Rod Dreher's Blog, page 469

Do We Need The Benedict Option? Yes, Says Bishop

Well, hello. You didn’t hear from me on Monday because I was busy gallivanting around New Orleans with J.D. Vance, Ken Bickford, and others. J.D. really, really wanted to eat at Toups Meatery, but it was closed on Monday. We ended up at Lüke, where they didn’t have the charcuterie board (either it wasn’t on the lunch menu, or they took it off the menu, period, since I was last there), but we did eat the chicken liver and rabbit pate, which was crazy good. I spent the day fighting off the flu, which has all three of my kids down with fever. We had a good turnout for the event at UNO, and a delicious dinner afterward at Ralph’s On The Park. J.D. is as nice as you expect that he would be, and New Orleans is … New Orleans. I don’t get down there often enough.

On Tuesday, I slept most of the day, fighting what at this point appears to be a losing battle against the flu. Who the heck gets the flu in April?! My kids do, and I’m thisclose to joining them. So, I apologize for the light posting. Let’s hope for a better day today.

I did see that the great Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles has written an endorsement, of sorts, of The Benedict Option, which he calls “the most talked-about religious book of 2017.” He concludes by saying:

So do we need the Benedict Option now? Yes, I would say. But we should also be deft enough in reading the signs of the times, and spiritually nimble enough to shift, when necessary, to a more open and engaging attitude.

This remark reminds me of this passage from G.K. Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis:

[I]t is true to say that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain was scattered over the world as seed. The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.

Similarly, this passage from The Benedict Option, in which Marco Sermarini, standing in his olive grove, reflected:

“I know from the olive trees that some years we will have a big harvest, and other years we will take few,” he said. “The monks, when they brought agriculture to this place a thousand years ago, they taught our ancestors that there are times when we have to save seed. That’s why I think we have to walk on this road of Saint Benedict, in this Benedict Option. This is a season for saving the seed. If we don’t save the seed now, we won’t have a harvest in the years to come.”

The point, obviously, is that we are in a period of storing-up. As I keep saying, We cannot give what we do not have. Robert Wilken, the historian of the early church, says: 

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

My sense is that a failure — willful or otherwise — on the part of conservative Christians to comprehend the depths of the current crisis has a lot to do with their knee-jerk rejection of The Benedict Option, especially if they haven’t read it. It sounds like it even affected Alasdair MacIntyre, if this account is correct. Excerpt:

MacIntyre heartily criticized this movement during the Q&A after his lecture on “Common Goods, Frequent Evils” on March 27. The central point, MacIntyre emphasized, was that St. Benedict “inadvertently created a new set” of ways of life, when all he intended to do was found a monastic order. The monastery symbiotically supported the “education and liturgy” of the local villagers who provided them with postulants, over decades and centuries “build[ing] up a local community [largely] independent of the feudal order.”

Hence, despite the youthful St. Benedict’s flee from Rome to become a hermit, his mature work was “not a withdrawal from society into isolation,” but rather a “creation of a new set of social institutions which evolved.” The new St. Benedict whom we await must offer a “new kind of engagement with the social order now, not any kind of withdrawal from it.”

The Benedict Option, as people who have actually read it know, makes it clear that St. Benedict’s historic work had sociological effects secondary to his seeking the face of God as a monk. St. Benedict did not go to the forest to Make Rome Great Again; he only went out there to pray and to seek God, and to figure out how to serve Him under the post-imperial conditions in which he found himself. This is how it will have to be with us too.

As I’ve said over and over — but apparently cannot say often enough — we in the laity are not called to total withdrawal from the world, but only withdrawal sufficient to make possible Wilken’s “rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.” As Bishop Barron writes in his piece, the danger we face is that we seek to be so “relevant” to the culture outside the church that we lose what makes us distinct. If the church (by which I mean the people of God, broadly) is to produce the kind of men and women who will be able to go out into the world and convert it, and work for its redemption under God, then it will have to do what Prof. Wilken says it must do.

So, when George Weigel writes, critically:

Yet proponents of the Benedict Option would do well to rethink several things. To begin with, this so-called “Ben-Op,” at least as imagined by some, misreads the history of the second half of the first millennium. Yes, the monasteries along the Atlantic littoral helped preserve the civilizational patrimony of the West when public order in Western Europe broke down and the Norsemen wrought havoc along the Atlantic seaboard and beyond. But Monte Cassino, the great motherhouse of St. Benedict’s reforming spiritual movement, was never completely cut off from the life around it, and over the centuries it helped educate thinkers of the civilization-forming caliber of Thomas Aquinas.

… he’s revealing that he hasn’t actually read the book, because in the book, I write about the kind of life that lay Christians are called to lead now requires strategic withdrawal for the sake of culturing ourselves in Christianity, so when we go out into the world — where most of us are called to live — we can represent Christ authentically in a world where the pressures to abandon the faith are very strong. As Prof. Wilken says, this culture is no longer neutral about Christianity; it is positively opposed to it. A Christian who lives as if these are normal times is going to get steamrolled.

The Catholic blogger Dr. Jared Staudt does a real service in this piece of his titled, “Stop Misunderstanding The Benedict Option”. Excerpt:

I’ve heard so many people characterize the Benedict Option as: “We can’t just retreat, give up, or bury our heads in the sand.” Many people have equated the Benedict Option with disengagement and withdraw.

Here is the real basis of the Benedict Option:

Given the profound crisis of culture (which has affected the Church as well), we cannot look to mainstream institutions for our future.
Rather, we need to form intentional communities that more fully embody our Christian faith and in which we are willing to face the consequences of going against the stream.
It is from such institutions that real cultural change will occur.

Thus, the Benedict Option is all about being active and engaging the problems of society. It recognizes, however, that solutions will begin locally, in the relationships that we can influence. Rebuilding will begin there. Do we really think that our political, educational, and economic institutions will provide a secure future for the practice of our Christian faith?

Dr. Staudt goes on to explain why the particular model given to us by St. Benedict is well-suited to our time and place. He concludes:

I recommend actually reading Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option, before forming opinions about it. The strength of the book comes from its description of the Benedictine ideal, primarily through the lens of the monks of Norcia, and from providing other concrete examples such as the Tipi Loschi lay community, also of Italy. The book certainly has its limits. It is a reflection, which should begin a conversation, and—even more that—a process of discernment. We all need to find our own particular way to respond to the crisis of our time. St. Benedict certainly provides an important, and we might even say crucial, witness on how to build a Christian culture, centered on what Pope Benedict described as quaerere Deum, the search for God.

Not everyone may be called to follow the [Benedict] Option, but at least don’t misunderstand it.

Read the whole thing. It’s a concise summary of the main thrust of the book. For Catholics who think everything is going pretty well with the next generation of the Catholic Church, allow the (Catholic) sociologist Christian Smith to disabuse you of that notion. Except for Mormons, and to some extent Evangelicals (but far fewer than you might imagine), no church in the broad Christian tradition is doing a good job of forming its youth into disciples.

At the J.D. Vance event the other night, someone said to me that he had read The Benedict Option twice, and though he doesn’t want to accept its conclusions (“I’m an optimist by temperament,” he said), he can’t find where my diagnosis is wrong. I’ve been thinking about that since I was in New Orleans. It is certainly true that some critics of the book dissent from it in good faith, but of course many do not. I am convinced that they refuse to see what’s in the book because if I’m right, then they will have to change their lives in ways that they don’t want to. Understand me clearly: I concede that I might be wrong! But if I am wrong, then show me where I am wrong; don’t satisfy yourself with endless griping about the book you think I have written, or by creating straw men that are easy to knock down.

