Rod Dreher's Blog, page 480

Benedict Option On The Road

Hey readers, only a few days left until The Benedict Option is available in bookstores. If you live in the Washington, DC, or New York City areas, please consider coming to hear me (and others) talk and debate the Benedict Option.

The first event is sponsored by the Trinity Forum in Washington, DC. Details:

Date:

Wednesday, March 15, 2017 – 6:30pm to 8:30pm

Location:

The National Press Club Ballroom

529 14th Street NW

Washington, DC 20045

Pete Wehner and Kirsten Powers are going to be there to comment on my presentation, and engage in conversation with Your Working Boy about it. Register by following this link.

The second one, on Thursday night, is in NYC. You also have to register for this one. Get this: the great Tristyn Bloom has invented a bourbon cocktail called the Benedict Option, which they’ll serve at the reception. You are going to miss the chance to taste that? No, you’re not.

‘I Feel Just Like Jesus’ Son’

Here’s a link to a Christopher Caldwell essay in First Things that will grab you by the lapels and shake you hard. It’s about the opioid addiction in America. Excerpts:

Drug addiction used to be a ghetto thing. Now Oxycodone has joined shuttered factories and Donald Trump as a symbol of white working-class desperation and fecklessness. The reaction has been unsympathetic. Writes Nadja Popovich in The Guardian: “Some point to this change in racial and economic demographics as one reason many politicians have re-evaluated the tough ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric of the past 30 years.”

The implicit accusation is that only now that whites are involved have racist authorities been roused to act. This is false in two ways. First, authorities have not been roused to act. Second, when they do, they will have epidemiological, and not just tribal, grounds for doing so. A plague afflicting an entire country, across ethnic groups, is by definition more devastating than a plague afflicting only part of it. A heroin scourge in America’s housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000. The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his soul ballad “Freddie’s Dead.” The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia.

Can you believe those numbers? In terms of death, the opioid epidemic is five times worse than the crack epidemic. Remember how (rightly) freaked out we were as a nation by the crack epidemic?

Caldwell says that our response to the crisis has been to cast aside the language and concepts of moral condemnation, and to focus exclusively on the therapeutic. For example, there’s a whole new set of politically correct rules that you are supposed to use when you talk about drug addicts, so they don’t feel so bad about themselves. Caldwell adds:

Calling addiction a disease usefully describes certain measurable aspects of the problem—particularly tolerance and withdrawal. It fails to capture what is special and dangerous about the way drugs bind with people’s minds. Almost every known disease is something people wish to be rid of. Addiction is different. Addicts resist known cures—even to the point of death. If you do not reckon with why addicts go to such lengths to continue suffering, you are unlikely to figure out how to treat them. This turns out to be an intensely personal matter.

Medical treatment plays an obvious role in addressing the heroin epidemic, especially in the efforts to save those who have overdosed or helping addicts manage their addictions. But as an overall approach, it partakes of some of the same fallacies as its supposed opposite, “heartless” incarceration. Both leave out the addict and his drama. Medicalizing the heroin crisis may not stigmatize him, but it belittles him. Moral condemnation is an incomplete response to the addict. But it has its place, because it does the addict the compliment of assuming he has a conscience, a set of thought processes. Those thought processes are what led him into his artificial hell. They are his best shot at finding a way out.

In 1993, Francis F. Seeburger, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, wrote a profound book on the thought processes of addicts called Addiction and Responsibility. We tend to focus on the damage addiction does. A cliché among empathetic therapists, eager to describe addiction as a standard-issue disease, is that “no one ever decides to become an addict.” But that is not exactly true, Seeburger shows. “Something like an addiction to addiction plays a role in all addiction,” he writes. “Addiction itself . . . is tempting; it has many attractive features.” In an empty world, people have a need to need. Addiction supplies it. “Addiction involves the addict. It does not present itself as some externally imposed condition. Instead, it comes toward the addict as the addict’s very self.” Addiction plays on our strengths, not just our failings. It simplifies things. It relieves us of certain responsibilities. It gives life a meaning. It is a “perversely clever copy of that transcendent peace of God.”

That is profound. It brought to mind a guy I knew in college in the 1980s. He was not an addict, though he was a heavy drinker, like many of us. He was also a really smart kid, but lost as he could be. Felt his life had no purpose. It’s normal for college students to go through this, “What is my life all about?” phase, and it’s even healthy. But there was something especially intense about him. He was really into the Existentialism class we took together, and now that I look back on it, I can see that he was in it because he was craving a reason to live. He said something to me once in jest, but in light of what I know about him, and Caldwell’s article, I think it was a deep truth: “My life would be easier in one way if I had a heroin addiction. At least then I would know what to do with myself.”

As far as I know, there was no heroin in Baton Rouge back then, or if there was, it was not easy for middle-class white college boys to find. That’s why I didn’t take him seriously. But I wonder what that guy would have done had heroin been around, and easy to obtain. Would what he said as a joke (apparently) have given him the idea to try it? Understand what I’m saying here: this guy was in spiritual pain. He was really anxious, and searching for some grounding in life, something to give his life meaning, purpose and direction.

Thinking of him this morning in light of Caldwell’s article, I can see so clearly that he was looking for that “transcendent peace of God.”

I was too, in my own way, though in a much less dramatic form. I drank like a fish back then on the weekends, not because it was pleasurable, but so that I could forget my own anxiety, self-loathing, and self-consciousness long enough to talk to girls. That was it: to drown my inhibitions. To experience, however crudely and fleetingly, deliverance from myself. No wonder I liked that heroin guy. His inner drama was existential; mine was about talking to girls. But we both wanted peace and deliverance. When Caldwell writes that addiction plays on our strengths as well as our weaknesses, I think about that classmate, who was not a bad guy at all, but to the contrary, the kind of person looking for a mission in life, something greater than himself to serve. If that passion could have been focused and channeled to the good, he could have become somebody great. If not, not. But it had to go somewhere. It was tearing him up inside.

I wonder what happened to him.

This was an intelligent middle-class white kid who had social capital and economic resources, and, this being the 1980s, didn’t have serious temptations greater than booze and pot. Now, think about this same kid in 2017, working class version. Raised by his mother, who had a series of live-in boyfriends. No church background. Chaotic home life, with lots of TV and video games. He graduates high school, knows he’s not college material, and thinks about what he’s going to do with his life. There aren’t many good jobs for somebody like him. He’s like the young white guys that showed up at the warehouse where young J.D. Vance worked: good jobs were available, but they couldn’t hold on to them because they had no self-discipline, and a poor work ethic. Let’s not blame our hypothetical young man for that. He was not so much raised as jerked up with no parents — especially no father — to teach him this.

So: he’s 21 years old, with no direction in life, with no good lifelong worth prospets, and no social pressure within his sphere to get a job (however unsatisfying), and start saving towards marriage and family. There is no expectation that his life is heading toward that purpose, or should. Do it or don’t do it: nobody cares. Most young men in that situation would be lost and hurting.

And along comes the heroin dealer, offering you respite from that pain and anxiety, and giving you an extremely perverse reason to live.

Caldwell, again:

The deeper problem, however, is at once metaphysical and practical, and we’re going to have a very hard time confronting it. We in the sober world have, for about half a century, been renouncing our allegiance to anything that forbids or commands. Perhaps this is why, as this drug epidemic has spread, our efforts have been so unavailing and we have struggled even to describe it. Addicts, in their own short-circuited, reductive, and destructive way, are armed with a sense of purpose. We aren’t. It is not a coincidence that the claims of political correctness have found their way into the culture of addiction treatment just now. This sometimes appears to be the only grounds for compulsion that the non-addicted part of our culture has left.

Read the whole thing. Where are the metaphysicians when you need them…?

One more thing, while I’m at it. This piece speaks to why I have never bought the anti-drug war rhetoric. Let’s say you make it possible for everybody to buy heroin. Do people really believe that the addiction problem is not going to get much worse? That the only real problem with drug abuse is the lawbreaking that attends it? That society has an interest in making it even easier for people to give themselves over to an addiction that consumes their lives?

Caldwell says that we mistakenly think that all addicts want to quit. This, I suppose, is behind the thinking that says “legalize it, and let’s treat the addicts.” Well, what if the addicts don’t want treatment? What if they prefer the prison of addiction to the pain, anxiety, and purposelessness of life without the drug?

