Rod Dreher's Blog, page 456

Wet Walker Percy Weekend

Missy Couhig is selling WPW umbrellas at The Conundrum, her bookstore

Fair warning for you headed to Walker Percy Weekend this Friday and Saturday in St. Francisville: the forecast is dismal. The weather folks say it’s going to rain all weekend. They might be wrong. Yesterday Baton Rouge suffered a monsoon, but St. Francisville, only 30 miles to the north, stayed perfectly dry. So we hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Bring your umbrellas.

Our fearless festival leader, Missy Couhig, is selling WPW umbrellas at The Conundrum, her bookstore on Ferdinand Street which doubles as festival headquarters. Supplies are limited, so get there early.

We had a festivalgoer from Texas call yesterday to ask if St. Francisville, which sits on the Mississippi River, was in danger of flooding, given that the river is in flood stage now. Not at all! The town is build on a bluff high above the river. We don’t flood, not even under torrential rainfall. You’ll be fine.

By the way, Miles Higgins, who coordinates the Bourbon Stroll for the festival, told me yesterday the names of the four bourbon cocktails they’ll be serving this year: Mint Julep (following Walker Percy’s Uncle Will’s recipe), Kentucky Mule (a Moscow Mule, but made with bourbon), St. Francisville Sour, and Frozen Peach Old Fashioned.

Tickets are still available for last-minute festivalgoers for everything except the lectures on Saturday. See the Walker Percy Weekend website to buy them. I’m thrilled to say that after breaking his leg at last year’s event, our dear friend Franklin Evans has returned, and is already in St. Francisville hanging out.

By the way, authors and presenters Harrison Scott Key and Jessica Hooten Wilson will be signing their books at The Conundrum on Saturday, as will Your Working Boy. I’ve not read Jessica’s book on Flannery O’Connor and Dostoevsky, but I have read Harrison’s memoir of his Southern childhood, The World’s Largest Man, and it’s funnier than anything I’ve ever read not written by P.G. Wodehouse or John Kennedy Toole. Not kidding.

Banning Anti-Gay Fruit

From The Benedict Option:

The workplace is getting tougher for orthodox believers as America’s commitment to religious liberty weakens. Progressives sneer at claims of anti-Christian discrimination or persecution. Don’t you believe them. Most of the experts I talked to on this topic spoke openly only after I promised to withhold their identities. They’re frightened that their words today might cost them their careers tomorrow.

They’re not paranoid. While Christians may not be persecuted for their faith per se, they are already being targeted when they stand for what their faith entails, especially in matters of sexuality. As the LGBT agenda advances, broad interpretations of antidiscrimination laws are going to push traditional Christians increasingly out of the marketplace, and the corporate world will become hostile toward Christian bigots, considering them a danger to the working environment.

Here’s one more thing you are going to have to dismiss, explain away, or otherwise overlook to justify calling me paranoid:

A Catholic farmer in Michigan is suing the city of East Lansing after he was barred from a municipal farmers market over his views on same-sex marriage.

Stephen Tennes filed a lawsuit at a federal court on Wednesday (May 31), seeking his reinstatement.

In it, Tennes says he was prohibited from selling his products after his business, Country Mill Farms, refused to host a lesbian couple’s wedding at its orchard in Charlotte, 22 miles outside the city and he stated on Facebook “his Catholic belief that marriage is a sacramental union between one man and one woman.”

Country Mill Farms had sold fruit and produce at the market for six years, but after city officials learned about the Facebook post, they “strongly and immediately pressured us not to return to the farmers market,” Tennes told a news conference at the state Capitol.

According to the lawsuit, Country Mill is the only business to have been prohibited under the market’s anti-discrimination policy.

In a statement, the city of East Lansing said the farmer’s refusal to host a same-sex wedding violated a “long-standing ordinance that protects sexual orientation as well as the Supreme Court’s ruling that grants the right for same-sex couples to be married.”

So: Farmer Tennes did not and does not discriminate against LGBT customers at the farmer’s market, but the City of East Lansing made it impossible for him to sell his fruit there. This, for something he did on his own farm, 22 miles outside the City of East Lansing.

Country Mill Farms hosts weddings on its property. It’s probably the case that it will either have to accommodate gay couples, or stop doing weddings entirely. But that has nothing at all to do with the farmer’s market. The City of East Lansing has no jurisdiction here, but is going out of its way to punish Farmer Tennes for his viewpoint.

Thank God Tennes is represented by ADF (which could use your financial support, by the way). If not for ADF, what choice would he have but to surrender? What farmer has the resources to fight the city?

Christians in the East Lansing area need to turn out to support Country Mill Farms by buying its produce (even if you have to drive out there), and by protesting at the Farmer’s Market. This is not a time for silence. But Christians also need to take this kind of thing seriously, and to grasp that this is going to be happening more and more in the future. If you aren’t preparing now for how to deal with it, you are in denial. More from The Benedict Option:

In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of antidiscrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.

“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.