UPDATE: Another good, explanatory piece by the Protestant scholar Scot McKnight.  One thing he says, though:

When I heard of this book and when I opened it I expected to read about Ave Maria University in Ave Maria FL, a community Kris and I wandered around one day. Not a word. Nor does it seem to me Dreher sees Ave Maria as what he’s on about. From my reading he imagines Christians remaining where they are but forming tighter fellowship with other like-minded Christians in their community. Unlike the Essenes of Qumran they are like the Pharisees of Galilee. (I know many see the word “Pharisee” and think “negative.” Forgive me, but I don’t. The Pharisees remained where they were and lived in their community according to their own rule of life, the Torah interpreted.)

I would have liked to have written about Ave Maria, and a number of other communities, but I simply didn’t have the time. I had hoped to have a couple of years to work on the book, but that’s not how the deadline worked. Rest assured that I am aware that there are plenty of communities I could have written about.

About the Pharisees, I appreciate McKnight’s point. The main problem with the Pharisees (from the perspective of the Gospels) is that they observed the outward form of the Law, but were inwardly corrupt. This is a problem that all of us, Christians and otherwise, can easily develop. The answer for Christians is not to say that we are to have no rule of life, but rather to make sure that our rule of life does not become an idol, but rather serves as a means of deepening our transformative relationship to Jesus Christ. Similarly, the Church is necessary to draw us to Christ, but if it becomes a destination (as opposed to a way), it turns into an idol.

On Misreading The Benedict Option

A reader writes:

Tuesday I was having lunch with someone who is a pretty popular blogger. We got to talking about the Benedict Option. He told me two or three problems he had with it. I asked him if he’d read it. He said no he was relying on reviews. I said I thought as much. I said I had read it and what he was criticizing was not what you said. I suggested he read the book. I liked the book.

I find this endlessly frustrating. Why are so many people so eager to see things that are NOT in the book? Why are so many people quick to attribute to me things that I clearly do not believe, and that I explicitly contradict in the book? It’s bizarre.

Here’s a pretty clear summary of the Ben Op’s cultural critique from the popular Evangelical writer Scot McKnight. I smiled at this reference to Jamie Smith’s slimy “review” in the Washington Post:

Facts and interpretations are alarmist according to the eyes of the beholder. I read Smith’s review twice before I read Dreher’s book and Dreher’s book is not recognizable to me in Smith’s review. Hence, I want to give Dreher’s book a fair description.

And McKnight does just that — which doesn’t, of course, prevent some commenters on that post from saying that they haven’t read the book, but it seems to them that … and off they go accusing me of advocating things I do not advocate.

The National Review piece by Rachel Lu  is a great example of this — better than most, because it is pretty clearly not written from a malicious point of view. Rather, it’s the view of a very smart person and a good writer who seems to have worked exceptionally hard to miss the point. Excerpt:

Worldly withdrawal is a hard row to hoe, which is why we probably needn’t worry too much that droves of Americans will suddenly decide to “go Benedict.” There will never be so very many who want to give up modern comforts and securities to become turnip farmers, and it’s not necessarily bad to have a few. Traditionalist experimentation can yield benefits for society, just as other forms of innovation can be beneficial. Tiny, traditionalist communities may succeed in uncovering or preserving certain salutary truths that have been lost to the culture at large. In any case, a free society should be able to make room for a few such endeavors.

Right, because if there’s one thing that The Benedict Option preaches, it’s that everybody should all rusticate themselves and become turnip farmers for Jesus. Good grief. For the record, here is one of many passages from the actual book in which I refute this lazy caricature — in this case, by quoting someone living out a Benedict Option:

“Ultimately I think Christians have to understand that yes, we have to be countercultural, but no, we don’t have to run away from the rest of society,” he says. “We have to be a sign of contradiction to the surrounding society, but at the same time we have to be engaged with that society, while still nurturing our own community so we can fully form our children.”

Another Lu passage:

The Benedict Option was controversial in large part because religious conservatives are already very attracted to quietist modes of thought. Quietism, a posture of spiritual detachment, has appeared in various forms throughout Christian history and culture. It gains force when a culture is in decline or elites become overtly hostile to Christianity. Withdrawal holds appeal, not only because the world is hard but also because Christians believe themselves to be the inheritors of a rich tradition that promises something better. To Christian faithful, life is first and foremost a quest for eternal redemption. If the mainstream culture seems uncongenial to that journey, there will always be some who judge it best to give up the fight for the world and to focus instead on forging a less perilous path for themselves and their loved ones.

So the Benedict Option is quietist? That’s not what the actual book says. From The Benedict Option:

The real question facing us is not whether to quit politics entirely, but how to exercise political power prudently, especially in an unstable political culture. When is it cowardly not to cooperate with secular politicians out of an exaggerated fear of impurity—and when is it corrupting to be complicit? Donald Trump tore up the political rule book in every way. Faithful conservative Christians cannot rely unreflectively on habits learned over the past thirty years of political engagement. The times require much more wisdom and subtlety for those believers entering the political fray.

Above all, though, they require attention to the local church and community, which doesn’t flourish or fail based primarily on what happens in Washington. And the times require an acute appreciation of the fragility of what can be accomplished through partisan politics. Republicans won’t always rule Washington, after all, and the Republicans who are ruling it now may be more adversarial to the work of the church than many gullible Christians think.

Many Christians are so discouraged by the political situation that they have resolved to disengage from partisan politics or at least to care less about it than they once did. This need not mean a retreat into quietism. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Later in that chapter, I hold up the late Czech dissident Vaclav Benda, who was a Catholic, as as an example of Christian engagement in a post (or anti) Christian environment:

At serious risk to himself and his family (he and his wife had six children), Benda rejected ghettoization. He saw no possibility for collaboration with the Communists, but he also rejected quietism, considering it a failure to display proper Christian concern for justice, charity, and bearing evangelical witness to Christ in the public square. For Benda, Havel’s injunction to “live in truth” could only mean one thing: to live as a Christian in community.

Benda did not advocate retreat to a Christian ghetto. He insisted that the parallel polis must understand itself as fighting for “the preservation or the renewal of the national community in the widest sense of the word—along with the defense of all the values, institutions, and material conditions to which the existence of such a community is bound.

I personally think that a no less effective, exceptionally painful, and in the short term practically irreparable way of eliminating the human race or individual nations would be a decline into barbarism, the abandonment of reason and learning, the loss of traditions and memory. The ruling regime—partly intentionally, partly thanks to its essentially nihilistic nature—has done everything it can to achieve that goal. The aim of independent citizens’ movements that try to create a parallel polis must be precisely the opposite: we must not be discouraged by previous failures, and we must consider the area of schooling and education as one of our main priorities.

From this perspective, the parallel polis is not about building a gated community for Christians but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society. (In this we hear Brother Ignatius of Norcia’s call to have “borders”— formal lines behind which we live to nurture our faith and culture—but to “push outwards, infinitely.”) Benda wrote that the parallel polis’s ultimate political goals are “to return to truth and justice, to a meaningful order of values, [and] to value once more the inalienability of human dignity and the necessity for a sense of human community in mutual love and responsibility.”

In other words, dissident Christians should see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them. That’s a grand vision, but Benda knew that most people weren’t interested in standing up for abstract causes that appealed only to intellectuals. He advocated practical actions that ordinary Czechs could do in their daily lives.

