Rod Dreher's Blog, page 42

Remembering Hungary 1956

To mark the anniversary of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, I’m publishing in this space an essay from Stephen Sholl, an American academic living in Budapest, and a friend I made this summer:

Today will mark the 65-year anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. For many Americans, this anniversary will go unnoticed, yet the lessons that this episode holds are important ones for Americans to understand.

The Hungarian Revolution was the most serious challenge to Soviet Rule in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. In late October 1956, demonstrations, often beginning at universities, erupted throughout Hungary. Within a week, these demonstrations had evolved into an outright popular revolt, with the revolutionaries demanding major reforms and calling for the Soviet Army to leave Hungary.

Initially it appeared to be successful, with previous Prime Minister and reformer Imre Nagy being reinstated and the Russians withdrawing from Budapest. Once Nagy, however, declared his intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets quickly returned and crushed the Revolution in Budapest and in Hungary’s other major cities after intense street fighting. By November 10, the Soviets had decisively squashed the Revolution. More than 2,000 Hungarians died in the fighting, and hundreds of thousands fled to the West in the aftermath.

The lesson for Americans, lies not with the defeat of the Hungarian freedom fighters — though their bravery and courage in the face of insurmountable odds is a trait worth emulating — but rather the path that led Hungary to 1956.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hungary, while war-ravaged, was not decisively on the path to dictatorship. The Soviets appeared to follow through on their promise to establish democracies in their occupied areas, and introduced parliamentary democracy into Hungary. While the Soviet Army intimidated opposing parties and falsified ballots, other parties were allowed to compete, and their votes were recognized. In Hungary’s first election in 1946, the Communists were defeated by an overwhelming number of votes, only earning around 17 percent.

The Independent Smallholders Party, which represented the center-right, secured an outright majority, and was even allowed to form a government. The Communist Party asked only to be allowed into the governing coalition, and was granted the Ministry of the Interior. Unfortunately for the young Hungarian Republic, the ruling party accepted the coalition. Granting the Communists control over the Interior ministry meant they controlled the country’s police.

Using the martial power of police authority, Communists began a systematic takeover of Hungarian institutions — this, despite the fact that a formally “non-Communist” government was in power. The police intimidated political opponents and local leaders into joining the Communist Party; those who refused were labeled ‘fascists’ and forced out of the public sphere. In institutions such as courtrooms, schools, universities, churches, and unions, those expelled would be replaced by loyal Communists, slowly turning these bodies into extensions of the Communist Party. This institutional dominance, by a people and ideology that were not held by the vast majority of Hungarians, eroded any notion of real democracy in Hungary (at the time, the CIA estimated only 10 percent of Hungarians were Communist).

By 1949, the institutional control of Hungary by the Communists was complete, and the Hungarian Republic was formally replaced by the Hungarian People’s Republic. Led by the self-proclaimed “Best Pupil of Stalin” Mátyás Rákosi, the new regime began to remake Hungary in the image of Marx and Lenin. By merely gaining control of the important organs of state and society, the Communists were able to attack and infiltrate every part of society.

Education became a centerpiece of the regime’s grand design to remake Hungary. Since most schools in Hungary were church-run, one of the Communist regime’s first acts was to nationalize the school system. With this acquired monopoly over Hungary’s educational institutions, the state enforced a propagandistic curriculum aimed at building an ideal “Communist Man” out of every one of its students. Universities, likewise, were turned into ideological weapons of the regime. Unlike primary and secondary schools, however, the regime did not desire everyone to attend. They introduced quota and acceptance standards based on social class, and denied entry to the ‘privileged’ children of middle and upper-class families in favor of working and lower-class ones.

Taking education away from the churches did not go far enough when it came to the institution of religion. As an atheistic regime, the Hungarian People’s Republic had no tolerance for the strongly entrenched Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran churches of Hungary, and began a widespread campaign to destroy them.

They established a specific government ministry for the churches and used it to censor, infiltrate, and monitor each religion. Most notably, the highest-ranking Catholic in Hungary, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, was arrested, tortured, and brought to trial for “treason” against the state. While he was spared the death penalty, lesser-known churchmen were not so lucky, and many members of the clergy were murdered throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. All these efforts were an attempt to completely erase religion from the public sphere as well as the minds of Hungarians.

Finally, the social and economic structure of Hungary was attacked, dissolved, and recreated during this period. Historically, Hungary was a heavily agricultural society based strongly in traditional social structures left over from feudalism. It had an extensive and powerful aristocracy, but also a sizable “middle class” of landowners. These social institutions, which governed the lives and society of Hungarians ,were anathema to the Communists, who immediately set out to rectify both. Under the guise of rebuilding Hungary after the destruction of the Second World War, the Communists began restructuring the Hungarian economy. Through land nationalization and redistribution, the authorities destroyed many of the traditional great estates of the Hungarian gentry and redistributed them. Massive industrialization occurred as well, with peasants and farm dwellers forced into the cities, completely remaking the demographic landscape of Hungary in only a few short years.

Thus, the period preceding the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 represents a rapid and radical transformation of Hungary from a nominal parliamentary republic into a Communist dictatorship. This was accomplished not through an outright coup, but a rapid infection and cooption of the governmental institutions by an ideological force. By 1956, the Hungarians were under a regime that hated them, their nation, their religion, and their traditions. They were ruled by an ideology supported by none of them, yet they were forced to bend the knee to its tenets and beliefs.

It was this devolution into a repressive and alien regime that drove the Hungarians into the streets, demanding change, and a return to national sovereignty over their social, economic, and political institutions. They were tired and disgusted by the people who unjustly ruled them and clearly held them and their society in much derision.

While the Hungarians were lamentably crushed in the first weeks of November, they were crushed not because of the weakness of their struggle for freedom, but by the weakness of the ideology that ruled them. The Soviets and their Hungarian puppet-government knew that Communism could not exist if people were allowed to choose their own destiny. The 1956 Revolution had to die lest the entire system fail.

As we remember the heroism of the Hungarian revolutionaries and honor their great sacrifice for their nation and liberty, we should first be thankful to live in a country wherein we still hold on to the freedoms passed down from our forefathers. As Americans, we must recognize that ceding control of our institutions to a monolithic ideology is a grave threat to our republic and our freedoms. We must jealously protect and revive our social and governmental institutions, for if we do not fight for our institutions, we might find ourselves fighting in the streets.

Stephen Sholl is a Visiting Fellow with the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Previously, he was a Junior Fellow with Hungary’s Committee of National Remembrance, an independent research institution which studies the legacy of Communism in Hungary.

Note from Rod: This paragraph of Stephen’s essay jumped out at me:

Using the martial power of police authority, Communists began a systematic takeover of Hungarian institutions — this, despite the fact that a formally “non-Communist” government was in power. The police intimidated political opponents and local leaders into joining the Communist Party; those who refused were labeled ‘fascists’ and forced out of the public sphere. In institutions such as courtrooms, schools, universities, churches, and unions, those expelled would be replaced by loyal Communists, slowly turning these bodies into extensions of the Communist Party. This institutional dominance, by a people and ideology that were not held by the vast majority of Hungarians, eroded any notion of real democracy in Hungary (at the time, the CIA estimated only 10 percent of Hungarians were Communist).

Do you see why people who came to America to escape Soviet communism are freaked out by what they see happening in American universities and institutions, with the advance of wokeism? In much of academia today, as we see, if you dissent from the ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, you can be driven to the margins, or not hired (because you have to sign de facto loyalty oaths to this ideology as a condition of teaching). This is happening right now, within our liberal democracy. In Hungary, this march through the institutions was a precursor to the advent of Communist tyranny. The soft totalitarianism didn’t stay soft for long. There is a lesson in that, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to magnify the voices of the people who lived through this once, and don’t want to see it happen to America.

When I was in Hungary in 2019 researching Live Not By Lies, I had the very great privilege of interviewing one of the great heroes of 1956, Maria Wittner. Here she is in 1956:

From a Wittner passage in Live Not By Lies:

Defending the right to speak and write freely, even when it costs you something, is the duty of every free person. So says Mária Wittner, a hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. A communist court sentenced Wittner, then only twenty, to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.

“Once I said to one of the guards in prison, ‘You are lying.’ For that alone, I was taken to trial again,” remembers the feisty Wittner. “The state prosecutor said to me, ‘Wittner, why did you accuse the guard of being a liar? Why didn’t you just say, ‘You’re not telling the truth’? I said, ‘It matters that we speak plainly.’”

For her insolence, Wittner was sent back to prison with extra punishments. She had to sleep on a wooden bed with no mattress and was given reduced rations. By the time her sentence was commuted and she was released, Wittner weighed scarcely one hundred pounds. Nevertheless, she insists that a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit.

“We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,” she tells me as I sit at her table in suburban Budapest. “You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”

Under hard totalitarianism, dissenters like Wittner paid a hard price for their freedom, but the terms of the bargain were clear. Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience, but as Mária Wittner insists, you can’t escape the decisions. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.

More:

Mária Wittner, now in her eighties, is regarded by her countrymen as a national hero for fighting the Soviets when they invaded Hungary in 1956. She was only a teenager then. The communist regime arrested her shortly after she turned twenty, and a year later, sentenced her to death. Her sentence was later reduced because of her youth. But she endured terrible grief and pain in her eight months on death row.

“There was an execution either every day or every other day, by hanging,” she tells me. “The people who were being brought to the execution, each one said their name aloud and left some sort of message in their final words. Some sang the national anthem, others praised their country, there were people saying, “Avenge me!”

There were days when several people were hanged, even seven a day. Wittner’s friend Catherine was also sentenced to death. They spent Catherine’s last night together in the cell, and said their final goodbyes after sunrise.

Wittner explains:

The guards took her. The last sight I saw of her was that she straightened herself up and went with her back ramrod straight. The door closed, and then I was left alone. I started to bang on the door, shouting, “Bring her back!” even though I knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t matter. Then I fainted. When I came to my senses, I swore to myself that I will never be silent about what I have seen, if I have the opportunity to bear witness.

This, she believes, is why her life was spared: so that she could to tell the world what the communists did to people like her.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about fear, as such,” she says. “What is fear? Someone who is afraid is going to be made to do the most evil things. If someone is not afraid to say no, if your soul is free, there is nothing they can do to you.”

The old woman looks at me across her kitchen table with piercing eyes. “In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.”

Here is the great lady today (well, two years ago, in her house, after I interviewed her):

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was not just a geopolitical event. It was a human tragedy. Maria Wittner is the face of that tragedy, but also the face of the inevitable triumph over the Big Lie that was and remains Communism.