Says a religious liberty lawyer, “There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”

Once again, class, what does the Law of Merited Impossibility say? “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

If you and your church are not talking about and planning for what you are going to do when this happens to you, why not? As I quote David Gushee, the pro-gay rights Baptist ethicist, in The Benedict Option:

“Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”

Young Man At A Crossroads

Vulcano/Shutterstock

A reader writes:

I write to you asking for a bit of advice, not just for myself, but for the many young professionals attempting to discern which graduate school programs to attend (if any), and which vocations will allow for both a virtuous life and a sufficient salary.

A key argument of your writing references the ideas of agrarianism and distributism, advocated by Wendell Berry and J.R.R. Tolkien, respectively. In your opinion, should young professionals shift their studies to these more practical matters, such as sustainable farming and the economics of cooperatives, abandoning the expensive and compromised masters programs of major universities?

As an intelligence professional, I worry that another degree spent rehashing the same tired arguments about international relations lacks relevance in this era of cultural disruption. Alternatively, by mastering the field of Middle East language and culture, could I provide a service to whichever Catholic community my wife and I find as a teacher? Should everyone aspiring to bring the Benedict Option into our lay culture become a farmer, teacher, or small business owner? Has government service become too hostile to our way of life to maintain virtue? Is migrating to the Washington DC bubble only perpetuating the loss of rural culture and values?

This young man asks serious questions about vocation. With his permission, I’m asking you all for your answers. Serious responses only, please.

#Covfefe

All I want to say is that it’s both humiliating and frightening to think that the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, is lying in bed after midnight tweeting while falling asleep. This is a man whose words could start a war, and this is how reckless he is, and how childish.

We’re going to be lucky to get out of this presidency without a national security crisis caused by something as stupid as a midnight tweet.

UPDATE: People. People. It’s not that he misspelled a word. It’s that he is so reckless that he lies in bed at night tweeting while drowsy. If I do that or you do that, no big whoop. I repeat: this is a man whose words could start a war. He has no real awareness of or respect for his office and its responsibilities.

UPDATE.2: BaronHarkonnen writes:

It’s much worse than you think.

Think about it: what is the president thinking about as he is dozing off?

He’s thinking about how unfair the press is to him. And he’s tweeting to whine about it. He’s not thinking about the country’s problems. He’s not thinking about foreign policy issues. He’s not thinking about our current and potential military engagements.

No, his big last thought for the day is about how unfair the press is to him. He is literally losing sleep over it.

I, Spiritual Pornographer

When last you read about Prof. Alan Levinovitz, it was my commenting on an essay he had published in Slate, defending intolerance.  A quote from that Levinovitz essay:

Just as it is foolish to condemn all intolerance, it is also misguided to make strict rules about permissible forms of intolerance. No shouting. No breaking the law. The correct form of intolerance always depends on its object and its context. If Charles Murray were to hand out copies of The Bell Curve in a supermarket, it would be entirely acceptable to shout at him. Sometimes laws need to be broken—sometimes you need to sit at the front of the bus. And for all but the staunchest pacifists, violence can be a perfectly justifiable way to express intolerance when someone attacks you.

Earlier I claimed that it’s no longer controversial to think that civil liberties don’t depend on race, gender, or religion. Unfortunately, a clear-eyed assessment of the evidence shows that many people would likely embrace a return to the (not so) good old days. In this country, a congressman can publically [sic] express ethno-nationalism—“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”—and be praised by colleagues for it. The longtime best-selling book of Christian apologetics—C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity—calls for religious nationalism (“all economists and statesmen should be Christians”) and argues that God wants men to be the head of the household. These are popular ideals, but they are poisonous and deserve fierce resistance, not complacent tolerance.

As I wrote in response, note well that Levinovitz believes that C.S. Lewis — C.S. Lewis! — advocated “poisonous” ideas, ones that deserve “fierce resistance.” And he believes that Charles Murray deserves to be shouted down — and Levinovitz is highly ambiguous on whether or not people should beat Murray up.

In another piece, an “open letter” to Sen. Marco Rubio, who is a Christian, Levinovitz goes on to say that academia is a universalist religion that instantiates a “sacred order.” And:

In fact, humanities professors like me work against many of your core values. Explaining the origin and persistence of creationist pseudoscience? Religion and philosophy. Shutting down racists and sexists who explain discrimination with “natural differences”? Anthropology and history. We can’t take all the credit, of course, but the fact that the arc of history seems to bend toward justice is due, at least in part, to the efforts of humanities scholars.

As I said at the time:

This man is not a disinterested scholar. He’s a zealot, and an extremely self-righteous one at that. Prof. Levinovitz is as ardent for his own god as any hidebound fundamentalist is for his.

Note well that Levinovitz believes that ideas he finds offensive are “poisonous,” and that those who advocate for them ought to be shouted down, and perhaps subject to violence. And note also that he forthrightly boasts about people like him working to undermine “many of your core values.”