How anybody can read these passages (to say nothing of the rest of the book) and conclude that I am advocating Christian quietism is beyond my ability to comprehend. There’s more:

Personality cults come and go, but the Jewish carpenter has held strong for nearly two millennia, today claiming almost 40 times as many living followers as voted for Trump in the last election. The lamb may look vulnerable, but he’s proven to be very resilient.

The book is explicitly about Christianity in the West, not global Christianity. To fail to see that and to acknowledge it in one’s critique is a fundamental failure as a reader. More:

Quietist-type thinking trains us to look on our culture with an eye only for the things we cannot change. Dreher traces our current malaise back to philosophical errors deep within the modern psyche, although at the same time he also blames Christians for their own downfall, contending that they were too willing to sell their birthright for short-term political victories. Our current struggles, it seems, were somewhat inevitable; nevertheless, in Dreher’s view, we should blame ourselves and don sackcloth.

At this point I wonder: what on earth is wrong with this reviewer? The Benedict Option is filled with practical examples of all kinds of Christians doing things to counter the spirit of the age. Rachel Lu is having an argument with a book that does not exist except in her imagination — and she is far from the only reviewer doing so. The reader who sent me the Lu piece adds:

I’m assuming she read it. I’m also assuming she is young, and sees the political sphere as a worthwhile arena for her efforts. But for some reason they just don’t get it. Not sure how else you can say it.

It’s like she was a liturgical traditionalist and thought Gregorian chant was the cat’s meow, and decided to start a traveling mission to bring it to parishes across America, but showed up at the first place and everyone realized she had no musical training. Could not sing. Could not play. Could not read music. Could not conduct. Sorry Rachel, you need to know how to do Gregorian chant to infuse the culture with Gregorian chant.

Or if she saw a great need for a soup kitchen and gathered up 100 volunteers, who showed up to discover no food, no money, no plates, no kitchen. Sorry. You aren’t prepared to embark on the mission you propose.

And that to me is the central critique. Of the BenOp.

Maybe I’m drunk. Or everyone else is. But this constant misreading seems to me like a pretty bad sign.

You say, hey, the music at this church needs work. Nobody can sing. Nobody can play. The organ is broke. Luckily we have a strong tradition. Let’s get some people trained up. Let’s raise some money and fix the organ. It’s important.

Response: Dreher hates music! He says stop singing. He says everything is wrong. Alarmism! Music is important! It’s a crucial ministry! What about St. Cecilia!? Let’s resist his urge to turn away from music and keep playing!

Dreher: But I love music. I’m saying you aren’t doing real music because the organ is broke and if it weren’t nobody could play it anyway, and…

Response: Music hater!

Yep.

Look, don’t misunderstand: I hope everyone will like the book, but I am certainly aware that folks will have principled objections to parts of it, or all of it. That’s fine. That’s normal. What frustrates me are these people who seriously mischaracterize the book and its claims and contentions. I had a brief exchange on Twitter over the weekend with a self-styled Christian educator who dismissed the book entirely. When I asked him if he had read it, he did not respond, only redoubled his criticism.

If you have decided that The Benedict Option is all wrong, but you have not read the book, only read reviews of it, then you may be making a big mistake. Read it for yourself and make up your own mind. If you want a short, accurate description of its basic claim, read this Scot McKnight blog entry. McKnight seems to be writing a series of blog posts describing the book (here’s part 2), and I assume he will make his own judgment of it. I will be eager to read what he has to say. Though he is so far only really summarizing it, the accuracy with which he states the book’s argument and claims is hopeful. Even if he doesn’t agree, ultimately, I’m grateful for the clarity McKnight brings to the discussion.

As Maggie Gallagher said in the comments here, she has big problems with the book, but she says I ask all the right questions. I appreciate that. If others have better answers to those questions, then I surely want to hear them. My future as a Christian and the future of my descendants depends on it.

(Hey, readers, I’m about to head for the airport to pick up J.D. Vance, and then go on into New Orleans for the event tonight. I won’t be able to approve comments for most of today. Please be patient.)

Yuval Noah Harari’s Dystopia

I recently read Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the new book by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a terrible book if you read it in terms of prescription. That is, if the world Harari expects to come into existence actually does, it will be a nightmare (though he considers it a dreamland). But if you read it for an insight into where certain defining trends in our culture are taking us, then it’s an excellent resource.

Here is Harari’s basic thesis. Science and technology have solved many of the problems that preoccupied mankind since the dawn of his existence. More people today die from obesity than from starvation. If we haven’t universalized the solutions yet, then we must keep at it. The point is, we have largely mastered nature. Now, modern people seek happiness, indeed have come to think of it as a right. In the future, people will use biotechnology and other forms of technology to create happiness for themselves. They will become like gods, “attaining divinity.” This is a very good thing; it means we can go beyond humanity, and “acquire for us divine powers of creating and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo Deus. Another great social project of the 21st century is to biologically re-engineer Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure.

It’s no surprised that Harari’s favorite book is Brave New World. He said about it:

When you read 1984 by George Orwell you know it’s a dystopia, you know it’s a horrible world. The only question is how do we prevent it from happening? So in this sense it’s not very sophisticated. It’s quite straight forward. When you read Brave New World you don’t know if it’s a utopia or a dystopia. You have the sense that something is terribly wrong in this world but you can’t put your finger on what it is because everybody is happy and satisfied all the time. The amazing thing is that when he wrote it in the 1930s everybody read it as a dystopia. When you read it today, more and more people actually think that it’s a utopia. Looking at our present trajectory we are on the way to Brave New World.

Everybody read it as a dystopia because they understood living in a state of constant pleasure, controlled by the state, was to give up your liberty. For people back then, there were some things more important than pleasure. To be fair to Harari, though, he’s right that we are headed to Brave New World. When people would rather surrender liberty than suffer pain, or even discomfort, we are well on our way to servitude. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — a Christianity without the cross — is the religion that prepares people for slavery. Real religion has done a poor job standing against “the capitalist juggernaut [that says] happiness is pleasure. Period.”

Harari advocates for eugenics. He doesn’t use the word, but that’s precisely what he’s calling for: humans gaining control of the genome to manipulate it for the sake of creating a higher species. Harari says that it doesn’t matter whether we should be doing this. We’re going to be doing this, because it is in our nature to do so. And it will start with scientists saying that they are undertaking this or that genetic engineering initiative for the sake of healing.

Harari is a thorough materialist, of the sort who says that if we haven’t measured it or isolated it in a laboratory, it cannot be said to exist. “If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul,” he writes. Oh really? He believes that the proper object of worship for humans is themselves. Whatever we choose to make of our own genetic nature, whatever post-human, or trans-human, future we choose for ourselves is good by the fact that we have chosen it. As a result of the changes in science and technology, “our world of meaning might collapse within decades.”

Again, I remind you that to Harari, this is a very good thing. He eagerly anticipates the future mankind will build for itself, bound by nothing but its own will and imagination. This caveat is half-hearted:

[I]t is far from clear that we should be aiming at immortality, bliss and divinity. Adopting these particular projects might be a big mistake. History is full of big mistakes. Given our past record and our current values, we are likely to reach out for bliss, divinity, and immortality — even if it kills us.

To be fair, I completely agree with that last line. I believe quite strongly that we should not be aiming at these things, but I believe that given human nature, and given “our current values,” that there is a certain inevitability to this.

