Rod Dreher's Blog, page 465

Alton Sterling Cops: No Charges

After almost a year of exhaustive investigating, the US Justice Department announced today that it would not file charges against the two Baton Rouge police officers in the Alton Sterling case.  You’ll recall that Sterling was the black man shot dead in a scuffle with two white police officers last year. The Obama Justice Department conducted a full investigation, and found no grounds to file federal civil rights charges in the matter. From the federal statement:

The Department examined the facts in this case under all relevant federal criminal statutes. The federal criminal statute applicable to these facts is Title 18, United States Code, Section 242, Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law. In order to proceed with a prosecution under Section 242, prosecutors must establish beyond a reasonable doubt that a law enforcement officer acted willfully to deprive an individual of a federally protected right. The right implicated in this matter is the Fourth Amendment right to be free from an unreasonable seizure. This right includes the right to be free from unreasonable physical force by police. To prove that a police shooting violated the Fourth Amendment, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of force was objectively unreasonable based on all of the surrounding circumstances. The law requires that the reasonableness of an officer’s use of force on an arrestee be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with added perspective of hindsight. The law set forth by the Supreme Court requires that allowances must be made for the fact that law enforcement officers are often forced to make split-second judgments in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.

Additionally, to prove that a shooting violated section 242, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers acted willfully. This high legal standard – one of the highest standards of intent imposed by law – requires proof that the officer acted with the specific intent to do something the law forbids. It is not enough to show that the officer made a mistake, acted negligently, acted by accident or mistake, or even exercised bad judgment.

Although Sterling’s death is tragic, the evidence does not meet these substantial evidentiary requirements. In light of this, and for the reasons explained below, the federal investigation concluded that this matter is not a prosecutable violation of the federal statutes.

More:

The investigation revealed that at approximately 12:30 a.m. on July 5, 2016, an individual called 911 from a location near the Triple S Food Mart (“Triple S”) and reported that he had been threatened outside of a store by a black man wearing a red shirt and selling CDs. The caller reported that the man had pulled out a gun and had the gun in his pocket. The caller’s first call disconnected, but he called back a few moments later and reiterated his report. Dispatch relayed that information to Officers Lake and Salamoni, who responded to the Triple S, where they saw Sterling, wearing a red shirt and standing by a table with a stack of CDs.

The subsequent exchange between Sterling and the officers happened very quickly, with the events – from the officers’ initial approach to a struggle on the ground to the shooting – happening in rapid succession. From the moment when Officer Lake gave his first order to Sterling, through the firing of the final shot, the entire encounter lasted less than 90 seconds. More specifically, from the start of the officers’ physical struggle with Sterling on the ground, through the firing of the final shot, the encounter lasted less than 30 seconds.

Multiple videos captured portions or the entirety of the officers’ interaction with Sterling. These include cell-phone videos, surveillance video from the store, and video from the officers’ body cameras and a police vehicle. FBI video forensic experts also provided enhancements of relevant videos for the portion of the struggle that immediately preceded the shooting.

The videos show the officers as they arrived on scene and engaged with Sterling. The videos show that the officers directed Sterling to put his hands on the hood of a car. When Sterling did not comply, the officers placed their hands on Sterling, and he struggled with the officers. Officer Salamoni then pulled out his gun and pointed it at Sterling’s head, at which point Sterling placed his hands on the hood. After Sterling briefly attempted to move his hands from the hood, Officer Lake then used a Taser on Sterling, who fell to his knees, but then began to get back up. The officers ordered him to get down, and Officer Lake attempted unsuccessfully to use his Taser on Sterling again. Officer Salamoni holstered his weapon, and then tackled Sterling; both went to the ground, with Officer Salamoni on top of Sterling, who was on his back with his right hand and shoulder partially under the hood of a car. Officer Lake joined them on the ground, kneeling on Sterling’s left arm while Officer Salamoni attempted to gain control over Sterling’s right arm. Officer Salamoni then yelled, “Going for his pocket. He’s got a gun! Gun!” Officer Salamoni then unsuccessfully attempted to gain control of Sterling’s right hand, while Officer Lake drew his weapon and yelled at Sterling, again directing him not to move. Less than one second later, during a point at which the location of Sterling’s right hand was not visible to the cameras, Officer Salamoni again yelled that Sterling was “going for the gun!” Officer Salamoni then fired three shots into Sterling’s chest.

After the first three shots were fired, Officer Salamoni rolled onto on his back, facing Sterling’s back, with his weapon still drawn. Officer Lake stood behind both of them with his weapon drawn and pointed at Sterling. Sterling began to sit up and roll to his left, with his back to the officers. Sterling brought his right arm across his body toward the ground, and Officer Lake yelled at Sterling to “get on the ground.” As Sterling continued to move, Officer Salamoni fired three more rounds into Sterling’s back. Within a few seconds, Officer Lake reached into Sterling’s right pocket and pulled out a .38 caliber revolver. Investigators later confirmed that Sterling’s gun was loaded with six bullets at the time of this exchange.

Following the shooting, Officers Salamoni and Lake each provided a detailed statement offering his version of how and why this shooting happened. According to the officers, Sterling was large and very strong, and from the very beginning resisted their commands. The officers reported that they responded with multiple different compliance techniques and that Sterling resisted the entire time. Both officers reported that when they were on the ground, they saw Sterling’s right hand in his pocket, with his hand on a gun. Officer Salamoni reported that he saw the gun coming out and attempted to grab it, but Sterling jerked away and attempted to grab the gun again. Officer Salamoni then saw “silver” and knew that he had seen a gun, so he began firing. Both officers reported that after the first three shots, they believed that Sterling was attempting to reach into his right pocket again, so Officer Salamoni fired three more times into Sterling’s back.

So:

Alton Sterling had a fully loaded weapon in his pocket
He refused police orders to put his hands on the car, until an officer pointed a weapon at him
Even then, he tried to remove his hands from the car
The Taser did not work on him (he was 6’3″ and weighed over 300 pounds)
The officers could not subdue Sterling, especially not his right hand, which they both testified was reaching for the gun in his right pocket. This could not be verified with the camera, but the fact that his right hand was not under the officers’ control was verified by the camera, as was the fact that he had a loaded pistol in his right pocket

More from the Justice Department statement:

The investigators also consulted with two independent, nationally recognized use-of-force experts with whom the Civil Rights Division has previously consulted in civil rights cases. While both experts criticized aspects of the officers’ techniques, they also concluded that the officers’ actions were reasonable under the circumstances and thus met constitutional standards. The experts emphasized that the officers were responding to a call that someone matching Sterling’s description had brandished a weapon and threatened another person; that Sterling was large and strong; and that Sterling was failing to follow orders and was struggling with the officers. The experts noted that the officers also attempted to control Sterling through multiple less-than-lethal techniques before ultimately using lethal force in response to Officer Salamoni’s perception that Sterling was attempting to use a gun.

Read the entire Justice Department statement. 

Keep in mind as you watch the coverage over the next few days that Alton Sterling was a thug with a long criminal rap sheet, including:

 

9/09/96 aggravated battery
10/31/97 2nd degree battery
1/06/98 simple battery
5/04/00 public intimidation
9/20/00 carnal knowledge of a juvenile
9/04/01 domestic violence
5/24/05 burglary of an inhabited dwelling place
7/11/05 receiving stolen things
9/12/05 burglary of inhabited dwelling place
3/17/06 simple criminal damage to property, simple robbery, simple theft, drug possession, misrepresentation during booking, simple battery, aggravated battery
4/12/06 aggravated battery, simple criminal damage to property, disturbing the peace, unauthorized entry
4/04/08 domestic abuse battery
6/03/09  resisting an officer, drug possession, receiving stolen things, possession of stolen firearm, illegal carrying of a weapon with CDs,       sound reproduct without consent
10/12/09 illegal carrying of weapon, marijuana possession
8/13/15 failure to register as a sex offender
4/08/16 failure to register as a sex offender
6/14/16 ecstacy and marijuana possession

As The Hayride pointed out last summer in the wake of the protests following the shooting:

What this arrest record shows is not the story the family and the “community” is trying to paint, of a “misunderstood” poor father trying to earn a living selling CD’s. He got arrested three weeks ago on drug possession – that’s hardly somebody trying to turn his life around. His arrest record shows that, charitably, he was a wannabe drug dealer but wasn’t very good at it.

And since he knew that gun was illegal and he was likely to be off to jail for a good while for having it, you can understand struggling with the police. Not to mention that if he was arrested three weeks ago for possession of ecstasy, you now have at least something to speculate about as to why he could be tazed and it wouldn’t even affect him. We know that gang-bangers use ecstasy, or a form of it called thizz which is something akin to crystal meth, as fuel for street violence, and it’s often mixed with marijuana for maximum effect. There was even a sizable drug case involving a rap label that was apparently a front for an ecstasy ring a few years ago.

Again, not a whole lot of this matters where the shooting is concerned unless the cops had a reasonable suspicion he was trying to get his gun.

The facts uncovered by the Justice Department indicate that the cops had a reasonable suspicion that he was trying to get his gun. To be clear, they were only investigating potential civil rights violations; the feds have handed the investigation back to state authorities to pursue possible criminal charges. Which I’m sure will not be filed, because what are the grounds?

Note well that this federal investigation had long been underway by the time Jeff Sessions took over the Justice Department. This result cannot be blamed (“blamed”) on Trump. Indeed, right after the shooting, a retired police officer friend of mine who has strong views about police violence surprised me by saying that based on his viewing of the tape, the officers’ conduct was defensible. I think what the acting US Attorney in Baton Rouge said today is true:

“There are no winners here, and there are no victories for anybody. A man has died, a father, a nephew has died. My heart goes out to the family.”

This is a tragedy. But it is not racism, and it is not police brutality.

 

Hatmaker Heresy

My friend Tish Harrison Warren, a priest in the Anglican Church of North America, has been taking a lot of incoming fire over this important essay calling into question the teaching authority of popular lay commentators in the Christian blogosphere. Tish rightly sees this as a “crisis of authority,” and writes:

One of the most prominent recent examples of this crisis involves the popular blogger Jen Hatmaker, who last year announced that her views about homosexuality have changed. She was cheered by some and denounced by others. LifeWay stopped selling her books. Aside from the debate about sexuality, broader questions emerged: Where do bloggers and speakers like Hatmaker derive their authority to speak and teach? And who holds them accountable for their teaching? What kinds of theological training and ecclesial credentialing are necessary for Christian teachers and leaders? What interpretive body and tradition do these bloggers speak out of? Who decides what is true Christian orthodoxy? And how do we as listeners decide whom to trust as a Christian leader and teacher?