With that in mind, let’s have a look at his recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece, in which he describes my book The Benedict Option as “spiritual pornography.” Here’s how he recalls that Slate article of his:

The post was about a polemical article of mine in which I argued that not all ideas deserve “tolerance,” giving as examples creationism, vaccine denial, and ethnic nationalism. In certain contexts — in a supermarket, say, or on a bus — one may be justified in shouting down an idea, and even resisting it by breaking the law (civil disobedience). I also argued, not for the first time, that universities are spaces where ideas should never be shouted down. “An overlooked evil of censorship,” I said, “is that it denies weak arguments the opportunity to publicly humiliate themselves in a fair fight.” I cited the revered Christian apologist C. S. Lewis’s position that women should be subordinate in the household as a prime example of a weak argument.

Actually, he didn’t. Read his entire essay here.  He did not call Lewis’s belief “a prime example of a weak argument.” He called it “poisonous”. And he did not blame the students for the attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury, but rather the university for having invited him in the first place. And he fudged on whether or not violence is an acceptable form of resistance. He is unambiguously clear that it’s fine to shout people down in public if you don’t like their ideas.

This is not normal. And I objected strongly to it. This is exactly the kind of liberal intolerance that would silence and intimidate people like me — and that is doing so on campuses around the country, and elsewhere.

So, Levinovitz got around to reading The Benedict Option, as well as Anthony Esolen’s Out Of The Ashes. He did not like them:

But as I kept reading the regret never lasted, because the soul of these books is not love of God; it is bitter loathing of those who do not share it. They are a kind of spiritual pornography that works against spiritual regret, designed to arouse climactic cries of Yes! Yes! in its readers, pleasing the soul’s darker parts by swapping a hollow fantasy of physical union for an equally hollow fantasy of moral warfare: a Manichean vision of a virtuous few battling mightily against everyone else.

Um, okay. What Levinovitz describes as “spiritual pornography” are plain-spoken (if strongly phrased) observations on how far our contemporary culture has departed from traditional Christian teachings and practices. Both books are written for conservative Christian audiences. It offends Levinovitz, the secular fundamentalist, that we take our religion seriously — the same religion whose beliefs he no doubt finds “poisonous” and deserving of being shouted down in the public square.

He cites this passage from The Benedict Option as an example of my “hyperbolic exaggeration”:

Anecdotally confirming what seems to be a trend, a woman in suburban Baltimore said to me, “All those people who say you are alarmist about the Benedict Option must not be raising children.” She went on to say that at her daughter’s high school, a shocking number of teenagers were going to their parents telling them that they think they are transgender and asking to be put on hormones.

What do the parents do?

“You’d be surprised how many of them do it,” the woman said. “They are so afraid of losing their kids. And this is how our culture tells them to react. Parents like this become the fiercest advocates for transgenderism.”

Three months after our conversation, that woman’s daughter came home from high school with the news that she is really a boy, and demanding that her family treat her as such.

This really happened! The woman is a reader of this blog. She told me this in person when I spoke to her after an event. I have heard the same thing from others around the country, and even in my own city. In what sense is this “hyperbolic exaggeration”? Levinovitz prefers that the rest of us not notice these things, it seems.

More Levinovitz:

The 21st-century equivalent is not anti-Catholic but anti-secular, a category capacious enough for atheists, reform Jews, New Age mystics, nihilist Nietzscheans, even liberal Christians — the last of these described by Dreher, derisively, as “moralistic therapeutic deists,” and Esolen, appallingly, as Persecutors and Quislings — anti-anyone, really, whose religiosity is deemed less austere than that of the pornographer.

Calling spiritual pornography a fantasy helps to evoke its psychological appeal, but the world it conjures up is closer to that of the fairy tale. Both genres are built on two foundational features: dramatic arcs that proceed from Order to Disorder to Order, and clearly defined roles and rules that map neatly onto good and evil. It’s a world that trades humans for archetypes, nuance for simplicity, and the tangled skein of history for the orderly vectors of myth — but if you’re on the side of the angels, living in it feels really, really good.

Ah, so I get it: conservative Christians, we spiritual pornographers, are making it all up for perverse ends, because we live in a simplistic, black-and-white world. This, from a man who would see Charles Murray refused a platform on a college campus for a book he co-wrote in the early 1990s, even when he was invited to speak on a much more recent book he wrote about the white working class. In what sense is this not trading “nuance for simplicity”? His entire Slate column is in many ways an example of what he denounces in Esolen and me — but he doesn’t see that because he believes these things are normal and good.

Except here’s what you will never see, read, or hear Anthony Esolen or Rod Dreher doing: recommending shouting down a speaker in public for speech we disagree with, or seeming in any way to legitimize violence as a response to offensive speech. Unlike Alan Levinovitz.

And in this passage, Levinovitz is just trolling:

It also helps to imagine a golden past, while conveniently ignoring developments such as the abolition of slavery and universal suffrage. Dreher includes a section entitled “Democracy, Romanticism, Capitalism: The Calamitous Nineteenth Century,” which finds room for not even one sentence acknowledging slavery.

This “section” is three and a half pages long. Slavery was not relevant to the book’s overall thesis, or to the point of this chapter, which is an attempt at a genealogy of Christianity’s decline in the West. But you wouldn’t know this if you took Levinovitz’s column as an accurate description of The Benedict Option. He writes like someone who picked up a D.H. Lawrence novel and skimmed it until he got to the dirty parts.