Here, in Budapest today, is an image today of the political leader who is the West’s most effective and tireless fighter against soft totalitarianism:

Prime Minister Viktor Orban

There will be more to follow, in France, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. The people of the West are waking up. We may not prevail in the short term, but we are going to fight. As we fight politically, let us not neglect to build, and build up, the communities and the virtues and, above all, the faith, to endure what may be a long defeat. This war is going to go on for a long time, and it is not primarily political. At the Tyniec Abbey near Krakow a couple of years ago, Father Wlodzimierz Zatorski, a well-known and respected Benedictine monk, confirmed for me the things I had been hearing from serious and faithful young Catholics in Warsaw and Krakow: that the Catholic faith was in collapse among the younger generations, and with it, the hopes of successful political Catholicism. (And if political Catholicism can’t prevail today in Poland, there is no country on earth where it can!) As I have written here before, Father Zatorski said the only way forward, in his view, was the Benedict Option: small, tight, resilient Catholic communities capable of resisting persecution, and ultimately re-evangelizing the country. Father Zatorski told me that he intended to launch a Benedict Option foundation, and build a community like this. The dear old priest did launch the foundation, but last year, died of Covid. The further we get into the West’s civilizational crisis, the more I am certain that our future, if we are to have one, lies in the experiences of the peoples of Central Europe. We need Viktor Orbans, and we need Father Wlodzimierz Zatorskis. The Orbans can protect the ability of the Zatorskis to do the work of spiritual and cultural rebuilding, and the Zatorskis, like his fellow Benedictines of the early medieval period, can lay the spiritual and cultural foundation for the rebirth of a political and social order based on the Good.

But let’s not forget the words of Viktor Orban, which I read in an interview that I can’t find now, but which I’ve never forgotten. He was talking about the limits of politics. He said that as a politician, he can give people things — meaning he can control, to some extent, the material order — but he cannot give people meaning. This is what religion does. In my view, people looking to politics as a source of ultimate meaning are either going to be disappointed, or turn into tyrants.

The post Remembering Hungary 1956 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Putin Gets It. Why Don’t We?

The reason I wrote Live Not By Lies is because people who lived under Soviet communism were telling me that what’s happening in the US right now, with the acceleration of cancel culture, militant wokeness, and the rest, remind them of what life was like under Communism. They’re angry that Americans won’t believe them. Hence the book. Well, I did not expect to have Russian President Vladimir Putin confirm the thesis of Live Not By Lies, but he just did — and if anybody should know about Soviet totalitarianism, it’s a former KGB colonel. Excerpts from the Daily Wire piece about Putin’s speech:

Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed during a speech on Thursday the far-left woke ideology that he said is causing societal ills throughout the Western world, saying that it is no different than what happened in Russia during the 1917 revolution.

Putin made the remarks during a plenary session of the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi where the topic was “Global Shake-up in the 21st Century.” Putin’s remarks were translated by an interpreter and that video was uploaded to the Russian government’s website.

“We see with bemusement the paralysis unfolding in countries that have grown accustomed to viewing themselves as the flagships of progress,” Putin said during an event where he spoke for a few hours. “Of course, it’s none of our business or what is happening, the social and cultural shocks that are happening in some countries in the Western countries, some believe that aggressive blotting out of whole pages of your own history, the affirmative action in the interest of minorities, and the requirement to renounce the traditional interpretation of such basic values as mother, father, family, and the distinction between sexes are a milestone … a renewal of society.”

Putin said that Western nations had a right to do whatever they wanted to do but that “the overwhelming majority of Russian society” rejected these new ways of thinking.

“The preparedness of the so called social progress believe that the bringing a new conscience, a new consciousness to humanity, something that is more correct,” Putin said. “But there is one thing I would like to say: The recipes they come up with are nothing new. Paradoxical as it may seem, but this is something we saw in Russia. It happened in our country before after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks followed the dogmas of Marx and Engels. And they also declared that they would go into change the traditional lifestyle, the political, the economic lifestyle, as well as the very notion of morality, the basic principles for a healthy society. They were trying to destroy age and century long values, revisiting the relationship between the people, they were encouraging informing on one’s own beloved, and families. It was hailed as the march of progress. And it was very popular across the world and it was supported by many, as we see, it is happening right now.”

More:

“Incidentally, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of other opinions, different from their own,” Putin continued. “I think this should remind you of something that is happening. And we see what is happening in the Western countries, it is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind in distant path, the fight for equality and against discrimination turns into an aggressive dogmatism on the brink of absurdity, when great authors of the past such as Shakespeare are no longer taught in schools and universities because they announced as backward classics that did not understand the importance of gender or race.”

“In Hollywood there are leaflets reminding what you should do in the cinema, in the films, how many personalities and actors you’ve got, what kind of color, what sex, and sometimes it’s even even tighter and stricter than what the Department of Propaganda of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee did,” he said. “And the fight against racism, which is a lofty goal, turns into a new culture, cancel culture, and into reverse discrimination, racism on the obverse. And it brings people apart, whereas the true fighters for civic rights, they were trying to eliminate those differences. I asked my colleagues to find this quote from Martin Luther King, and he said, ‘I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ That is a true value.”

“You know, the Bolsheviks were speaking about nationalizing not just the property, but also women,” Putin continued. “The proponents of new approaches go so far as they want to eliminate the whole notions of men and women, and those who dare say that men and women exist and this is a biological fact, they are all but banished. Parent number one, parent number two, or the parent that has given birth, or instead of breast milk, you say human milk. And you say all of that, so the people who are not sure of their sexual agenda are not unhappy.”

Read it all. And if you want to see the speech dubbed in English, click here. Whatever else you think of him, Putin is telling the God’s honest truth here.

See, this is the thing. Putin, Orban, and all the illiberal leaders that our baizuocracy loves to hate are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism. It should not be that way, but it is. Meanwhile, our Democratic political class, and the baizuocrats throughout the American elite (e.g., those who run corporations, universities, the media, law, medicine, sports, the military), are actively destroying this country and its founding values with their ideology. The Republicans, for the most part, aren’t doing a damn thing (though good for Sen. Tom Cotton for just introducing a bill to prohibit schools from participating in the gender transitions of children behind the backs of parents; more, please). Trump talked a reasonably good game, had some minor successes, but had too little follow-through. It is time to get serious, to quit playing around, before it’s too late.

There are a lot of Americans who will look to Putin and Orban and point to corruption they’ve allowed under their governments, and use that as a reason to dismiss everything they say about wokeness. This is a foolish error. You don’t have to endorse corruption in order to recognize that on these cultural matters, they are correct. Besides, as a young woman I shared a taxi with across town in Budapest told me, she recognized that the Fidesz Party governance had tolerated far too much corruption, but she was going to vote for them anyway in next year’s election. Why? She said that she doesn’t want her young children to grow up in a country that has destroyed the idea of man and woman, and of family. There are some forms of corruption, she explained, that are harder to recover from.

As I see it, this is the main lesson American conservatives can learn from Viktor Orban and his government. They grasp that this is a civilizational struggle, and that they are not just dealing with opponents, but with very powerful people who push an agenda that is tearing our societies apart. And they are willing to use the power of the state to stop it. You don’t have to commit to a grand integralist theoretical scheme to do as they are doing. You have to use the laws that are already there — but you also have to not give a damn what the media and the baizuocracy say. If the GOP comes to power again, please, let’s stop this pantomiming.

I was talking yesterday to a conservative Catholic friend who is very smart about all this. He says that all talk of integralism is a complete non-starter in the US, and a distraction from what might actually work in the real world to save the country from its internal enemies. My friend pointed out that democracy has not prevented the Left from mainstreaming all kinds of crazy concepts in a lightning-fast way, and using the actual institutions of liberal democracy to bring about illiberal Leftism.

The problem, he said, is that we on the Right have been too stupid to understand that control over institutions matters. Yale Law School is incomparably more powerful than 15 million Southern Baptists. That being the case, why do we allow these people who actually hate us and want to see us crushed hold so much power? We allow these institutions, run by and filled with people who hate us, to credential the ruling class, and yet we sit by hoping that one day, they will wake up and realize that our arguments are better, and change? Not going to happen. Why do we give Big Tech, which also despises us and our values, control so much of the public square? Why do we all keep voting Republican, even though the party outsources its policymaking to libertarians and neocons who have no real problem with the baizuocracy, as long as they can maintain their position within it?

J.D. Vance gets it (“We are actively subsidizing the people who are destroying this country”) even if the rest of the GOP does not (and even if his main primary opponent is the kind of hopped-up GOP guy who only wants to tweet and meme rather than offer serious ways to dismantle the baizuocracy). We tried the Trump thing. There were some successes, but it didn’t work. Trump left office with the White House and both houses of Congress in Democratic hands, and with the woke more entrenched in power than ever. Time for something new. When even America’s No. 2 rival in the world, Vladimir Putin, can see what’s happening, what on earth is wrong with us?

If you haven’t read Live Not By Lies, let me ask you to do so, please. It’s exactly what Putin is talking about here. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Vladimir Putin, but when the man is right, he’s right.

Ask yourself: is there a single American conservative politician with the guts to give a speech like Putin did? If not, why not? You see the crisis.

It is interesting to consider that Live Not By Lies has sold over 140,000 copies in the one year since its release, yet as far as I know, except for the week it appeared on the Times bestseller list, the first time it was mentioned in the mainstream media at all was in the story about Hungary in this weekend’s Times magazine. I’m not complaining because I’m losing money — I’m making good money on this book, with sales like that. I’m saying that it means something when a book like this, one that gives voice to immigrants to America who escaped Communism, and who say that they’re watching the same thing happen here with wokeness, is widely ignored in the mainstream media, despite being a bestseller. The media don’t want people to read this, because if the book is telling the truth, and if these immigrants from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact are accurate in their insights, then Live Not By Lies stands to awaken the somnolent public about the true nature of this crisis. If people wake up, then they might just fight back hard against wokeism. That is something the media does not want, for obvious reasons.

Wake up. The media and the baizuocracy are gaslighting us all. The immigrants who came to this country seeking freedom from Communist totalitarianism are desperately trying to warn their fellow Americans — but few of us want to listen. Now even a former KGB colonel says it’s true. At some point, Americans will either wake up and fight back, or we are going to find ourselves living under a social credit system, and crushed by the baizuocracy.

The post Putin Gets It. Why Don’t We? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Friends And Ex-Friends

I just saw this on Twitter:

How you know if someone’s your friend:

You can tell them bad news, and they’ll listen. They won’t tell you why you’re stupid.

This is the weirder thing: You can tell them good news, and they’ll help you celebrate.

That’s a good way of deciding who you should have around you. pic.twitter.com/IRWViB1RAL

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) October 21, 2021

He’s right about that. I found out today from an old friend that on the Facebook group of my high school graduating class, someone who had been one of my best friends there was denouncing me as a “fascist” and “contemptible” because of that NYT story quoting me about Hungary, and criticizing wokeness. This was surprising. I knew this old friend was a man of the Left, but I never thought he was the kind of person who would place politics above friendship. But I was wrong.