These are massively important questions for the church, no matter which side of the gay questions you come down on. More Tish:

Yet, in this new Internet age, women still—as much as men—deserve the best teaching the church has to offer. We don’t need less than funny stories, relatable prose, or charming turns of phrase, but we certainly need more than that. We need teachers and writers who can break our hearts with beauty and who also do the hard work of biblical interpretation, of learning the doctrines and history of the church, and of speaking clearly out of a tradition that they name and know. As Christian women, all of us can embrace writing and teaching that is relevant, compelling, and down to earth, and also ask that our leaders—both male and female—embrace theological study, intellectual rigor, and church hierarchy and accountability.

And I’d like to submit to my fellow female writers and teachers, in particular, that part of our responsibility as Christian leaders is to take on the burden, the joy, and the accountability of being deeply rooted in the church—not only privately and personally, but publicly and institutionally. If we are to help build not just a personal brand but a beautiful, faithful church for generations of women (and men) to come, we must work to strengthen and shape institutions larger than ourselves and submit ourselves to the authority and oversight of Christ’s church, even as we are honest about its frailty and faults.

Why does the authority question matter? One more clip from Tish’s piece:

In his essay “Sinsick,” Stanley Hauerwas famously explores the notion of authority using a medical analogy. If a medical student told his advisor, “I’m not into anatomy this year, I’m into relating” and asked to skip anatomy class to focus on people, the medical school would reply, “Who in the hell do you think you are, kid? … You’re going to take anatomy. If you don’t like it, that’s tough.” Hauerwas delivers his crucial point by saying: “Now what that shows is that people believe incompetent physicians can hurt them. Therefore people expect medical schools to hold their students responsible for the kind of training that is necessary to be competent physicians. On the other hand, few people believe an incompetent minister can damage their salvation.”

The church has said for millennia that bad teaching is more deadly than bad surgery. Now we have an influx of teachers who become so by the stroke of a key. The need for formal structures of training, hierarchy, and accountability in medical schools and medical boards is obvious because we don’t want our doctors to simply be popular or relatable; we want them to practice medicine correctly and truthfully, participate in a medical tradition broader than themselves, and serve under the authority and oversight of others. We need to be as discerning in whom we trust with care of souls as we are with care of our bodies.

Read the whole thing. It’s a really important piece.

The lefty Evangelical writer Jonathan Merritt responded that he would “take courageous Jen Hatmaker over her cowardly critics any day.” He hysterically accuses these critics of engaging in “character assassination.” Excerpt:

Jesus may not be prophesying about modern America, but his words remind us that religious people have a tendency to believe that they’ve been commissioned by God to purify the church of those who refuse to genuflect to the whichever Christian warlord is ruling their region. These people will work to expel dissenters from the community in the name of God, convinced that heaven looks on them with favor for their efforts. In this regard, 1st century Palestine doesn’t look all that dissimilar from 21st Century America.

To express views as Jen Hatmaker did took guts. It took courage. She knew there would be blowback from the evangelical mafia for stating what she believed, but she stood up and spoke up anyway. She knew that angry letters would follow, that she might lose some fans and followers and readers. But she decided to speak the truth anyway.

“Truth”? What is truth? Merritt has decided that his smelly little liberal orthodoxy is Truth, because it suits what he prefers to believe. I have no doubt that he believes Hatmaker spoke the truth, but how does he know it’s the truth? On what grounds does he, an Internet commenter, determine that Hatmaker speaks truth and Warren speaks falsehood? He unintentionally confirms Warren’s point: that there is a crisis of authority within the church, and that it is really important.

It is worth pointing out that even churches that have formal structures of teaching authority are caught up in this crisis too. It is often impossible for orthodox Catholics to argue with liberal ones, many of whom believe they are under no obligation to submit their consciences to the authority of the Roman church, even though that is the key thing that sets them apart as Catholics from Eastern Orthodox and Protestant believers. I would wager that an orthodox Catholic would be more likely to find Christians who agreed with him on key moral issues at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary than on the faculty of Boston College. Formal structures of authority are necessary, but in liquid modernity, insufficient.

Denny Burk, who teaches at SBTS, reminds Merritt that “it is not ‘character assassination’ for the church to be the church.” Excerpt:

There are more problems in Merritt’s article than I can address in a single essay, but it is worth pointing out some of the more significant mischaracterizations. The entire 2,000-year history of the Christian church has spoken univocally about homosexuality. Faithful Christians have always believed what the scriptures teach about this. Homosexuality is sexual immorality and is therefore sinful (Rom. 1:26-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-11; 1 Tim. 1:10). We understand that this is an unpopular point of view today, but it is nevertheless what the church has always believed and confessed.

There are many voices within the North American evangelical movement that are turning away from what the church has always believed and confessed. Hatmaker is now among them. They are trying to tell people that sexual immorality is compatible with following Jesus. And they are asking the rest of the church to accept their point of view as within the orthodox stream.

The problem is that their teaching never has been, is not, and never will be within the orthodox stream. It will always be a mark of those who have fallen away from the faith. Theirs is an ancient error—one that can be found within the pages of the New Testament itself:

“Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 3-4)

What is this departure from “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”? What is this teaching that amounts to a denial of “our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” and that puts adherents under “condemnation”? It is the teaching that distorts the grace of God into a permission slip for sexual immorality. It is the errant notion that somehow God is okay with sexual immorality after all.

But He’s not okay with it. And neither are his people, the church. Faithful Christians are never going to accept this teaching. The true church is never going to embrace this. It may look otherwise to those who are focused on Christian organizations in the secular west. But this is not an accurate picture of the church worldwide, which is overwhelmingly with the orthodox on this question. And if we give attention to what G.K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead”—the faith of the church throughout the ages—it becomes very clear that American revisionists are a tiny schismatic minority. Just an ounce of historical and global perspective puts the lie to the notion that the revisionists are winning the day on this. They are not.

They may win the day in the United States — that remains to be seen — but if so, theirs will have been a Pyrrhic victory, because the compromises they will have made to accommodate this extremist revisionism will have destroyed the church. As I wrote in a 2015 post highlighting an interview between William Kristol and David Gelernter: 

Why was Obergefell the tipping point? (And believe me, it really was; as longtime readers know, I’ve been writing about this stuff for at least a decade, but few people paid attention until Obergefell.)

The Obergefell ruling was only possible as the conclusion of a long period of the dissolution of the ties that bind (in the Connerton sense). When the Supreme Court can find in the Constitution the right to deny not only biological reality, but virtually the entire history of Western thought and practice about sex and social relations, we have entered into uncharted waters. Obergefell is critically important because of what it says about individualism and desire in our post-Christian culture, and because anti-discrimination principles will be the instrument in which Christian individuals and institutions are banished from the public square, both in law and in culture.

In short, Obergefell is a condensed symbol of nominalist, therapeutic, individualist culture, and how it has conquered the American mind and the American Establishment. Roe v Wade was a part of this long march away from our past, and anything that would restrict individual liberties because of a Christian moral order, but it wasn’t as revolutionary. Roe did not challenge the basic idea of gender, marriage or family, much less write the cultural revolution that did into constitutional law.

What does this have to do with Kristol and Gelernter? Notice this from Gelernter:

So we have second-generation ignorance is much more potent than first-generation ignorance. It’s not just a matter of one generation, of incremental change. It’s more like multiplicative change. A curve going up very fast. And swamping us. Taking us by surprise.

Young adults today, especially many Christian ones, cannot explain in even a rudimentary way why we believe and do the things we do. It’s all about individual choice and preference for them. And so they don’t really know that they are guided by their own passions, and that these choices are being made for them, because neither their parents nor their normative institutions gave them any grounding in the past, or outside of themselves. Their religious institutions have by and large been conquered by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, an infinitely malleable faith that bears only tangential resemblance to what came before it.

And here is Kristol, again:

What strikes me today is – correct me if I’m wrong – is there’s not even that sense of lack or of not knowing or knowing that you don’t know or admiring the people who really know. It’s almost not even a sense of what it would mean to really know something. Is that exaggerating?

Gelernter says it is no exaggeration. I have heard the same thing from other college professors, men and women who teach at Christian colleges. Most of the kids they teach don’t know what they don’t know, and critically, don’t care.

The Benedict Option has to be about learning to love the past, and to care about it, to the point of suffering for it. And not just “the past,” which can become an idol, but the God and the faith that comes to us through the past, in Scripture, and in Tradition. We cannot make it up as we go along. Churches that do this in an attempt to be relevant and seeker-sensitive are preparing their flocks for assimilation to the secular culture.

The Czech dissident novelist Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The struggle of Christians in the West today is not the struggle of conservatives versus liberals, but the struggle of remembrance against amnesia.

The Jonathan Merritts of the world would have the church forget everything it knew until the day before yesterday, for the sake of accommodating what they wish were true. Those who follow them will be following them right out of Christianity, whether they realize it or not. Today they look like the secular culture at prayer. Their kids — if they have any — will wonder why bother with prayer. And that will be the end. Look at European Christianity.

If you are inclined to agree with Merritt on the nature of religion and authority, I advise you to watch A Man For All Seasons, or at least this one-minute clip:

If Merritt, Hatmaker, and their philosophical allies (whose number includes professing Catholic and Orthodox Christians) are willing to cut down the authority of Scripture and tradition, however understood, for the sake of casting out something they view as a diabolical prejudice, what will they do when, say, a race-supremacist Christian declares that the “truth” is something that is clearly antithetical to Biblical teaching? Where will they stand, having denied any binding authority outside of individual subjectivity?

As Peter Brown, a leading contemporary historian of the early church, puts it in his magisterial work The Rise of Western Christendom, the barbarian invasions that overturned the Roman Empire in the West did not happen at once:

The Roman frontier was not violently breached by barbarian ‘invasions.’ Rather, between 200 and 400, the frontier itself changed. From being a defensive region, which kept Romans and “barbarians” apart, it had become, instead, an extensive “middle ground,” in which Roman and barbarian societies were drawn together. And after 400, it was the barbarians and long longer the Romans who became the dominant partners in that middle ground. The Middle Ages begin, not with a dramatic “fall of Rome,” but with the barely perceived and irreversible absorption, by the “barbarians,” of the “middle ground” created in the Roman frontier zone.

What Denny Burk and Tish Harrison Warren are doing is defending the borders. This is vital work.

The Cost Of Christian Denial

I’m not sure what Catholic writer Phil Lawler thinks of The Benedict Option, but I know for a fact that he is not fooled about the seriousness of the crisis, at least in his own church and archdiocese. Excerpts:

[I]n the past 50 years, the Archdiocese of Boston has opened zero new parish churches. Over the same span, roughly 125 parishes have been shut down or merged into “cluster” units.

This might be understandable, if the Boston’s Catholic population had disappeared. But it hasn’t—at least not according to the official statistics. On paper, it has grown. There were about 1.8 million Catholics registered in the area covered by the Boston archdiocese 50 years ago; today the official figure is 1.9 million.