Though he doesn’t use the phrase “liquid modernity” — Zygmunt Bauman’s term for our own time, a time in which the rate of change is so rapid that no customs, forms, or institutions have time to solidify — Harari writes about it here:

Centuries ago human knowledge increased slowly, so politics and economics changed at a leisurely pace too. Today our knowledge is increasing at breakneck speed, and theoretically we should understand the world better and better. But the very opposite is happening. Our newfound knowledge leads to faster economic, social and political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge, which leads to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future. In 1016 it was relatively easy to predict how Europe would look in 1050. Sure, dynasties might fall, unknown raiders might invade, and natural disasters might strike; yet it was clear that in 1050 Europe would still be ruled by kings and priests, that it would be an agricultural society, that most of its inhabitants would be peasants, and that it would continue to suffer greatly from famines, plagues, and wars. In contrast, in 2016 we have no idea how Europe will look in 2050. We cannot say what kind of political system it will have, how its job market will be structured, or even what kind of bodies its inhabitants will possess.

He’s right about this. Christian readers, this is why I’m so insistent on the Benedict Option as the only viable strategy for the church going forward. The changes upon us now, and the changes coming, are going to wash away churches that are not capable of riding out the flood.

Harari makes a good and important point in his discussion of “intersubjective truth”. He says that most people think there are only two kinds of truth: objective and subjective. But there is a third kind: intersubjective. An intersubjective truth is a truth that is only true when it is shared by a network of subjects. Let me clarify this.

An objective truth is one that can be demonstrated scientifically or logically.

A subjective truth is a truth that can only be apprehended personally. It doesn’t mean that it is objectively untrue, but only that its truth can only be known by taking it into one’s own life and living as if it were true. For example, I believe that God’s existence is a fact, whether or not others do. But God’s existence cannot be demonstrated scientifically. It is in His nature, and in ours, that the truth of His existence is something that can only be experienced in the subject’s experience.

An intersubjective truth is a subjective truth that depends on a group (of any size) of subjects believing it for it to have the force of truth. Money — the belief that little green-tinted pieces of paper with numbers printed on them have value — is a good example of intersubjective truth. If large numbers of people quit believing this, the fact that a wad of $20 bills will buy you a nice dinner will cease to be true.

So, think of it this way:

Objective truth: Bill and Janet live together.

Subjective truth: Bill and Janet love each other.

Intersubjective truth: Bill and Janet’s union is consecrated in marriage, a social institution that we all agree carries with it a certain meaning, and certain binding obligations.

So, let’s go to this Harari quote:

We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories. Why does a particular action — such as getting married in church, fasting on Ramadan or voting on election day — seem meaningful to me? Because my parents also think it is meaningful, as do my brothers, my neighbours, people in nearby cities and even the residents of far-off countries. And why do all these people think it is meaningful? Because their friends and neighbours also share the same view. People constantly reinforce each other’s beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes.

Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.

He’s right about this, too. To stick with the subject most important to me, Christianity: in the West (though not elsewhere on the planet), we are living through the unraveling of the distinct web of meaning we call “Christianity”. We should not be surprised that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has supplanted Christianity as the de facto religion of America; it is an attempt to hold on to some meaning, articulated in familiar religious concepts. But as Christian Smith has demonstrated, it is simply impossible to reconcile MTD with any version of historical Christianity. It is a different religion. 

What the Harari passage above tells us, though, is the inconvenient truth that “Christianity” as a sociological fact is inevitably going to be whatever most people who call themselves Christians say it is. If you believe in some form of traditional Christianity, and believe it to be objectively true, then you have no realistic choice now but to form small communities of really convinced believers, and from that dense, thick community try to form the next generations with a resilient commitment to the traditional Story. Otherwise, as Father Cassian of Norcia puts it, you will not make it through what’s coming. Learn more about this here. 

It’s not just about religion. We face the unraveling of the postwar world order, and within our own country, the fraying of the bonds that have historically united our diverse people. One has to hope that this process can be halted, but once people have lost a common Story — be it sacred or secular — it is hard to see how it can be easily reclaimed.

Harari — who, recall, is a professional historian — says that humans think they make history, “but history actually revolves around the web of stories.” It is impossible to organize masses of people without them sharing some “fictional myths. So if you stick to unalloyed reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people will follow you.”

He predicts that

in the 21st century, we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens. Being able to distinguish fiction from reality and religion from science will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.

We will do this because people cannot stand too much isolation and lack of meaning. A reader sends in a link to an unsettling George Monbiot column in The Guardian talking about the physical and social toll that our social order is taking on people. Monbiot, you may not know, is a left-wing secularist. He writes:

If social rupture is not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because we cannot see it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and injury. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.

Experiments summarised in the journal Physiology & Behaviour last month suggest that, given a choice of physical pain or isolation, social mammals will choose the former. Capuchin monkeys starved of both food and contact for 22 hours will rejoin their companions before eating. Children who experience emotional neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: hideous as it is, violence involves attention and contact. Self-harm is often used as an attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical pain is not as bad as emotional pain. As the prison system knows only too well, one of the most effective forms of torture is solitary confinement.

It is not hard to see what the evolutionary reasons for social pain might be. Survival among social mammals is greatly enhanced when they are strongly bonded with the rest of the pack. It is the isolated and marginalised animals that are most likely to be picked off by predators, or to starve. Just as physical pain protects us from physical injury, emotional pain protects us from social injury. It drives us to reconnect. But many people find this almost impossible.

More Monbiot:

This does not require a policy response. It requires something much bigger: the reappraisal of an entire worldview. Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.

Back to Harari now. Harari says that liberals hate it when you say that they believe in religion, because they associate religion with supernatural claims. In fact, he says, all that means is that they believe in some system of moral laws that all humans must obey. Here is a non-religious statement that is “religious” in the sense Harari means: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What’s important about this is Harari’s recognition that human beings require a sacred story to make sense of their lives — and “sacred,” broadly speaking, is not strictly religious, but a shared story that people see as defining their identity, and binding them together and to beliefs they understand as higher than themselves. “We hold these truths” is part of one such story.

Harari understands that modernity has a way of dissolving all inherited sacred stories. Here is a key paragraph that is incredibly important:

Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Read that again. Think about it. What he’s saying is that ceasing to believe that there is fixed meaning in the universe leaves us in an unstable situation, but it gives us more agency to remake the world in our own image. Very few people are what Damon Linker calls “honest atheists” — that is, atheists who understand what it means to surrender the meaning that comes with theism. Most of them end up becoming sentimentalists of some sort or another — and that is the fate of Yuval Noah Harari, who is an incorrigible nostalgist for the future.

He believes that having been freed from the old myths is a very good thing indeed, because it liberates us to do what we like. Harari believes that capitalism is a force for good in the sense that it responds to human desires. Human desire is good. The desire to be free from pain, suffering, and death is good. Therefore, anything done in service of those goals is good. He eagerly anticipates the power of redefining what it means to be human that will soon be delivered to us via science and technology.

It is breathtaking to read this book and to accept that an intelligent person believes these things in the 21st century, given events of the 20th century. You do not have to be any kind of religious believer to accept what in Christianity is called “original sin” — the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with us humans. Harari doesn’t deny this, exactly, but he seems blithely confident that there’s nothing wrong with us that science and technology won’t one day fix.

