “this is all there is.” Our right brains know that this is not all there is, that there is in the phenomena of the world more than we can every fully grasp. Modern Western culture has taught us, however, to downplay our noetic intuitions, and to dismiss them as “subjective,” meaning mere opinion.

In truth, as Kierkegaard said, “truth is subjectivity.” He did not mean that there is no such thing as objective truth. He meant rather that all the truths for which one would live or die can only be known subjectively. For example, you cannot objectively prove that God exists — but God’s existence does not depend on our being able to prove it objectively. The nature of the phenomenon we call “God” is such that He can only be known subjectively. Similarly with love. You cannot prove objectively that you love your spouse. Even if you made a long list of all the things you have done that demonstrate your love, it will always be possible to say that you use the word “love” to refer to selfish acts.

See what I mean? God may or may not exist, and your love for your spouse may or may not be real, but the point is that you will not be able to demonstrate that in the same sense that you can demonstrate a mathematical proof, or a physical law. You can only demonstrate the truth of these claims by being willing to live by them, and even die by them. McGilchrist points out several times in his book that this can be a difficult thing for English speakers to grasp because we have only one verb for “to know,” whereas other languages — like French and German — have different verbs to describe knowing as possessing knowledge of things, and knowing as a relationship. To know about a man is not the same thing as knowing a man personally.

Rosa says that gaining mastery over the world — conquering it — can lead us to despair:

None of this means anything to me. It doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t affect me, and I’m not having any effect on the outside world. This experience is characteristic of a depressive condition, when all axes of resonance have fallen mute and “nothing speaks to us anymore.” This feeling of a loss of world exists independently of the question of how expansive one’s share of the world is. It can arise, individually and collectively, even where—in fact especially where – we have the world technologically, economically, and socially largely in our grasp. Everything out there is dead, gray, empty, and cold, and everything within me is mute and numb, too.

Taking all the above reflections and observations into account, we can note that the individual and institutional efforts of modernity to make the world controllable, in all four dimensions and with an ever wider reach, have yielded paradoxical side effects, which can be described as disenchantment as opposed to ensoulment (Weber). Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself. This is the conclusion of my sociology of our relationship to the world. Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached.

Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached. What a powerful line, reflecting a profound insight. And it goes right to the heart of my new book project, which is about restoring to us the ability to be called, and reached — by God.

Do y’all remember me banging on and on last year about that dream scene in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia in which the protagonist, Andrei, is stalking through a ruined church, and the voice of the Virgin asks God to speak to him, because he’s so lost, or to show Himself to Andrei … but God replies that Andrei is not receptive to Him. Here it is:

Andrei is modern Western man. If his way of life is really a way of death, then what is the way out of the dark wood? Rosa:

What does a successful relationship to the world look like? If the culturally and structurally enforced attitude of conceiving of the world as a point of scientific, technological, economic, and political aggression, as something to be brought within our individual reach, turns out to be the cause of our ever increasing alienation from the world, then the question becomes: What other attitude toward the world is even possible or conceivable?

The answer, says Rosa, is resonance.

The basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn.

My argument is that resonance is not just a metaphor for a certain experience, or a subjective emotional state, but is a mode of relation that can be precisely defined by four exemplary characteristics:

1. Being affected. Resonating with another person, or even with a landscape, a melody, or an idea, means being “inwardly” reached, touched, or moved by them.

2. Self-efficacy. At the same time, we can speak of true resonance only when this call is followed by our own active response. This always manifests itself in a physical reaction that we might describe in everyday language as “getting goosebumps,” “the hair on the back our neck standing on end,” or “a shiver running down our spine” and that, in medical terms, may be measured as a change in our skin resistance, breathing rate, heart rate, or blood pressure. Resonance also involves our reacting to the impulse that calls us by reaching out toward that which moves…

3. Adaptive transformation. Whenever we resonate with another human being, a book, a song, a landscape, an idea, a piece of wood, we are transformed by the encounter, although of course in very different ways. There are encounters that leave us “a different person” in their wake, and there are adaptive transformations that produce barely noticeable, often only temporary changes, for example in our voice. In every instance, however, a change in how we relate to the world is constitutive of resonant experience. When we resonate with the world, we are no longer the same afterwards.