The trouble, of course, is that most of those 1.9 million Catholics aren’t practicing the faith. Consequently it should be no surprise that their sons don’t aspire to the priesthood. There were just over 2,500 priests working in the archdiocese 50 years ago; now there are fewer than 300. That’s right; nearly 90% of the priests are gone. If you can’t replace the priests, you can’t keep open the parishes.

Let’s be frank. These figures are not a cause for concern; they are a cause for horror. Panic is never useful, but something close to panic is appropriate here. Things have gone terribly, terribly wrong.

More:

Although the situation in Boston is unusually bad, it is not unique. All around us, the same sad trends are in evidence. Parish closings and wholesale diocesan retrenchment programs have become familiar. How should we respond?

Here are two possible responses:

A) “This is a disaster! Stop everything. Drop what you’re doing. “Business as usual” makes no sense; this is a pastoral emergency. We don’t just need another “renewal” program, offered by the same people who have led us into this debacle. We need to figure out what has gone wrong. More than that. We know that the Gospel has the power to bring people to Christ; therefore it follows that we have failed to proclaim the Gospel. The fault lies with us. We should begin with repentance for our failures.”

B) “Don’t worry. Times change, and we have to change with them. Religion isn’t popular in today’s culture, but the faith will make a comeback sooner or later. We just need to keep plugging away, to have confidence, to remember God’s promise that the Church will endure forever.”

You see what’s wrong with argument B, don’t you? Yes, the Lord promised that the Church would last through the end of time. But he did not promise that the Archdiocese of Boston (or your own diocese) would last forever. The faith can disappear, indeed has disappeared, from large geographical areas—northern Africa, for instance.

Moreover, it’s both presumptuous and illogical to assume that the faith will make a comeback in another generation or two. The young adults who today don’t bother to marry in the Church are not likely to bring their children there for Baptism (if they have children). Those children, years later, aren’t likely to feel the urge to go back to their parish church (if it still stands), since they were never there in the first place. The Catholic faith is passed down from generation to generation. If parents stop teaching their children, those children have nothing to teach the grandchildren. In two generations, a thoroughly Catholic society can become mission territory. Look at Boston. Look at Quebec. Look at Ireland.

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

This is not only true about the Catholic faith, but also true about all forms of the Christian faith. Do not take what you have for granted. I highly recommend The Final Pagan Generation, by Edward J. Watts, a historical work explaining how fourth-century Roman elites who had been educated in classical paganism had no idea that their world was about to vanish.

A reader e-mailed from an Evangelical school yesterday to say that from what he can tell, the Evangelical right hates the Benedict Option book because it calls out the failure of the Religious Right. The Evangelical left hates it because they are ready to compromise (quietly) with the culture on moral theology. And most of the people who actually read the book but disagree with it don’t really think the situation on religious liberty and the rest is as bad as Rod Dreher does.

I’m not sure how true any of that is — you Evangelical readers tell me what you think — but it sounds plausible. I don’t take seriously (as a challenge to the Ben Op) the Christian left’s reaction, because what Christians like me see as evidence of decline, they see as evidence of progress. Their spiritual progeny will not last in the world to come. Note well that I am not talking about left-of-center Christians whose leftism is found in their economic views. I am talking about those who compromise on moral teaching, especially on sex and sexuality, and on the nature of religious authority. Ultimately our division is on metaphysics, but that’s an argument for another time.

I do take the old-line Christian right’s views more seriously, because in some real sense, these are my tribe. I take this Amazon reviewer of The Benedict Option to be typical of their view of the book:

The writer makes timely observations about the deterioration of our culture and the decline of Christianity’s influence. Yet his solution elevates just one school of Christian discipline as the solution, that of the Benedictines.

Mixed with the good there is a whole lot of man-made dross, lifting liturgy & other catholic ideas like celibacy to the level of Biblical teaching. Better stick to Scripture and continue its solution – the Great Commission of proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But not retreat. Never, ever retreat.

Well, the reviewer is simply wrong. In no way do I do that to liturgy or celibacy in the book, though I do talk about sexual discipline (which is a Biblical teaching!), and I discuss the role of liturgy in forming the imagination. If you are an Evangelical reader of the Protestant philosopher James K.A. Smith’s popular books on cultural liturgies (“Desiring The Kingdom,” “Imagining The Kingdom”), the discussion will make sense to you. This reviewer reads it through ideologically Evangelical eyes, and rejects any claim, or any discussion of any claim, that doesn’t make 100 percent sense to him as an Evangelical.

Most telling is his idea that the “solution” is evangelizing, and not doing anything that even looks like retreat. I admire the reviewer’s zeal, but this point of view is like encouraging soldiers armed with swords and clubs to charge into a machine-gun fusillade, on the theory that it’s better to die being ineffective than to live to keep fighting in the long war.

A close observer of Evangelical theology and culture wrote me to reflect on why there is so much Evangelical pushback to the Ben Op book [Note: I should say here that it’s also the case that Evangelicals have overwhelmingly been the most enthusiastic receivers of the book.] He told me that there’s a self-critical saying among Evangelicals holding that their typical strategy is, “Ready, Fire, Aim.” That, coupled with the fact that Changing The World is in their missional DNA, renders them susceptible to jumping to conclusions about anything that challenges their model.

The observer adds that many Evangelicals view conversion not as a lifelong process of steady repentance and dying to self, but rather as a singular moment in time. The kind of thing I discuss in The Benedict Option — the necessity of incorporating the Gospel into a holistic and disciplined way of life — doesn’t make intuitive sense to people who believe the summit of Christian activity in the world is preaching the Word and leading people to accept Jesus as their Savior.

I think this point has been one that I have been slow to grasp, given that I have no Evangelicalism in my own background and experience. The idea that Christians can or should cease to evangelize is bizarre to me, and nowhere in my book do I claim it. To cease to evangelize is to disobey the Great Commission. Yet as I write in the book:

But you cannot give what you do not possess. Too many of our churches function as secular entertainment centers with a religious moral slapped on top, when they should be functioning as the living, breathing Body of Christ. Too many churches have succumbed to modernity, rejecting the wisdom of past ages, treating worship as a consumer activity, and allowing parishioners to function as unaccountable, atomized members. The sad truth is, when the world sees us, it often fails to see anything different from nonbelievers.

Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co- opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize. Without a substantial Christian culture, it’s no wonder that our children are forgetting what it means to be Christian, and no surprise that we are not bringing in new converts.

The point is, evangelism is largely pointless without discipleship: the sustained and continuous formation of the individual Christian into the disciplines of the Christian life. Evangelical professors keep telling me that the typical student at their Christian college is one who is filled with strong emotions about Jesus, but with little or no formation in the habits of Christian thought and living. Their faith is built on sand, which is why it is not likely to survive the rising floodwaters of liquid modernity.

This is a point that cannot be emphasized strongly enough. After one accepts Christ, then what? That is not the end of the journey, but rather the beginning. Very few of us will be called to be Benedictine monks, of course, but all of us are called to lives of discipleship. Benedictines have a rigorous model of Christian discipleship that they, as monks, follow. The Benedict Option explores what we lay Christians have to learn from their example, for the sake of strengthening our own discipleship. Because here’s the deal: if we Christians today do not embrace lives of ever more radical discipleship, rooted firmly in Scripture and in historical Christianity, we are going to cease to be Christian. 

It’s like this. The great historian Robert Conquest said that this is his Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” Adapted to Christianity, this might say, “Any Christian individual, church, or organization that does not understand itself as orthodox and live accordingly will sooner or later become heterodox.” (A helpful variation of this is Neuhaus’s Law: “Where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.”)

It is also true that given the nature of post-Christian culture, to affirm heterodoxy is to cross a Rubicon that will eventually cause the evaporation of faith. A Christianity that has fully accommodated itself to this post-Christian culture of the West does not have the resources to withstand it. Read Phil Lawler! His lesson is by no means limited to Roman Catholics, but is valid for Protestants and Orthodox as well. Lawler’s “Answer B)” is what I hear, more or less, from Evangelicals like the Amazon reviewer of my book I cited above. Lawler:

“Don’t worry. Times change, and we have to change with them. Religion isn’t popular in today’s culture, but the faith will make a comeback sooner or later. We just need to keep plugging away, to have confidence, to remember God’s promise that the Church will endure forever.”

Yes, it will endure forever, somewhere in this world. It seems to be doing well in Africa, for example. But if you really think the church will endure forever in the West, or in the United States, I invite you to write to the chancery office in the Diocese of Hippo Regius to ask how things are going for them.

Adapting Lawler, I strongly urge all my Christian readers to understand that the Christian faith is passed down from generation to generation. If parents stop teaching their children, those children have nothing to teach the grandchildren. If pastors, churches, and Christian schools stop teaching and discipling their children, those children will think Christianity is about nothing more than assenting to general propositions, and arranging their emotions to make themselves comfortable. In two generations, a thoroughly Christian society can become mission territory.

This is happening now. We are living through this. Those who think the religious liberty situation isn’t all that bad should reflect on the fact that the ACLU is now suing California Catholic hospitals for refusing to do transgender surgeries. Maybe the ACLU will not prevail. One certainly hopes not. But this assault on religious liberty will never, ever end. The left does not for one second intend to agree to live and let live. In a post-Christian culture, one that is both increasingly secularizing and that has come to see sexuality is constitutive of identity, you’d have to be a fool to think that courts are going to uphold a strong religious liberty wall of protection in the long run. We may have some victories in the short run, but the law does not exist in a vacuum. If culture changes, so will the law and its interpretation. Yesterday a reader who is a law student e-mailed to say:

I was just reading education chapter of The Benedict Option over lunch. You hit the nail on the head when discussing the total ignorance students regarding the history of Western thought. You might think it would be different in law school because we at least have to learn about the Common Law. Sadly, no. Law school is a seminary of modern progressivism. First principles are rarely worthy of discussion. Only relevance matters. The mysterious science of the law is described as neither mysterious nor science but simply prejudice wrapped in the cloak of an undeserved constitution. And it’s important to emphasize that, though the faculty deserve some blame, this trend is largely driven by students, who care only about advancing their self interests while engaging in various virtue signaling rituals to demonstrate the depth of their devotion to the anti-culture.

You really think the coming generation of lawyers and judges will care about defending religious liberty when they see it as nothing more than a cloak for bigotry? Are you willing to stake your future on that?

Moreover — and this is even more important — the churches themselves may capitulate. Look at these 2016 Pew numbers on the views held by self-identified Christians on religious liberty and government coercion on policies related to sexuality. Chart here:

Note that a very strong majority of Catholics do not even support the religious liberty position of their own church on mandatory birth control. A majority of Evangelicals do, and generally hold the line for religious liberty, but they’re the only ones. This poll does not break out white Evangelicals into age groups, but do any conservative Christians really believe the trend lines among Evangelicals (or anybody else) are headed in a direction favorable to religious liberty?