More Levinovitzian mendacity:

These distortions are necessary not only to fulfill narrative requirements, but also because the hero of spiritual pornography, like the hero of most fairy tales, is an underdog. The satisfaction of moral superiority is sadomasochistic, requiring a villain holding a whip. “We are a powerless, despised minority,” complains Dreher, repeatedly, flagellating his audience with shared victimhood at the hands of liberal elites — in a book that was twice reviewed in The New York Times and earned him a New Yorker profile.

Here is the actual passage from which he draws that quote:

In thinking about politics in this vein, American Christians have much to learn from the experience of Czech dissidents under Communism. The essays that Czech playwright and political prisoner Václav Havel and his circle produced under oppression and persecution far surpassing any that American Christians are likely to experience in the near future offer a powerful vision for authentic Christian politics in a world in which we are a powerless, despised minority.

See what he did there? The words are accurate, but he quoted it out of context to distort my meaning. I actually wrote that in the future, should we become a powerless, despised minority (as I think likely), we should turn to the example of the Czech dissidents for a model of how to avoid political despair, and stay involved. It would be crazy to call Christians today a “powerless, despised minority” — which is why I did not do it!

Read the whole thing, if you have about seven minutes to waste. It is certainly true that both Esolen and I write in a prophetic mode — in my case (and I suspect Esolen’s as well), because I am trying to get my fellow conservative Christians to grasp the seriousness of the current crisis, and act. If you don’t believe the things Anthony Esolen and I believe, I can see why it wouldn’t make sense to you. But notice that Levinovitz even says flat-out that people like him undermine (“work against”) many of the things people like Esolen and me believe in. That can be just fine, in the sense that a real education requires teaching students to critically examine their beliefs. But it is also the case that professors can mock and deride these beliefs, even if the beliefs are well within mainstream thought and practice.

Esolen just left a teaching position at Providence College, a Catholic school, in part because he ceased to believe that the school upheld Catholic teachings. It is very common for orthodox Catholics on Catholic campuses to experience teachers who condemn what the Catholic Church professes. I’ve mentioned before one untenured theologian who told me that he is afraid to discuss in a neutral fashion what the Catholic Church teaches about human sexuality — even to quote the words of Pope Francis — because he is afraid that students would report him to the administration for creating an “unsafe space” in his classroom. And he is afraid that the university administration would support the students. This, in a Catholic university!

But Levinovitz would have you believe that Christians like Tony Esolen and me are slightly more sophisticated versions of Jack Chick (really, he says this).

Weirdly enough, Levinovitz wrote last year in The Atlantic a good piece defending free speech and the free exchange of ideas on campus, in defiance of the whole “safe space” ideology. Excerpt:

The unpleasant truth is that historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities and members of the LGBT community, are not the only people whose beliefs and identities are marginalized on many college campuses. Those who believe in the exclusive truth of a single revealed religion or those who believe that all religions are nonsensical are silenced by the culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces. I know this is true because I know these students are in my classroom, but I rarely hear their opinions expressed in class.

It’s hard to reconcile the Alan Levinovitz of that article with the one who described some old-fashioned but hardly radical beliefs of C.S. Lewis as “poisonous,” and deserving of “fierce resistance”.

Whoever the true Alan Levinovitz is, I know that he’s given my book and Tony Esolen’s  mendacious readings. To be clear: a man with Levinovitz’s convictions certainly cannot be expected to approve of those books, and it would be unfair to expect him to. That’s not why I object to his short essay, which insults the intelligence of those who read it.

Still, it’s kind of thrilling to know that Prof. Alan Levinovitz thinks The Benedict Option is a dirty book!

Portland Man Believed In Hate

The Portland killings last Friday were an occasion of disgusting villainy and true valor. The two men who gave their lives trying to protect the Muslim girls from abuse and worse at the hands of a knife-wielding racist maniac are heroes, no doubt about it. Read this gripping account of what happened on the train that day, including the words one of the heroes said to the other passengers as he was carried off the train, dying.

Though he was screaming racist epithets at the two Muslim girls, it appears that Jeremy Christian, the alleged killer, is not so much ideologically motivated as driven by chaotic rage. Check out this Buzzfeed dossier on his public record. He has a long criminal record and did a stint in prison, where he established a record of assaults. He has championed right-wing fanaticism with a neopagan flavor, anti-Semitism, anti-Islam, and racism. But he has also publicly supported Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, and said that he could not bring himself to vote for Trump. He is also a monster raving loony on the subject of male circumcision.

It sounds like this man had a demon, so to speak, and that demon was hatred. Maybe something different will emerge at trial, but at this point, it looks like there was no coherent ideology behind what he did, just evil and madness. We should take care not to impose our own preferred narrative onto this monster. It sounds like he grabbed whatever crackpot, bigoted ideas he could find through which to channel his rage.

Obviously that does not in any way justify those wicked beliefs, but for the sake of understanding what actually happened here, we should resist appropriating this story to serve a pre-written narrative. At one point, Christian described himself as a “nihilist,” which is to say, a man who believes in nothing. That might have been the truest thing he said about himself.