Here are the lyrics to the Velvet Underground song “Heroin,” written by Lou Reed, who was a junkie. Notice the religious longing in these words, the craving for deliverance:

I don’t know just where I’m going

But I’m gonna try for the kingdom, if I can

‘Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man

When I put a spike into my vein

And I tell you things aren’t quite the same

When I’m rushing on my run

And I feel just like Jesus’ son

And I guess that I just don’t know

And I guess that I just don’t know

I have made big decision

I’m gonna try to nullify my life

‘Cause when the blood begins to flow

When it shoots up the dropper’s neck

When I’m closing in on death

You can’t help me now, you guys

And all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk

You can all go take a walk

And I guess I just don’t know

And I guess that I just don’t know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago

I wish that I’d sailed the darkened seas

On a great big clipper ship

Going from this land here to that

On a sailor’s suit and cap

Away from the big city

Where a man cannot be free

Of all the evils of this town

And of himself and those around

Oh, and I guess that I just don’t know

Oh, and I guess that I just don’t know

Heroin, be the death of me

Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life

Because a mainline into my vein

Leads to a center in my head

And then I’m better off than dead

Because when the smack begins to flow

I really don’t care anymore

About all the Jim-Jims in this town

And all the politicians making crazy sounds

And everybody putting everybody else down

And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

‘Cause when the smack begins to flow

And I really don’t care anymore

Ah, when that heroin is in my blood

And that blood is in my head

Then thank God that I’m as good as dead

And thank your God that I’m not aware

And thank God that I just don’t care

And I guess I just don’t know

Oh, and I guess I just don’t know

UPDATE: A reader posts:

“One more thing, while I’m at it. This piece speaks to why I have never bought the anti-drug war rhetoric. Let’s say you make it possible for everybody to buy heroin. Do people really believe that the addiction problem is not going to get much worse?”

Well, as mentioned above, decriminalizing does in general make the problem better. It will not eradicate it but will limit how much the rest of society suffers. But… It wouldn’t be such a problem if the doctors and our government weren’t the initial pushers in this case, not some seedy dealer looking for wayward youth. It’s absolutely vile the way pills are handed out like they’re nothing for everything that hurts these days not from derelicts, but from the people you’re supposed to trust the most with your health and well being.

A few examples just in my own life…

I had a TMJ joint issue in high school (the 90’s) and the Dr gave me 300 Soma’s with three refills. I was already a high functioning drug fiend at the time, but coming off those was brutal.

10 years ago one of my grandmothers from Kentucky was Dr shopping and taking nearly 60 pills a day. When my grandfather tried to leave her as he couldn’t get her to clean up it lead to her having a psychotic breakdown resulting in her murdering him and and herself.

A cousin my age ended up with a long lasting heroin addiction after hurting his back carrying feed bags. He’s functioning but a shell of a man with low chances of ever getting a decent job or having a stable relationship.

My fiancé was prescribed by her doctor a weekly bottle of both pills and liquid Loritab in high school for menstrual cramps.

Her little sister we recently had to detox after a different doctor was prescribing her up to 8 oxycontin a day for a pain issue. She’s 12.

When doctors are pushing the opiates and government backs them you cannot fix these issues properly and they are far worse drugs than a little pot, cocaine, or LSD will ever be.

“Addiction involves the addict. It does not present itself as some externally imposed condition. Instead, it comes toward the addict as the addict’s very self.”

This is what’s so hard to grasp to non addicts, and why it’s hard to ever really put yourself back in moral and spiritual shape. When you first get sober you no longer recognize who you are. You know the addict in the mirror. You don’t know sober you, and it’s scary to be so alienated not just from the world but from your self. You’re left with the silence, the shame, and lots of overwhelming unanswered questions about just what the hell you have been up to. It’s better to shut that voice up and get back to normal. Your psyche feels threadbare. It’s a shirt stretched out way too far that doesn’t quite ever go back into shape. The chaos, far from being scary, becomes what’s completely normal. You all know people like that, who when things get too good can’t help but blow their lives up. The madness is like a warm blanket. The physical and mental pain cycles back and forth and piles up on itself. If you’re going to change you have to want to and you have to be willing to be terrified of whatever normalcy entails. There IS a moral choice involved. It’s an incredibly hard one to make but it does get easier over time. It’s also the same type of one that most people need to do to get off their devices. You need to face the silence and what comes from it even when it’s hard.

Father Barnabas Powel said something … “Heaven and Hell are the same place, the only question is whether you’ll enjoy it.”

The addict, and I would guess most Americans, most assuredly if they had to stand in the truth of their current situations would not enjoy it.

 

On Christian Mourning In America

Well, The Benedict Option will be published a week from today, and the reviews and coverage is really starting to pick up.

In First Things, my friend Patrick Deneen reviews my book in tandem with Tony Esolen’s Out Of The Ashes and Archbishop Charles Chaput’s Strangers In A Strange Land. I’ve read both those books, by the way, and strongly recommend them. I’m honored to call those Catholic men friends and allies in our common struggle, and encourage all my readers to embrace this “ecumenism of the trenches” across church and denominational lines.

Why does Deneen gather our books together in a single review? He writes:

This project [Jerry Falwell’s 1980s-era Moral Majority] reflected a kind of optimism: America is seen as a decent, faith-filled nation that can be restored with the ejection of a corrupt leadership class. The Moral Majority wasn’t claiming to change the nature of America, but to allow its true nature to reassert itself. Though the religious right sometimes engaged in jeremiads, reproving America for falling into sin and vice, the focus was on restoration. Ronald Reagan—cheerful, optimistic, and imbued with a spirit of American progress—promised not to raze Sodom and Gomorrah, but to right the course toward Zion. Combining Winthrop’s call for America to be a “shining city on a hill” with FDR’s belief that America’s path was toward a “rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan embodied the confident hope of an American renewal.

Thirty years later, the mood has changed. Three books have appeared almost simultaneously that assume the opposite of what Falwell believed: America is populated by an immoral majority. Not only is its leadership class dominated by progressive elites, but the American public more generally has been corrupted by constant saturation in a media of skepticism and irony, pervasive consumerism, unavoidable pornography, and incessant distraction fostered by entertainment centers in every person’s pocket. America has lost its faith, and so the faithful have begun to question their belief in America.

Published within months of each other—by a popular blogger and author who has journeyed from Protestantism to agnosticism to Catholicism to Orthodoxy, Rod Dreher; by one of America’s most prominent and intellectually accomplished Catholic bishops, Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles J. Chaput; and by a Catholic professor of English at Providence College and renowned translator of Dante, Anthony Esolen—the books share the belief that traditional Christians are a moral minority. All three books were written in the midst of a political campaign that was expected to result in the election of Hillary Clinton. All three reflect the pessimism that accompanied that prospect.

The outcome of that election, surprising as it was, does not change the argument of these books: Politics will not save us. What is first of all necessary is to rebuild a culture in disarray. Compared with recovering the basic requirements of virtuous civilization—healthy communities, flourishing family life, sound education, a deep reservoir of cultural memory and practice, and formative religious faith—remaking the Supreme Court is a cinch. Philosophers who have described culture as the first requirement of a healthy civilization, from Plato to Burke to Tocqueville, have generally believed that the most one can consciously strive to achieve is preservation of a healthy culture, should one be fortunate enough to possess one. Once a culture is corrupted from within, however, they saw little hope of reversing its decay.

More:

Findings by the Pew Research Center about religious belief and practice show an ongoing decline in religious belief and membership, including a dramatic rise in nonbelievers, especially among the millennial generation. Even where religious faith persists, Christian Smith suggests that religion for many Americans is individualistic and therapeutic rather than a source of discipline and moral norms. For nearly thirty years, conservatives have triumphed politically amid a catastrophic breakdown of social and cultural norms, especially those that foster an ethic of self-sacrifice, commonweal, and practices that inculcate duty, discipline, respect, civility, and obedience.

After some thirty years of conservative ascendancy, it is difficult to proclaim the existence of a moral majority. If anything, the most recent election points not to hope for “morning in America,” but despair among those fearful of what comes after twilight. Calls for restoration of family values were nowhere to be heard among the cheering throngs at the rallies held for a serial adulterer and crude showman. The president secured the support of a number of prominent leaders in the Evangelical churches as well as majorities of Christian voters who viewed him not as the champion of a renewed Christian America, but as someone who could hold at bay a ruling class that is openly hostile to Christianity. The aspiration of those who voted against another four years of progressivism was not to restore political order but to smash Washington.

And so here we are. The long-standing conservative narrative held that America is fundamentally decent but that those decencies are being eroded by an elite that subscribes to non-American, and even anti-American, values. The simultaneous political success of conservatism and ruination of American culture has made this view untenable. Now, a more radical possibility is opening up. Traditional Christians now wonder if a just and righteous society must be built in opposition to a national creed that has led inexorably to libertinism.