If you want to see a glimpse of our potential future, see this story from Belgium, in which parts of the Catholic Church are surrendering to the culture of death:

Brother René Stockman is the superior general of the Brothers of Charity, a “congregation” of the Catholic Church which cares for the poor and the needy. Although residing in Rome in recent years, he has been one of the leading voices in Belgium opposing legalised euthanasia. This week the Belgian region, where the congregation started in the 19th Century, announced the startling news that its hospitals would offer euthanasia to non-terminally-ill psychiatric patients who request it. This was big news in the Belgian media because the Brothers are a major player in Belgium’s healthcare system, with 15 psychiatric hospitals and a number of other projects.

More, from the interview with Brother René:

Is this a world-first as the official position of a Catholic institution?

No, we know that in Belgium there are individual psychiatric centers where euthanasia is done, but the fact that a group with 15 psychiatric centers and with a so-called authority in the field of mental health care is doing that in a formal way is unique.

What proportion of places for the mentally i ll are run by the Brothers in Belgium and in Flanders?

As said, we have in Belgium 15 psychiatric hospitals (13 in Flanders and 2 in Wallonia), with 5,000 patients.

The refusal of the Brothers to allow euthanasia in their institutions has been described by critics as a major obstacle to the growth of euthanasia. So will this change in policy, if it goes ahead, have a big impact on psychiatric care in Belgium?

Yes, of course. All those who were against us are now singing that finally the group of the Brothers of Charity capitulated and came into their camp.

As this story explains, the board governing the Brothers of Charity facilities is now constituted by a majority of lay persons. As the culture has secularized in Belgium, so have Christians. Though we are farther behind the Europeans, it is happening here too. 

Phil Lawler is right. The Catholic Church — and all the Christian churches — in America are in crisis. Now is not the time to live in denial — and denial includes assuming that continuing to do the same thing that we’ve been doing is sufficient to meet the grave challenges of our time and place. “But not retreat. Never, ever retreat,” says the Evangelical reviewer. Keep thinking like that, and you will not notice that your supply lines have been extremely thin, as they now have, and vulnerable. When they are cut, what will you do, having advanced so mindlessly, without noticing how radically conditions on the battlefield have changed, and how thoroughly the hearts and minds of our own troops have been colonized by the barbarians who have been ruling us for some time?

 

Benedict Option For Secular Liberals

A reader writes:

I find it interesting how many people on all ends of the political spectrum insist that BenOp requires heading to the hills, when there are examples of other versions everywhere. And not just orthodox Christian ones. There are secular BenOps all over the place. (So… SecOps?) Seriously. What else would you call what’s happening with education in New York City?

Here, from the NYT, is what he’s talking about:

A look at the history of District 3, which stretches along the West Side of Manhattan from 59th to 122nd Street, shows how administrators’ decisions, combined with the choices of parents and the forces of gentrification, have shaped the current state of its schools, which, in one of the most politically liberal parts of a liberal city, remain sharply divided by race and income, and just as sharply divergent in their levels of academic achievement.

In 1984, two years before Ms. Shneyer started kindergarten, less than 8 percent of the district’s 12,321 elementary and middle school students were white. Not a single school was majority white, and the only school where white students made up the biggest group was P.S. 87 on West 78th Street. At the time, many white parents would not even consider their zoned schools. James Mazza, who served as deputy superintendent, and then superintendent of the district, from 1988 to 1997, recalled in an interview that parents would sometimes come into his office carrying a newspaper with the test scores of every school in the district and explain that they didn’t want to go to their zoned school because of its place on the list. Though scores are often used as a shorthand for quality, they correlate closely with the socioeconomic level of the children in a school.

“We tried to encourage people to make the decision about what school to attend based on more information than test-score results,” Mr. Mazza said, adding that that was often difficult. So the district pursued another strategy for attracting white, middle-class families: adding gifted classrooms, dual-language programs and schools that were open to all students from around the district.

Thanks to these options, more white families began sending their children to District 3 elementary and middle schools. Today, over a third of the roughly 14,000 elementary and middle school students in District 3 are white. But they are unevenly distributed. All but one of the zoned elementary schools below West 90th Street are now majority white. But because white parents elsewhere in the district take advantage of alternatives to their zoned schools, elementary schools in more ethnically diverse neighborhoods, like Manhattan Valley and Morningside Heights, remain largely black and Hispanic, and poor. Their test scores trail those of the district’s mostly white schools, and as the neighborhoods gentrify, their enrollment is declining.

(Back to the reader’s comments):

Upper class liberals are segregating themselves from minorities just as completely as white southern conservatives did in the era of school desegregation. These people have the opportunity to send their kids to school with blacks and latinos, but don’t. In fact, they spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to avoid doing just that. Of course, others take another path and just move to the exurbs. Still others go full monasticism for their kids and send them off prep schools in the mountains.

Why? They will tell you it’s for “academic excellence.” But really that’s just a code for “those other people don’t value what I value.” Which of course is exactly what the white Christian southerners said, right?

The key to all of this, I think, is that the BenOp is way easier when you either don’t know or don’t admit what you are really doing. A lot of potential BenOp fellow travelers really don’t want to confront or otherwise sandbag their existing parishes. They don’t want to admit that what they are doing is not working. So for those who have to ADMIT it, it’s really hard.

Look at the rich liberals. Look at the links. See them squirm and object when it’s pointed out what is really happening. NO! THIS IS NOT A REJECTION OF MINORITIES! We LOVE minorities! Look at my music collection! I went to Harvard with an Iranian guy, and there are like three Indian guys in my orthopedic practice! Diversity!

Sure.

Maybe they don’t reject their neighborhood minorities because of their skin color. That would be declasse. No. We just… really care about STEM classes! Or… we really care about the arts! Of course, this is saying that people living in their neighborhoods DON’T care about STEM and the arts. Or don’t care as much. And, you know, those families just so happen to be black and latino.

Fact is, those black and latino families are way more likely to be led by single mothers. They are more likely to religious. They are more likely to engage in super gauche activities like smoking and smacking their kids to punish them. The SecOp families know that it takes a village. It takes a culture. It takes a forceful rejection of the liquid modernity of their neighborhoods. So they build their own institutions and build walls around them and keep the smokers and kid smackers out, so Bryson can concentrate on getting into Princeton without, you know, those people. And those Indian guys from the orthopedic practice send their kids to the private school, too, so … diversity!

Sure.

We know BenOp does not require heading to the hills because the Dalton School is totally BenOp for secularists. And it’s not in the hills.

Amen. Oh, the lies people tell themselves to conceal from themselves and their friends what they’re doing and why.

Look, I don’t fault any parent of any racial, religious, or socioeconomic background for trying to get the best educational situation they can for their kids. I don’t blame anyone for wanting their kids to be in a school that’s safe, orderly, and focused on learning, and where the students, their parents, and their teachers share the same values. This is normal human behavior. But come on, let’s not be hypocrites about it, okay?

When Even A Porn Star Feels Guilty…

Whenever I go to a Christian college to speak, I talk to professors, staffers, and campus ministers about what they’re seeing among the students. Two things always come up: 1) far too many of their students know next to nothing about the Christian faith, and 2) pornography is a massive problem.

At one Christian college I visited over the past few months, a professor said, “For the first time, I’m starting to see it becoming a problem for my female students, not just the male ones.” A campus minister who works with young undergraduates headed for professional ministry told me that every single one of the men he mentors has a porn addiction.

Every. Single. One.

A Catholic priest who ministers on campus said that porn addiction is the biggest problem he deals with in his work. “Nothing else even comes close,” he said. And these are the undergraduates who recognize that it is a problem; many of them don’t see at that way at all.

A lot of Christian parents are totally in denial about what they’re aiding and abetting by providing their kids with smartphones. You know who’s not in denial? The porn superstar James Deen. In this piece from The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf takes note of Deen’s concern about pornography and the young. (Warning: there is some graphic description in the piece.). He begins by quoting from this 2012 profile of Deen by Amanda Hess:

Emily was sitting in her fourth-grade classroom when she was first introduced to porn. “These boys were sitting next to me, talking about boobs,” she says. Emily asked one of them what that meant, and “he stared at me like I was crazy.” In school the next day, the boy slipped her a piece of paper with a URL written on it. She caught “like five seconds’ worth of humping” before closing the page.  Now 17, Emily is distributing porn links of her own—this time, to other teenage girls across the United States.

Emily runs a Tumblr blog dedicated to her two obsessions: Twilight and James Deen. Thanks to Deen, Emily is no longer watching porn for the generalized humping. “When I watch his videos, I don’t really pay attention to the sex,” Emily says. “I watch his videos for his reaction. It amazes me.”

Friedersdorf quotes at length from Deen’s recent interviews, nothing that “he now feels there is an ethical dilemma in porn.

On one hand, the industry’s success depends on its being accessible to mass audiences online. On the other hand, Deen is convinced that the accessibility of porn is harming young people.

Here, he quotes Deen:

I’ve had conversations with business partners, the people that run––well, they run a bunch of adult web sites. This guy, he’s a father of two, and we were having a conversation about how I want all adult web sites, I want everything to be behind an age-verification wall. You can’t just say, “Yes, I’m 18”—you actually have to input a credit card, or something, the best you can, to create an 18-and-older environment… And he said––and I agree with him––“As a father I agree with you 100 percent, I would love to do that. As a businessman, I will go out of business in a day.”

Think about that: here is a man who makes his living exploiting young people, enticing them to watch things that he does not want his own children to see. If this were a just and sane society, he would be out of business, or in jail. I am not remotely a libertarian on this stuff.

Friedersdorf:

Just as likely, the industry will instead invest in virtual reality, and the teenagers of 2023 will see pornography that even Deen’s teenage fans could scarcely have imagined.

Insofar as that is a problem, it is not because seeing sex is inherently damaging to young people––for thousands of years, a village’s adults had no bedroom walls for privacy––but because what young people see, when exposed to hard core pornography, resembles real sex only as much as a Jackie Chan sequence resembles a real fist fight. Yet it creates the illusion of reality, then reaches sexually inexperienced porn consumers in a society where there are few graphic but non-pornographic portrayals of sex, and where accessing hard core porn is (properly) legal, but a teenage couple texting naked pictures to each other is a criminal sex offense.

No one would choose anything like that information ecosystem for the sexual acculturation of young people. But technology evolved in a way that made it so, changing the social landscape faster than humans evolved norms to mitigate its flaws. Mercenary concerns are delaying any hedge. The consequences remain to be seen.

Read all of Friedersdorf’s piece.