To be sure, we should not downplay the role ideology may have played in forming Christian. I don’t like it when the media are quick to dismiss the role Islamist ideology may play in forming terrorists. Similarly, if Jeremy Christian was catechized by white supremacy and related ideologies, we need to know that.

The point I’m making is that if we are to understand why young men give themselves over to this kind of all-consuming hatred, we need to grasp its workings. Was Jeremy Christian a basically decent, if troubled, young man who was radicalized by ideology? Or was he a ragemonkey who grabbed whatever he could to give expression to the anger possessing him? Or was it a combination of both?

For all that, there was a coherent set of beliefs and attitudes driving Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, who died trying to stop Christian, and Micah David-Cole Fletcher, who was seriously wounded doing the same: love, courage, and self-sacrifice. May their memory be eternal. The only way any of this hate-driven violence and intimidation ever gets contained and rolled back is through the courage of men and women like them. I choose to believe that their story is the more important one to come out of this horror.

UPDATE: Reader Osman Amir writes:

Can’t the same be said about the young men in Europe committing these violent acts in the name of Islam? A lot of them have criminal background in petty crime, drug and alcohol abuse and other nihilistic behaviour, and seem to be releasing their anger and hatred through the ideology of islamic extremism. I doubt any of them were true believers in Islamic theology, eschatology, or deeply convinced by the epistemological arguments made in Islamic scripture or by theologians.

This young man in portland is the mirror image of the men in paris, berlin, london, and manchester. And I would venture further and group them in with the school shooters in their character formation.

All this does not negate the real problem of Islamic Jihadism but should give us food for thought in ascribing “islamic” motives for the heinous acts we see far too often these days.

The Down Side Of DNA Testing

A reader writes:

I enjoyed your post about DNA testing–but this sort of thing does have a dark side to it. I think others in the comments section referred to the perpetual “ownership” of your DNA profile by the company and risks related to getting healthcare coverage. Our family experienced a completely different issue.

These tests are being used by adults who were adopted to identify and locate their birth parents–particularly their birth mothers. There is a member of my family who has always been quite private (not revealing her age for example) and left home as a teenager. She was mortified when it was revealed through paperwork needed to help her move closer to family in her old age that her only child was conceived 6 months prior to her first marriage. Many tears.

About a year later, family members were contacted by an individual who had performed a DNA test and was given actual family names and a location based on that DNA profile and a subscription to Ancestry.com. Turns out my family member was raped by a relative as a young girl, was sent away, put the baby up for adoption with anonymous records and specific orders not to reopen the file, and left home to make her way in the world. The baby was adopted into a functional and loving family–yet this individual continued to search for his/her birth parents despite knowing the records had been intentionally sealed. Enter for-profit DNA testing.

This person sent several emails to the younger generation of the family and the whole thing blew up. The elderly birth mother has since spiraled into a massive depression, brothers and sisters are arguing about whose “rights” are more important–birth parents or adoptee–and folks are lawyering up to ensure inheritance issues don’t arise. Google “birth mother doesn’t want to meet” to get a glimpse of how volatile these emotions can be on both sides.

Every now and then there is a feel-good story in the newspaper about a birth mother being reunited with a child they put up for adoption. I always wonder how many untold stories there are that didn’t end quite so well. Lesson learned though for the current generation: between DNA testing, social media, and Google absolutely no adoption is private anymore. Soon I suspect no “unknown” paternity will be private either.

Perhaps this is for the best overall. But I know for one person DNA testing “for fun” by her family members caused great anguish in her last few years on earth.

Playing A Bad Hand Badly

Watch as Stuart Jones, a high-level acting official in the State Dept, is asked why they criticize Iranian elections but never Saudi Arabia: pic.twitter.com/RLkKGn48Z7

— Alex Emmons (@AlexanderEmmons) May 30, 2017

That is … wow. That’s something. This man is the Acting Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. To be fair to him, there is no answer that is both honest and consistent with US policy. Which tells you something about US policy.

Marshmallow Vs. The Mob

If you have even the slightest doubt about what kind of tyrannical mob is now running Evergreen State in Washington, take a look at this video of their protests the other day. Notice especially the pathetic punching bag named George Bridges, president of the college, who sits there masochistically allowing these berserkers to abuse him. This video is NSFW:

In response to the mob intimidation — much of which is explicitly anti-white and racist — Bridges capitulated almost entirely. Here are excerpts from his response, published in the student newspaper:

I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.

Oh gawd…

I begin our time together today by acknowledging the indigenous people of the Medicine Creek Treaty, whose land was stolen and on which the college stands. I would like to acknowledge the Squaxin people who are the traditional custodians of this land and pay respect to elders past and present of the Squaxin Island Tribe. I extend that respect to other Native people present.

In response to Native Student Alliance requests, we commit to opening every event with this acknowledgement.

Yes, this is how George Bridges, the president of the college, speaks. More:

We have heard from students very clearly that they experience racism on campus that interferes with their education. We acknowledge that the status quo isn’t acceptable. We don’t know all the answers. We want to come together with you to learn from your experience, to build solutions, and to take action. We are grateful for this catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.