This conclusion has become harder to avoid. If the conservative political movement animated by a belief in a moral majority was born out of Roe v. Wade, it died with Obergefell v. Hodges. It died especially because, unlike Roe—which was decided while public opinion was divided, inchoate, and moveable on the question of abortion—Obergefell was decided with the backdrop of consistently growing popular support for marriage between homosexuals, with particular enthusiasm among a younger generation that will inherit the nation. Obama’s war against traditional Christians paid electoral dividends, supported all the while by the media, schools, universities, and even corporate America. This has caused a growing number of Christians to conclude that the nation is no longer a Christian nation, if it ever was.

One more bit:

Comparisons of America to Rome are as old as America, but the comparison takes on a distinctive cast for these authors. Rather than using the trope of Roman decline as a means to encourage recovery of republican virtues, the authors are in general agreement—with some interesting differences of emphasis as well as substance—that the task at hand is the creation of a distinctive Christian culture amid the ruins of the American republican experiment. If there is to be a recovery, it will have to take place during the decline of the American imperium. Perhaps, if some restoration of culture is successful, a political remedy may present itself. But all agree that any national political recovery is secondary, and perhaps ultimately unrelated, to the effort to build Christian communities in a corrupt social order.

This is a new condition for American Christians. Like Augustine, who wrote his masterpiece City of God following the sack of Rome in 410, these writers take our time as a reminder that a Christian’s ultimate allegiance is to heaven above. That still leaves the question of how we will understand our civic duties here on this earth. With the notable exception of those brought in bondage from Augustine’s Africa, Christians of various stripes have mainly been deeply supportive of the American political order, viewing it as a work of providence. These leading Christians are now calling on their fellows to consider something new. Perhaps it is time to see faith as working against rather than for the American creed.

Read the whole thing. Don’t worry, I haven’t over-quoted here; it’s a long review essay, but it’s so well written that it doesn’t read like a long review essay. I don’t want to spoil Deneen’s conclusions about any of the books, but I will say that I agree with his conclusion at the end of the essay:

Christianity is inevitably political. If Christians are to eschew Washington, D.C., as a lost cause, they should not imagine they can just build familial monasteries. Instead, we need to focus on our town and city halls, our neighborhood associations, seeking to foster the kinds of communities where our children can—and will—roam the fields again. At some scale, however small, the moral minority must become a majority again.

That’s true, and I talk about that in the Politics chapter of The Benedict Option. Deneen’s essay is a great introduction to the problem that all three books are trying to address.

This is not a link to a review, but to an interview I did with Michael Schulson at Religion & Politics. What good questions he asked! Excerpt:

R&P: How much is this an abandonment or disillusionment with the American project?

RD: I really don’t know if America is going to make it. God knows I don’t wish for America’s demise. It’s all I know, and it has been and continues to be a force for good and a safe haven. And it’s home.

We as a society have lost a sense of inner order. We’re seeing this more and more in the economic order, in the cultural order, with the dissolution of the family and the atomization of the individual.

The greatest thing [the Benedict Option] can do politically is teach us how to rightly order our hearts toward service of God and service to others, and to turn away from this radical individualism which has torn and will tear our country apart. Whether America can make it through, I don’t know. But that’s not as important to me as whether or not the church can make it through.

R&P: America is a pluralistic, multicultural democracy. How do kids growing up in a Benedict Option community learn to deal with people who are different from them?

RD: I don’t think most of us who do the Benedict Option are going to be retreating anywhere. I don’t think it’s feasible for most people, and probably not even desirable.

What’s important is that parents approach the Benedict Option not by simply saying no to bad things or harmful things, but by saying yes to good things. That means, in part, finding the good in other people and people outside our own tradition. For example, we have a lot to learn from our Orthodox Jewish brothers and sisters. They have been living as minorities in a hostile culture for a long, long time (sadly, hostility coming from Christian anti-Semitism).

I did talk to a young woman, about 18 [years old], whose parents ran to the hills to keep their kids from being polluted by the evil world outside. And their fanaticism, their paranoia, ended up strongly alienating their children from the faith. Every one of their adult children no longer practices the faith. That is a strong warning to the rest of us.

R&P: The Benedict Option still seems like a shrinking away from the basic, messy work of pluralism. Are you shying away from this uncomfortable reckoning with how to deal with people who think very differently from you about what it means to build a family or a culture?

RD: The fact is, it’s more important to be faithful Christians than it is to be good Americans. That’s the bottom line. And I would think that anybody, from whatever religion—Islam, Judaism, whatever—would place fidelity to what God expects of them above conforming to a culture.

There has never been a Christian utopia, and we can’t delude ourselves into thinking that it was. Look, I come from the Deep South, at a time when Christian faith was much more robust, and a lot of white Christians were severely oppressing black Christians. We can’t idealize the past.

That said, I wonder if your question is not so much that orthodox Christians don’t know how to deal with people who are different from us as that we are not changing our minds. People who are liberal on sex or whatever, in a time when the culture was more conservative, they had to figure out how to deal with the conservative majority too. And a lot of them did. I would hope to be in a time when we can find a lot more tolerance for each other’s difference, across both left and right.

I think of myself, and my generation—most of us, even we who are conservative Christians, would never want to go back to a time when gays and lesbians have to be back in the closet. I don’t want that at all. At the same time, I don’t want the state compelling religious institutions—churches, hospitals, schools—to violate our conscience on what sex is for and who the human person is and what marriage is.

I could be wrong about a lot of things, and I probably am. But that’s just life in a pluralistic culture, and if we start out with the presumption that people who don’t think like us are bad, there’s just going to be more and more warfare on both sides, and I think we’re seeing that.

Read the whole thing. 

My pal Russell Arben Fox writes about the Ben Op on Front Porch Republic. A critical review, but as with all the best critical reviews, one that I cherish because I learn from it, and, at the risk of being mawkish, I know it comes from a place of fraternal love. You should know before going in that Russell is a Mormon and a political liberal. Excerpts:

I have three points to make about this book. The first is that it’s really pretty great. Some chapters are better than others, but all are solid, as much as your mileage of appreciation may vary. (For example, I found chapter 2, “The Roots of the Crisis,” in which Rod lays out the whole intellectual history of Western Christendom’s rise to and fall from sociopolitical and cultural prominence in 26 pages, a little simplistic and pat, but those who aren’t scholars may well disagree with me;

I can see that. Imagine my poor editor, though, when I sent her the first rough draft of that chapter. It was over 17,000 words long, and I told her that I didn’t feel good about this draft, because I had really simplified things too much. She reminded me that the entire book was set to be 75,000 words long, and I had a lot of chapters left to write. There would be blood on the floor from all the cutting that lay ahead of me. In the end, that chapter ended up at something like 7,500 words long, which is more or less what all of them turned out to be. What I wanted to convey with that chapter is the sense that the crisis we are in today didn’t just come from nowhere. In my view — and this is a controversial one — the source of so much of this lay in 14th century theological shifts, which, as they played out over time, led us to this place. What I present is by no means a complete genealogy of an idea, but a conceptual framework pointing to what I believe we Christians need to recover. In truth, technology and economics also played a tremendous role in these changes, and cannot be separated from ideas. Ideas alone do not guide history. I just wanted to make clear that I concede that the history I offer is simplistic and pat, but also necessary to make sense of the rest of the book.

More Russell:

on the other hand, I thought chapter 10, “Man and the Machine,” was a sharp, haunting synthesis of the many powerful arguments which have been made regarding the “fatal error” of accepting unquestioningly “a world mediated by technology”…though I have no doubt that plenty of conservative Christian couples who only have children thanks to in vitro fertilization will be infuriated by his description of the damaging liberationist logic which he sees than practice as implicitly licensing–pp. 223, 234-235.)

Yes, they will. I don’t mean to give offense, but this is a good example of what I’m talking about. The context is as follows. From The Benedict Option:

Consider in vitro fertilization (IVF), a breakthrough technique allowing infertile couples to conceive. The 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” caused great controversy at the time, especially among religious leaders, many of whom denounced it as unnatural and warned that it would lead to the commodification of childbearing by separating conception from sexual union. But most Americans did not agree. A Gallup poll at the time found that 60 percent of the public approved of IVF.