It is symptomatic of depression, a state in which all our axes of resonance have fallen mute and grown numb, that nothing touches or moves us anymore. At the same time, we also feel that we ourselves cannot reach anyone, that we are “frozen” and thus incapable of change.

Even if we wish to leave aside the argument, put forth by authors such as Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, that attributing a capacity for resonance to human beings alone and holding everything else in the universe to be mute and “dead” is a highly dubious, one-sided approach peculiar to the modern rationalistic–scientific worldview (along with its corresponding mode of aggression), it is nevertheless evident that resonant experiences also significantly change inanimate objects (if only for us).

Without the trifecta of af←fect (in the sense of being affected by an other), e→motion (as a self-efficacious response that creates a connection), and adaptive transformation, appropriation remains a relation of relationlessness.

4. Uncontrollability. The fourth (and, for this book, critical) aspect of resonant relationships consists in the fact that the “pathological” (or simply unfortunate) conditions described above cannot be changed merely through an act of will, that resonance cannot be manufactured or engineered. I describe this as the uncontrollability of resonance, which means, first, that there is no method, no seven- or nine-step guide that can guarantee that we will be able to resonate with people or things.

This sends me back to the advent of nominalism, which defeated metaphysical realism in the High Middle Ages. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the metaphysical realist position holds that God is, in some sense, intrinsically present in the material world. How this works is controversial; the Latin church and the Byzantine church have different explanations, because in no case can we say that the material world is God. That would be idolatry. It suffices to say that before nominalism, the divine participates in the material world intrinsically. The nominalist view places God outside of the material world (which He created, as they acknowledge).

In my view — and it’s not original to me — disenchantment began with nominalism. I won’t go there right now, because I want to stick to Rosa. Keep in mind, though, as you read on, that there is a metaphysical and religious dimension to what he’s saying, though he writes as a sociologist.

Rosa contends that we cannot hope to find resonance with the world if we insist on controlling everything, and having an “attitude of constantly perceiving the world as a point of aggression” — that is, as something to be consumed and mastered. But it is not the case that resonance and uncontrollability are the same thing!

Rosa:

In fact we are able to resonate with other people or things only when they are in a way “semicontrollable,” when they move between complete controllability and total uncontrollability.

Rather, we must establish a relationship to the world. He explains:

It is not enough that I have access to and can take hold of the world. Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from the outside.

In other words, we must in some sense seek to “know” the world in the subjective sense. Obviously objects don’t have personalities; what he means is that we should focus on how interacting with things in the world can change us. This can only happen if we recognize that for these phenomena to change us, we have to accept that we can never fully control them, which is to say, never completely possess them. More:

My argument is that, if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experience being called by the falling snow.

If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.

In another sense, this also applies, say, to a poem that I feel has something to say to me. A poem can resonate with me only as long as I have not yet fully grasped, understood, and processed it (dimension 3) [making the visible world accessible and manageable — RD], only as long as it continues to occupy me and still seems to be hiding something from me.

To restate for the sake of clarity, “Things we can completely control in all four dimensions lose their resonant quality.”

We can only resonate with a counterpart that in a way “speaks with its own voice,” that has something like its own will or character, or at least its own inner logic that, as such, remains beyond our control. What is more, we must be able to understand this voice as speaking to us, and thus as being in some sense responsive.

Rosa goes on:

Resonance demands a form of uncontrollability that “speaks,” that is more than just contingency.

Indeed, in everyday language we say things like “This book (or song) appeals to me” to describe even the most banal forms of this sensation. By this we do not mean that the book or song in question actually speaks to us in any concrete or metaphysical sense, but rather that we are in some way called by it, and that at the same time we, or something inside us, react and respond to it. Such experiences, however—regardless of whether our counterpart is another person, a piece of music, a mountain, or the falling snow—also involve, first, a feeling of inner change or transformation and, second and foremost, the assumption or hope that it might be worth engaging more closely with that which appeals to us, precisely because we do not fully understand it or have not yet exhausted it.