This is a guy who has suffered in his life. His academic career suffered a major setback, from which it has not recovered, and never will. His marriage ended. Horrible stuff. Though he lives far away, I tried to support him through this, as friends do. I don’t care what your politics are — I will never abandon a friend. But many people don’t live by that standard.

A few months ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper in support of US Sen. Bill Cassidy’s vote to impeach Trump after the January 6 event. I know Cassidy somewhat, and believe him to be a man of principle. I hoped that as a nationally known conservative writer who lives here in Louisiana, I should stand up for him publicly while he is being dogpiled by other conservatives. The morning the letter appeared, I received a text from a friend of over 40 years, ending our friendship. She is on the far left politically, but again, so what? She’s been a good friend. Now, though, she was ending the friendship. I asked her if she was aware that I was writing in support of Trump’s second impeachment. Yes, she said, but I said in the letter that Trump had done some good things in his term — and that was unforgivable.

Forty years of friendship gone, because I do not hate Trump with perfect purity. I don’t even hate Trump, or any politician. What a loser I must be.

“It’s everywhere,” a conservative academic friend of mine told me today, as we were talking about people ending friendships over politics. He told me some stories. It’s not just left-wing people doing it to right-wing people. Purity policing is happening all the time in certain right-wing circles. Aside from the moral scumminess off people writing off their friends over politics, I have to wonder why, on the Right at least, intelligent conservatives think that we can afford to do that as a tactical matter. We control no institutions, and among us Christian conservatives, at least, we are shrinking in numbers and influence. This is not going to get better anytime soon, barring conversion. But please, let’s go ahead and patrol our own to wipe out any dissent.

Back in 2002, when I was working at National Review, one of my colleagues petitioned Rich Lowry not to publish as a cover story my essay about crunchy cons. Why did this man not want that piece to run? According to an NR friend who was party to these discussions, because it would give liberals the idea that conservatives were not united. To his great credit, Rich published the piece, but that taught me something about some people in political journalism and academia. They are not in it to explore ideas, to discuss them, to compare them and work through them. For them, it’s all about power.

Nevertheless, I have observed that of late people on the Left are far more willing to end friendships over politics than people on the Right. To be clear, I would end a friendship over politics only if the political friend was obnoxious and wouldn’t shut up about politics — but then, that wouldn’t be ending a friendship over politics per se, but over someone becoming a fanatic, and disrespecting me. I would end a friendship with someone who behaved the same way over religion. A friend of mine told me in a phone conversation this week, “We used to go over to visit [a married couple] all the time, but we got sick of it because all they could do was complain about the people they hated. Every conversation always came back to whoever they were made at.”

One of the loveliest men I know is a friend who is very liberal, but who understands that politics are only part of life. I no longer live in his town, but when I did, we loved getting together to talk about our kids, travel, books, music, whatever. We never discussed politics, because why do that? We didn’t see eye to eye on either politics or religion, but we shared so much in common, and that’s what we leaned in to. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Weren’t most people like this, until social media came into existence, and wokeness showed up?

Today the liberal NYT columnist Tom Edsall writes about academic studies showing that conservatives are happier than liberals. Here is a long excerpt; I apologize for the length, but it’s hard to quote it in shorter bits:

Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject. “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?” by Jaime Napier of N.Y.U. in Abu Dhabi and John Jost of N.YU., and “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?” by Barry R. Schlenker and John Chambers, both of the University of Florida, and Bonnie Le of the University of Rochester.

Using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine other countries, Napier and Jost note that they consistently found conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers).

This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style. We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality — a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

Napier and Jost contend that their determinations are “consistent with system justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function.”

One of Napier and Jost’s studies “suggests that conservatism provides an emotional buffer against the negative hedonic impact of inequality in society.”

In addition, they argue that rising levels of inequality have “exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer.”

A very different view of conservatives and the political right emerges in Schlenker, Chambers and Le’s paper:

Conservatives score higher than liberals on personality and attitude measures that are traditionally associated with positive adjustment and mental health, including personal agency, positive outlook, transcendent moral beliefs, and generalized belief in fairness. These constructs, in turn, can account for why conservatives are happier than liberals and have declined less in happiness in recent decades.

In contrast to Napier and Jost’s “view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality,” Schlenker, Chambers and Le argue:

Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general and in specific domains (e.g., marriage, job, residence), report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems, and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.

Liberals, Schlenker and his co-authors agree,

have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions (e.g., less religiosity, less likelihood of being married, and perhaps lessened belief in personal agency).

They go on:

Conservatives generally score higher on internal control as well as the Protestant Work Ethic, which emphasizes the inherent meaningfulness and value of work and the strong linkage between one’s efforts and outcomes, and is positively associated with achievement. Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to see outcomes as due to factors beyond one’s personal control, including luck and properties of the social system.

These differences have consequences:

Perceptions of internal control, self-efficacy, and the engagement in meaningful work are strongly related to life satisfaction. These differences in personal agency could, in and of themselves, explain much of the happiness gap.

So too, in their view, does the liberal inclination to view morality in relative, as opposed to absolutist, terms, have consequences:

A relativist moral code more readily permits people to excuse or justify failures to do the ‘‘right’’ thing. When moral codes lack clarity and promote flexibility, people may come to feel a sense of normlessness — a lack of purpose in life — and alienation. Further, if people believe there are acceptable excuses and justifications for morally questionable acts, they are more likely to engage in those acts, which in turn can create problems and unhappiness.

Perhaps most significant, Schlenker, Chambers and Le found that while both liberals and conservatives place a high value on fairness, they have diverging definitions of the concept:

Liberals define fairness more in terms of equality (equal outcomes regardless of contributions) and turn to government as the vehicle for enforcing social justice and helping those in need. Conservatives define fairness more in terms of equity (outcomes should be proportional to contributions), rely on free markets to distribute outcomes, and prefer individuals and private organizations, not government, to contribute to the care and protection of those in need.

More:

Perhaps the most thought-provoking statement on these issues comes from Viktor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” published in 1946, a year after Frankl’s liberation from a concentration camp.

Frankl contended that meaning in life comes through work, love and suffering, and that all these involve the subordination of self:

Man is originally characterized by his “search for meaning” rather than his “search for himself.” The more he forgets himself — giving himself to a cause or another person — the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.

The implication favors liberals.

Wait … what?! The implication does not favor liberals. The implication favors people who are not egotistical, who find their meaning in dedicating themselves to something greater than themselves. You can find them on both sides.

I admit to being skeptical of any attempt to quantify happiness, which is a subjective judgment. Nevertheless, if it is true that conservatives are happier on balance than liberals, I think it has to do with two basic things.

First, conservatives tend to accept that the world will never be perfect, and find it easier to live with imperfections. Napier and Jost say that “the rationalization of inequality” is why conservatives are happier than liberals. They make it sound like conservatives don’t care about inequality, and that’s why they are happier. Could it be, though, that conservatives understand that it is impossible to create a world of total equality, and that it is folly even to try? Improve things where you can, but don’t ever think that perfection is achievable, because it’s simply not. That’s not how the world works. We have ample evidence from the socialist and communist experiments of the 20th century what happens when you try to create a world of total economic equality. It makes everybody poor, and even then hierarchies and classes emerge, because that is human nature.

Second, conservatives tend to care less about political crusading. I’m not talking about your Uncle Kenny who watches Fox all the time and won’t shut up about the libs. I don’t know any ordinary conservatives who would cut off a friend over their liberal politics. Yet in my own life, I’ve just told you about two of my oldest friends who have done that to me just this year. I hear anecdotally from conservatives all the time who report the same thing. I’m sure that it happens sometimes the other way — in Nashville three years ago, a campus pastor told me a student in his congregation had been cut off by her parents because she opposed Trump — but I far, far more often hear about it happening from left to right.

My mom and dad did not share my politics. We were all conservatives, but they thought of me as some kind of liberal, even before Trump came around. This was because their idea of “conservative” was set by whatever Fox News was saying. I remember once criticizing then-President George W. Bush in their presence, and my mother called me a liberal — and meant it.

That’s beside the point. The point was that we realized that our relationship was more important than politics, so we decided at some point just not to talk about politics. This was easy to do. It’s very easy to do, in fact! But I have found over the years that some of my lefty friends cannot help themselves. They have to get on their political high horses, and find ways to bring every conversation around to politics, if only to let me know that they know I’m a right-wing louse, and that I shouldn’t think I was fooling anybody. I have eased myself away from those people — not because of their politics, but because they couldn’t allow our friendship to exist outside of politics.

Here’s a counter example. In my hometown, when I moved back in 2011, I met the man who had served as Episcopal priest for years there. He is a Latino immigrant. At some point I learned that he had been in a poker group with one particular man  in town — a man who had since passed away. This old man was known for his far-right views, especially on race. I asked the Latino priest how on earth he managed that relationship. He said that the old man was all right once you got to know him. And I thought: Wisdom, let us attend! These two men — the Latino immigrant pastor and the white far-right retiree — were very far from sharing the same views on politics or anything else. But they shared the same town, and found a way to get along, somehow. I gained a lot of respect for that priest that day. I never knew the old white man, but I would not be surprised if the mercy of friendship that the Latino priest extended to him in their poker games changed his heart before he died. We can only hope.

“The personal is political” — now there’s a totalitarian statement! — was a leftist rallying cry in the 1960s and 1970s. These days, it seems that many leftists really do believe it, even still. Maybe it’s just my circles, but I don’t know any conservatives who believe that. They tend to regard politics as only part of life. For some (many?) liberals, politics are at the center of life. Back when I lived in NYC, there was a conservative Baptist reader of National Review who wanted to convert me out of my Catholicism. It didn’t work (it took the Catholic bishops to do that), but I agreed once to meet him for coffee. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for our entire meeting to be about converting me to his point of view. I mean, I figured it would come up, but I quickly realized that the only reason he wanted to meet me at all was to tell me how wrong I was, and to convince me to agree with him. I cut him off after that, because I realized that he didn’t actually care about me as a person; he only cared about me as a potential convert.

Similarly with these leftist ex-friends, it is a hidden blessing that they are throwing me aside. I had been under the impression that we were friends for the reasons most people are friends. I did not know that their friendship was conditional on me not being conservative, or at least not being a self-hating conservative. My life is better with those sad, miserable people out of it, but still, what a shame.

My conservative academic friend told me today that a while back, he and his wife had been invited to dinner with a friend they hadn’t seen in a while. The friend told them that he didn’t want to see them if they had voted for Donald Trump. In fact they had not voted for Trump, but the very fact that this impurity would have made their company unbearable for their friend, even though there was no reason for politics to come up at the dinner, struck my pal as incredible — and insane.

If you would not be friends with me because of how I voted, then I don’t want to be friends with you in the first place. To me, one of the least interesting things about you are your political ideas. I want to know: Are you kind? Are you funny? Are you interested in the world outside your head? Do you respect others? Are you loyal? Everything else follows from that.