This society has a death wish. I wish I had some idea how it could be saved. What concerns me most of all right now is the horrifying complicity of conservative, even conservative Christian, parents in the spiritual, moral, and emotional ruin of their children and of their moral ecology because they, the parents, are too damn afraid to say no, my kids will not have a smartphone, I don’t care what they and society think of me.

If this is you, stop and think about what you’re doing! If even a porn star is worried about it, why aren’t you?

I strongly, strongly urge you to buy my friend Andy Crouch’s new book The Tech-Wise Family.  It’s about how and why to reclaim a space for your family from technology. It’s not mostly about sex and technology, but that is the focus of the final chapter. According to data in the book, more than half of teens ages 13-17 seek out porn, and three out of four young adults aged 18-24 do. He writes:

The porn-saturated culture comes to see sex itself as a kind of technological enterprise — to be assisted with various devices and techniques that ensure satisfaction, remove vulnerability and uncertainty, and require neither wisdom nor courage, just knowledge and desire (and knowledge of one’s own desires). The next frontier in porn will be enhanced by virtual reality and robotics, so that devices substitute entirely for other people, allowing for a perfectly controllable experience of solitary ecstasy.

But Crouch cautions:

The truth is that if we build our family’s technological life around trying to keep porn out, we will fail. Pornography saturates our society even if you somehow manage to never click on an “NSFW” (not safe for work) website. … The path to health is not encasing our children in some kind of germ-free sterile environment that they will inevitably try to flee; rather, it is having healthy immune systems that equip us to resist and reject things that do not lead to health.

According to Barna Research, whose data Crouch uses in the book, “the vast majority of teens (79 percent) say they have no one in their life helping them to avoid pornography. And those who do are most likely to say it’s a girlfriend of boyfriend rather than a parent or spiritual advisor.”

Andy Crouch concedes in this chapter that he once had a porn addiction. His wife helped him overcome it. He doesn’t come at this topic from a position of outside judgment, but as a Christian who has struggled personally with it. There is no mere technological fix for this challenge. It has to involve the whole family. I was talking earlier today with a couple of readers who administer a classical Christian school. I mentioned the Friedersdorf piece to them, and said that I really want to help parents realize how serious this situation is regarding kids, porn, and smartphones, “but I don’t want to freak them out.”

“Freak them out,” said one of the men. “They need to be freaked out. That’s the reality we’re dealing with.”

So it is.

Sully’s Sympathy For Neoreaction

Andrew Sullivan has really been on fire lately. I think his leaving blogging and returning to long-form essays has been great for him. In his latest piece for New York, Sullivan writes about why everyone needs to take reactionaries seriously. Excerpts, with my comments interspersed:

Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power.

He’s right about reaction not being the same thing as conservatism. I don’t agree that the GOP is a reactionary party, though I can see why one might think so. Maybe the Republicans are headed that way, but whatever the GOP is, powerful is not a word I would use to describe them. True, they hold the White House and Congress, and ought to be powerful. But they can’t seem to get much of anything done. Our Big Reactionary President is an administrative incompetent of no particular political or philosophical conviction. That doesn’t necessarily spare him from the “reactionary” label, and certainly true reactionaries were enthusiastic about his candidacy. But Trump? Not really.

That said, I believe Andrew is onto something. Right-of-center politics is going to be more reactionary in the future. The problem with reactionaries right now is they are not politically organized. Trump is turning into a more or less normal Republican because he doesn’t know what else to do, and it’s a role that a lot of DC Republicans are willing to help him learn. What’s going to be interesting is to see if and how reaction rises from the grass roots right. I don’t sense a lot of enthusiasm for the standard Republican positions. (Similarly, on the left, I don’t think we’re going to see any more Hillary Clinton types, though this is going to take a lot of time to sort out.)

More Sully:

You can almost feel the g-force today. What are this generation’s reactionaries reacting to? They’re reacting, as they have always done, to modernity. But their current reaction is proportional to the bewildering pace of change in the world today. They are responding, at some deep, visceral level, to the sense that they are no longer in control of their own lives. They see the relentless tides of globalization, free trade, multiculturalism, and mass immigration eroding their sense of national identity. They believe that the profound shifts in the global economy reward highly educated, multicultural enclaves and punish more racially and culturally homogeneous working-class populations. And they rebel against the entrenched power of elites who, in their view, reflexively sustain all of the above.

I know why many want to dismiss all of this as mere hate, as some of it certainly is. I also recognize that engaging with the ideas of this movement is a tricky exercise in our current political climate. Among many liberals, there is an understandable impulse to raise the drawbridge, to deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation, to prevent certain concepts from being “normalized.” But the normalization has already occurred — thanks, largely, to voters across the West — and willfully blinding ourselves to the most potent political movement of the moment will not make it go away. Indeed, the more I read today’s more serious reactionary writers, the more I’m convinced they are much more in tune with the current global mood than today’s conservatives, liberals, and progressives. I find myself repelled by many of their themes — and yet, at the same time, drawn in by their unmistakable relevance. I’m even tempted, at times, to share George Orwell’s view of the neo-reactionaries of his age: that, although they can sometimes spew dangerous nonsense, they’re smarter and more influential than we tend to think, and that “up to a point, they are right.”

This is true. In France, nobody really believes that Emmanuel Macron is the future. He will probably win the French presidency this weekend because most French voters fear a National Front future. But the issues that drive the National Front are at the core of France’s politics. As my colleague Scott McConnell writes, quoting an unnamed National Front activist, if Marine Le Pen had a different last name, she might be winning this thing. Anyway, if you were betting on French politics over the next 20 years, would you really bet on the cosmopolitan centrists, or the reactionary right? This may not be the National Front’s year, but the forces that have carried the party toward the center of France’s politics are only going to grow stronger. Do you doubt it?

Sully offers short profiles of three reaction-oriented contemporary thinkers — Claremont’s Charles Kesler, Michael Anton, and Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) — some of whose ideas sound great to me, but others (Yarvin’s “Receiver”) are nuts. The point to take from this is that there is real variation among the reactionary right. And then he writes:

Reaction is a mood before it is anything else, and I know its psychological temptations intimately. Growing up steeped in traditional religion, in a household where patriotism seemed as natural as breathing, I became infatuated with a past that no longer existed. I loved the countryside that was quickly being decimated by development, a Christianity that was being overwhelmed by secularism, and an idea of England, whose glories — so evident in the literature I read, the history I had absorbed, and the architecture I admired — had self-evidently crumbled into dust. Loss was my youthful preoccupation. The mockery I received because of this — from most of my peers, through high school and college — turned me inward and radicalized me still further. I began to revel in my estrangement, sharpening my intellectual rebellion with every book I devoured and every class I took. Politically I was ferociously anti-Establishment, grew to suspect and even despise much of the liberal elite, and rejoiced at Margaret Thatcher’s election victories.

So a sympathy for writers and thinkers who define themselves by a sense of loss comes naturally to me. I’ve grown out of it in many ways — and the depression and loneliness that often lie at the core of the reactionary mind slowly lifted as I grew more comfortable in the only place I could actually live: the present. But I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV. I’ve become entranced by the novels of Michel Houellebecq, by his regret at the spiritual emptiness of modernity, the numbness that comes with fully realized sexual freedom, the yearning for the sacred again. Maybe this was why as I read more and more of today’s neo-reactionary thought, I became nostalgic for aspects of my own past, and that of the West’s.

Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.

I was surprised to read my name in this piece, though Andrew and I are friends. I catch hell from actual reactionaries for failing to be sufficiently reactionary. In fact, I have never identified as a reactionary precisely because the people who do see me as “cucked.” Though I hate the term, they’re not wrong, in that I recoil from the hard edges of their point of view, especially the racialism that motivates so many of them. I suppose for me, I’m much less interested in political reaction than I am in cultural reaction. And unlike Yarvin, I fear a strong state, much preferring a weaker state with strong mediating institutions.

Unlike many reactionaries, I do not believe there was a Golden Age in the past to which we should return, unless you consider the vastness and complexity of the Christian era of the West a “Golden Age.” I don’t consider it a Golden Age in the sense that there were no problems, but it was a better time than we have today because we held religious truth in common, and whatever conflicts arose from that, we had a commonly-held source of moral truth and authority with which to solve them. More than politics, though — and I need to stress this — we lived within a civilization that, however imperfectly, understood itself as peoples of the Bible. The loss of this fundamental truth entails the loss of many others. It is seemingly impossible to convey to moderns — many Christians among them — why the rise in material living standards in the post-Christian era cannot begin to compensate for that loss.

I question too Andrew’s characterizing his moving away from reactionary views a matter of growing in maturity. Perhaps it was with him, but couldn’t it be that for some people, moving towards reaction is growing in maturity, if by “maturity” we mean wisdom? I can think of a couple of reactionaries I know who strike me as deeply immature men. But I can think of many more progressives I know whose progressivism derives from not being able or willing to face the more challenging realities in life. I think we need to be careful about this kind of thing. My guess is that what most people believe politically from age 18 to 25 has more to do with their inward emotional state than with a serious consideration of ideas.

Sullivan:

And is it any wonder that reactionaries are gaining strength? Within the space of 50 years, America has gone from segregation to dizzying multiculturalism; from traditional family structures to widespread divorce, cohabitation, and sexual liberty; from a few respected sources of information to an endless stream of peer-to-peer media; from careers in one company for life to an ever-accelerating need to retrain and regroup; from a patriarchy to (incomplete) gender equality; from homosexuality as a sin to homophobia as a taboo; from Christianity being the common culture to a secularism no society has ever sustained before ours.

I give Sullivan a lot of credit here. It hardly needs to be pointed out that he, as a gay man, has been one of the great beneficiaries of these changes. Yet he recognizes the staggering revolutionary nature of these changes — and, because he doesn’t believe that his homosexuality is the only relevant part of his identity, he also feels the loss of the old world, to a certain extent. He grasps the self-serving delusion embraced by so many Westerners today: that progress is not only inevitable, but always a good thing. Indeed, that’s why they call it “progress.”

But what if the changes are not progress at all, but rather regress? To call it “progress” is to have a fixed goal in mind, and to believe that we are steadily moving in that inevitable direction. The British political philosopher John Gray has powerfully criticized the modern view of progress, calling it (rightly) a secularization of the Christian belief that history is headed toward a fixed conclusion. Marxism adopted this worldview, and reframed the End of History as the realization of Full Communism, and the withering of the State. Progressives today, both of the liberal and conservative variety, accept unthinkingly that history is moving towards a global paradise of free markets and free individuals all exercising maximal Choice. In this sense, there is less difference between Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton than between Ronald Reagan and a contemporary reactionary.