By 2010, when Robert G. Edwards, the British scientist who helped pave the way for IVF, won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his efforts, IVF was widely accepted. A 2013 Pew survey found that only 12 percent of Americans see IVF as morally wrong. The numbers are roughly the same with American Christians.5

As to the commodification of childbearing, consider the childless Tennessee couple who had donor eggs fertilized with the husband’s sperm, creating ten embryos. Four babies later the couple decided they didn’t want the remaining embryos and took to Facebook to offer them to a good home.

“We have six good-quality frozen six-day-old embryos to donate to an amazing family who wants a large family,” the wife posted, according to the New York Times. “We prefer someone who has been married several years in a steady loving relationship and strong Christian background, and who does not already have kids, but wants a boat load.”

According to orthodox Christian teaching, these are six human persons. The embryo donation community has developed a cute euphemism for these unborn children: “frozen snowflakes.”

Meanwhile British government statistics made public in 2012 revealed that 3.5 million embryos were created in UK laboratories since 1991, when record-keeping began.7 Ninety-three percent never resulted in a pregnancy, and about half were thrown away without even trying. The United States has no reliable records for the sake of comparison, but with a population five times larger than Britain’s, a parallel number would mean 17.5 million unborn human beings were brought into existence in a laboratory, with 16.2 million dying, and 8.8 million thrown into the trash can without an attempt at implantation.

Imagine every man, woman, and child in New York City, or the population of Houston times four, and you will understand the immensity of the death inside fertility clinics. That is, if you believe that life begins at conception, as 52 percent of Americans in a 2015 YouGov poll affirm.

Clearly there are millions of Christians not putting two and two together. Many conservative Christians strongly oppose abortion and back laws restricting it. There is no movement to ban or restrict IVF, even though from the life-begins-at-conception point of view, it exterminates millions of unborn lives.

How do conservative Christians who believe that life begins at conception justify this, except through consequentialist reasoning? The point of this chapter is not to condemn these people, certainly, but to show where the kind of reasoning that is common in the technological age can lead us. I hope that the book will start meaningful conversations about this kind of thing. It would have been easy to talk about the deleterious effects of technology on our thought and behavior had I chosen only examples that were easy for conservative Christians to affirm. This is one of the hardest cases, I think, which is why I chose it. Remember, The Benedict Option is more than anything else a challenge to conservative Christians. What you might not know, though, is that everything I say critical of the way so many of us fall short of our ideals applies to me, myself, and I as well.

Enough me. More Russell:

Overall Benedict Option is not, I think, Rod’s best writing; ideas are most deeply and effectively explored when they are organically revealed in the context of a story, and he did that better when he told the tale of his sister’s life, her death, and the hometown they shared in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (a book I couldn’t write enough about when it first came out, and which I still buy copies of to give to students of mine as they graduate, marry, or move away), and then again when he wrote a spiritual autobiography of sorts as a sequel, How Dante Can Save Your Life. Benedict Option isn’t organic in that sense; while there are stories in it, they are arranged to serve as parts of his argument. Here the ideas, not the stories, come first.

That’s fair. If I had had more time and space, I might have been able to weave personal stories more neatly into the narrative. But this is, as Russell says, a book about ideas more than personal stories.

Look, I can’t begin to do justice to the complexity of this review by quoting bits and pieces. If I have time later this week, I’ll return to answer a couple of the objections he raises. In the meantime, I hope you’ll read the whole thing. Here’s the conclusion:

So I come to the end of this fine and challenging book and have to conclude: Rod’s thoughtful and important call for strengthening our families and rebuilding our communities by way of the same rules of attentive withdrawal and humble practices which communist dissidents and Catholic monks alike long exemplified is one that I can be inspired by and learn from–but it’s a lesson he’s not actually directing it at me. This makes me sad, a little bit: because when I look at the end of the book, and I read passages like this…

The Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real work from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big life: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like (p. 236).

…I think to myself: yes, that’s what I want and need. If I am to make rational sense of the fact that I find my soul responding to much of Rod’s antipolitical politics, to his parallel polis, to his localist alternatives, and to his traditionalism, will I need, ultimately, a deeper conversion? Maybe. Or maybe not. But in the meantime, I hope Rod never forgets: for all our disagreements (and some of them are pretty huge), there are plenty of capitalist dissidents and liberal communitarians and heterodox Christians and modern pluralists and aspiring “intenders” like me who think you’re on to something. Even if you’re not talking to us, we’re listening, and we like a lot of what we hear, and are thankful for it.

A writer is blessed by friends who will speak to him honestly about his virtues as a writer and his faults. Thank you, Russell. Thank you, Patrick. And thank you Michael Schulson for your thoughtful attention to my book.

Readers, I’m getting lots of e-mails right now, more even than usual. If I don’t answer you, it’s not that I’m ignoring you. It’s that I can’t keep up. Please don’t be offended.

 

Culture War On A Bus

That poster appeared in Spain recently, put up by a transgender rights group. It says, “There are girls with penises and boys with vulvas. It’s as simple as that.”

In response, a Catholic group, Hazte Oir (“Make Yourself Heard”), put up the poster below on a bus:

HazteOir/Flickr

It reads:

Boys have penises, girls have vulvas. Do not be fooled.

If you are born a man, you are a man. If you are a woman, you will continue to be one.

Well, we can’t have such blasphemy on Spanish roads, seen by Spanish eyes. From the BBC:

An outcry arose in various quarters when the bus was spotted in Madrid on Monday.

The Equality spokeswoman for the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Angeles Alvarez, branded the bus tour “a hate campaign based on intolerance”, according to Spain’s El Pais newspaper.

A spokeswoman for socialists on Madrid City Council, Purificacion Causapie, called it “contrary to the dignity and rights of transsexual children”.

She urged the mayor’s office to ensure Madrid remains “a city free of discrimination, violence and attacks on minors”. Madrid City Council said the vehicle could incite hatred.

Though the outrage centres on its message, the bus has technically been ordered off the roads for breaching municipal rules on outdoor advertising.

Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena said the City Council wants the vehicle out of the city “as soon as possible”.

The Councilman for Security, Javier Barbero, said on Tuesday that police had contained “the bus of shame”.

Think about that: the bus has been banned, and caused outrage, for stating biological facts! So much for science.

More from the BBC:

The Mayor of Barcelona made clear the controversial coach would not be welcome there, writing on Twitter: “In Barcelona there is no place for LGBT-phobic buses. We want our children to grow in freedom and without hatred.”

Barcelona’s City Council has warned the group it could face a fine of up to €3,000 (£2,560; $3,160) for breaching advertising laws if the bus takes to the streets.

This is how radical the LGBT movement has become, and how intolerant the Left in power is. People ask me all the time why social and religious conservatives spend so much time focusing on LGBT issues. The answer is: because we are forced to by the militancy of the broader culture. No democratic Western governments are trying to shut down the free speech of Christians, or take away their schools’ accreditation, who proclaim Biblical teaching on poverty, or anything else. Only this issue.

Note that in the US, one noted Democratic Party personality endorses this kind of bigotry and censorship:

 

Please don’t bring these buses to the U.S. (or anywhere). https://t.co/WEvIIptmxf

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) March 1, 2017

UPDATE: Behold, Arnold Schwarzenegger confronts History’s Greatest Monster!

Power, Powerlessness, Truth

Maggie Gallagher writes:

In 2002, the sociologist James Davison Hunter gave an extraordinary talk to Church leaders. Most Christians, he said, think of culture as the values in individual hearts and minds, and imagine therefore that changing culture is the task of evangelising individual hearts and minds. Hunter called this view of culture “pervasive” and completely wrong. “If one is serious about changing the world,” he said, “the first step is to discard this view of culture and how cultures change, for every strategy based upon it will fail – not most strategies, but all strategies.”

Culture, instead, is a form of capital, a kind of power. But what sort of power? “It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be taken seriously,” Hunter said. “It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things.”

A culture war is a struggle over who has the power to name what is real. For generations in America there was a central source of information in the body politic for naming what was real, at least at the level of simple fact. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the Left could use its influence over these elite information streams to deprive the conservative movement of the capacity to make changes. Republicans lived in fear of being branded a bigot, a hater or a racist, and so the circle of what counts as bigotry, hatred and racism expanded to include more of the Left’s social agenda (particularly, but not exclusively, around gay issues).

It was an effective weapon and it worked, until Trump refused to be cowed by this narrative and still won.

She goes on to talk about how Benedict XVI spoke in his Regensburg Address about how science and reason cannot stand alone. They require grounding in faith to become themselves most fully — and, in turn, faith has to be grounded in reason, in the concept of the Logos running through all of creation. When this connection is sundered, says Benedict XVI, paraphrased by Gallagher:

Both faith and reason are corrupted and community consequently becomes far more difficult to create and sustain.