Another classmate — a fellow conservative — texted to say how obnoxious and disgusting she found those comments on Facebook. She told me she wishes now that she had stood up for me, but she normally hates to get involved in drama. I wish too that she had stood up for me, but I understand why she didn’t. People like the sad, failed academic who started the trashfest are toxic. Normal people don’t want to get involved with them. Most people aren’t politicized freaks like that. The problem, though, is that when we don’t stand up to that sort of person, they end up dominating whatever sphere they are in, because nobody wants to confront them. This, I think, is why the woke often end up winning. People find it easier to brush off their pain-in-the-ass hysteria than to confront it.

This makes sense to a point — but then you end up in a situation that a friend of mine is facing in her family. According to her, her grandmother has always been the kind of crybully who makes demands, utters harsh statements, tells white lies, etc., and when anybody in her family would push back, Granny would throw a fit, and accuse them of disrespecting her, and so forth. Over the years, they all got used to giving her her way, because the stakes were usually small. Well, a situation recently came up in the family where Granny’s lies have plunged the whole family into a serious crisis. Hearing all this made me wonder if things might have turned out differently if the family had not tolerated Granny’s meanness and nonsense all along.

The regular commenter on this blog who comments under the name Pete From Baltimore said today on a thread that he didn’t understand what people like me expect people like him to do to resist wokeness. He said that he, like most people, is fully occupied with making a living, and the ordinary things of life. Should he really give himself over to joining a fight against this abstract threat? He’s got a point. I don’t know if he considers himself a conservative politically, but his orientation to the world is … normal.

However, the reason the woke have gone so far is that they are willing to trouble themselves to get active in public life, to push their agenda. I’ve told in this space before the story about how some conservative Christians in California some years back trying to rally support to protect Christian colleges from proposed legislation that could end up forcing those institutions to violate their religious conscience on LGBT matters, or shut down. A friend who was involved in that effort told me that when his group went to visit leaders of big white Evangelical churches in conservative Orange County, nobody would take a stand — even though the leadership agreed with the cause. They were afraid of being called bigots. They just did not want to get involved. They wanted somebody else to do it for them. My friend told me the only reason they were able to turn back this threat was because black Pentecostal pastors in Los Angeles took their side, as did Catholic Archbishop Jose Gomez of L.A.

My point is simply this: ordinary people had better change their minds about getting involved in the fight against wokeness. They might not be interested in wokeness, but wokeness is interested in them. We don’t have to become as obsessed with politics as they are, but if we avoid taking stands because we don’t want to dirty our hands grappling with these dirtbags, they are going to keep winning, and spreading their misery to all our lives.

I’m thinking now of my ex-friend who vomited up such vicious bile about me, and the other ex-friends who cheered him on. What happened to them? Who, or what, poisoned their souls? Can they be saved? Maybe, but it’s going to have to be somebody else who saves them from their contempt and misery. I couldn’t possibly care at this point. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

 

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URGE-ing Woke Totalitarianism In Science

An academic reader who requests anonymity to protect himself writes in response to this post of mine, and to this related post:

The rot goes much deeper than has been reported. My question is whether the National Science Foundation helped coordinate the organized movement against Dorian Abbot. Not through conspiracy, but as the unavoidable consequence of ideologically-driven bad decisions. I’ll explain.

The Williams chair you profiled, who was among the vocal anti-Abbot leaders online, is also part of the leadership of an organization called URGE, which materialized in 2020. https://urgeoscience.org/about/

The purpose of this organization is to “develop policies and programs” to “unlearn racism” in geoscience departments nationwide. This is effected through “pods”, which are groups of activists organized within individual departments. In the past 18 months, these “pods” have appeared in geoscience departments across the country, where they apply pressure from within. There are a lot of them:

https://urgeoscience.org/pods/

The pods have a curriculum, which you can read on the website. The quote from Dr. Cohen gives a sense of the overall ethos, and the treatment of Dorian Abbot gives a sense of the preferred policies. This Medium post describes current activities such as hosting segregated “BIPOC-only sessions”: https://urgeoscience.medium.com/the-future-of-unlearning-racism-in-geoscience-d961d9249f70

But here’s the crux of it. While it’s perfectly fine for individuals to organize as they see fit, and propose new policies however misguided they may be, this is a coordinated ideological push. And it is is federally funded by the National Science Foundation! At the bottom of their page you can read that “URGE is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant EAR#1714909 and by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.”

The public description for EAR#1714909 is available at the NSF website. It is an award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1714909&HistoricalAwards=false

Absent from this public-facing description is anything about ‘unlearning racism’ or hosting segregated meetings. I cannot explain this discrepancy (and this is perhaps something a reporter could look into). But by appearances, NSF is funding a network of ideological activism under the guise of science. Activism that targets people like Dorian Abbot.

More recently, NSF has funded URGE explicitly:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2126109&HistoricalAwards=false

The money involved is small, but you’ll find it difficult to find any NSF-funded programs that address issues of representation from a perspective of individual dignity instead of group identity.

More broadly, there is an even bigger question of the degree to which NSF has been ideologically compromised. Every NSF grant proposal is evaluated by two merit review criteria: “intellectual merit” (the potential to advance knowledge) and “broader impacts” (the benefit to society). While NSF will deny it, it is now widely understood if only implicitly that the Broader Impacts section of every proposal must be something “woke” to be maximally competitive. Some of these projects are excellent, but many are ideological. At some point Congress will need to decide if this is what they intended. A specific policy could be aimed at addressing this.

NSF was founded in 1950 “To promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense.” Is that what it’s doing now?

This is a critically important question, especially as we have just learned that the Chinese hypersonic missiles just tested have qualities that seem to defy physics. Seems to me pretty urgently important for national security reasons that Congress deal harshly and urgently with these totalitarians on science faculties and in universities, and remove them and their racist de facto loyalty oaths from having any influence at all over how we do science in this country.

Come on, Congressional Republicans (and anti-woke Democrats), this is serious. It could hardly be more serious.

UPDATE: A reader who asked me to withhold her name writes:

I’m an early-career professor at a research university that skews far left even for academia, in the sciences. I completely agree with your recent posts that academia is headed quickly in a very woke direction, but I don’t think things are quite as dire yet as you make them sound.There are definitely a multitude of things that make it difficult to be a faithful Christian in academia (and woke ideology showing up in other ways is a huge part of that). I’m also worried that if we use too much outrage now on things that are marginally outrageous, everyone will tune us out when things get worse.1. Yes, more and more universities are requiring applicants to faculty positions to write statements on their efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In my field, basically only the California system required a DEI statement 5 years ago, and a significant majority require it now.I’m not all that surprised that the California system would use a DEI screening before faculty see the applications, but I strongly suspect that hasn’t spread much farther yet (though I’d be interested to hear if I’m wrong about that). In my department and many others, the DEI statement is something that’s there mostly because the university told us to require it.From what I’ve seen from being on several faculty search committees, some people on the search committee will glance at the DEI statement, but it’s far down the priority list. So far, ~3/4 of the statements are a page of meaningless fluff that may spout a few buzzwords but don’t actually tell us anything about the candidate’s ideology or plans. I’m sure there are an increasing number of departments with vocally woke faculty who will try to veto anyone who doesn’t fully embrace woke ideology in their statement, but it’s also at this point not that hard to write a DEI statement that’s entirely acceptable to many departments that basically sidesteps the issue of woke ideology.2. Yes, NSF requires “broader impacts” in all proposals and evaluates that as a  part of funding, and has for quite a while. A large portion of the “broader impacts” criterion is that the research has the potential to benefit society by learning the fundamental science that’s needed for new technology, medicine, national defense, etc.From what I’ve seen in both recently receiving an NSF grant and serving on a review panel, it’s more or less expected that faculty will include something that can check the box of “cares about giving people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to succeed in science”, but it doesn’t have to fit within a woke DEI framework. I’ve seen that box checked by working with students from poor rural backgrounds, interactions with K-12 students or teachers, etc. with little or no reference to race or gender, without any negative effects on funding.3. For NSF grants like the one that originally supported the URGE project, it’s very standard for the public description to describe the science that ~80-100% of the actual grant money is going toward and not say much about the non-research broader impacts activities. I’m not at all surprised that it’s absent from the public description of the grant – my recent grant has one sentence in the public description saying that I’m participating in a couple outreach-type activities.I’m disappointed but not at all surprised that NSF did extend continuing funding directly to the URGE project. I noticed that the second grant directly funding URGE is coming from funding that’s earmarked for “education and human resources”, so it’s coming from a different pot of money than what’s used to fund actual research. Of course, that raises the question of how that money got split up into those pots in the first place, but that’s a question that goes much higher up the chain.

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Dorian Abbot & Academic Soft Totalitarianism

This is one of the most important things you will read today. It’s a Twitter thread by Boston University philosopher David Decosimo, laying bare the fundamental totalitarianism of contemporary academia. Read on:

Here’s the reality about the @DorianAbbot situation. What happened was an *aberration.*
Not the cancelling; Abbot being invited to begin with.

The hiring process in many places is now *deliberately designed* to keep an Abbot from ever getting a faculty job in the first place. 1/ https://t.co/hvQPmsGiVg

— David Decosimo (@DavidDecosimo) October 20, 2021

Here’s a link to the story about “citational justice.” It also includes the quote I cited earlier, from the Williams College paleontologist, saying that rigorous intellectual debate is a white thing.

Here is the passage in Live Not By Lies where I explain the totalitarianism of the kind of thing that has happened to Dorian Abbot:

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. Similar politically correct loyalty oaths are required at leading public and private schools.

More:

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship. The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

This is exactly what is happening in American academia. There are no gulags, or prisons; it is, for now, soft. But it is still totalitarianism. It is totalitarian when a distinguished scientists like Dorian Abbot is not allowed to give a talk about science at a leading American science and technology university because he doesn’t agree with leftist approaches to DEI. Prof. Romps at Berkeley discovered in trying to defend Prof. Abbot that his own academic institution is more interested in imposing political litmus tests than in defending science and academic inquiry.

As horrible as it is for this sort of totalitarianism to have conquered the humanities, it conquering STEM fields guarantees a Lysenkoist future for our country. Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who was profoundly wrong about genetics, but was politically correct, thus promoted by Stalin. This set back Soviet agricultural science greatly. It is impossible to do science if scientific inquiry is bounded by pointless ideological concerns. It is not pointlessly ideological to put ethical limits on, say, experiments on humans. But it is pointlessly ideological to blackball scientists like Dorian Abbot for ideological deviancy on DEI, or anything else non-scientific. Only a thoroughly corrupt academy could possibly support this kind of thing.

Here’s what I hope: that as we approach the 2022 elections, Republicans will make fighting soft totalitarianism their rallying cry, and propose specific policies for how to fight it. For example, universities that receive federal funding must abolish or radically overhaul their DEI programs, and establish mechanisms to prove that applicants for jobs are not subjected to these loyalty tests. Perhaps politicians, moving as they do in the world of elites, don’t quite understand how popular these proposals would be.