Sully is not, however, a neoreactionary:

This, of course, is not to defend the neo-reactionary response. Their veiled racism is disturbing, and their pessimism a solipsistic pathology. When Anton finds nothing in modernity to celebrate but, as he put it to me, “nice restaurants, good wine, a high standard of living,” it comes off as a kind of pose, deliberately blind to all the constant renewals of life and culture around us. When Houellebecq has one of his characters sigh, “For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless,” I chortle. When Dreher hyperventilates that today’s youngsters “could be one of the last generations of this thing called Western civilization” and that American Christians today must “live lives prepared to suffer severe hardship, even death, for our faith,” I take my dogs for a walk. When Yarvin insists that “if the 20th century does not go down in history as the golden age of awful government, it is only because the future holds some fresher hell for us,” I check my Instagram account. There is something hysterical here, too manically certain, bleaker than any human being can bear for long.

Well, to be clear, I don’t at all agree with Yarvin or Houellebecq, and I don’t think I agree with Anton either. Only a few years before I was born, in my Southern town apartheid was legal, and black citizens lived under a reign of terror. I’m serious: read this 1964 magazine article describing events in my own town.  A few years back, I met three Freedom Riders who had been part of those events. It really happened. Thank God those days are over.

Yet we cannot easily dismiss the words that a melancholy older black man, a taxi driver, said to me in 1993 as he drove me down a decimated avenue of Washington, DC, which was then at the peak of its murder epidemic. He told me about what it was like for him growing up in segregated DC. He pointed to storefronts and buildings that were now vacant and decaying. “That was a bakery, and that was a drugstore,” he said. “Black-owned. We had something back then.” On and on he went, describing the way this blasted-out part of town looked in his youth, and cursing the young black men who do nothing but sell drugs and shoot each other. I squirmed in the back seat listening to this older black man tell these stories to me, a young white man, but he didn’t hold back. I got the feeling that he wasn’t even paying attention to me, but was rather just musing aloud. He ended by telling me that he wasn’t sure at all that there had been progress. Yes, segregation was gone, but look around you, son, at what we black folks in DC have lost in the last thirty years.

That is a reactionary sentiment. And it’s important. I did not experience that old black taxi driver calling for the return of segregation, or lamenting its passing. I experienced him as a man aware of  human tragedy. The progressive narrative requires that the old man’s views be suppressed. But he knew what he saw all around him.

In The Benedict Option, I write of a conversation between two women I know personally:

On a warm evening in the late autumn, a recently retired woman sits on the front porch of her neighbor’s house, talking about the ways of the world. It is two weeks before the Trump-Clinton election, and everything seems to be going to pieces, the neighbors agree. How did our country get to this place? they wonder. Both of the women are working class by culture, born into poverty but thanks to economic and cultural changes in the mid-twentieth century, they are now entering their golden years as members of a modest middle class. America has been very good to them and their families.

Yet neither woman is confident about the future for their grandchildren. One tells the other that in the past year, she has gone to six baby showers for young women in her family and social circles. None of the expectant mothers had husbands. Some had more than one child out of wedlock. The gray-haired women know what poverty and insecurity are like, and they can’t believe that these young women would bring children into the world without fathers in the home, given how much more likely children in those situations are to be poor. And where are the fathers, anyway? What is wrong with young men these days?

These women are pro-life Christian conservatives who would never countenance abortion. They would rather see babies born than exterminated in the womb, no matter what the cost. Still, the normalization of having children outside of marriage is hard for them to take. In the 1940s, when they were born, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among whites was 2 percent. It is now nearly 30 percent (the overall birth rate to unwed mothers is 41 percent). “It’s like the whole world is coming apart,” sighed one of the women.

“I’m glad I’m not going to be around to see it,” said the other.

The world of today is more kind to babies born outside of wedlock and to their mothers in one respect. Yet it is harsher in another one, in the sense that the relaxation of the taboo against unwed childbearing has brought about a hell of a lot more of it — and with it, more poverty and more social unraveling. These two old women have high school educations and could not analyze what happened and why with much historical or sociological awareness. But they feel the impact of the change, and they don’t know how the future is going to play out, because they have never lived in a world in which the traditional family has collapsed. They can barely comprehend such a thing. But they see it every day, and grieve over it. I know these women, and know they both have very kind hearts. Their grief is not out of anger, but out of pity and concern for those children, and the hard lives they know those kids will have.

I bet they and that old black DC cab driver would have a lot to say to each other about progress.

Anyway, on Sullivan’s piece, read the whole thing.  He talked about how unworkable reactionary political programs are, and my guess is that he’s right. In my own case, I don’t see the Benedict Option as any kind of political program. I see it as an orientation towards the modern world, and a set of practices that will prevent Christians from being torn apart by the forces reshaping our culture. It is a strategy of resistance and resilience — indeed, of resistance through resilience. Whether our country remains on the liberal democratic, consumerist, globalist track, or whether it convulses in reaction, the Christian faith faces immense challenges, now and in the future. We had better be ready.

A Tale Of Two Photos

If you read the New Yorker profile of me, you saw that this photo (by Maude Schuyler Clay) is the one they chose to illustrate it:

Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay, for the New Yorker

Maude Schuyler Clay is a terrific portraitist. You can see her other portraiture here — please do go see it, because it’s something else. Her 2015 collection Mississippi History is mesmerizing; Richard Ford wrote about it for the New Yorker here.

Yesterday, Maude e-mailed a different photo from that long Sunday afternoon session:

Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay

This is what I think I look like. This is what I feel like inside most of the time.

But the first photo — the one New Yorker photo editor Thea Traff chose — reveals a profound truth about me, a truth that Joshua Rothman’s profile also captures, I think. I have been thinking all week about it, to be honest. I think Maude’s more conventional portrait is magnificent, but I believe the unconventional one is arguably more truthful, or at least far more illustrative of the truth Josh Rothman tells in his piece, titled “The Seeker.” I think the juxtaposition of the two images tells us something important about art, truth-telling, and discovery. Let me explain.

Often I’ve remarked here on how strange it is for me to meet people in person, and have them tell me that I’m a lot more laid back than they expected, given the nature of my writing on this blog. Well, the photo in front of the cracked mausoleum is how I am in everyday life. That’s the me you meet — and my happiness there is not incidental to the broken tomb, insofar as it is symbolic of the Jesus Christ of whom we Orthodox sing at Pascha:

Christ is risen from the dead/trampling down death by death/and upon those in the tomb bestowing life.

That content man in front of the cracked tomb, that’s the me that I am most of the time. The photo without the glasses, though, is the me you meet on this blog, which is more reflective of my inner turmoil when I contemplate the kinds of things I generally write about here. Both are truthful portraits. The less conventional one, though, illustrates facets of the man relevant to Josh Rothman’s profile.

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy wrote, “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” The first photo shows the man who has found what he’s looking for. The second photo is of the man who is aware that there is something more behind the veil.

I wrote last week about how all this surprised me with the recognition that my late father and I are a lot more alike than I ever imagined.  We both were (are) deeply, deeply concerned with fundamental order, its waning, and our own impotence in the face of that fact. We just drew the lines in different places. From last week’s post:

Though my dad and I clashed intensely for much of our life together, what we shared was a profound need for order, to believe that the world was ordered in a certain way, and that people were seeking to harmonize with it. But people, being people, tend not to do this, hence the anxiety within the ordered person. My father worried a great deal because the world surrounding him would not order itself, or be ordered, as he thought it should. This anxiety took a painful toll on me, because my own disorder (in his eyes) was a thorn in his flesh. It was by no means the only one, but given that I was his only son, and was named after him, it was his chief torment. At least until his daughter, the Golden Girl who never did anything wrong, died of cancer at age 42.

What Josh Rothman’s profile, and Maude Schuyler Clay’s photo, revealed to me is how very much alike my late father and I are. There’s one big difference, though: Though we were (are) both restless souls, Daddy was convinced that he had found the right place; his restlessness manifested itself in countless projects around his land, by which he sought to order it. Mine was more inward, though certainly it had outward manifestations. Daddy never doubted himself or his way of living, and indeed could not have conceived of doing so. That’s not me, and never was. But the anxiety, that we share.

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking even further about this, from our similarities and our differences. As I’ve said here often, my father was a Stoic, far more than he was a Christian. He didn’t perceive the difference, really, nor, as Percy understood, would many old-fashioned Southern men. Percy once wrote of a character in a Faulkner short story:

The nobility of Sartoris — and there were a great many Sartorises — was the nobility of the natural perfection of the Stoics, the stern inner summons to man’s full estate, to duty, to honor, to generosity toward his fellow men and above all to his inferiors — not because they were made in the image of God and were therefore lovable in themselves, but because to do them an injustice would be to defile the inner fortress which was oneself.

That was Daddy, though I would modify this to say that he didn’t think any man (including himself) was lovable in himself, but only lovable insofar as he did his duty. To avoid defiling the inner fortress which was oneself — that was what drove him, and what drove me for most of my adult life. The tension between the Christianity I affirmed with my mind and the Stoicism soaked into my bones defined my interior life until it all broke down, and I had to become a full Christian (see How Dante Can Save Your Life for that full story). There was a certain nobility in my father’s agonizing willingness to bear suffering — his own physical decline, and the emotional blows life landed on him. He thought that he could change the world by imposing his own formidable will on it, but when the world refused to be changed, he turned that will inward, toward the last-stand defense of his inner fortress.

So, when his Prodigal Son returned home, he did not understand it as a Christian would have done. He understood the event as a son who had refused to do his duty returning to his post. But when the son insisted on being unlike his father, the father absorbed it as another betrayal, one to be endured, not in any way redeemed. To have admitted error in any way would have been to defile his inner fortress. Had he been able to turn his fortress into a temple, things might have turned out better for us all. But he could not; none of them could. So it all came tumbling down.

As you know, he and I came to terms in the months before he died, and it was a beautiful, grace-filled ending, for which I will be forever grateful. Here’s the thing, though, that rests on my mind: Is the Benedict Option project little more than a grandiose attempt on my part to achieve the same doomed objective that my father did: defend a fortress that cannot be defended?

My father wanted to defend the family, a place, and a way of life. I want to defend the Christian faith, which is embedded in a way of life. What do the two projects have in common? How do they differ? Is it possible to learn from the failure of my father’s quest to make my own more achievable?

First, the things they have in common. Both of us understood — I have to use the past tense when talking about my dad — that changing times threatened what we valued most. Both of us esteemed tradition, family, and place. We also understood, however intuitively, that what we loved had to be concrete, not abstract. And we knew that self-discipline was important to achieving most good things.

How do they differ? This is where it gets interesting. My dad believed that he could impose his favored solution by bending everyone in his family to his will. He could not do this, not only because people have free will, but also because of other contingencies, e.g., the unexpected advent of terminal cancer into the life of his daughter, the Golden Girl, and her demise. I don’t believe that a vibrant Christian orthodoxy can be achieved by force of anybody’s will. The Church can only propose; it cannot impose.