This is not simply saying that we like this or that thing. It’s much deeper. This is what Rilke means by his poem “Archaic Torso Of Apollo”:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The meaning of a poem, a song, a tree, a building, etc., depends on how we respond to it. In a resonant relationship, both sides are transformed by their relationship.

Charles Taylor, the fundamental achievement of the philosophy and poetry of German romanticism, as encountered in the work of Hölderlin, Friedrich and August Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling, was making it possible to conceive of reality as being co-constituted in this way, in a mutual movement between subject and world.

… Fatally, it is precisely our sense that we are not yet finished with something, that there is still something there, that tempts us into trying to “take hold” of it in order to bring it under our control, to be able to access and engage with it at will. Our efforts to secure “resonant” encounters medially, especially by photographing or filming them, are a particularly revealing example of this. Such media make it possible for us to take naturally ephemeral phenomena such as snowfalls and sunsets “out of time,” making them accessible and controllable for the future. Unfortunately, however, attempting to take hold of the dynamic of resonance generally means paralyzing it. When we approach a landscape, an event, or an object with the eye of a photographer, these things stop speaking to us. We may well be able to sense that a landscape would have something to say to us, which is why we want to take hold of it in the first place, but it does not speak to us when we fix our photographic gaze on it or capture it on film. This observation is difficult to prove empirically, but anyone can experience it for themselves at any time.

Establishing a resonant relationship with the world requires us to renounce the impulse to make a phenomenon controllable. “Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism,” Rosa writes.

As we have already seen, uncontrollability on the side of the subject means that we must be willing to allow ourselves to be touched and changed in unpredictable ways.

Resonance implies vulnerability and a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable. On the object side, uncontrollability means that what we encounter must resist us in at least one of the four dimensions of calculation and control. There must be at least one “obstinate remainder” that has something to say to us, that is meaningful to us in the sense of a strong evaluation.

… When we engage in activities in which we are certain of the outcome, we may well experience success, but never resonance.

“Strong evaluation” is a term from Charles Taylor, referencing things we decide are fundamental truths around which we must orient ourselves. Something that we evaluate in a “strong” way is a thing or value that we cannot render inert by absorbing it fully into our own subjectivity.

More:

For the subject, being reachable means being fundamentally capable of being touched, of being called, such that resonance may occur. As we have seen, however, subjects cannot control their capacity for resonance. Today I will allow myself to be touched! I intend to be moved by my date tonight!

At the same time, reachability is not a matter of pure contingency. We can of course try to create the dispositional and situational conditions necessary for us to be capable of being moved. A museum, for instance, is a place where we generally do not pursue any instrumental aims, where we want instead to come into contact with things in a way that is geared not toward escalation or control, but toward unexpected or unpredictable, resonant encounters, where we are inwardly open and ready to be called.

As we have seen, the same applies to the objects we encounter. Resonance is impossible if we cannot reach or access them in some form (we must able to read the Bible or Marx’s Capital, or hear a piece of music, in order to resonate with it), but equally impossible if they are completely controllable in all four dimensions. Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able—and trusting in our ability—to reach out to this other side and establish responsive contact with it.

Reminds of me of Elaine Scarry’s line about education: it involves training students to be looking in the right corner of the sky when the comet passes.

Rosa says that modernity’s basic conflict is to confuse reachability for controllability. This is built into the logic of modernity, which tells us that we can only be our fullest selves if we use technology to bring more and more of the world under our control, to produce desired outcomes. But you cannot find resonance with the world if you seek to impose total control over it.