Look:

The Dorian Abbott situation is another example of the democratic deficit in American institutions. Elites treat racial preferences as something that shouldn’t be questioned while the majority of Americans oppose them. pic.twitter.com/IWCtY4YhRQ

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 20, 2021

Fighting back hard against this garbage in law would be popular! These are the same people, broadly speaking, who are trying to cancel Dave Chappelle, one of the most popular comedians in America, because he said that only biological women are truly women. You think Chappelle’s stance is controversial among most Americans? Surely you cannot be so dim.

Fight these people, while we still can! There are allies to be found everywhere. Among the most effective are public intellectuals of the anti-woke Left: Bari Weiss, Peter Boghossian, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, and their tribe. These people are not conservatives, but they understand better than most how destructive this totalitarian ideology is.

Yet as far as I can tell, no Republican lawmakers are launching a crusade on behalf of free speech and freedom of academic inquiry, and against the soft totalitarianism that rules academia and, increasingly, every institution in American society. Why is Bari Weiss braver and more aware of the left-wing ideological threat to the present and future of America than the GOP?

This has to change, while it still can change. There are gifted and intelligent men and women of all races in this country who are being kept out of the academy by these commissars. The commissariat must be destroyed, without fear or apology. The future of our country depends on it.

UPDATE: Financial Times report (quoted in Daily Mail, so outside of paywall) says China actually tested two hypersonic vehicles, which seem to defy the laws of physics. Wokeness in academia, especially in STEM, is now a direct threat to US national security. Come on, Republicans, wake up! Do something about this, while we still can. The DEI commissars must be totally sidelined.

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Professor: Intellectual Rigor Is Racist

Phoebe Cohen, a paleontologist at Williams College, is featured in this story in The New York Times, about the scandal over MIT cancelling a prestigious science lecture by climate scientist Dorian Abbot, because Abbot had co-authored an op-ed criticizing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. Behold, this passage:

Phoebe A. Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College and one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak, given that he has spoken against affirmative action in the past.

Dr. Cohen agreed that Dr. Abbot’s views reflect a broad current in American society. Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action. Nor was she enamored of M.I.T.’s offer to let him speak at a later date to the M.I.T. professors. “Honestly, I don’t know that I agree with that choice,” she said. “To me, the professional consequences are extremely minimal.”

What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.

::::::chin drops to chest::::::

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.”

An actual college professor said those words. And you wonder why this country is decaying. Look who leads our institutions. If I were the president of Williams College, and one of my professors said something so utterly disqualifying to The New York Times, I would have her butt in my office first thing the next morning to explain how denouncing “intellectual debate and rigor” as racist influences her pedagogy.

Of course Prof. Cohen will not be called to account by the president of Williams College, because the president of Williams College doesn’t give a rat’s rear end. Neither do the Board of Trustees of Williams College. Neither would the presidents or trustees of just about any college in America. None of the parents paying $59,350 in yearly tuition to Williams College will phone the president demanding to know why they are sending their kid to a college that charges that much money but employs professors who think rigorous intellectual debate is racist. No parent at just about any college would. Because we are a country where giving a rat’s rear end either does you no good or even becomes a liability.

Meanwhile:

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Further Thoughts On Postliberalism

I want to add some follow-up commentary on Elizabeth Zarofsky’s good New York Times Magazine piece about “how the American Right fell in love with Hungary,” which landed to great effect yesterday.

Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar and founder of the National Conservatism movement, offers some constructive criticism of the piece (which he liked overall) on Twitter:

That’s really true, and I had not thought about that. The Catholic contribution to this general project is vital, but it is by no means a Catholic-only, or even Catholic-dominated, one. Viktor Orban is a Calvinist, as is his beloved-by-all-of- us Minister of Family, Katalin Novak. He has around him strong Catholics, like Balazs Orban. But theirs is an ecumenical project, one they are undertaking with the full knowledge that Hungary is effectively post-Christian. They seem to understand that if they are going to have any chance of success, they are going to have to make and strengthen alliances not just across confessional lines, but to non-Christians, and secular people. In Hungary, the number of observant Christians is pretty sparse, but rejection of mass immigration (as a strategy to maintain national sovereignty) is popular, as is holding the line against gender ideology. Orban is not a cuddly figure, heaven knows, but he has managed to do what Donald Trump could not, in large part because he doesn’t go out of his way to insult and antagonize people. To be clear, he is hated by the Hungarian left, but he does not engage in lib-owning for its own sake. This is one of the big failings of Trump: he reveled in being hated, even when it hurt the substantive political causes he favored.

It’s also true that most of the Catholic intellectuals Zerofsky cited — Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari — identify as integralists, which is a distinct intellectual tradition in Catholicism (Patrick Deneen, as far as I can tell, is a fellow traveler, but does not identify as an integralist). Catholic integralism basically means that Catholicism should be the underpinnings of the state, as the established religion, or close to it. It’s political Catholicism. This is a very old mode of thought in Christendom; in Orthodox Russia, it is called “symphonia”. It is intellectually rich, but in the modern world, quite problematic. In Russia today, the state is cracking down on Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians — something that I, as an American Orthodox Christian, reject. I think it was important for the fragile postcommunist state to do this at first, when Orthodox institutions stood eviscerated by Communism, and the Russian people, having suffered seven decades of militant de-Christianization, stood vulnerable to well-financed American Evangelical movements swooping in. But at some point, the religious liberty of Russian Evangelicals and Pentecostals must be respected, in my view. This is why I still have a lot of classical liberalism left in me: I believe people have a right to be wrong.

Plus, the very close relationship between Church and State in Putin’s Russia has not been good for the Church and its witness. On the Catholic side, modern Ireland was about as close to an integralist state as you could find. How did that work out? The state turned a blind eye to the church’s horrific sexual abuse problem, until that was no longer possible. Now Ireland has secularized, and Catholicism is seen with contempt by many Irish people. This is a catastrophe. I don’t think separation of church and state would have necessarily spared Ireland this calamity — it certainly didn’t spare the US — but the close cooperation between church and state in Ireland made it much worse, I think, or at least harder to fight. In general, I think keeping Church and State in a relationship of creative tension is the best possible arrangement.

Besides, integralism is an absolute dead letter in the post-Christian West, especially the United States, where Catholicism is a minority religion. More to the point, study after study has shown that a large majority of American Catholics relate to their church with an essentially Protestant mindset — meaning they do not accept and live by its authority. I regret this as an ex-Catholic, because Christianity in America overall is helped by a strong Catholic witness. But it’s the sad truth. Integralism will never get anywhere in America unless and until American Catholics return to submitting substantively to the Magisterium — as a start. The plain fact is that most Americans don’t want to live in a Catholic confessional state, and most American Catholics don’t either.

And there’s one more thing. Ever heard of Edgardo Mortara? He was a six-year-old Jewish child living in Bologna in the mid-19th century, when that city was still part of the Papal States (meaning it was a Catholic monarchy led by the Pope). The family’s Catholic maid secretly baptized the boy when he fell ill. When this fact became known to Church authorities, they seized him from his Jewish parents to give him a Catholic upbringing. The law held that a Catholic child required a Catholic raising, so agents of Pope Pius IX took him, and refused his parents’ please to give him back. It became a huge controversy in Italy and beyond, and for good reason. As a matter of law, the Pope was correct. But the fact remains, the Church, in an integralist state, kidnapped a little boy from his parents, and refused to return him.

It was monstrous. One of my big concerns with postliberalism on the Right is that we never, ever allow ourselves to get into a position in which something like the Mortara case can happen. Mind you, the woke Left is all in favor of the state seizing trans-identified children from their parents. Abigail Shrier recently wrote about a Muslim family that fled Oregon to escape a law that would have given the state the right to seize their minor son and administer hormones and other sex-change treatments, because the boy identified as female. If you support the state in that case, you have no business criticizing Pio Nono for grabbing Edgardo Mortara. You should know that Adrian Vermeule and I cannot stand each other (for more on that, see here), something I bring up only to illustrate that by no means does Catholic integralism define the postliberal political movement. (For a robust conservative Catholic critique of integralism, see this piece by James M. Patterson at Law & Liberty.)

Nevertheless, I sincerely welcome integralists to the broader debate, because they ask hard and important questions about the deep conflicts between liberalism and Christianity. If integralists have few realistic answers to the problems, they are at least making the incommensurability of liberalism and Christianity clearer. Classical liberalism, as you know, arose out of the post-Reformation Wars of Religion, as a way for people of different religions to live together in relative peace. Integralists and others (especially Deneen) are correct to point out that liberalism brackets ultimate questions of the Good for the sake of maintaining the social order — and that this is ultimately untenable. I think they are right about that. It is easier for Christians to espouse classical liberalism within a society in which there is broad agreement on basic goods.

But we no longer live in such a society. So now what?

When I said to the Times reporter that I doubted very much whether our side was going to handle power well, what I was getting at, in context of our discussion (if memory serves), the sad fact that in our political culture today, we have all become subject to a moralistic extremism that leads us to justify treating those who oppose us inhumanely. The Left has almost all the power within institutions, and has no self-restraint when it comes to imposing its convictions. Even though gay customers could have bought wedding cakes at many other places in Colorado than Masterpiece Cake Shop, and could have bought wedding floral arrangements at many other places than Baronnelle Stutzman’s shop, the Left is so militantly moralistic and hateful that they would happily crush those Christian business people for the sake of proving a point. This is the same spirit that led the Church to seize Edgardo Mortara in the 19th century. That temptation is within every one of us, if we’re honest: the temptation to wield power cruelly, out of confidence in our own righteousness.

It is impossible for me to overstate how important the impact the catastrophes of the Iraq War and the Catholic sex abuse scandal had on me, and the understanding I bring to this postliberalism question.

The absolute certainty I had that the Iraq War was just and right frightens me to think about, because that war destroyed the lives of so many, and brought nothing good to our country. Yet back in 2002, like many conservatives (including religious conservatives), the case for war was crystal-clear, such that the only reason anybody opposed it was that they were fools or cowards. I really believed that, and so did most conservative in my circles. We were dead wrong. We sincerely thought we were doing good, but in fact, exactly the opposite was true — and both America and the world are still paying the price.

As to the Catholic abuse scandal, I once held, as a Catholic, what I now recognize was a very naive view of the Church. I did not believe that the Catholic Church was perfect and sinless, but then I plunged into the demonic mess that was the scandal, and saw how much raw evil was perpetrated and covered up for by churchmen who sincerely convinced themselves that they were doing the right thing. As you know, I lost my ability to believe as a Catholic, but more than that, I gained a radical understanding for how vulnerable all of us are to rationalizing evil by convincing ourselves that it is necessary for the common good.