For a long time, we’ve been working on the concerns you’ve raised and acknowledge that our results have fallen short. We should have done more to engage students in our work on equity and inclusion. This week, you are inviting us into the struggle you have taken up. We share your goals and together we can reach them.

Evergreen State is a fringe-left campus, yet these students seem to believe that it’s Ole Miss circa 1955. Heaven help any teacher on campus who has to try to do his or her job with an administration that empowers a deranged mob. More:

[Student demand:] “We demand mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training for faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees.”

Immediate action:

The United Faculty of Evergreen and the College have executed a memorandum of understanding committing to mandatory training. I’d like to Invite Grace Huerta to speak about the agreement we’ve reached today. It reads:

“Now, therefore, the parties agree as follows:

“We share a mutual interest in ensuring that all Evergreen students receive an education that is culturally competent, culturally relevant and free from the negative effects of bias.

“To achieve this, we recognize that Evergreen faculty members must have access to, and take advantage of, professional development opportunities to address subjects including but not limited to institutional racism, and the needs of students of color, LGBTQIA students, undocumented students, victims of sexual assault, and students with disabilities.

“We commit to annual mandatory training for all faculty beginning in fall 2017.

“This agreement was ratified today by both parties”.

Next steps:

Required training for all staff currently includes a review of the college’s non-discrimination policy. We commit to providing cultural competency, sensitivity, and anti-bias training in the training required of all staff. By requiring this training for all staff, we will also ensure that all search committee members are trained. We’re launching staff training in the fall and offering it throughout the year.

“We demand the creation of an equity center.”

Immediate action:

Today we commit to establishing a new and expanded equity and multicultural center with design plans finalized for student review by the beginning of fall quarter this year. You will have the space that you seek and deserve.

Next steps:

The design of the center will be informed by students. Over the summer, we seek to hire students to design and plan for a new equity and multicultural center in collaboration with staff. They will be compensated for their time. A final plan for implementation will be developed following the work completed this summer.

Et cetera. Bridges concludes by thanking the mob for abusing him and his colleagues:

Let me reiterate my gratitude for the passion and courage you have shown me and others. I want every one of you to feel safe on this campus and be able to learn in a supportive environment free from discrimination or intimidation.

Yes, but Bret Weinstein and others on campus who disagree with the mob cannot teach or learn on Evergreen’s campus, because President Bridges is afraid to do his job.

I’m telling you, if you are a college professor, you had better learn how to resist the insanity on campus by joining Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy group right now. Here’s Haidt’s response to the latest round of witch hunts on campus. Excerpt:

There are several lessons that American professors can draw from these three events:

1) Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted. You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.

2) Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you (as Weinstein and the Christakises found out). Whatever your politics, you are eventually going to say or do something that will be interpreted incorrectly and ungenerously. Your intentions don’t matter (as Dean Spellman found out at CMC.) This is especially true if your university offers students training in the detection of microaggressions.

3) If a mob comes for you, there is a good chance that the president of your university will side with the mob and validate its narrative (as the presidents at Yale and Evergreen have done, although the presidents at Middlebury and Claremont McKenna did not).

4) If a mob comes for you, the great majority of its members will be non-violent. However, given the new standard operating procedure (which I described in a recent Chronicle article entitled “Intimidation is the New Normal”) you must assume that one or more of its members is willing to use violence against you, and you can assume that many members of the mob believe that violence against you is morally justifiable.

… Many faculty and students report being afraid to speak up openly and honestly on many issues, even in seminar classes. What will presidents and administrators do about it? What will alumni and trustees do to put pressure on presidents and administrators to do something about it? When will the faculty begin to stand up en masse?

When indeed. Read the whole thing. 

And might I ask when will state legislators start raising hell about this stuff when it occurs at state-funded colleges like Evergreen? What’s wrong with Washington state lawmakers?

UPDATE: Reader Mr. Pickwick comments:

My youngest son is a student at a state university in Oregon, and says that the level of intolerance and intimidation by the Far Left on campus is impacting the educational experience. He is by no means a conservative or a Republican. Here’s just one example of what he is encountering. He was astonished to show up for the first session of a particular class of a required writing course to find that the theme of the course was “Toxic Masculinity.” He tried to tough it out, but after several sessions of being a minority of one (he objected to the assumed collective guilt of all straight, white males), he found that he simply couldn’t bring himself to enter the classroom anymore. The never-ending verbal assaults and mob-think were just too much to take. And he could no longer write the assigned papers (about how bad straight males were) in good conscience. He was afraid to tell his academic advisors about what was going on (didn’t want to be identified as An Enemy of the People). One advisor seemed to figure out what was going on, and urged him to file a complaint. But my son feared that he would be targeted by the mob. So he flunked the course, which endangered his financial aid.

Good news: he is now re-taking the course, but from a different professor. This professor has injected no politics or ideology into the class, so now my son is flourishing. In fact, none of the courses he is taking this quarter pose any problems in terms of Far Left intolerance. He filed an appeal with financial aid, and (without mentioning the subject of the course) explained how the mob mentality in the course brought on a personal crisis. Financial aid granted his appeal.