And, Daddy believed that tradition, family, and place were ends in themselves. I don’t believe that tradition, family, place, or the Church are ends, but rather means to an end, which is unity with Jesus Christ, and all that entails.

What does my father’s project have to teach me about the Benedict Option?

For one, Dante taught me that all sin comes from disordered love: loving the wrong things, or loving the right things too little or too much. Family is good. Place is good. Tradition is good. But these things are only good insofar as they reveal and guide one to God. To place anything above God is to make it an idol — and our idols inevitably tyrannize us. So, if our goal in the Benedict Option is only to preserve the outward forms of the Church, or the Church as a way of life, we will fail. We must instead strive to preserve the outward forms of the Church for the sake of nurturing its inner life, and orienting it towards communion with God. Inside the Benedictine monastery, everything the monks do is not for its own sake, but to deepen their conversion.

For another, mercy is as important as justice. My dad was not a stern man, generally. The relaxed face of myself that you see? That’s also his face. Most of the time Daddy was happy. It is hard to overstate how much people loved him and respected him. He could be very funny, and quite tenderhearted. My mother once told me how frustrated she was with him during a time in which he owned some rental properties. Some renters took advantage of him because he had a soft spot for people who had fallen on hard times. He’d let people get backed up on their rent because he didn’t want to be cruel to them — even when he had reason to believe they were cheating him. And he would go out of his way to help people. There were very good reasons why he was so widely admired.

Yet it seems to me that he granted others mercies that he did not reserve for his own kind. He was Col. Sartoris the Stoic: he was a true gentleman towards others because that is what a gentleman does. He cut everybody else slack, but not his own family, because we ought to have known better. So many times as a child did I hear the chastisement, “We raised you better than that!” Maybe it’s not that way so much with Southern families today, but it is difficult to overstress the extent to which we were raised in a shame-honor culture. There is little flexibility within it. You either do your duty, or you fail to do so, and bear the shame of that. What I never could figure out is why all the success I enjoyed in the world as a writer and journalist meant nothing to him. I see it now: because I had failed to do my duty.

I revered my father for his strong moral sense, but in truth, it was a Stoic’s morality, not a Christian’s. Forgiveness wasn’t a big part of it. Nor was humility. If preventing the inner fortress from being defiled meant that he had to deny his own culpability, well, then that’s what he would do, by force of will.

Once, back in the 1990s, during my first failed attempt to re-enter his world, I showed him the Auden poem As I Walked Out One Evening. Especially these verses:

‘O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

See, this is us! I tried to say. We’re all broken, but we can love each other. 

He didn’t get it. Why would anyone love their crooked neighbor? He’s a crook! He ought to do right.

So, the Benedict Option. If it is to have any chance of working, it will have to know when to be disciplined, and when to be flexible. It will have to be willing to bear suffering, as my father was, but find a way to transform that suffering into redemptive love, which his Stoicism could not accomplish. And it will have to keep squarely before it the truth that this world is always passing, and we should hold perishable things lightly, so that we can hold imperishable things firmly. This is a paradox.

There are surely many other lessons to be learned. I welcome your thoughts on this. Every book I’ve written began as a series of blogs here, vastly enriched by the input of you readers. This next book of mine, whatever it is, will likely be no different.

I don’t know what my next book will be, or when I will start it. But the questions unearthed by The Benedict Option are staring down at me, and I can’t shake their gaze. Here’s what the art of photographer Maude Schuyler Clay and the craft of photo editor Thea Traff has done for me: they have shown me that some truths are better explored through art than philosophy — in my face, through fiction than non-fiction. The juxtaposition of the two photos at the top of this essay have told me more about myself than the last three books I’ve written. Maybe the way to find the answers I’m looking for now is to stop thinking about them, and instead create characters who try to live through the problems they pose. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to Franz Kappus, the young poet:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Live them … or live them through the characters you create, either in a novel or a screenplay. The anxious contemplative in the photo above will try that.

The Self-Murder Of Academic Philosophy

Can somebody please tell me why anybody would choose to go into academic philosophy? You’ll recall the shameful episode last year at which the distinguished Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne was denounced at a Christian philosophers’ conference for stating in passing his belief in what the Bible says about homosexuality. History’s greatest monster, that Swinburne!

Now, the social justice Jacobins are eating their own. Sit down and read this recap on the philosophy blog Daily Nous. It has to do with a feminist philosophy journal causing a collective seizure in the profession by publishing a paper contending that “transracialism” — that people should be allowed to change their race, à la Rachel Dolezal — ought to be accepted for the same reason that transgenderism should be. Rebecca Tuvel, the scholar in question, unequivocally supports transgender rights, by the way.

 

But that is not enough. These madwomen are eviscerating Tuvel over the question of how many transgendered anti-misogynists can dance on the severed head of Princess de Lamballe. The Daily Nous reports:

Nonetheless, in one popular public Facebook post, Nora Berenstain, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, says the essay contains “discursive transmisogynistic violence.” She elaborates:

Tuvel enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay. She deadnames a trans woman. She uses the term “transgenderism.” She talks about “biological sex” and uses phrases like “male genitalia.” She focuses enormously on surgery, which promotes the objectification of trans bodies. She refers to “a male-to- female (mtf) trans individual who could return to male privilege,” promoting the harmful transmisogynistic ideology that trans women have (at some point had) male privilege. In her discussion of “transracialism,” Tuvel doesn’t cite a single woman of color philosopher, nor does she substantively engage with any work by Black women, nor does she cite or engage with the work of any Black trans women who have written on this topic.

An open letter to Hypatia complaining about the article is now being circulated  and currently has over 130 signatures. It states that the article “falls short of scholarly standards” and requests the article be retracted. Among the reasons cited are the following:

1. It uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields; for example, the author uses the language of “transgenderism” and engages in deadnaming a trans woman;

2. It mischaracterizes various theories and practices relating to religious identity and conversion; for example, the author gives an off-hand example about conversion to Judaism;

3. It misrepresents leading accounts of belonging to a racial group; for example, the author incorrectly cites Charles Mills as a defender of voluntary racial identification;

4. It fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of “transracialism”. We endorse Hypatia’s stated commitment to “actively reflect and engage the diversity within feminism, the diverse experiences and situations of women, and the diverse forms that gender takes around the globe,” and we find that this submission was published without being held to that commitment.

Discursive transmisogynistic violence. Oh my. Well, just like that, the editorial board of the journal collapsed like a bunch of screaming meemies:

We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, extend our profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists, and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused. The sources of those harms are multiple, and include: descriptions of trans lives that perpetuate harmful assumptions and (not coincidentally) ignore important scholarship by trans philosophers; the practice of deadnaming, in which a trans person’s name is accompanied by a reference to the name they were assigned at birth; the use of methodologies which take up important social and political phenomena in dehistoricized and decontextualized ways, thus neglecting to address and take seriously the ways in which those phenomena marginalize and commit acts of violence upon actual persons; and an insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory.

You might expect such gutlessness on the philosophy faculty of Moscow State University under Stalin. So what is the excuse of the Hypatia jellyfish?

To this anathema, Prof. Tuvel replied, in part:

So little of what has been said, however, is based upon people actually reading what I wrote.

Oh, sister, I know the feeling.

She continued:

Calls for intellectual engagement are also being shut down because they “dignify” the article. If this is considered beyond the pale as a response to a controversial piece of writing, then critical thought is in danger. I have never been under the illusion that this article is immune from critique. But the last place one expects to find such calls for censorship rather than discussion is amongst philosophers.

Read the whole thing. 

I’ve gotta say: really, Rebecca Tuvel? By this late date, you think that the “last place” one expects to see censorship is among philosophers?! Humanities faculties are the first place you’d expect this garbage.

Prof. Tuvel’s tribe is cannibalizing its own. One imagines that she thought she was immune to this kind of thing, given the statement on her faculty page at Rhodes College:

My research lies at the intersection of critical race, feminist and animal ethics. Throughout my research, I have considered several ways in which animals, women and racially subordinated groups are oppressed, how this oppression often overlaps and how it serves to maintain erroneous and harmful conceptions of humanity. Uniting these lines of research is an underlying concern to theorize justice for oppressed groups.

And now, the mob has turned on her as an oppressor.

It will be a great day when this particular venomous snake finally devours its tail, and it becomes safe for people who actually care about philosophy as the search for truth to come out and do their vital work. In the meantime, why not form alternative institutions where people who want to do true scholarship and teaching can enter a classroom with colleagues and students who want the same thing, as opposed to joining the impotent clerisy of ideological crackpots who have nothing better to do deploy weaponized jargon against each other.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I think you’re overstating the problem a bit. I thought very seriously about going into academic philosophy (I graduated from a top philosophy grad program in June 2016), and my reasons for leaving academia had nothing to do with the politics of philosophy departments (and I’m certainly no leftist).

While such incidents are disturbing, I never found any such political discussions to dominate the mainstream in philosophy departments. This is mainly because mainstream analytic philosophy doesn’t touch such topics. The vast majority of professional philosophers are still doing great research and teaching in the classic areas of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, phil of mind, phil of language, logic, political philosophy etc.

It’s also worth noting that many professional philosophers are themselves disturbed by the “Hypatia incident”. In my experience, philosophy departments really are the last place you’d expect to find censorship — mainstream academic philosophers really do take pride in argumentative engagement.

For instance:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/the-defamation-of-rebecca-tuvel-by-the-board-of-associate-editors-of-hypatia-and-the-open-letter.html

Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I don’t see the need for “alternative institutions” (not yet anyway).

Duterte, Sex Abuse, & Street Justice

From a 2015 story published when he was mayor of Davao City:

Mayor Rodrigo Duterte has named the priest who allegedly molested him and several other high school boys when he was a teenager studying at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Davao University (AdDU) here.

Duterte said the sexual abuser was the late Fr. Mark Falvey, SJ, one of the Jesuit priests at AdDU, and that the abuse happened once when he was a high school freshman in 1956. And he spelled out the name of the American Jesuit priest.

“It happened during our generation, two years ahead of us and two years following us,” Duterte told reporters here late Thursday.

“It was a case of fondling, you know, during confession, that’s how we lost our innocence early,” he said.

“It was a sort of sexual awakening for each of us. We realized quite early that ganun talaga ang buhay (life is really like that),” Duterte said.

He said Falvey was later involved in a payout amounting to P25 million in the United States after a number of his victims filed a case against him.

Later, when Pope Francis came to the Philippines, Duterte denounced him, drawing criticism from the country’s bishops. Excerpt:

In an interview with reporters on Tuesday, Duterte warned the prelates against continuing tirades against him.

“I will destroy the Church and the present status of so many priests and what they are doing,” he said. “You priests, bishops, you condemn me and suggest I withdraw, but then I will start to open my mouth. There are so many secrets that we kept as children. Do not force (me to speak) because this religion is not so sacred.”