This is not just a Catholic problem. This is something that afflicts every one of us. About a decade ago, I read a biography of Robespierre, whom I only knew as the premier butcher of the French Revolution. What I had not known was that he was known as “The Incorruptible” for his stringent moralism. He began as a provincial lawyer who fought bravely for social justice for those oppressed by the monarchy. But his dedication to justice was sincere, but abstract. He had little capacity to empathize with other human beings. So, when he attained supreme power, he saw human beings who dissented from the Revolution’s principles as nothing more than objects to be done away with for the sake of Justice.

That, I confess, is kind of how I viewed potential Iraqi victims of the unnecessary war the US launched on that country. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, they weren’t real to me. About the Church scandal, it is widely known now that the many victims of clerical sex abuse and their families were mere abstractions to many bishops and laypeople in church administration. I bring both instances up in this context because I learned from those shattering experiences how easy it is to be so carried away with The Cause that you forget that the lives of real human beings are at stake.

To be sure, one cannot allow oneself to become paralyzed by fear of making a mistake. You have to act, even though it is often impossible to do so without hurting some innocent people. I’m digressing here, so I’ll end by saying that we live in a political culture that rewards nastiness, and drawing unnecessarily sharp friend-enemy distinctions, even when they hurt the cause. And within Christian circles, too many of us think assholiness is compatible with holiness. Too many of us think compromise is always a sign of weakness, as opposed to often being the best we can hope for in an imperfect and fallen world. This is why I don’t have a lot of confidence that we would be wise in how we wield power, should it come to us. This is less a remark about us and more an observation about the chaotic world we all live in.

It occurred to me this morning that one significant distinction to be made in this discussion has to do with the question, “What is postliberalism?” Some people on my side, I think, see it as a positive program, e.g., “Here is what we postliberal right-wingers believe and want to see happen.” I tend to see it more in the sense of “postliberalism” being a general condition, and all of us having to figure out where we stand, and where we should stand, now that liberalism has exhausted itself.

The woke Left has no intention of being classically liberal. It pushes illiberal Leftism — wokeness — at every opportunity. And it holds nearly all of the institutional power in this country. What, then, does this mean for us on the postliberal Right — by which I mean, all people on the Right, given that all of us live in the condition of postliberalism?

Many of us on the Right fight wokeness to defend classical liberalism. David French is the paradigmatic example of this sort of conservative. Aside from the fact that he is a good and decent man, one reason I do not join in the anti-French pile-on is because as a lawyer who has defended many religious liberty cases, French understands better than our leading postliberal ideologues what can and can’t be accomplished under our Constitutional system. Unless there’s going to be a revolution sometime soon, we are all going to be living under the US Constitution for the foreseeable future. Whether we like it or not, the Constitution, and constitutional interpretation, is going to set the boundaries for what we can and cannot do. We should be grateful for men and women like David French, who know how to use the system to protect our liberties, and not treat them like enemies — which they are not.

On the other hand, my sense is that French and his cohorts have too much faith in liberal proceduralism, and in the durability of the American order. French famously called the fact that both drag queens and Christians can use the public library one of the “blessings of liberty.” He did not, as many of his enemies claimed, call Drag Queen Story Hour a blessing of liberty. He said that equal access to public spaces is a blessing of liberty. I think that is naive. Recently I had a painful conversation with a friend who told me about a family he’s close to that is falling apart over their children embracing sexual and gender fluidity. My friend is heartbroken. There is no doubt in my mind that this never would have happened to that same family a decade ago. We have welcomed these malignant spirits into our public and private lives, and celebrated them as great goods. Now these spirits are destroying families, and destroying us as a people. It is not a blessing of liberty that drag queens can preach gender fluidity in public libraries to little children. It is a curse of degenerate liberalism.

Which brings us to Viktor Orban. He correctly sees this as degenerate, and wants to protect Hungarian children from it, as best he can, using the power of the state, within the bounds of the law. Good for him! If being a classical liberal means having to surrender to the cultural forces destroying the lives of children and families with these lies, then to hell with classical liberalism.

[David French voice:] “You sure about that? What happens when you have cut down all the laws built on classical liberalism, to get at those devils. Where are you going to hide when those devils turn on you?” 

You see the problem. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if there is an answer, to be honest. The tension between the principles of classical liberalism and rival visions of the Good is too great to be resolved, I fear. It wasn’t when we all generally shared a basic Judeo-Christian moral framework, but that’s gone. This is why I am fairly confident that the power-holders — the illiberal Left — will deploy a social credit system to suppress dissidents and control society in a totalitarian way. What could stop this? In the short term, the Right getting its act together and using the power of the State to push back hard on these illiberal leftist institutions. J.D. Vance’s argument for taxing assets of giant foundations is a good example. 

Here’s the long-term problem: the culture is swiftly moving to the Left. In Hungary not long ago, I spoke with a middle-aged mom and Orban supporter who told me she is losing her children to cultural leftism. Her 19-year-old son told her that all of his friends were experimenting with gender fluidity, and that she was out of touch for finding this problematic. She told me that for at least two years, he has watched, listened, and read only English-language media. The Hungarian government can ban LGBT proselytizing to minors all it likes, but it can’t get around the Internet, which is forming the moral imaginations of all the youth of Hungary. In Poland too, a high school teacher told me that there is no institution in the country — not the Church, not the State, not the family, nothing — more effective at shaping the worldview of the youth than TikTok, YouTube, and social media.

If we remain democratic in the West, eventually we on the Right are going to be strongly outvoted. That day is coming soon. And if we are to stop it by non-democratic means, well, what does that make us?

To end this already far too long post, I want to reiterate Yoram Hazony’s point that the postliberal thinkers on the Right are fairly diverse, religiously and otherwise. This is a good thing, because we are facing a hell of a challenge, and need to think hard, figure out how to build meaningful coalitions, and learn lessons from figures like Viktor Orban that we can adapt to our American circumstances (while supporting him too as he squares off against the illiberal Leftists of the European Union, to defend Christian democracy and Hungarian national sovereignty). I know that I have a lot yet to learn, and I haven’t found anyone yet who has this all figured out. Come join us at the National Conservatism II conference in Orlando in a couple of weeks (Oct 31-Nov 2) to hear from a diverse round of speakers, and meet the people who are part of the growing movement. If you follow the link and see who’s coming, you will instantly be able to tell that there are a lot of things on which we don’t agree. But I think we know, and I hope we know, that we have to build an effective resistance. The day may come when circumstances require me to give up what classical liberalism I have left in me, but we aren’t there yet, and I hope we don’t get there, because none of the alternatives are appealing.

And look, we might not win, in the end, but we damn sure have to fight, and fight intelligently. We can’t hope to own the future if we only really care about owning the libs.

UPDATE: This just posted: the weekly podcast from Kale Zelden and me. This week, we talk about the Zerofsky piece, and what it says about Americans on the Right. Check it out:

The post Further Thoughts On Postliberalism appeared first on The American Conservative.

News From Clown World

Did you know that today is International Pronouns Day? The US State Department would like you to get with the program:

Today on International Pronouns Day, we share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles. Read more here on @ShareAmerica: https://t.co/gWhoItvGvo.

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 20, 2021

You know that we — our government, I mean — are often the bad guys, right? How is US diplomacy going, y’all? When are we going to observe International America Screwed Over Afghans Who Helped It Day? Anyway, in celebration of International Pronouns Day, here’s a lesson in a pronoun you didn’t even know was a pronoun:

Mental illness epidemic pic.twitter.com/dOhxAb16hE

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 20, 2021

In other government news, a military reader sent me a link to the Department Of Defense policy manual for how to deal with transgendered service members. Here’s something interesting from page 35:

Got that? If you are a female service member and you do not want to share quarters with a female-presenting penis-haver, you are out of luck, bigot. The US Department of Defense says so.

What a country we have become.

Meanwhile, today in Hollywood (this video is hilarious, but NSFW):

#BREAKING: Dozens of Netflix employees and their supporters staged a walkout outside Netflix Headquarters

#Hollywood l #California

To protest the transphobic comments made by Dave Chappelle in his latest comedy special released earlier this month by the streaming giant pic.twitter.com/zkNnSDaE95

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) October 20, 2021

We keep waiting for the Normie Uprising, and it never comes. Think it ever will?

UPDATE: A friend who retired not long ago from the military texts about the transgender guidance manual:

Do you know how many officer staff hours are being consumed by this sh*t? I can tell you a lot. China will invent teleporting before we get our head out of our own asses. Our military is dying by self-immolation. We used to kick ass all week then drink beer on Friday and talk about how we kicked ass all week.

UPDATE.2: Zaid understands that in these culture war fights, our media are all about manufacturing discontent:

The Netflix walkout over Chappelle was reportedly going to be 1,000 employees. It appears that a fraction of these numbers materialized. This whole thing seems like the news media trying really hard to will something into reality when reality won’t comply…

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 20, 2021

UPDATE.3: A military source sends a series of transgender US Army training slides. Look at this one giving guidance on how to deal with a female-to-male trans soldier and “his pregnancy”:

UPDATE.4: News from the Netflix protest, via Variety:

The event attracted some high-profile talent, including “Transparent” creator Joey Soloway, who argued that Chappelle’s jokes crossed a line.

“Trans people are in the middle of a holocaust,” Soloway said in an address to the crowd. “Apartheid, murder, a state of emergency, human rights crisis, there’s a mental health crisis. There’s a suicide crisis, a bullying crisis, an anxiety, depression, self-hatred state of emergency crisis. But trans people are also out here dreaming. Dreaming of safety, dreaming to be alive, to be human, to belong and to have some time, which is privilege.”

“The line is simple: stop making things worse,” Soloway added. Soloway also called on Netflix to appoint a trans person to the board “this f*cking week.”

Joey Soloway was born Jill Soloway. Trans people are in the middle of a “holocaust”? Really? Cattle cars hauling them by the tens of thousands to incinerators? Are they really? Seems to me they are the most sacred caste in all of America, under this regime. You know, Joey-Jill, you are Jewish. Don’t you feel just a little twinge of “I’ve gone too far” when you made that comparison?

These people, I swear.

UPDATE.5: International Pronouns Day + Netflix Trans Walkout Day are two great tastes that taste great together!

One of the protesters at Netflix today. This is someone we’re supposed to listen to and take seriously.

pic.twitter.com/AdsEBfFKDP

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 20, 2021

The post News From Clown World appeared first on The American Conservative.

Netflix Caving On Chappelle in 5…4…3…

Everybody get ready, Netflix is in the process of caving to Big Trans. From an interview Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos did with Variety:

On the eve of a planned employee walkout at the streaming giant — organized by trans and LGBTQ+ staffers, content creators and allies — Sarandos addressed numerous points related to recent jokes from Chappelle that have incensed the trans community and been labeled as harmful.

Stop right there. Those who walk out should be told by Netflix to keep stepping.