Moral of the story: at schools where the intolerant Far Left is allowed to throw its weight around, serious students have to be very careful about course selection. My son avoids any course with a description that makes any reference to gender, race or privilege. Generally, he avoids courses in the English department. He gravitates toward courses in the Pol Sci, History and German deparments (although even in those departments he still exercises caution). And there are, here and there among the faculty and administration, decent people who are trying to uphold the best aspects of academia. Example: even though many students and faculty at his school are on board with the Far Left,, there are at least two profs who are members of the Heterodox Academy. More power to them.

Fusionism & The Conservative Future

Writing in the conservative journal Modern Age, Samuel Goldman counsels fellow conservatives to move with extreme caution in the Age of Trump:

Conservatism does have to adapt if it is to survive the Age of Trump. But a conservatism that panders to populist fantasies and embraces the morality of professional wrestling is not worth saving. One place to start rebuilding amid the ruins is a return to the blueprint developed by political theorist Frank Meyer as the modern conservative movement was first taking shape. “Fusionism” is part of the conservative past. But it may also be the future.

Fusionism, as you probably know, is the concept that united the libertarian Right and the traditionalist Right in the 1950s. It found a way to accommodate the small-government/pro-market beliefs of libertarians with the concern for virtue and social order among traditionalists. Ronald Reagan was the ultimate fusionist conservative candidate.

Goldman delivers a good basic explanation of fusionism (which readers new to the term will recognize as mainstream American conservatism of the last half-century), and contrasts it to Trumpian populism. He notes fusionism’s failures, and concedes that however crude Trumpism may be, it didn’t come from nowhere. Yet he believes that Trumpian populism does not provide any kind of solution to the problems fusionism has failed to resolve. Excerpt:

[T]he insufficiency of one solution does not necessarily mean that a better one is available. The midcentury industrial workplace really did provide a stable and dignified life, especially for men who took pride in their mastery of things rather than facility with numbers or words. Unfortunately, we have no idea how to bring it back.

We also have no idea how to restore a “thick” national identity without employing unacceptably coercive means. It is easy to forget that the common culture of fond memory was made possible by policies that included the legal suppression of America’s largest immigrant culture (the German-speaking Midwest) during the First World War, and mass conscription and a virtual takeover of the economy and media during World War II. The comfortable sense of belonging many Americans enjoyed half a century ago was also buttressed by the formal and informal exclusion of black people from the mainstream of American life. These were bad measures that no one seriously proposes to revive.

I think Goldman has hit on the very serious dilemma facing conservatives now. The old way of doing things — fusionism — has failed to address deep structural problems in American life. Populism, though, proposes solutions that are arguably unjust and unworkable. Giving the state more power does not bother traditionalists as much as it does libertarians, but only because traditionalists don’t mind using the state to achieve virtuous ends. But trads (like me) have to confront the fact that we are a post-Christian democratic nation, and that concentrating power in the hands of the state will in most cases be used against us.

Read Goldman’s entire essay. He contends that conservatives should abandon the idea that we will ever have a polity as unified as we once did, and that a reformed fusionism — reformed in light of the failures of the fusionist status quo that gave rise to Trumpist populism — still gives us the best principled hope for realizing conservative ends in this environment.

I guess I agree with this by default, if only because I see no prospect that Trumpism, for which I have a certain sympathy, can work. Even if Trump were to seek to empower and to encourage virtue — that’s okay, I can wait for you to stop laughing — the plain fact is that we are now too fissiparous a society even to agree on what virtue is. What fusionism works out to in practice, it seems to me, is business interests using traditionalists (chiefly Christian conservatives) as useful idiots to get what they want out of government. Do you see the Republican Party standing up for traditional values and virtues in the face of the LGBT juggernaut within corporate America? Of course not. And the truth is, traditional values on matters of sex and sexuality are increasingly unpopular. We really are a post-Christian nation.

That said, it still makes sense for trads to work within the Republican Party. If the GOP is not promoting our interests, at least it is not outright hostile to them, as the Democrats are. The long-term trend in our country, however, is running against traditionalist Christians. We cannot expect GOP politicians in a democracy to stand up for values that a diminishing number of American share. And we cannot expect politics to solve, or even adequately address, the core crises of American culture and society. We are much more likely to get the breathing space to work on our own localist solutions if Republicans (either populist or fusionist) are in power, but that’s about all we can hope for.

Despite what you’ve heard from some quarters, the Benedict Option does not call on Christians to abandon political involvement. Rather, it calls for Christians to re-prioritize their concerns. For too long, too many conservative Christians have acted as if the most important thing we can do for the country is to vote Republicans into office. Meanwhile, our churches have rotted from within. Massive numbers of Millennials are drifting away from the church, and those who stay are, like most of the older generations, really Moralistic Therapeutic Deists. As Robert Louis Wilken said back in 2004:

At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.