His understanding of religion can be crazy-making, because deep down, he doesn’t really get what it is and what it’s for. He indulges in techno-triumphalist cant about “new discoveries” in religion — as if revealed religion were like science. That said, I find it hard to deny his point that religions have to be able to answer the challenges of their own times, or they fade away. The thrust of the Benedict Option project is to say that Christian life in the West, as it is presently constituted, is wholly unsuited for enduring the post-Christian order. Harari praises progressive Christianity for updating itself by accepting contemporary mores and conventions, but he laughs gently at the lie they have to tell themselves: that these things can be justified by the Bible.

“Then they pretend the [modernizing] idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault,” he writes. “The Bible is kept as a source of authority, even though it is no longer a true source of inspiration.”

Here’s the fundamental question Harari asks:

The humanist belief in feelings has enabled us to benefit from the fruits of the modern covenant without paying its price. We don’t need any gods to limit our power and give us meaning — the free choices of customers and voters supply us with all the meaning we require. What, then, will happen once we realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?

In other words, he says that we have enjoyed the economic and technological benefits of modernity — that is, of being set free from a world of pre-determined meaning, our passions and desires being the only real guides for our life. Those days are coming to an end, he says, because science is discovering that there is no such thing as free will, that the human person is nothing but an algorithm. The good news (from Harari’s point of view) is that science will be able to come up with new ways for us to satisfy our desires. For him, being blissed out, to banish awareness of suffering, is to achieve freedom. And if man is nothing but an algorithm, then in theory, it will be possible to engineer his permanent happiness.

This is batty. Because I’ve gone on far too long here, let me refer you to Alan Jacobs’s deft evisceration of this childishly naive point of view.  What troubles me so much about Harari’s book — and why I think it is a good bad book — is that he really does exemplify the way a lot of very smart people think. At one point, he says that the future is determined by small groups of dedicated innovators (= Toynbee’s “creative minorities”), e.g., the scientists and engineers who created the iPhone will probably have had more influence on the direction of history than hundreds of millions of people who did nothing. Whether you and I think that this Silicon Valley Epicurean mythology Harari has concocted is viable or true is beside the point. If those elites who maintain a monopoly on the means of idea production in our society believe it, then we are all going to have to live in the world they have brought into being.

If you think Brave New World is utopia, then you will love Harari’s book without qualification. If, however, you think it is a dystopia, then you may respect Harari’s analysis in many (but by no means all!) respects, but find his prescriptions terrifying. I think the book is ultimately a lie, but it is a seductive lie. Again, I believe Harari has done a pretty good job of showing why, if many of the things we accept in late modernity are true, we really have no strong reasons for following the logic further, into his dystopia. Harari is an evangelist for the Grand Inquisitor of the Church of Silicon Valley (“the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley”), preaching that we can have perfect happiness if we will surrender all our freedom to the ones who know better.

 

 

J.D. Vance Tonight In New Orleans

Courtesy HarperCollins

Hey readers, if you’re in New Orleans, come see J.D. Vance and me onstage at UNO tonight at 6. We’ll be talking about faith, family, politics, and the future of our country. Details here. It’s free and open to the public.

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Bombing

That short clip from “Fox & Friends” is like something off of “The Simpsons.” It shows the MOAB bomb dropping in Afghanistan. The intro music is “Courtesy Of The Red, White, and Blue,” a country song by Toby Keith. The female co-host Ainsley Earhardt says, “That’s what freedom looks like.” Geraldo Rivera said it gives him great pleasure to watch bombs fall on bad guys.

Man.

Look, I don’t mourn one bit for the ISIS fighters killed in that attack. ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of our time. We have to kill them. I am certain that the world is a better place for those ISIS berserkers having been removed from it by the big American bomb. But for God’s sake — I mean that literally — we should not take pleasure in killing. It may be our grim duty — killing ISIS fighters is precisely that, in my view — but to equate dropping bombs on people with “freedom,” and American ideals? It’s depraved.

The late Paul Fussell’s acerbic memoir of his time fighting Nazis in the US infantry, “Doing Battle,” is an important book to read. He had no doubt at all that the war he was fighting was just. But Fussell speaks bluntly about the waste and the cruelty of war. War is at best a tragedy. It is a terrible thing that the armed forces of civilized peoples have to wipe out as many ISIS fighters as we can, given the atrocities those evil berserkers wreak everywhere they go. But you don’t have to pity ISIS to recognize that killing is not what men were made for.

“That’s what freedom looks like.” Sick. I am not a supporter of the death penalty for capital crimes, but if I were, I could look at the body of an executed murderer, and say, “This is what justice looks like.” But the idea that a newscast would introduce video of the execution accompanied by a celebratory pop song, then feature newscasters talking about how happy the execution made them — well, I think this is sort of what barbarism looks like.

Good Friday/Holy Saturday

At St. Matthew’s Orthodox Church, Baton Rouge

Greetings in the final hours of Good Friday. Lots of churchgoing today. Above, a photo I took of the Gospel Book atop the epitaphios (a special icon depicting Christ’s body being prepared for burial). The epitaphios is carried from the altar out into the congregation, and laid on a table, as if it were Christ’s body. The Gospel Book (the collection of the four Gospels, which we use in liturgical services) is then laid atop it. As the service of Good Friday ends, each member of the congregation comes forward, prostrates several times, kisses the epitaphios and the Gospel book, and leaves a rose in memory of Christ. (It can be slightly different in different congregations, but this is how we do it in ours.)

Tonight we sang the matins of Holy Saturday for nearly three hours. Lots more prayers in church tomorrow, before the Paschal liturgy begins at 1 am. I’m going to be quiet on this blog until Pascha. I wish you all a peaceful weekend, and a holy one for fellow Christians celebrating Pascha, as well as a holy one to our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrating Pesach (Passover) through Tuesday.

The Turmoil In France

If you haven’t yet read my colleague Scott McConnell’s dispatch from Paris, in advance of the April 23 French elections, please do. Note this:

In any case, Le Figaro today published its investigation of the state of the Muslim vote in the campaign. It is still quite small, a million perhaps, but growing. Of course all the candidates have at least put forth some ideas of how to deal with radicalization: Muslim imams should be trained in French universities, so that they absorb “the values of the Republic” (Macron); Muslims who go abroad to fight should be stripped of their nationality (Fillon); support the values of laïcité, protect the girl who wears shorts as well as the one who wears the headscarf (Hamon); the left-most candidate Mélenchon warns against the “instrumentalisation” of laïcité against Islam, which I suppose is is a nice way of saying he doesn’t plan to do anything. Le Pen, of course, has a long list of ideas, ranging from the aforementioned dissolution of the UOIF, to banning the wearing of ostensible religious signs or garments, shutting down Salafist mosques, the requirement that sermons be preached in French and the creation of a special surveillance agency to keep track of radical prisoners. To see these ideas written out makes me suspect no satisfactory political solution is going to be reached any time soon.

In its survey, Le Figaro makes the point that the Left can’t be assured of picking up the Muslim vote, that 86 percent of Muslims voted for President Hollande last election and yet feel “disappointed by the Hollande years.” But it’s fair to say the disappointment goes both ways, and the fact that heavily armed policeman are needed to guard religious services on Good Friday is an expression of what the politicians understand but don’t want to talk about.