More:

Do you have any regrets about how this process was handled, especially in your internal communication with employees? 

Ted Sarandos: Obviously, I screwed up that internal communication. I did that, and I screwed it up in two ways. First and foremost, I should have led with a lot more humanity. Meaning, I had a group of employees who were definitely feeling pain and hurt from a decision we made. And I think that needs to be acknowledged up front before you get into the nuts and bolts of anything. I didn’t do that. That was uncharacteristic for me, and it was moving fast and we were trying to answer some really specific questions that were floating. We landed with some things that were much more blanket and matter-of-fact that are not at all accurate.

Of course storytelling has real impact in the real world. I reiterate that because it’s why I work here, it’s why we do what we do. That impact can be hugely positive, and it can be quite negative. So, I would have been better in that communication. They were joining a conversation already in progress, but out of context. But that happens, internal emails go out. In all my communications I should lean into the humanity up front and not make a blanket statement that could land very differently than it was intended.

Man, I do not get this. At all. Publishing and media executives do this crap too. Do they have any idea what kind of business they are in? Chappelle’s great sin, in the eyes of these crybullies, was that he said trans women aren’t women because they do not have the biology of women. I believe that. A lot of people believe that. Maybe Chappelle is wrong about that. But if this now unsayable, even by a comedian (who makes fun of everybody), this is madness. Sarandos ought to tell those protesters if they cannot handle working for a giant media company that distributes a comedy show in which a standup says only biological women are women, then they should find another line of work. This is cringe.

More:

So the special will remain on the service?

I don’t believe there have been many calls to remove it.

That’s not a “no,” is it? And it’s a not-no that leaves open the possibility that there will one day be so “many calls” that Netflix decided to take it down.

Look at this, and try to make sense of what Sarandos is saying:

Is there anything more specifically actionable from the list of requests — like a call for a new trans and nonbinary talent fund be created? 

We have a creative equity fund that we’ve heavily invested in exactly the things I believe they are asking about. We have and continue to invest enormous amounts of content dollars in LGBTQ+ stories for the world and giving them a global platform. Specifically, trans and non-binary content as well. That’s obviously continued strong, and I think we’ll continue on that path. What’s important to remember is that we’ve got incredible growth in our employee base, and a lot of people have joined during COVID and have never met anyone from Netflix. It’s very tough to understand company history, knowing where we’re at, what we do, and what kind of folks we are. We’ve got to take this opportunity to make sure that they know we are with them and creating this content to spread around the world and creating a great workplace for diverse and marginalized populations. We’re firmly committed to it.

Translation: “We’re going to throw money at making more trans and non-binary shows, so please, I beg you, leave us alone!”

When do you think Netflix will actually pull the special? I bet they’re waiting to see what the response to tomorrow’s walkout is. Remember, even though probably 95 percent of America doesn’t care if a comedian says “only women are women” on his Netflix special, the five percent who do are concentrated in the circles in which Netflix executives move.

Soft totalitarianism is about to claim another scalp…

UPDATE:

The woke employees' feelings exception to free speech. Unfalsifiable veto. https://t.co/qiXDrQRHev

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 20, 2021

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Mircea Eliade’s Guide To The Sacred

As many of you know, I write a Substack newsletter that appears two or three times each week, to paid subscribers. I reserve the newsletter for writing about spiritual matters, mostly, but also more generally for writing about hopeful things. I’m really excited about the new book I’m preparing to start work on, and will be sharing most of my thinking-out-loud about that book with my Substack readers. The book, broadly speaking, is about the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world, from a traditional Christian point of view.

I’m about to write tonight’s newsletter, which will continue in the vein of the one I’ve adapted below. What you’ll see beneath this paragraph is a version of what appeared on my most recent newsletter. I invite you to subscribe, if this is the kind of thing you like.

—

When I wrote in this space about my new book project, about re-enchanting the world, someone suggested to me that I read Mircea Eliade’s classic The Sacred And The Profane.

Eliade (1907-1986) was a Romanian historian, novelist, and scholar of religion. This book is one that I’ve meant to read for years, but never got around to. At the Touchstone conference last weekend, Eighth Day Books had its tables set up, and there was a single copy, just asking me to buy it. So I did, and started it on the last leg of my flight home. I finished the first chapter as we landed in Baton Rouge, and my mind was on fire. Eliade’s thought illuminated like a row of Klieg lights my forthcoming project! As soon as I finish the book, I’m going to rewrite the opening chapter that I’m about to send to my editor at Sentinel.

The purpose of the book is to explain what traditional religion is, and is not. Eliade writes that to the religious man, experiencing the “living God” is not like encountering the God of the philosophers. “[I]t was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.”

This holy terror, this fear of God, is not like what it means to be scared by encountering a bear in the woods. It is more like what one feels when one is confronted with an overwhelming manifestation of power, of mystery, of majesty, “in which the perfect fullness of being flowers.”

The sacred, in this sense, is a manifestation of “a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities.” Eliade prefers the term hierophany — meaning “manifestation of the sacred” — to refer to this phenomena. (This is not the same thing as a theophany, which means “manifestation of a god.” All theophanies are hierophanic, but not all hierophanies are theophanic.) Eliade:

By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in tis surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity. … Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.

This is the key. Carl Trueman, in his Touchstone conference lecture, said that for moderns, to deny the Self is to destroy the Self, because the Self discovers itself through what it desires. This is false. In truth, said Trueman, “The Self is realized by discovering the structure of reality and conforming oneself to it.”

This is the fundamental metaphysical point from which we religious people diverge from profane modernity. In my view, this is also the metaphysical point on which small-o orthodox Christianity breaks with its various contemporary forms. In general, for the orthodox (theological conservatives), religion is in part a means through which we discover the structure of reality and conform ourselves to it. For the modernists (theological liberals), religion is a means by which we make ourselves at home in this world. It’s not that the orthodox don’t want to make a home in this world, or that the modernists don’t want to live in reality. Rather, it’s that the orthodox believe that all of reality is undergirded, and founded, in a sacred order of which we are a part. We can’t make it up as we go along; we must instead be open to divine revelation, and organize our lives from what has been revealed from God, because it tells us what is really Real. The modernists, by contrast, more or less disbelieve that the material world has a telos (end purpose), and that things have a logos (rational purpose) intrinsic to themselves.

Whenever you hear a Christian defending heterodox sexual morality, say something like, “I find it hard to believe that the all-powerful and eternal God really cares what we do with our body parts” — you are dealing with a modernist, and not simply because such a claim violates Scriptural teaching. In this case, metaphysics are a guide to morals. We who believe in the God of the Bible know that sex has sacred meaning because all things are saturated with the sacred. If I’m reading Eliade correctly, then all traditional and archaic religions, whatever their particular teachings about sex, share that basic understanding. A pure materialist, by contrast, can rightly say that there is no ultimate meaning behind a sexual act, other than the meaning we assign to it.

Eliade, who was raised Orthodox, writes that the traditionally religious man doesn’t want to know about ultimate reality; he wants to participate in it. As the Anglican scholar Hans Boersma so beautifully explains in his book Heavenly Participation: The Weaving Of A Sacramental Tapestry, all Christians, up until the end of the Middle Ages, believed that ultimate reality was something one participates in via ritual, practices, and other sacramental ways. It is my view, and I think Boersma’s, that Christianity will not survive unless it returns to strong sacramentalism — that is, the belief that God is everywhere present, and is filling all things, and the rituals and practices that help us live within that reality by making it manifest to us.

“For religious man, space is not homogeneous,” Eliade writes. He means that some places are qualitatively different from others. When Moses approaches the Burning Bush on Sinai, God tells him to take off his shoes, because he stands on holy ground. Eliade goes on:

It must be said at once that the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world. For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.

What is he saying here? In this one short paragraph, I understood why my tourist visit to the cathedral of Chartres in 1984 became the experiential foundation of my faith. I’ve told the story many times, so I won’t bore you with all of it again. Recall that I wandered into the great medieval Gothic cathedral as a mindless tourist, and had a hierophany. Standing there, in the center of the labyrinth, gazing around me in total awe, I had an overwhelming feeling that God was real, and that He wanted me for Himself. It was the most real thing in the world.

By God’s grace, I did not do as the protagonist in Houellebecq’s novel Submission does when he has a hierophany, and rationalize it away — but neither did I act on it. Instead, it remained like a pebble I could not remove from my shoe. As I walked through life, I could not shake the Chartres hierophany: the sacred had revealed itself to me, and I had a responsibility to it. I did not want that responsibility, because if it was true, then that meant I could not create my own reality from the material of the world. For me, as a college boy, it meant that I was not free to have a sex life free of fetters, or a sex life at all (unless I married). This is why I wanted to shake the stone out of my shoe. But I couldn’t. I learned how to walk on it without limping too much, but it was always there … until finally I accepted that the stone was real, and I surrendered to the Real.

In Chartres, I caught a glimpse of “an absolutely fixed point, a center.” I spent the next eight years trying to break free of the gravity of that center, before finally surrendering. Since then, I have been engaged in a spiral orbit, moving ever closer to unity with the center, which, if I stay on the journey, will happen after I die.

I walked into Chartres as a tourist; though I didn’t really understand it at the time, I exited that cathedral as a pilgrim.

“If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded — and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space,” writes Eliade. He’s saying that we religious people have to either discover or make sacred spaces for ourselves. We are adrift without it. For profane people, the material world is neutral and homogeneous. No place is ultimately more or less valuable than any other. It might be more pleasing to dwell in or look at, but that doesn’t give it ultimate value. This is the difference between the experience of space of sacred man vs. profane man.

That said, Eliade points out that nobody lives in a wholly profane world. “Even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world,” he writes. Indeed, the sacralization of Victims — usually racial and sexual minorities — and the demonization of Oppressors (racial and sexual majorities), and the rituals and practices that one must use to purify the world of the Oppressors’ evil, is at the core of the pseudoreligion of Wokeism.

God sends religious man signs. They are hierophanies that serve as a direction from God, or the gods, to do a particular thing. “In such cases, the sign, fraught with religious meaning, introduces an absolute element and puts an end to relativity and confusion. Something that does not belong to this world has manifested itself apodictically [in an undeniably true way — RD] and in so doing has indicated an orientation or determined a course of conduct.”

More Eliade:

Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion.

This, he says, is why all traditional religions have rites for the consecration of spaces. It is claiming places for the holy. On Sunday after church, my son Lucas, who is 17 years old and just bought his first pickup truck (2011 Ford Ranger), asked our priest, Father Joshua, to bless it. We are Orthodox Christians, which means there is a blessing for everything. Here is the Orthodox prayer for the blessing of automobiles:

O Lord our God, Who makes the clouds Thy chariot and Who walks on the wings of the wind, Who has sent to Thy servant, the Prophet Elias, a chariot of fire, Who has guided man to invent this (car, truck, motorcycle, etc.) which is as fast as the wind. We thank Thee for Thou hast provided Thy servants with this vehicle to serve their various needs.