Here is Rosa’s understanding of how this applies to faith:

In my layman’s understanding, the essence of the Judeo-Christian conception of God consists in an idea entirely in keeping with resonance theory. Even if—and especially if—God is conceived of in generally negative theological terms, as fundamentally inaccessible or beyond control, the relationship between God and the human being is understood to be one of mutual relatedness and reachability. Humans are supposed to listen to God or hear God’s word, and God in turn can be reached through prayer—although this precisely does not mean that he can in any way be controlled. Leaving aside any and all endless theological debates, responsivity here signifies an ultimate, potentially transformative relationship of mutual listening that also allows each side its “own voice” and freedom to respond. Whether resonance occurs or what its result might be remains uncontrollably open.

In my view, this kind of relatedness forms the basis of the practice of prayer, which cannot be understood otherwise. In contrast to what happens in the practices of alchemy or magic, in prayer there is no attempt to manipulate the other side or to engineer a particular result. The aim is rather to feel or sense an accommodating response, the content of which is not predetermined.

Listening and responding constitute a different attitude from planning, doing, and calculating.

Rosa writes:

Thus falling in love is not compatible with a late modern culture geared toward making life controllable.

This made me wonder if the increasing difficulty young people have today pairing off is because they are formatted from the beginning by this culture to expect that the world is controllable. This is one of the malign features of porn: it gives its user a sexual experience that is entirely controllable.

If you have followed me in my writing about Iain McGilchrist’s new book, you will know why this clip from Rosa is so, well, resonant. It’s what the left hemisphere does:

Identity thinking operates according to the opposite principle: it is always already finished with everything. This is easily and clearly illustrated through everyday situations. Let us imagine that we are captivated by the sight of the moon, turn to our companion, and say: Oh, look, the moon! To which they respond: What about it? It’s been there the whole time. It’s just a rocky orb, 385,000 kilometers away, littered with craters, without any life. It’s been like that for millions of years, it never changes. What are you talking about?

We wouldn’t know what to say. That is in fact what the moon is. But it is not only that. It is also an object of fear and desire and longing, and has been for millennia. It’s the moon of “Fly Me to the Moon,” Dark Side of the Moon, and thousands of other songs and fairy tales. Its biological significance as well as its psychological influence on us are still not entirely clear scientifically. It even has an important social meaning, as it structures and modifies our social rhythms and calendars. But, in going after all of these different meanings and trying to “nail them down,” we too are already in the realm of fixating, mortifying identity thinking, the very destroyer of things. It is impossible to enter into a responsive relationship with the moon in this way; nor can we explain in this way what we meant when we called out to our companion, “Look!”

So it is with God — and this, I think, is one great strength of the Eastern Orthodox approach to God via negative theology, which is describing who God is by saying what He is not.

Rosa says that our desire for the world — our eros directed towards it — is fundamentally human. All desire is first directed toward something uncontrollable, by “a longing to bring something unreachable into our reach.”

The problem is that when he have mastered it completely, we have hollowed it out, and we believe that there is no longer anything to discover about it.

If my arguments here are sound, then modern culture has committed a fundamental error in transforming our always open-ended longing to bring the world within reach into a demand to bring it reliably under control, a demand that has been systematized into a program of constant expansion of our share of the world, making it controllable in all four dimensions.

Where “everything is under control,” the world no longer has anything to say to us, and where it has become newly uncontrollable, we can no longer hear it, because we cannot reach it.

So this is why it is so much more difficult to believe in God in modern times: because we resist what we cannot control and explain, and because granting free reign to the impulse to dominate and control is what it means to be modern. Again, this is a different way of saying what Iain McGilchrist says in his work on culture and brain hemispheres.

There’s more to what I wrote, but this is most of it. If you want to read more regular commentary like that, please subscribe to Rod Dreher’s Diary, my Substack newsletter, which focuses on spirituality, culture, art, and reasons to hope. I hope the post above will inspire you to order Rosa’s wonderful short book, and to dive into the parallel work of Iain McGilchrist. Find out more about McGilchrist at his website, Channel McGilchrist. I’m reading now his massive new book, The Matter With Things, but a more manageable introduction to his work is his highly acclaimed 2009 book The Master And His Emissary. 