Roger Cohen has a much longer piece in the NYT today, reflecting with some anguish about France’s state these days. It is titled “France At The End Of Days” — note this well, ye readers of mine who accuse me of alarmism. Cohen’s piece justifies the headline. Here’s why (emphasis mine):

A Le Pen victory is far from assured, plausible if not probable. Returning to France late last month, to the glow of Paris and the gloom of the provinces, I was struck by how much Le Pen’s party, whose racist ideology was once taboo, has joined the mainstream. The pattern that has prevailed throughout the Fifth Republic — alternation of center-left and center-right — seems dead. The French are tired of increasingly indistinguishable Socialist and Republican presidents. President François Hollande, a socialist with a single-digit approval rating, decided not to run for a second term. As elsewhere in the West, traditional parties bereft of compelling ideas are in crisis, buffeted by social-media-driven mobilizations.

The first round of voting on April 23 is almost certain to send Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old upstart leader of a new catchall centrist movement, into the runoff on May 7: the xenophobic nationalist versus the pro-Europe neophyte.

In other words, the center is not holding anymore. This is a very big deal. And it is by no means the case that the first round will send Le Pen and Macron into the runoff. As of today, the polls show a statistical dead heat among the top four candidates, including François Fillon, the fading center-right standard-bearer, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left insurgent. Around one-third — one-third! — of voters are undecided. It is entirely possible that Le Pen and Mélenchon will make it to the second round, meaning the next president of France could be either on the far right or the far left.

Cohen says that on paper, life is pretty great for the French — but they are a miserable lot. More:

I headed east to Metz, in the Lorraine region of France. Outside the station, opened in 1908 when the city was part of Germany, I found French, German and European Union flags fluttering to mark “Metz Wunderbar” (“Wonderful Metz”) week, a celebration of French-German friendship. Such is Europe today: a shared house built over borders etched in blood. Lorraine closed its last iron ore mine a couple of decades ago. The region has struggled to replace it with service sector jobs. The National Front has prospered.

At a restaurant I ran into Thierry Corona, a sommelier from nearby Koenigsmacker who had come to attend a Le Pen rally. A blue rose, Le Pen’s campaign symbol, was pinned to his lapel. Corona was fired up. Le Pen would boost the wine industry by getting rid of a “politically correct” law curtailing advertising. She would end “the dictatorship of Brussels.” She would rebuild “France for the French.”

Koenigsmacker, Corona said, had been stripped of life. Small stores had been replaced by huge “hypermarkets” on the outskirts of town. Human contact was almost forgotten. “In the shopping malls the cashiers are lined up like cattle for the slaughter,” he said. Old people without cars were treated like human refuse. “And immigrants arrive and they immediately get handouts!”

Such provincial alienation is widespread. The most talked-about political book these days is Christophe Guilluy’s “The France of the Periphery,” a devastating portrait of what he calls the “total cultural fracture” between the networked milieu of Paris and a few other cities, and the declining dystopia outside them. If America has New York and Trump country, France has Paris and Koenigsmacker. The red state-blue state chasm, in various guides, is the core cultural condition of the West.

Think about that: the core cultural condition of the West. When people try to tell you that the culture war isn’t real, or is something right-wing people made up to sell fear and alienation, you can probably assume that those are blue-state people who think their own views are normative for all the great and the good.

Here’s a quote from Macron:

“Modernity is disruptive,” he declared, “and I endorse that.”

Well, so are earthquakes. Whether or not a disruption is worth endorsing depends on what — and who — is disrupted. As Zygmunt Bauman has written, the kind of people who thrive in “liquid modernity” — the condition of permanent disruption that we all live in today — are those who have no ties to people, places, or creeds. Nothing that could keep them from going with the flow, wherever it takes them.

Few people can wish to live like that. It’s not human. On the other hand, stasis is unsustainable. Cohen writes:

But the comprehensive French welfare state — financed by mandatory contributions for pensions, health and unemployment benefits that push up wage costs — tends toward inflexibility. Firing anyone can be tedious and expensive, so there’s reluctance to hire. Youth unemployment stands around 25 percent. Over 31 percent of gross domestic product is spent on health, unemployment and other benefits, compared to 24.6 percent in Germany. France has in effect made a structural choice for unemployment. Everyone knows this. But because attachment to the model is fierce, honest discussion tends to be taboo.

A good friend left his French homeland in the late 1990s, headed to the US in pursuit of starting his own company. He said the entrepreneurial environment in France was deadly. Nothing but stagnation through over-regulation and a mindset that was very conservative (he wasn’t talking politics, but rather the general approach to life, and to the prospect of change). Now, in 2017, the company he co-founded is worth almost $400 million.

All those jobs he has created ought to have been French jobs. But he saw no hope of being able to build his company in his native country, because of the regulation. This is the land of “immobilisme” — paralysis — that a young small entrepreneur in Cohen’s story decries:

An argument ensues. Cyrille Jacquiot opened the restaurant last year and is working a 75-hour week. He thinks France’s problem is not the fraying welfare state but the fact that “there are too many acquired rights and too little will to work.” Jacquiot tells Dufour and Meunier they are deluded. If France is the land of “immobilisme” — roughly paralysis — it is because the French know they are protected. “If you want less unemployment, you need more flexibility,” he says. “People need to know they can be fired. Otherwise all sense of responsibility is lost. You have to decide in life: Do you want to work or not?”

Cohen is very much on the side of Macron. He continues:

Could he do it? I want to believe he can, in part because I take seriously something he had said earlier: “I want to help with Muslim integration. If you follow the line of Marine Le Pen, you create a civil war.”

In “Submission,” his best-selling novel, Michel Houellebecq writes: “The growing gap — an abyss — between the population and those who spoke in its name, politicians and journalists, had necessarily to lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable. France, like other western countries, had been heading for a long time toward civil war.”

In the book, frantic maneuvering to keep Le Pen from power leads to the victory of an imagined Islamic party led by a telegenic character Mohammed Ben Abbes. Houellebecq’s France is culturally exhausted — a land of desperate sex and spiritual emptiness — and so it succumbs to a movement driven by faith and conviction.

Cohen goes to the grim Muslim-dominated suburbs of Paris, and finds a Muslim who tells him, “I know people who are ready to vote Le Pen just to break something.”

Read the whole thing.  It seems the height of naiveté to think that the presidential election will solve anything in France. It seems that whoever wins will preside over the start of some very serious troubles. Does anybody — left, right, or center — think the problem of Muslim integration that nobody can really talk about is ever going to be solved?

Zuckerberging Public Discourse

Two readers tell me that Facebook will not let them post a link to yesterday’s entry here in which I criticize LGBT rights groups who are trying to get all those who oppose their goals labeled as haters and bigots. All my post does is criticize them as trying to shut down free speech and open discourse by calling dissenters bigots. But this is apparently too much for Facebook (or its algorithms) to tolerate.

This put me in mind of Nicholas Carr’s blog post from a few weeks ago, in which he criticized FB founder Mark Zuckerberg’s most recent “message” to the world. Carr begins:

The word “community” appears, by my rough count, 98 times in Mark Zuckerberg’s latest message to the masses. In a post-fact world, truth is approached through repetition. The message that is transmitted most often is the fittest message, the message that wins. Verification becomes a matter of pattern recognition. It’s the epistemology of the meme, the sword by which Facebook lives and dies.

Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?

It’s a good question, though I’m not sure there is any world that we all want, and if there is one, I’m not sure Mark Zuckerberg is the guy I’d appoint to define it. And yet, from his virtual pulpit, surrounded by his 86 million followers, the young Facebook CEO hesitates not a bit to speak for everyone, in the first person plural. There is no opt-out to his “we.” It’s the default setting and, in Zuckerberg’s totalizing utopian vision, the setting is hardwired, universal, and nonnegotiable.