“To change the world is, at some point, to take power seriously,” said James Davison Hunter. “But the power we need to take seriously is not power in a conventional sense. … Rather, it is the power to define reality in ways that sustain benevolence and justice.”

Without a shared faith in objective truth, and a way to reach a rough consensus on what it is, where shall we get that power? How shall we do without it? Democracy dies in darkness.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in the foreword to the 2007 edition of After Virtue, writes that after the first edition (1981), he came to realize that Aquinas understood things better than Aristotle, and that the virtue tradition cannot be sustained without a metaphysical basis. (For more on this, take a look at MacIntyre’s 1993 NYTimes review of Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. Murdoch was not a believer, but she contends that morality does not make sense outside of a metaphysical commitment — that is, an axiomatic, Platonic conviction that there is an ideal realm of the Good outside of the material world.

To put it bluntly: we cannot be good without God, because we cannot know what the Good is without believing that it exists and is guaranteed by the transcendent realm. This god does not have to be a being; in ancient Chinese thought, the Tao serves as the metaphysical grounding for morals. The point is that there has to be a shared, communal conception of the good for moral reasoning to have authority and meaning.

We have lost that in modernity, says MacIntyre. Here’s a helpful short film (3:38) outlining his case in After Virtue:

To repeat: MacIntyre later said that his reflections after publishing this book caused him to realize the need for metaphysics. He became a Christian, and a Thomist.

So, what does all of this have to do with us? The Benedict Option is built on the conviction that the faith of the Bible reveals to us the nature of reality — not in the sense of being a science textbook, but rather it tells us How Things Are, including What We Are For. It is also built on the conviction that Christian thought, for a number of reasons, has become dangerously fragmented and atomized in late modernity, such that its truth claims are being vacated, even by those who profess to believe them. This is what is revealed to us chiefly through Christian Smith’s research on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: that what goes by the name “Christianity” in the West is Christian in name only, and has increasingly little in common with Christianity as it has been traditionally understood by Christians — Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox.

The Benedict Option is a call to active remembrance, and active remembrance in community, which is the only way the traditions that sustained our ancestors in the faith can be revived and passed on in the face of liquid modernity. Our situation is so dire that we must now wage a heroic battle to maintain the power to define reality even among ourselves and our own communities. That is to say, to keep our eyes on the Good, as it has been revealed in Scripture and handed down to us in Tradition, requires unprecedented individual and communal effort by 21st century Christians. If we do not draw strong distinctions; if we do not catechize ourselves, our children, and our church communities in the traditional Christian worldview and practices that imprint it on our hearts; and if we do not do so in a spirit of love — then we will disappear, dissolved into the chaos of liquid modernity. It is already happening — indeed, has already happened to much of the church in the West.

The Benedict Option is a way of fighting for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, as revealed to us in the Christian tradition. It is a way of defending Christian identity in a time of scattering, and even persecution. We are going to see ourselves losing political and cultural power, but the real power of the powerless is the power to define reality, to define truth, and to live out that truth in the face of lies. It is a stance of conscience. The worst defeat is not to lose cultural or political power. The worst defeat, for Christians, is to lose Jesus Christ through compromise with the post-Christian world. That’s what I’ve written The Benedict Option to prevent. From the book, this reflection on the inspiration provided by Vaclav Havel and the Czech dissidents:

Havel, who died in 2011, preached what he called “antipolitical politics,” the essence of which he described as “living in truth.” His most famous and thorough statement of this was a long 1978 essay titled “The Power of the Powerless,” which electrified the Eastern European resistance movements when it first appeared. It is a remarkable document, one that bears careful study and reflection by orthodox Christians in the West today.

Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under Communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power—and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs. Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity.

Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth”— and it’s going to cost him plenty.

He will lose his job and his position in society. His kids may not be allowed to go to the college they want to, or to any college at all. People will bully him or ostracize him. But by bearing witness to the truth, he has accomplished something potentially powerful:

He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system—but he has preserved his humanity. And that, says Havel, is a far more important accomplishment than whether this party or that politician holds power (a fact that became painfully clear during the debasing 2016 U.S. presidential campaign).

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,” Havel goes on. “In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.” (emphasis mine).

Here’s the point: if Christians want to maintain a “faithful presence” in the world today — as we must — then they are going to have to do the Benedict Option.

Evangelical Problems With The Benedict Option

You might have seen Andrew T. Walker’s positive review of The Benedict Option in the Weekly Standard.  I hope you did! His review was cut by the editors for space, which meant that the part where he criticized the Ben Op didn’t make it into print. In a post today, he talks about where he stands apart from the Ben Op, though still a supporter. Excerpts, with my responses:

First, Dreher’s view of history moves only in one direction, and that direction is always bad. A reader may object that Dreher’s reading of culture is too pessimistic and that Dreher underestimates the unknowns and contingencies that history rides upon.

Well, yes, it does. Life is unpredictable. Nobody saw Soviet communism collapsing so quickly. Nobody saw Trump coming. And so forth. I think what Andrew means here is that my very broad take on the history of the past 700 years or so has been one of decline. That requires explanation, obviously. Anyone who denies the material advances since the High Middle Ages is a loony. It is also the case that there have been genuine and valuable moral advances. Give the left-wing narrative that says history is only moving in a progressive way (a narrative shared by right-wing liberals — also called Republicans — who adhere to what has been called the “Whig Theory of History”), people like me who question that narrative often feel compelled to point out the contradictions. Why was the twentieth century both the most advanced in many ways, but also the century in which two world wars happened, plus the Holocaust, plus the Stalinist horrors, and untold masses starved or otherwise murdered by Mao?

It’s more complicated for Christians, because our Scriptures tell us that we are moving forward through time to a particular end: the culmination of history with the Return of Jesus Christ. And yet, our Scriptures also tell us that things are going to get extremely bad before that blessed event.

If I’m reading Andrew correctly, he senses that my decline narrative puts the Reformation

Andrew T. Walker

in an unflattering position as a key event in the Great Unraveling to which the Benedict Option is a response. As a committed Southern Baptist, he understandably has a problem with this. Well, he’s right that my book treats the Reformation as a critically important historical moment in this decline narrative. But I am careful in the book not to “blame” the Reformation, along the lines of saying, “If not for the Reformation, everything would have been fine.” As I acknowledge in the book, the Reformation occurred in large part as a reaction to the corruption in the Roman church (surely this is not a controversial thesis), but also — and this was new to me until I started researching this project — most of the key theological ideas that made the Reformation possible had already emerged in Roman Catholicism before Luther was born. The point of my book is not to point fingers, but rather to help readers understand that the chaos and fragmentation we’re now living with did not start in the 1960s (as some conservatives seem to think), or 1789, or 1517, or 1054. These were all points along the path. We can’t erase history, but we do have to know how we got here if we are going to figure out how to stop the unraveling.

The Western Roman Empire fell in 476, but out of those ruins came St. Benedict and others who rebuilt, and led to the refounding of civilization. We have been declining for a long time, and may be in for a fall. Certainly the Church (churches) in the West are in precipitous decline. But I have hope that somewhere in the West — and maybe in more than one place — a new and quite different St. Benedict has been born, and that God will use that person’s fidelity, and the fidelity of those inspired by him (or her) to rebuild. Our task now is not to rebuild Western civilization or Christianity, but to keep its memory alive in our hearts and in our institutions, so that those mustard seeds will grow in the sunlight of a far-off future.

More Andrew:

Second, classical liberal-style conservatives (like myself) will object to Dreher’s reading of the Enlightenment and its intellectual genealogies. In Dreher’s view, the liberal project is designed to fail because it rests upon a faulty anthropology of individualism and self-actualization, which, when weaponized apart from transcendent boundaries, breeds relativism. Critics will accuse Dreher of overplaying his hand here, because it bends toward viewing the Founders of America, for example, as purveyors of a licentious individualism. Given the Christian anthropology resonant during the era, my own reading of Enlightenment political philosophy views their interests more in freeing individuals and communities to live in accordance with ordered liberty free from government coercion.