This is not surrender. It is a strategy for facing our post-Christian reality. It is not a call for Christians to abandon politics entirely — I don’t believe we can or should do that — but it is a call to understand the nature of the times, and to commit our attention and our resources to building up the life of the church in truly countercultural ways. We cannot expect as much from Republican politicians or politics itself as many of us wish to think that we can. Continuing to respond as if we were in normal times in this regard amounts to a fruitless shoring up of the declining imperium, when what is most needed — not exclusively needed, but most needed — is what we have neglected among ourselves for far too long: building up the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.

In his most recent column, Dennis Prager (who is Jewish) criticizes Trump-opposing conservatives:

I have concluded that there are a few reasons that explain conservatives who were Never-Trumpers during the election, and who remain anti-Trump today.

The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.

While they strongly differ with the left, they do not regard the left-right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.

Well, I wasn’t one of the Never-Trumpers, and I do believe that we are indeed engaged in a great battle in this country. The difference between Prager and me has to do with the nature of the war. The idea that Donald Trump is in charge of the forces of righteousness is farcical. And the idea that the line between the forces of good and evil in this war is drawn between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, is delusional.

Prager also makes the shopworn “Georgetown cocktail party” criticisms, accusing Never-Trumpers of being too prissy and self-involved to embrace Trump:

They can join the fight. They can accept an imperfect reality and acknowledge that we are in a civil war, and that Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters. But too many of them, some of the best minds of the conservative movement, are AWOL.

I beg them: Please report for duty.

What, exactly, is Donald Trump fighting for? And why is the righteousness of that cause so overwhelmingly clear that it requires conservatives to abandon their principles for the sake of winning power? This is not clear at all to me. The Trump phenomenon is, to me, a sign that we traditionalist conservatives have already lost the war. The Benedict Option is the most important form of resistance open to us.

As I have written here, a conservative Evangelical friend who doesn’t like Trump told me that his crowd has gone all-in for him because “they don’t have a Plan B” — meaning that they have no idea what to do if they lose power. They don’t realize that they — that we — have already lost power, and if we keep telling ourselves that we can win it back, we will continue to neglect the most important work we can and should be doing right now.

We are not engaged in a battle to “preserve the nation”. We are engaged in a battle to save the church. It is entirely possible that we could preserve the nation, whatever that means, but lose the church. Both are important to me, but I know which one matters more.

UPDATE: Patrick Deneen has an essay about conservatism in the Age of Trump in the same issue. Excerpts:

In the roughly half century of political ascendancy of American conservatism, little was recognizably conserved. The economic landscape of America was remade not only by a series of free trade agreements that accelerated globalization and economic integration but also by internal policies, both federal and local, that favored large corporations over small business. The rise of big-box stores was coincident with the postwar creation of suburbia and settlement patterns that found Americans increasingly living often at vast distances from work, school, church, and commerce. Findings by social scientists, most prominently Robert Putnam, demonstrated a consistent and substantial decline in the associational life of Americans and the rise of forms of what Tocqueville predicted would be the dominant democratic ethic of individualism. Every religious tradition, with the notable exception of Mormonism, saw extensive losses in adherents, especially pronounced among the millennial generation whose commitments to “none” began approaching the 50 percent mark. Schooling increasingly emphasized both sensitivity and utilitarian skills, rejecting traditional efforts to steward history and perpetuate a culture. Universities, in turn, became dominated by left-wing identitarians and a bloated corporate administrative class that together eviscerated distinctive cultural and religious institutional traditions in a deracinated commitment to vague social justice and job preparation. The media became saturated with explicit sexuality, incessant sarcasm, and default mockery of traditionalist beliefs. Pornography went mainstream. Demonstrations of bathetic patriotism became obligatory at every public event even though a tiny minority of Americans would ever be directly affected by the inconveniences of military service. In nearly every aspect of American life, little worth conserving was conserved.

American conservatism was ultimately a failure because it advanced a liberalism that has now been visibly revealed to be fundamentally destructive of the fabric of lives of a wide swath of countrymen, particularly those who are in many respects by design the “losers” in the liberal order. The rejection of American conservatism was most fundamentally a rejection of American liberalism, and Trump was the carrier of anxieties not over the course of the Republican and Democratic parties but the American order itself. Yet, far from ensuring the rise of a new and more credible conservatism, the rise of Trump may signal that no conservatism arising from the morass of contemporary American anticulture is viable. [Emphasis mine. — RD]

More:

If nothing else, the exceedingly narrow victory of Donald Trump may be understood as the last gasp of a dying conservatism that has been destroyed by American liberalism. That “instinctive understanding of inherent limits” may be the animating attraction to a vision of Trump’s promises for a nation with a border and a common culture; a foreign policy largely defensive instead of a de facto empire; a capital drained of cronies and riggers; and the liberty to call things as they really are, including men, women, and children. Yet protection of this instinct was given to a man with no apparent conservative values or vision, less a sign of hope than desperation. Conservatism may have a future in America, but it will arise most likely from families and intentional communities that live as a counterculture to self-immolating American liberalism, and not as something that will be created in a political laboratory by the educated or from the wreckage of a Flight 93 administration in Washington, D.C.

Yes. This. Shore up the imperium if you like, but understand that in doing so you are conserving very little that matters, or should matter, to socially conservative religious traditionalists.