Therefore, O Master, pour out now upon it Thy heavenly blessings; assign to it a guardian angel to preserve it from all evil. And as Thou didst grant faith and grace by Thy deacon Philip to the man from Ethiopia who was sitting in his chariot and reading holy Scripture, show the way of salvation to Thy servants. So that helped by Thy grace and always intent on doing good works, they may after all the trials of their pilgrimage on earth, attain to everlasting joys, through the intercessions of our Most-pure Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, by the power of the precious and life-giving Cross; through the prayers of the holy Angels; of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and of all the Saints:

For Thou art the Provider and Sanctifier of all things and to Thee do we ascribe glory, and to Thy Only-begotten Son, and Thy All-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

 

This might seem silly to you, but it doesn’t seem that way to us. Once a year, all pious Orthodox homes receive a visit from the family’s priest, who takes holy water and parades through the house praying God’s blessing on it. This is not just a neat ceremony, but as we believe, it really does call down and channel divine grace in a special way, infusing it into matter. Wesley J. Smith’s story about the holy water flowers at his Orthodox parish is an example of how this can occasion a hierophany.

To me, the most interesting part of the first chapter is Eliade’s discussion of chaos and cosmos. In everyday usage, “cosmos” and “universe” are synonyms, but that’s not quite true. Universe refers to all things that exist. Cosmos, on the other hand, refers to an ordered whole. Conceptually speaking, the universe is chaotic, whereas the cosmos is what you have when you have ordered the universe through consecration.

“The sacred reveals absolute reality, and at the same time makes orientation possible,” writes Eliade. “Hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world.”

The hierophany at Chartres was when God began to found the world I would live in as a man, because it was the first moment that I deeply understood, beyond all rationality, that I had stumbled into the presence of the immense Other. For me, every time I say grace over a meal, or cross myself, or stand by with my head bowed as a priest consecrates a pickup truck, I am, in a sense, extending within my consciousness the bounds of that founding hierophany. God first awakened within me, in my early maturity, an awareness that there was a center of all Being, and that it was not inside of me, but I was, in a mystical sense, inside of it — and was being called to by it to join myself more fully to it (or rather to Him, for God is not only Being, but he is a person).

Eliade writes about when the Scandinavian colonists first arrived in Iceland and cleared it for human habitation, they did not regard that as an original undertaking or a profane work. “For them, their labor was only a repetition of a primordial act, the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation,” says Eliade.

This also describes the early Benedictine monks, moving out across chaotic post-Roman Europe, and transforming chaos into cosmos by consecrating and cultivating the wildness in nature, and the wildness in people’s souls. Reading these lines, I stopped to reflect on The Benedict Option, and for the first time thought of it as an attempt to meet the accelerating chaos caused by our world’s de-Christianization (or, by its dis-integration with Christianity). It is an attempt to transform chaos into cosmos by more deeply cosmicizing, if that’s a word, our own lives. That is, the people who say the Benedict Option is not missional are not only wrong, but missing the point. I have found that often people who say that have a shallow idea of what it means to be Christian. I don’t mean to question their passion for God and His Word, but I do mean to question whether they grasp the metaphysical depth of the Christian faith.

Pope Francis (or his speechwriters) has repeatedly, but obliquely, dismissed the Benedict Option as anti-evangelical, as hiding in the catacombs. I’ve said a million times that that is not true, but let me emphasize here the metaphysical problems with the pope’s stance (a stance that various Protestants have taken). To evangelize means to bring the gospel to unbelievers, to convince them to believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior. That is to say, they are manifesting a hierophany. Almost no one who hears an evangelical appeal is ever really convinced by the superior logic of the case put to him; rather, he must in some sense intuit that this is a kind of hierophany, that God himself is speaking to him. If he converts and comes into the life of the church, that man will have to embark on a life of deepening his discipleship. Part of that is to allow the Holy Spirit for more fully inhabit the chaos of his mind and his life, and to order it to Christ. As his own inner chaos coalesces in greater order, through a lifetime of faithful worship, obedience, repentance, and charity, all of which open him even more to the healing grace of God, the religious man becomes a vessel through which God manifests himself to the world, and orders the chaos.

Therefore, if we Christians do not cultivate discipleship within ourselves, within our families, and within our communities, we will be substantially unchanged by having received the good news and believed it, and will be like those Jesus condemns in the Parable of the Sower. That is to say, if our evangelism is not ultimately about transformation through participating in the holy, then it’s not worth much. If we Christians are going to reclaim the chaos for God, we first have to allow the Holy Spirit to reclaim the chaos inside ourselves, our families, and our churches. That is the Benedict Option: to recognize that the force of chaos of the world in the present moment is so overwhelming that in order to avoid being torn apart by it, Christians need to step back somewhat to strengthen ourselves spiritually — so that when we enter the world, we will be steady icons of light and order, bringing God’s cosmos to the chaos.

This is how Mircea Eliade’s book helped me understand the Benedict Option in a metaphysical way.

Then I arrived at the part of Chapter 1 in which Eliade discusses the importance in traditional world religions of the “sacred pole” as the “cosmic axis” of the newly founded world. He mentions a nomadic Australian aboriginal tribe who believe that the sacred pole they carry with them allows them to communicate with the divine, and to create “their world” wherever they wander.

“For the pole to be broken denotes catastrophe; it is like ‘the end of the world,’ reversion to chaos,” writes Eliade. He goes on to say that for this tribe, the pole is the only way they can communicate with the sky realm. Without this connection to their god, they dissolve. “Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos,” he writes. “Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible — and the [Aboriginal tribe] let themselves die.”

The sacred pole, in that tribal religion, marks the Center Of The World. My margin notes say, “Is this our secular world? Our pole has been broken — is this why we are slipping into chaos and dying?” This is obviously true for those who do not believe in God, but for almost all of us who do believe in God, the desacralized cosmos is too much within us. And this is what my book is going to be about: how and why to recover a sense of the sacralized cosmos.

And then it hit me: for St. Galgano, the sword in the stone is the sacred pole! Eliade last night taught me to see Luca Daum’s iconic engraving of St. Galgano in a metaphysical light. Here, once again, is the image that the Italian artist gave to me that night in Genoa in 2018, when he came forward and said he had been praying that afternoon in his studio, and the Holy Spirit told him to come out that night and give me this engraving. Luca did not understand why, but he did as he was told, and handed me this, titled “The Temptation of St. Galgano”:

It hit me on the plane last night: this iconic image is the message of my new book. St. Galgano’s story is here, for those who have joined this newsletter list since I last wrote about him. The saint had a hierophany — a dream of the Archangel Michael — and a theophany — a vision of Jesus, Mary, and the Apostles standing around a round church that had appeared atop a hill — calling him to leave the world and follow Jesus, but he resisted. It was only after the third — him telling God that it would be easier for him to put his sword through the stone next to him than to lay it down and leave the world, and the sword miraculously piercing the stone — that Galgano did as God asked. His conversion was instantaneous and radical. He lived as a hermit in a hut build over or near the sword in the stone. He burned so intensely that he died a year later. But he must have been a walking miracle, because bishops and abbots attended his funeral, and he was canonized a few years later.

Luca Daum’s engraving shows Galgano kneeling bare-kneed on a rock (symbolizing physical hardship), in prayer, his eyes focused on heaven. His sword is stuck in the stone, symbolizing the center point of his world. It was for Galgano what Eliade would call the “cosmogonic moment”: the founding of Galgano’s new life. Three years after Galgano’s death, the bishop built a round church over the sword in the stone, just as Galgano had seen in his vision. After watching a year ago Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia, and being stunned by its power, and discovering that San Galgano figures into the plot (I wrote about that here, below the Kingsnorth material), I vowed to go to the chapel to pray the next time I was in Italy. As you will remember, I visited it last month, and prayed before the sword in the stone:

 

Directly overhead, inside the dome of the 12th century church, this is what it looks like:

The expanding cosmos, from the center point marked by the sacred pole. Notice in the Luca Daum engraving that the mountain that has been sacralized by the sword in the stone has borne fruit in the form of a tree with broad leaves, miraculously growing out of hard stone. Life arises from sacrifice (the death of Galgano’s old self). The image is telling us that the profound conversion of Galgano, symbolized by the sword tilling the ground of his hard heart, allowed so much grace to flow into Galgano that miracles, including the healing of the sick, passed through him from God. This is all possible as long as Galgano keeps his eyes firmly affixed to heaven.

His temptation is a serpent who comes out of his ear — that is, his head; we are looking at a thought — that when fully expressed, has the head of a man. He is trying to convince the saint to take his eyes off of the sacred, and look down at the earth, to the profane (from Latin: pro + fano, meaning “outside of the temple”). If the serpent can convince Galgano to take his eyes off of the sacred, the sacred spell will be broken, and he can destroy his faith. The serpent’s face is that of every person whose words desacralize the world by causing us to take our eyes off of what is really Real.

Later in the chapter, Eliade talks about how in the Rig Veda of Hindu culture, the world was founded when a god cut off a snake’s head. Eliade writes, “As we said, the snake symbolizes chaos, the formless, the unmanifested. To behead it is an act of creation, passage from the virtual and the amorphous to that which has form.” To kill a dragon is to defeat the forces of chaos and destruction. In a spiritual sense, Galgano has to use the sword sheathed in the rock to behead the serpent and save his faith.

On Sunday morning in church I was praying about this, and realized that I have thought all along that the St. Galgano irruption into my life was a sign that God was going to call me to make a great personal sacrifice. He might yet do that. But the thought occurred to me today that the message embedded in Luca Daum’s arresting engraving embodies in a single simple image the whole message of this book I want to write. In fact, in the proposal I sent to my agent, I suggested using this as the cover image. Luca’s engraving is the conceptual road map for this next book.

On my knees in Galgano’s church, I prayed fervently for God to reveal his will to me, and I prayed just as fervently for the saint to join me in this prayer. I have a feeling that a big part of the answer came to me on the plane last night, reading Mircea Eliade. You might even call the Daum drawing a … sign.

(This is the end of the adaptation of my Substack post.)

I will be writing a lot more about Eliade and this book in my newsletter over the coming days. Again, if this is the kind of thing you like, please subscribe. It’s only five dollars per month, and you can quit anytime.

This afternoon — Tuesday — I received two short videos from Father Daniel Scheidt, a Catholic priest from the US who is on sabbatical in Italy. He went to the chapel in Montesiepi built in the 12th century over the sword in the stone, and said mass for me and my family. He sent a beautiful short video telling me so. It literally left me in tears. Very few people have ever done such a kind thing for me. Here’s a screenshot. What a blessing to have such good people going with me on this pilgrimage. Thank you, Lord:

Father Daniel Scheidt beside the miracle of Montesiepi

The post Mircea Eliade’s Guide To The Sacred appeared first on The American Conservative.