I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t believe the Founders were purveyors of licentious individualism. I think that the Enlightenment foundations of liberal democratic order cannot sustain a good and/or stable society absent the Christian religion. In fact, Tocqueville observed that American liberty depended on American religious belief. Granted, the state churches of Europe have done even worse at supporting religious belief, but that’s because when a democratic people cease to believe in religion, their religious institutions will cease to inspire loyalty. My point (it’s really MacIntyre’s) is that the Enlightenment project has failed, and it’s impossible to build a stable, thriving, resilient society without broadly shared religious beliefs. These two quotes by John Adams highlight the problem:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Both are true, it seems to me. The political order does not support Christianity — but Christianity supports the political order. We are losing Christianity, and therefore, we are at risk of losing liberal democracy, because we are losing the capacity to govern ourselves.  It may be that there is no better solution to political problems than liberal democracy. But that does not therefore solve the problems of liberal democracy.

Andrew, again:

Third, Dreher’s dance with politics is a bit choppy. To be fair, Dreher does not negate the importance of politics altogether and he still calls for active engagement in the voting booth and throughout culture, but a reader looking to wash their hands clean of the stain of politics could find ample support in Dreher’s book. The response to Religious Right excesses is not abdication from prudent politics, but a move toward it.

Post-script: After reading Elizabeth Stoker-Bruenig’s thoughtful critique of the BenOp, I am prone to weaken my original critique of Dreher’s views on politics. While I still think Christians should advocate vociferously in the halls of electoral power(!!!), what I think Dreher is calling Christians to consider is that the sine qua non of Christian political witness may not, always and forever, be dedication to electoral politics proper.

Yes, this is true. Engagement in ordinary politics is necessary, but not remotely sufficient. The classical view is that disorder in the polity comes from disorder inside the souls of those who live in it. I emphasize personal and communal reform as the starting point for us, especially given that the power and authority of Christians in the public square is declining. This is not the same thing as quietism!

Finally, there is this:

There’s one point I want to emphasize from my review — the accusations of retreat, which is where the majority of criticisms come from, and especially from evangelicals. Initially, when Dreher began writing about the BenOp, I think complaints that he was advocating for withdrawal because of his terminology may have initially been legitimate (even if he never was conceptually advocating for retreat). For example, statements like this lended confirmation to those fears: “a kind of deliberate, strategic retreat so that we can tend our own gardens.” I criticized Dreher in other venues for what I thought was advocating for a sophisticated versions of Amish retreat. I now see, however, that that is decidedly not what Dreher is calling for.

I think Dreher’s language and phrasing has matured, as has his understanding of who his audience has grown to be, among them, conservative evangelicals. Dreher now understands that evangelicals hear that type of “retreat” language and are reminded of fundamentalist cultural retreat they’ve long since tried to spurn. It’s clear that Dreher never intended for Amish-style escape even in the beginnings of the BenOp, but I think that’s how he was interpreted and at times, used unsettling language to the ears of evangelicals.

But finally, that brings me to the close: Please, dear evangelicals co-laborers, stop calling the BenOp any form of “retreat” or “withdrawal” or seeing it as an escape from solidarity with one’s neighbors or an abdication from the public square or the common good. It simply isn’t that. If you think it is, buy it, read it, and be persuaded otherwise.

Read the whole thing. 

I want to thank Andrew for his praise and for his criticism. A writer benefits more from honest criticism than flattery. My friendship with Andrew and other Evangelicals has compelled me to see flaws in the Benedict Option concept, and to address them in both my thinking and my writing. Andrew et alia have helped me to be a better writer, a better advocate, and even a better Christian. If The Benedict Option proves helpful to Evangelicals in living more faithful Christian lives in community, you can thank Andrew T. Walker, Denny Burk, Russell Moore, Jake Meador, Matthew Lee Anderson, Alan Jacobs, and other Evangelical friends and readers of this blog. I really do mean it when I say that all of us small-o orthodox Christian are in this together, and we have to learn from each other, and help each other.

I want to highlight, and express gratitude for, Justin Lonas’s review. He’s another Evangelical friend who has helped me over the years with his encouragement and constructive criticism. Excerpt:

Some of his observations and recommendations may strike readers as good common sense (such as deepening the way our lives are structured around the historic rhythms of church life or a call to support the businesses of our fellow believers). Others may be hard to swallow (as a fellow homeschooler, I am sympathetic to Rod’s call to pull our children out of both public and status-oriented private schools, but many will bristle at such a brusque suggestion). Dreher is at his finest in the two chapters on sex and technology, where the culture holds most sway within the church. You may react with shock, but you cannot deny the clear and dire warnings he lays out there.

Again, many (most) who initially pick up Rod’s book have probably made up their minds about his work already. The criticisms are easy enough to predict. Why should we hide from the world we are called to reach? What about the Great Commission? Shouldn’t the power of the Gospel convince us to expect the unexpected? How can we stand in solidarity with our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world if we would rather “head for the hills” than stand up for the faith? Don’t we have to stay engaged in the political sphere? Again, because of his long discussion of these ideas in public, Dreher has repeatedly interacted with these and others. His defenses come through in the book as thoughtful, reasoned responses, not combative rejections, or flippant dismissals.

From my own reading, there is one serious shortcoming: the solutions Dreher presents might be attainable enough for middle and upper class Americans, but do not translate well or practically for lower-income believers at home and abroad. A church that is serious about Benedict Option action has to come up with ways to include those who can least afford to be left outside. In doing so, we may just discover that the strengths they’ve already forged in poverty and oppression are invaluable to the discipleship of our communities. Even at that, only healthy, well-formed churches are ready and willing to take those steps.

I agree with this. The Benedict Option has to be an option for the poor and working class too. How do we do this? I’m not sure. But then again, I’m not sure how we do this for the middle and upper classes. All I can say is that these are our challenges, and that we have to meet them together. The inability to come up with a comprehensive universal solution at the start is no reason to decline to take up the challenge. It’s not like St. Benedict wrote his Rule, and voilà, the monastic archipelago sprung up across western Europe like mushrooms after a summer rain. Every pilgrimage begins with the first steps.

UPDATE: Reader Edward Hamilton, an Evangelical, comments:

The more I read these reviews, the more I wonder if they’ve dropped out of a parallel universe. In our current universe, the risk of evangelicals progressing into some kind of neo-Amish repudiation of American public life and culture is close to nil. Instead, virtually all the risk is on the side of evangelicals being too heavily compromised — either compromised in favor of becoming Trump-ified dupes of the Breitbart outrage-media empire, or compromised in favor of quietist accommodation on a wide variety of sexual ethics issues, or else compromised in favor of an utterly anodyne MTD ethos of mega-church growth-for-growth-sake. The evidence than any fraction of American evangelicalism is about to retreat from public life in any way that involves more self-sacrifice than so much as turning off the television for an extra hour a week is essentially negligible.

I say this as someone with plenty of roots in the Anabaptist world, and with a much higher respect for the Amish approach than either Rod or his many interlocutors. Nothing would make me happier than to life in which our biggest problem was that large swaths of American evangelicalism was being overly zealous in a well-planned project to create utopian agrarian communities based on overly naive readings of Wendell Berry novels. In that world, it would be easy to nudge that zeal back in the direction of supporting some useful rearguard defenses of religious liberty and urban witness.

Though speaking frankly, as someone with quite a few points of contact with the Amish/Mennonite/rural Anabaptist world that Andrew invokes so pejoratively — I spent a summer working on a Mennonite farm about a decade ago — I feel like this condemnation is already unfairly broad and oversimplified. Nearly everyone I’ve met from that background does a job as good or better of embodying virtues of hospitality, forgiveness, and social responsibility than the average American. God only grant that we should all be doomed to live in a world where our greatest concern would be too many evangelicals passionately emulating communities with that pool of values. I’d happily trade that for the current level of “political engagement” that I get through my local church, which mostly consists of being slipped mass-printed brochures every couple of years that explain which Republicans I’m supposed to vote for.

All of the real challenges of the regnant spiritual zeitgeist revolve around overcoming apathy, not suppressing revolutionary ardor.

The Madness At Middlebury

In the days before Charles Murray appeared at Middlebury College to deliver an address, a senior named Nic Valenti took to the op-ed page of the campus newspaper to inform the community why he refuses to engage with Murray. Excerpts:

Indeed, when I first arrived at Middlebury I was clueless to the systems of power constructed around race, gender, sexuality, class or ability, and found that when I talked about these issues as I understood them — or rather, as I didn’t — I was met with blank stares and stigma rather than substantial debate. As a young bigot, I can recall thinking: “I thought at Middlebury I would get to have intellectual discussions, but instead it feels as though my views are being censored.” However, as a first-year I had failed to consider a simple, yet powerful component of debate: not all opinions are valid opinions. I had fallen into the trap of false equivalence.