Right. Who is “we,” Kemo Sabe? Carr continues taking apart Zuckerberg’s message, pointing out its author’s assumption that all communities share the same values. Zuckerberg says that “churches” and “sports teams” are examples of local groups that help build social infrastructure. Carr remarks:

Zuckerberg’s conflation of religion and sports is odd but illuminating. In his view, the tenets of a religion matter no more than the rules of a game; what’s essential about a church and a sports team is that they both form social infrastructure that serves to “bring us together and reinforce our values.” It’s only by separating individual beliefs from community formation, and then pretending those beliefs don’t really matter, that Zuckerberg is able to sustain the fantasy that all sub-communities share a set of values — values that derive from community itself, independent of the members’ motivations in forming a group. These common values play the same role in building a global community that common standards play in building the internet: they enable seamless interconnectivity.

Zuckerberg remains oblivious to the fact that a sub-community, particularly a religious one, may be formed on a foundation of belief that is incompatible with, and in opposition to, the beliefs of the surrounding community. As the Wall Street Journal‘s Ian Lovett writes today in an article on a traditionalist Catholic community that has grown around a Benedictine monastery in Oklahoma, “The 100 or so people living here are part of a burgeoning movement among traditional Christians. Feeling besieged by secular society, they are taking refuge in communities like this one, clustered around churches and monasteries, where faith forms the backbone of daily life.” Such communities are very different from sports teams. Their formative beliefs aren’t some sort of standardized Lego infrastructure that enables the expression of universal community values. The beliefs of the individuals in the community are the values of the community, and they are anything but common standards.

One more passage from Carr, highlighting the techno-utopianism in Zuckerberg’s worldview:

Tension and conflict, then, become technical problems, amenable to technical solutions. And so, rather than questioning Facebook’s assumptions about society — might global community-building, pursued through media structures, end up encouraging polarization and tribalism? — and the role the company plays in society, Zuckerberg ends up back where he always ends up: with a batch of new hacks. There will be new algorithmic filters, new layers of artificial intelligence, new commenting and rating systems, new techniques for both encryption and surveillance. The bugs — bad actors and bad code — will be engineered out of the system. Zuckerberg’s program, as Ars Technica’s Annalee Newitz points out, is filled with contradictions, which he either won’t acknowledge or, thanks to his techno-utopian tunnel vision, can’t see. He makes a big deal, for instance, of a new initiative through which Facebook will provide management tools for organizing what he calls “very meaningful” communities — groups characterized by passionate members under the direction of a strong leader. The example Zuckerberg offers — a group dedicated to helping refugees find homes — sounds great, but it’s not hard to see how such tools, deployed in the context of Facebook’s emotionalist echo chamber, could be used to mobilize some very nasty groups, of just the sort that Facebook is hoping to purge from its network. “The best communities in the world have leaders,” Zuckerberg said in an interview promoting his so-called manifesto. So do the worst, Mark.

Read the whole thing. Carr is correct, obviously. But one has to wonder: do you really want people with a Silicon Valley view of the world determining the boundaries of discourse for  a global community?

Remember the 2014 revelation that back in 2012, Facebook conducted an experiment to control what appeared in the newsfeeds of 700,000 users, to see if it could manipulate their moods (it could)? Facebook gives the illusion that the only curators of what appears there are its users — but this is not so. I would be pleased if Facebook banned neo-Nazi propaganda and suchlike, and I presume that it is either doing so or working towards doing so. But when Facebook is administered by Californians who cannot tell the difference between conservative Christians defending free speech and open discourse, and Hitlerians dedicated to ethnic cleansing, how can you trust their judgment about what constitutes “meaningful” communities, versus those that need to be pushed to the margins and exiled from the greater community?

Last year in The New York Times, Jonathan Taplin warned about Facebook’s (and Google’s) growing monopoly over information delivery. Excerpt:

The former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, estimated that Facebook had “sucked up $27 million” of the paper’s projected digital advertising revenue in the last year by essentially keeping Guardian readers on Facebook, rather than linking them to the Guardian site.

“They are taking all the money,” he noted. “They have algorithms we don’t understand, which are a filter between what we do and how people receive it.”

But the problem isn’t just for musicians, authors, filmmakers or even the phone company. As the former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris wrote, “If you control the menu, you control the choices.”

We have ceded much of our freedom to choose by giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the menu (Google’s search rankings and Facebook’s Newsfeed). How that menu is determined by these black box algorithms isn’t known by anyone outside those companies. As more and more of our lives become digital, these new algorithms will assume more power over our lives.

Next week, I will be writing much more about Taplin’s new book on this topic, Move Fast And Break Things, which is set for April 18 publication. Taplin’s cultural politics are very different from my own, but we share concern over what this monopoly means. Last December, an ACLU lawyer wrote about his concerns over Facebook’s censorship policy. Excerpt:

But for Facebook to assume the burden of trying to solve a larger societal problem of fake news by tweaking these algorithms would likely just make the situation worse. To its current role as commercially motivated curator of things-that-will-please-its-users would be added a new role: guardian of the social good. And that would be based on who-knows-what judgment of what that good might be at a given time. If the company had been around in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, how would it have handled information about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, gay rights, and women’s rights? A lot of material that is now seen as vital to social progress would then have been widely seen as beyond the pale. The company already has a frightening amount of power, and this would increase it dangerously. We wouldn’t want the government doing this kind of censorship—that would almost certainly be unconstitutional—and many of the reasons that would be a bad idea would also apply to Facebook, which is the government of its own vast realm. For one thing, once Facebook builds a giant apparatus for this kind of constant truth evaluation, we can’t know in what direction it may be turned. What would Donald Trump’s definition of “fake news” be?

The ACLU’s ideal is that a forum for free expression that is as central to our national political conversations as Facebook has become would not feature any kind of censorship or other interference with the neutral flow of information. It already does engage in such interference in response to its commercial interest in tamping down the uglier sides of free speech, but to give Facebook the role of national Guardian of Truth would exponentially increase the pitfalls that approach brings. The company does not need to interfere more heavily in Americans’ communications. We would like to see Facebook go in the other direction, becoming more transparent about the operation of its algorithms to ordinary users, and giving them an ever-greater degree of control over how that algorithm works.

In related news, students at Duquesne University, a Catholic college, are upset because Chick-fil-A might bring some of its bigot Christian chicken nuggets to campus:

At the March 26 Student Government Association meeting, Senator at Large Niko Martini proposed that the SGA pass a resolution asking the university to reconsider the inclusion of Chick-fil-A as a dining option for students.

Martini is on the Lambda executive board. He clarified that he made the proposal on his own behalf and not Lambda’s.

“Chick-fil-A has a questionable history on civil rights and human rights,” he said in a statement to The Duke. “I think it’s imperative the university chooses to do business with organizations that coincide with the [university’s] mission and expectations they give students regarding diversity and inclusion.”

The SGA Senate did not pass any resolution but agreed to consider an alternate resolution to vett the Chick-fil-A Express, which senators tabled for the April 9 SGA meeting to allow time to research the concerns.

More:

Lambda President Rachel Coury personally said she worries the safety provided by Gay-Straight Alliance might be in jeopardy.

“I’ve tried very hard within the last semester and a half to promote this safe environment for the LGBTQ+ community,” Coury said. “So I fear that with the Chick-fil-A being in Options that maybe people will feel that safe place is at risk.”