It is interesting that what prompted the bishops to speak out against (then-mayor) Duterte was his foul-mouthed words complaining that Pope Francis’s visit was tying up traffic. Duterte later clarified:

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Duterte said: “It was my expression of anger borne out of the helplessness of the millions of commuters suffering from this daily gridlock. It was never intended to be directed to the person of his holiness Pope Francis, who has my utmost respect.”

He went on to become president of the country, and governs as a foul-mouthed populist.

All of this makes emotional sense to me. As many of you readers know, it was becoming deeply involved in reporting and commenting on the sex abuse story in the early 2000s that ended up costing me my Catholic faith. The other night in Nashville, in conversation with a new Catholic friend, I tried to explain to him what that felt like from the inside. He had said, reasonably, “I don’t understand why the sins of priests made you quit believing in the teachings of the Church.”

What I explained was that I too had believed that as long as I had all the arguments clear in my mind, my faith would be impregnable. And you know, that may work for some people. But entering into the stories of Catholic child victims of molester priests, and their families, changed me in ways that I could never have anticipated.

William Lobdell, once the religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes about how the same experience cost him his faith in Christianity, period. He used to be an enthusiastic churchgoer, and had entered into the process by which one joins the Roman Catholic Church. When he started covering the abuse scandal, a priest warned him to keep his eyes on Christ, not on priests. But then:

But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.

Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to escape prosecution.

I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies — many of them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.

I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, spoke out for the victim.

On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn’t belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn’t go through with the rite of conversion.

I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?

I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going altogether.

Lobdell writes in his long, heart-rending piece, that it was by no means only the Catholic Church’s shenanigans that did him in. He also wrote about sexual abuse in non-Catholic churches. Gradually, it chewed him up. After writing about a man whose life was ruined by his own molestation as a boy at the hands of a priest, but who still believes fervently in God, Lobdell concludes:

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

Read the whole thing. 

The point I wanted to make to my new Catholic friend last week is that these things cannot be easily compartmentalized in the intellect. For me, it wasn’t so much the fact that these horrible things happened — the acts of child rape and sodomy, I mean — as it was that men in the Church who ought to have protected those kids, and sought justice for them, in fact threw them under the bus. Systematically threw them under the bus. It wasn’t a one-off; it was the entire system that conspired to do this.

Because ganun talaga ang buhay — life is really like that. And that’s what this has to do with Rodrigo Duterte’s coarse authoritarianism.  I had a shameful moment back in 2002, in my own writing about the abuse scandal, in which I blogged approval of a Baltimore victim shooting his priest abuser. It was not a fatal shot, but in a fit of rage, I wrote that the priest deserved what he got. Whether that is true or not, it was wrong of me to say that; we cannot have the rule of law if there is vigilante justice. Nevertheless, I can see clearly now what moved me to write that: seeing these horrible, horrible crimes against children go unpunished, and seeing church authorities routinely and bloodlessly sacrificing children for the sake of protecting their own class, and the image of the church, as well as seeing the laity collude in this massive injustice — well, at some point people may snap, and rejoice in rough justice.

Again, it’s important that you understand: I know I was wrong to give in to that impulse. I bring it up here to say that knowing of Duterte’s background as a childhood sex abuse victim, and how the institutional church in his country covered it up, helps me to understand why he believes and says and does the things he does. For example, he calls for the extrajudicial execution of drug dealers. It’s a horror — but if you live in a world in which the wicked escape justice in the system, that kind of thing may make sense to you.

A searing lesson that “life is really like that” learned in childhood doesn’t go away. In my own case, I was never sexually abused, thank God, but I was bullied in middle school and high school. In what I see in retrospect was a formative experience of my childhood, I was on a school beach trip in 1981 when a group of older kids held me down and tried to take my pants off, just for fun — boys trying to impress their girlfriends. I was struggling, but the boys held me fast. Crucially, there were two adult chaperones in that hotel room, and I cried out to them to help me. Both of them stepped over me to get out of the room, and did nothing. All I can figure is that they didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the popular kids.

The small mob never did take my pants off; they let me go, and I ran down the hallway and into my room, where I cried and tried to figure out what had just happened. That was a turning point in my life. It’s when I learned that ganun talaga ang buhay — that the powerful will use and abuse the weak, and that those in authority cannot be counted on to use their authority to seek justice.

It is why to this day I fear and despise the mob — any mob. The mob is the enemy of law, of civilization, period. And it is why it is very, very easy for me to get emotional about this kind of thing.

There is no perfect justice in this world. In trying to bring perfect justice about, we may end up creating worse injustices than the ones we seek to address. It may be that clerical sex abusers deserve to be shot in the leg by their victims (as the Baltimore priest was), but if we allow a world in which that is permissible to come into being, we open the door to something much worse. This is the fear people have about Duterte’s personal lawlessness.

The point is, Duterte’s lawlessness probably arose out of lawlessness operating under the guise of law. Rodrigo Duterte learned at a young age that the promises institutions make to protect the weak are often worthless. In fact, they will protect their own first. Last year, he said:

Asked about how being abused had influenced him, Mr Duterte told Al Jazeera: “It’s what you get along the way that shapes your character. At that time [it influences] your politics and how you look at the world.”

“It blends into something that forms your own values in life”.

You know what Duterte’s approval rating is? From last month:

Results released by Pulse Asia Research Inc. showed that 76 percent of the 1,200 respondents expressed trust in Duterte, down 7 percentage points from December. Some 78 percent of respondents approved of his performance, down from 83 percent.

To me, Duterte comes across as a bully, a lawless man. But to most of his countrymen, people who have surely been bullied by the system in the Philippines, and who learned in their own ways the lesson of ganun talaga ang buhay, he is justice, or at least a greater embodiment of justice than what they have known.

And you know, this is what frustrates me with the people of my own cultural and social class who can’t understand why populism is rising. They cannot grasp that the people in power have in many cases come to assume that what is good for their own particular class is good for all of society. They are being reminded by the Dutertes, the Trumps, and others that life is not always like that.

The harder lesson to absorb is that often we just replace one set of injustices with another (sometimes vastly worse — see the Russian Revolution, for example). But that’s a topic for another day.

Can The Marine Corps Save France?

Here’s a really good column by Noah Millman, questioning the conventional wisdom that Marine Le Pen as president of France is unthinkable. Noah says he doesn’t support Le Pen at all, but he’s bothered by the inability of the bien-pensants to grasp why she doesn’t look so bad to a lot of French voters. Note well that Noah wrote a similar column about Donald Trump back when the possibility of a Trump presidency was too shocking to take seriously. Here’s the heart of  his piece on Le Pen:

The FN’s course is unquestionably risky. But the risks of the status quo have been abundantly in evidence over the past decade, and what is to be done about them? Does anyone, at this late date, really believe that the EU is working? Either it is a failed experiment that needs to be abandoned, or European institutions need to be substantially rethought to make a common currency area work better for the people and not just for the interests of capital. Neither can possibly happen until a major, core country forces the question. What country better than France to force that reckoning?

The same can be said about NATO. Donald Trump argued repeatedly during his campaign that the alliance was obsolete (though he has now reversed himself on this as on so much else), but America could never plausibly reform it because we naturally want it to remain a force-multiplier for American policy rather than a true instrument of collective security. It will take a major European state to force a substantive change. Again, who better than France, which always historically charted an independent course?

Moreover, on neither front is the world going to change overnight were Le Pen to win the presidency. Rather, negotiations would commence for new arrangements. Those negotiations might go well or poorly — but it is a mistake to view any one election in apocalyptic terms.

Finally, it is true that a Le Pen victory would likely be welcomed in Moscow and in Washington, and would be a terrible blow to those who see themselves as the liberal vanguard. But there are other threats to liberal democracy than populist nationalism, and the technocratic order that Macron runs to vindicate may well be one of them. Brussels rules not so much with the consent of the governed as with the conviction that it alone is capable of properly balancing the continent’s manifold interests — which is precisely what ordinary democratic politics is supposed to be for. Is it so unthinkable to prioritize the latter threat over the threat of populism?

Read the whole thing.  Seriously, do. The piece puts me in mind of how I felt the week before the US presidential election. I thought either outcome would be bad for America — and I wasn’t sure which one was going to be worse.

That was a very easy question for lots of voters to answer, on both sides. I wasn’t among them. The idea of four more years of an Establishment functionary (Clinton) filled me with dread. The idea of Trump did too, for the same reasons it bothered most everybody else. I found, though, that I was “anti-anti-Trump,” in the sense that while I could not support him in good conscience, I was most exercised over the vehemence with which so many people — including #NeverTrump conservatives — attacked him. Their visceral loathing of Trump was such that it blinded them to the very real failings of the Establishment — both Republicans and Democrats — that made a figure like Trump appealing in the first place.

I feel the same way about Le Pen. Were I a French voter, I would have gone for Fillon in the first round. This time? No way in hell I would vote for Macron, an empty suit who promises more of the same thing that has brought France to this miserable position it finds itself in. But for all my deep reservations about Le Pen (which Noah catalogs), I do not consider hear as unpalatable as Donald Trump, and for the reason Noah cites here:

Le Pen is not Donald Trump. She’s not a lazy, narcissistic, ignorant con artist. She’s been at this for years and she knows her stuff.

If Macron wins, as is still expected, does anybody seriously believe that France’s decline will be arrested? That the massive immigration problem in France will be taken care of? That the country will be put on the right path? Macron was a minister in the government of outgoing president François Hollande, who has a four percent approval rating. He is the poster child for an era now ending. Marine Le Pen might not be the future, but Emmanuel Macron is most definitely the face of 1995’s view of the future.

So: why not Le Pen? Again, read Noah’s great piece, and read Ross Douthat’s similar column from yesterday’s Times.  Douthat wrote that she’s not like Trump for these reasons:

There is no American equivalent to the epic disaster of the euro, a form of German imperialism with the struggling parts of Europe as its subjects. There is no American equivalent to the challenge of immigrant-assimilation now facing France — no equivalent of the domestic terror threat, the rise of Islamist anti-Semitism, the immigrant enclaves as worlds unto themselves.

Which means that while much of Trump’s notional agenda was an overreaction to the country’s problems, some of Le Pen’s controversial positions are straightforwardly correct.

She is right that France as a whole, recent immigrants as well as natives, would benefit from a sustained mass-immigration halt.

She is right that the European Union has given too much unaccountable power to Brussels and Berlin and favored financial interests over ordinary citizens.

And while many of her economic prescriptions are half-baked, her overarching critique of the euro is correct: Her country and her continent would be better off without it.

The French will presumably vote against her nonetheless. They will choose Macron, a callow creature of a failed consensus, over the possibility that the repulsive party’s standard-bearer might be right.

That decision will be understandable. But it’s the kind of choice that has a way of getting offered again and again, until the public finally makes a different one.