False equivalence is simple: just because two sides are opposed does not mean they are equally logically valid.

The Hon. Valenti goes on to use profanity to express his wokeness, and to identify Murray as “dangerous.”

So. Murray comes to the Vermont college to speak about the themes in his book “Coming Apart,” which details the social, economic, and moral collapse of the white working class. He’s going to talk about the lessons from the Trump victory. Then all hell breaks loose. Reports PBS News Hour:

Prior to the point when Murray was introduced, several Middlebury officials reminded students that they were allowed to protest but not to disrupt the talk. The students ignored those reminders and faced no visible consequences for doing so.

As soon as Murray took the stage, students stood up, turned their backs to him and started various chants that were loud enough and in unison such that he could not talk over them. Chants included:

“Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away.”
“Your message is hatred. We cannot tolerate it.”
“Charles Murray, go away. Middlebury says no way.”
“Who is the enemy? White supremacy.”
“Hey hey, ho ho. Charles Murray has got to go.”

The scene was recorded and posted to YouTube. Murray appears around minute 19.

After the students chanted for about 20 minutes, college officials announced that the lecture would not take place but that Murray would go to another location, which the college didn’t name, and have a discussion with a Middlebury faculty member — livestreamed back to the original lecture site.

According to Middlebury officials, after Murray and the professor who interviewed him for the livestream attempted to leave the location in a car, some protesters surrounded the car, jumped on it, pounded on it and tried to prevent the car from leaving campus.

Here’s the YouTube clip. Watch from the moment Murray appears (minute 19). It is horrifying:

The Middlebury student mob physically attacked Prof. Allison Stanger as she was trying to protect Murray from violence. She had to go to the hospital for treatment. Here’s what she said later on Facebook:

I apologize for the impersonal and lengthy nature of this communication, but I wanted to provide a general response to the many people who wrote to me on Friday, and this was the most efficient way to do so. Your cards, gifts, and letters have meant so much to me. Please know that I will be responding to you individually in due time.

I agreed to participate in the event with Charles Murray, because several of my students asked me to do so. They are smart and good people, all of them, and this was their big event of the year. I actually welcomed the opportunity to be involved, because while my students may know I am a Democrat, all of my courses are nonpartisan, and this was a chance to demonstrate publicly my commitment to a free and fair exchange of views in my classroom. As the campus uproar about his visit built, I was genuinely surprised and troubled to learn that some of my faculty colleagues had rendered judgement on Dr. Murray’s work and character, while openly admitting that they had not read anything he had written. With the best of intentions, they offered their leadership to enraged students, and we all now know what the results were.

I want you to know what it feels like to look out at a sea of students yelling obscenities at other members of my beloved community. There were students and faculty who wanted to hear the exchange, but were unable to do so, either because of the screaming and chanting and chair-pounding in the room, or because their seats were occupied by those who refused to listen, and they were stranded outside the doors. I saw some of my faculty colleagues who had publicly acknowledged that they had not read anything Dr. Murray had written join the effort to shut down the lecture. All of this was deeply unsettling to me. What alarmed me most, however, was what I saw in student eyes from up on that stage. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. It was clear to me that they had effectively dehumanized me. They couldn’t look me in the eye, because if they had, they would have seen another human being. There is a lot to be angry about in America today, but nothing good ever comes from demonizing our brothers and sisters.

Things deteriorated from there as we went to another location in an attempt to salvage the event via live-stream for those who were still interested in engaging. I want you to know how hard it was for us to continue with fire alarms going off and enraged students and outside agitators banging on the windows. I thought they were going to break through, and I then wondered what would happen next. It is hard to think and listen in such an environment. I am proud that we somehow continued the conversation. Listen to the video and judge for yourself whether this was an event that should take place on a college campus.

When the event ended, and it was time to leave the building, I breathed a sigh of relief. We had made it. I was ready for dinner and conversation with faculty and students in a tranquil setting. What transpired instead felt like a scene from Homeland rather than an evening at an institution of higher learning. We confronted an angry mob as we tried to exit the building. Most of the hatred was focused on Dr. Murray, but when I took his right arm both to shield him from attack and to make sure we stayed together so I could reach the car too, that’s when the hatred turned on me. One thug grabbed me by the hair and another shoved me in a different direction. I noticed signs with expletives and my name on them. There was also an angry human on crutches, and I remember thinking to myself, “What are you doing? That’s so dangerous!” For those of you who marched in Washington the day after the inauguration, imagine being in a crowd like that, only being surrounded by hatred rather than love. I feared for my life.

Once we got into the car, the intimidation escalated. That story has already been told well. What I want you to know is how it felt to land safely at Kirk Alumni Center after taking a decoy route. I was so happy to see my students there to greet me. I took off my coat and realized I was hungry. I told a colleague in my department that I felt proud of myself for not having slugged someone. Then Bill Burger charged back into the room (he is my hero) and told Dr. Murray and I to get our coats and leave—NOW. The protestors knew where the dinner was. We raced back to the car, driving over the curb and sidewalk to escape quickly. It was then we decided that it was probably best to leave town.

After the adrenaline and a martini (full disclosure; you would have needed a martini too) wore off, I realized that there was something wrong with my neck. My husband took me to the ER, and President Patton, God bless her, showed up there, despite my insistence that it was unnecessary. I have a soft brace that allowed me, after cancelling my Friday class, resting up all day, and taking painkillers, to attend our son’s district jazz festival. He’s a high school senior who plays tenor sax, and I cried when I realized that these events had not prevented me from hearing him play his last district concert.

To people who wish to spin this story as one about what’s wrong with elite colleges and universities, you are mistaken. Please instead consider this as a metaphor for what is wrong with our country, and on that, Charles Murray and I would agree. This was the saddest day of my life. We have got to do better by those who feel and are marginalized. Our 230-year constitutional democracy depends on it, especially when our current President is blind to the evils he has unleashed. We must all realize the precious inheritance we have as fellow Americans and defend the Constitution against all its enemies, both foreign and domestic. That is why I do not regret my involvement in the event with Dr. Murray. But as we find a way to move forward, we should also hold fast to the wisdom of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

 

“I feared for my life.” This is an American university professor — a liberal! — under assault by a left-wing mob.

Charles Murray’s version of events is here. Excerpts:

We finished around 6:45 and prepared to leave the building to attend a campus dinner with a dozen students and some faculty members. Allison, Bill, and I (by this point I saw both of them as dear friends and still do) were accompanied by two large and capable security guards. (As I write, I still don’t have their names. My gratitude to them is profound.) We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting.

What would have happened after that I don’t know, but I do recall thinking that being on the ground was a really bad idea, and I should try really hard to avoid that. Unlike Allison, I wasn’t actually hurt at all.

I had expected that they would shout expletives at us but no more. So I was nonplussed when I realized that a big man with a sign was standing right in front of us and wasn’t going to let us pass. I instinctively thought, we’ll go around him. But that wasn’t possible. We’d just get blocked by the others who were joining him. So we walked straight into him, one of our security guys pushed him aside, and that’s the way it went from then on: Allison and Bill each holding one of my elbows, the three of us plowing ahead, the security guys clearing our way, and lots of pushing and shoving from all sides.

I didn’t see it happen, but someone grabbed Allison’s hair just as someone else shoved her from another direction, damaging muscles, tendons, and fascia in her neck. I was stumbling because of the shoving. If it hadn’t been for Allison and Bill keeping hold of me and the security guards pulling people off me, I would have been pushed to the ground. That much is sure. What would have happened after that I don’t know, but I do recall thinking that being on the ground was a really bad idea, and I should try really hard to avoid that. Unlike Allison, I wasn’t actually hurt at all.

The three of us got to the car, with the security guards keeping protesters away while we closed and locked the doors. Then we found that the evening wasn’t over. So many protesters surrounded the car, banging on the sides and the windows and rocking the car, climbing onto the hood, that Bill had to inch forward lest he run over them. At the time, I wouldn’t have objected. Bill must have a longer time horizon than I do.

Extricating ourselves took a few blocks and several minutes. When we had done so and were finally satisfied that no cars were tailing us, we drove to the dinner venue. Allison and I went in and started chatting with the gathered students and faculty members. Suddenly Bill reappeared and said abruptly, “We’re leaving. Now.” The protesters had discovered where the dinner was being held and were on their way. So it was the three of us in the car again.