So now chicken nuggets are kryptonite for the Social Justice Warriors? As ridiculous as this sounds — as ridiculous as this is — the people running Facebook are far more likely to trend SJW in their worldview. And as Jonathan V. Last reports in the Weekly Standard, regarding the Human Rights Campaign and its Jesse Jackson-style shakedown of health care institutions, this stuff is not about fairness, but about power. Remember, the most potent manifestation of media bias is not in the stories themselves, but in what the media allow to be published or broadcast.

The Suffering Church Of Egypt

You saw that ISIS set off two bombs in Coptic churches in Egypt last Sunday, right? You may not realize that the Copts have long suffered persecution at the hands of Egypt’s Muslim majority. Samuel Tadros, an American Coptic Christian, writes:

The twin bombings were hardly the first attacks against Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Nor are they likely to be the last. In recent years, Copts, who constitute more than half of all Christians in the Middle East, have been setting the grisliest of records, with each new attack claiming more victims than the one before. The Islamic State has claimed credit for the recent bombings. Following its bombing in December of the Coptic Cathedral complex in Cairo, the group released a message promising more to come for the “worshipers of the cross,” the group’s name for the Copts. A week-long murder spree targeting Copts by ISIS in Northern Sinai in February nearly emptied the region of Christians. Bombing Coptic churches just before Christmas and Easter, ISIS seemed to take particular delight in targeting Copts during their most joyful celebrations.

More:

Christianity was born in pain in Egypt, its message of hope bathed in blood. Fleeing persecution in Israel, the young Jesus found refuge in the country. Yet suffering and martyrdom would become the central features of the Church his disciples would found. Saint Mark the Evangelist, who introduced Christianity to Egypt, shed his blood on the streets of Alexandria, and countless Copts followed him as they clung to their faith in their redeemer in the face of endless persecution. That initial blow, struck by Roman Emperors, was the first of many. The names of rulers may have changed, from Roman and Byzantine emperors to Muslim caliphs and governors, discriminatory laws changed from the Muslim rules of Dhimmitude, to the exacting, oppressive laws of Egypt’s present-day rulers, but the nature of the Coptic plight has not.

Through it all, Copts clung to their church. As everything from employment opportunities to roster spots on soccer teams were closed to them, the church became more than a house of worship, providing health care, private education, even sports venues. A Coptic nation exists today—but it does not seek independence. Membership is based not on race, nor, after the loss of the Coptic tongue, on a distinct language or even purely on religion. Instead, Copts are bound by the unique history of a church, a history of suffering. Holy Week may be focused on the pain of Christ, but for the Copts, their pain is seen and felt through His. They have carried their redeemer’s cross on the way to Golgotha, just as they carry a tattooed cross on their arms.

And:

It may well be time for Copts to pack their bags, close their churches, and bid farewell to 2,000 years of Christianity in Egypt. Will the Copts follow the Jews, both ancient and modern, kicked out of Egypt at the hands of Gamal Abdel Nasser? Where would they go? Who would take them? These are depressing questions, ones that Coptic parents in Egypt are confronting. Leaving, it seems, is inevitable.

Read the whole thing. Who would take them in? Why would we not, in the United States? We are a majority Christian country, and the Copts flourish here. Where else could they go? Do we American Christians care about them? It seems that our government has never given two flips about the welfare of Christians in the Middle East. What is the excuse of the American churches?

Pray for all the Christians in the Middle East on this, the holiest weekend of their year. We should not be surprised if those churches see martyrs made among them by their persecutors.

Pinkshirts On The Move

A reader writes:

The Law of Merited Impossibility strikes again!

The Law of Merited Impossibility, for those who haven’t been reading this blog for a while, is a principle that explains the behavior of gay rights advocates when confronted by opposition. They say that critics are being alarmist, that these things will never happen. And when those things actually happen? Well, the bigots had it coming. So, the Law is: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

So, remember how back in the day people who backed same-sex marriage said that there were no reasonable grounds to oppose it. “What does my gay neighbor’s marriage have to do with me?” they said. The rest of us tried to argue that it’s not so simple, but we were called fearmongers. Now we know that if a Christian florist or photographer doesn’t wish to be involved with your neighbor’s gay wedding, they will lose their business over it.

And now — this is the story the aforementioned reader sent in — national LGBT activists are moving to have any and all opposition blackballed as pure bigotry. From Reuters:

A liberal coalition on Thursday started a campaign to label social conservative organizations that oppose transgender rights as hate groups, ratcheting up the antagonism between opposing sides on one of America’s most contentious debates.

The Eliminate Hate Campaign seeks to draw attention to groups it sees as extreme and hateful against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, accusing them of hiding behind ostensibly Christian or family values.

Alarmed by a surge in reported hate crimes tied to the 2016 presidential campaign, the campaign will pressure the media to use the hate-group designation for about 50 organizations in the United States.

It also will encourage the public to oppose extremism and seek to diminish the prestige of groups it believes spread fear and lies about LGBT people.

Here’s a link to the Eliminate Hate website. Among the groups they target: the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most prominent legal organizations doing pro bono defense of Christians under siege for their beliefs, especially when they conflict with gay rights claims. Understand this: for a Christian even to defend herself in court gets her and her defenders labeled a bigot by these people.

Would it be fair for conservative Christian organizations to mount a campaign labeling any pro-LGBT rights organization as “Christian haters”? No, it would not. This Eliminate Hate campaign is really about eliminating dissent. It’s an attempt to no-platform anyone who doesn’t agree with them on gay rights, and/or who has the gall to defend themselves in court. You’d better support ADF; the livelihood they save may be your own.

I have talked to multiple Christian lawyers — not necessarily affiliated with ADF — who have told me stories about fellow lawyers — even prominent ones — losing their jobs at their firms simply for defending Christian clients in court in gay rights cases. Losing their jobs — this, because corporate clients deserted their firms rather than be associated with lawyers who defend Christian conservatives. How would you feel if it were the 1950s, and lawyers who defended clients accused of communist sympathies were informally blackballed, because they took the case of unpopular defendants? We know exactly what it meant when anybody who stood up to Sen. McCarthy’s bullying was called a communist. This is the same kind of thing — this time, coming from powerful people on the cultural left.

Similarly, at besieged Gordon College, the faculty senate has resigned in protest, standing by a professor there who claims she was denied promotion because she openly criticized the Christian college’s conservative stance on gay rights. From the Boston Globe:

The resignations represented the latest rift to emerge between the faculty and the administration at the small evangelical school in Wenham, which forbids professors, students, and staff from engaging in “homosexual practice” on or off campus.

In a complaint to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, Margaret DeWeese-Boyd, an assistant professor of sociology, asserts that the college president and provost denied her a promotion to full professor because she has openly criticized the policy since 2013.

DeWeese-Boyd says she has spoken against the ban at a faculty meeting, signed a petition opposing it, organized trainings and events related to gay rights, and directly addressed Gordon’s president, D. Michael Lindsay, about the school’s stance.

So, a faculty member has been repeatedly outspoken on a policy that means a lot to the school in terms of its faith identity, and indeed a policy on which it has been repeatedly attacked from the outside, and even threatened with the loss of its academic accreditation. She has done all that, and she’s surprised that the school doesn’t promote her? Must be haters, all of them. Only cretins blinded by bigotry could possibly object, right?

I don’t know whether Hosanna-Tabor will protect Gordon in this case if it ends up in court. In the court of public opinion, though, especially in Massachusetts, the verdict is not in much dispute.