 

The post Control And Enchantment appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘These Kids Are Becoming Evil’

A reader whose name and background I know sent me this story. I have changed names in it, and some minor identifying details to protect everyone’s privacy:

I thought you might be interested to hear this story which is about the daughter of one of my colleagues. As I have mentioned, I am a [profession], and I am very lucky to have two sweet, dedicated assistants. Rose has been with me for twenty years and the other, Annie, has been with me for fourteen years. My office is laid back and genial. It is really a nice work environment where the clients and staff are like an extended family.

In addition to working for me, Annie also drives a bus for the school district, and her husband works for a major regional employer in customer service. They have three daughters who are very smart, and they work hard to provide for them. The oldest graduated third in her class of thirteen hundred and was given a scholarship to attend an Ivy League university. The other two daughters—twins—attend a different university in a nearby city. As I mentioned, my relationship with these assistants is almost like family, and they will vent to me on occasion about some of their trials and tribulations.

The other day, Annie told me that there was a family argument because the daughter was going to schedule an appointment at the gynecologist to get her tubes tied. She is twenty-two years old! Her rationale was that the world is too awful and that no more children should be brought into this hellhole.

I have known her daughter since she was eight years old, and for the past fourteen years her mother has told me about her increasingly radical, Leftist views. Starting in high school, the cause was environmentalism, and then being at that Ivy League university, especially during these last two years, the cause has also grown to include the usual diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and destroy-Western-Civilization bullshit.

Last year, the same daughter made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to have an IUD implanted. Her mother threw a fit, as they have good health insurance; she lamented to me that if she wanted an IUD she could go to any gynecologist in the suburbs for a more hygienic and safer procedure. And what’s even more troubling is that the daughter isn’t even sexually active according to her mother (knowing the mother and the daughter, I believe it). Therefore, it wasn’t even for preventing pregnancy but rather for making a statement of solidarity with her “Black” and “Brown” sisters.

Two years ago, none of the three daughters wished their mother a Happy Mother’s Day, as they considered it an antiquated custom. The list goes on and on with gender fluidity, pronoun usage and of course, all the silliness with COVID hibernation. Now, keep in mind that the mother and the father are working class Democrats who have sacrificed for their three daughters; they are thoroughly middle class in their commitment to their children, and their children hate it.

Yet, the mother, with whom I work, often yields to her daughters in these silly arguments—well, with the exception of the most recent argument of having her tubes tied. I hope that this last argument turns on a lightbulb for the parents. Neither parent graduated from college, but they are good people, and as a result, they second-guess their own judgement and common sense reactions to these radical philosophies being pushed at these universities. These kids are becoming evil. At least one consolation is that if the daughter gets her tubes tied, that’s the end of that bloodline. But with that said, I felt truly sorry for my assistant, knowing that one of the greatest gifts is children and grandchildren — and that the Left and its universities are destroying that gift.

Now on a more optimistic note, I have attached a Christmas photo from one of my neighbors. The father is the pastor of a local Mennonite church. They have eleven children (they had twelve, but one died shortly after childbirth). They have all been homeschooled, and they are all very sweet and pleasant. The younger ones look after many of the other children and the elderly in the neighborhood, and the older ones who are married with children work as nurses, plumbers, teachers and painters. They are certainly an anomaly in our town, but they have also been a treasure. The mother and the daughters still wear the bonnets and full-length dresses and the men and the boys are always in long pants. And in their small plot of land (the houses in our town are small and usually set on a fifth or quarter of an acre) they raise fruits and vegetables that are given out to many in the neighborhood. They even carol as a family in the neighborhood on Christmas Eve, which is a joy for me and my wife and daughters each year.

Why have I written this? After hearing that my assistant’s daughter wants to be barren through tubal ligation as opposed to taking the pill or even the IUD, [I see that she] is bitter, hostile and final; I feel awful and angry for this twenty-two year old, because she has been so manipulated by the Left and the Ivy League. And then I look at the photo of my Mennonite neighbors, who through their faith, are so hopeful for the future with all their children and grandchildren.

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