Murray praises the Middlebury administration for standing by his invitation to speak on campus, and for preparing a Plan B to protect his right to speak in case of disruptive student protest. He now says that the “meaning” of the debacle depends on what Middlebury’s administration does now. If it does not take a hard line in punishing those who shut down the talk — including expulsion for those who were part of the mob that chased him and the others, and criminal charges against those who injured Prof. Stanger — then the Middlebury Mob Moment will become a turning point in American academic life. Here’s Murray:

Worse yet, the intellectual thugs will take over many campuses. In the mid-1990s, I could count on students who had wanted to listen to start yelling at the protesters after a certain point, “Sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say.” That kind of pushback had an effect. It reminded the protesters that they were a minority. I am assured by people at Middlebury that their protesters are a minority as well. But they are a minority that has intimidated the majority. The people in the audience who wanted to hear me speak were completely cowed. That cannot be allowed to stand. A campus where a majority of students are fearful to speak openly because they know a minority will jump on them is no longer an intellectually free campus in any meaningful sense.

A college’s faculty is the obvious resource for keeping the bubble translucent and the intellectual thugs from taking over. A faculty that is overwhelmingly on the side of free intellectual exchange, stipulating only that it be conducted with logic, evidence, and civility, can easily lead each new freshman class to understand that’s how academia operates. If faculty members routinely condemn intellectual thuggery, the majority of students who also oppose it will feel entitled to say “sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say” when protesters try to shut down intellectual exchange.

That leads me to two critical questions for which I have no empirical answers: What is the percentage of tenured faculty on American campuses who are still unambiguously on the side of free intellectual exchange? What is the percentage of them who are willing to express that position openly? I am confident that the answer to the first question is still far greater than fifty percent. But what about the answer to the second question? My reading of events on campuses over the last few years is that a minority of faculty are cowing a majority in the same way that a minority of students are cowing the majority.

The people in the audience who wanted to hear me speak were completely cowed. That cannot be allowed to stand.

I’m sure the pattern differs by geography and type of institution. But my impression is that the problem at elite colleges and universities is extremely widespread. In such colleges, events such as the Middlebury episode will further empower the minorities and make the majorities still more timorous.

Middlebury College is on trial now. Its administration will either forthrightly defend liberal democratic norms, or it will capitulate. There is no middle ground. And by the way, the way Nic Valenti was brainwashed at Middlebury hardly recommends it as a place to send one’s children to study.

It’s a cliche to say, “This is why Trump won.” But you know, it kind of is. These little Maoists studying at elite colleges and universities like Middlebury are on the fast track to move into the American ruling class. You see what they will do to dissenters. They must be resisted, and resisted strongly. If Middlebury and institutions like it do not believe in their mission enough to defend it against barbarians like that student mob — and defend it enough to expel the worst of them, without apology or appeal — then it deserves contempt and shunning by all people — left, right, and center — who believe in education, who believe in the free exchange of ideas on campus, and indeed, who believe in civilization.

Private Colleges = PC Madrassas

A well-known reader writes:

This is why ordinary people hate elites:

Fareed Zakaria to deliver Fordham Sapientia Et Doctrina lecture.

Fordham has invited a well-known plagiarist to give a prestigious lecture that is supposed to advance “rigorous scholarship.” Poor Monica Crowley worked for Fox, is white, and a Republican. So, she must suffer in shame for her plagiarism. While Fareed, who works for CNN, is a person of color, and is a liberal, gets to give prestigious academic lectures in New York City at a Jesuit university.

Again, this is another reason why Trump won. There are two different standards in this country: one for the rich and connected and their friends, and another for those who have the temerity to resist their hegemony. It makes me sick.  Blow it up.

Relatedly, a reader sends in this brilliant essay by the liberal (socialist, actually, and atheist) academic William Deresiewicz, on how the cultural left has turned many American universities into PC madrassas. We’ve all seen this kind of piece before, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it expressed so well. He writes from personal experience. Excerpts:

So this is how I’ve come to understand the situation. Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

I should mention that when I was speaking about these issues last fall with a group of students at Whitman College, a selective school in Washington State, that idea, that elite private colleges are religious institutions, is the one that resonated with them most. I should also mention that I received an email recently from a student who had transferred from Oral Roberts, the evangelical Christian university in Tulsa, to Columbia, my alma mater. The latter, he found to his surprise, is also a religious school, only there, he said, the faith is the religion of success. The religion of success is not the same as political correctness, but as I will presently explain, the two go hand in hand.

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

More:

The power of political correctness is wielded not only against the faculty, however, but also against other groups within the student body, ones who don’t belong to the ideologically privileged demographics or espouse the approved points of view: conservative students; religious students, particularly Christians; students who identify as Zionists, a category that includes a lot of Jewish students; “athletes,” meaning white male athletes; white students from red states; heterosexual cisgendered white men from anywhere at all, who represent, depending on the school, between a fifth and a third of all students. (I say this, by the way, as an atheist, a democratic socialist, a native northeasterner, a person who believes that colleges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvious by now, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.) I haven’t heard too many people talk about creating safe spaces for Christians, or preventing micro-aggressions against conservatives, or banning hate speech against athletes, or disinviting socialists.

What I have heard, frequently, for as long as I have been involved in academia, are open expressions of contempt or prejudice or hostility against those suspect groups or members of those groups. If you are a white man, you are routinely regarded as guilty until proven innocent, the worst possible construction is put upon your words, and anything you say on a sensitive issue is received with suspicion at best. I attended a workshop on micro-aggressions at the University of Missouri last year. The problem with micro-aggressions, the leader said, is that they “create a space of hostility,” that they say, “you don’t belong; you are different in a way that’s not okay.” Those formulations precisely describe the environment that the groups I just enumerated often encounter at elite private colleges, except that unlike the typical micro-aggression, the offense is not inadvertent. It is quite deliberate.

And:

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group.

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous.

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

But it isn’t simply the admissions process. The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it.

 

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do. Fareed Zakaria is in the club; Monica Crowley is not. This is the lesson for people to take about elitism, class, and access to power in this country.

The tragedy of Trump is that this system really does need to be blown up, or if not blown up, then dismantled and rebuilt. But his fatally flawed character is probably going to make that harder to do than it ought to be.

Still, why, exactly, would a smart, self-respecting aspiring scholar want to go into a world of people who think and behave that way? If most people are sick of it, but it still goes on, what are we to conclude?

Our Tabloid President

You saw this over the weekend, or at least reporting on it:

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

And:

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

As you likely have read, the White House offered no evidence to back up this extraordinary claim. FBI Director James Comey felt compelled to deny Trump’s allegation, because if Trump is right, it means the FBI may have broken the law. Comey’s request in effect calls the President of the United States a liar.

And Trump, via a White House spokesman, is not backing down this morning.

Over the weekend, Sen. Ben Sasse released this statement:

I agree with this a thousand percent. If Trump has reason to believe that there was an illegal wiretap, then he has to explain why he believes that. If the federal government surveilled a presidential candidate, even legally (that is, with a FISA Court order), then that is massive news. President Trump has levied an extraordinary allegation against another president. If he’s going to say something that explosive, he has to show proof. If there’s proof, that’s massive news.

But if Trump is just airing conspiracy theories, then that too is massive news, though of a different kind. It means that the presidency is occupied by a reckless fool who thinks nothing of destroying the authority of his office and the institutions of government for the sake of gratifying his own ego.

Which one do you want to bet on?

I am sick of the drama. Sick of it. It’s all so unnecessary, and all generated by Trump’s lack of discipline. During the campaign, I wasn’t so worried about the policy goals Trump would likely pursue as president. I’m not a conventional conservative, and I was ready for disruption of the Washington consensus. What concerned me was Trump’s character, especially his thin skin, his quickness to anger, and his habit of rhetorical recklessness. These are dangerous qualities in a president, to grossly understate the matter. We see now what this can do.

We are two months into the Trump presidency. He has been given a world-historical opportunity to make tremendous changes. Yet he’s going to blow it with his big mouth and his Twitter account. Worse, following Sen. Sasse, Trump is going to worsen already low levels of public trust in American institutions. To be fair to Trump, the Iraq War and the fallout from the financial crash of ’08 demolished the ability of many Americans to trust our institutions. This did not start with Trump; in fact, his election was a result of the lack of trust half the country has in its institutions.

But rather than rebuild that trust, Trump seems determined to obliterate what remains of it. And for what? Who can possibly believe a thing he says? If he doesn’t produce any evidence backing up his wiretap claim, there’s no reason to take Trump’s word seriously at all. When the US faces a serious national crisis, who will follow him?

We’re only two months in. This thing is not going to last. And then?

Out Of Academia’s Ashes

In the introduction to Out Of The Ashes, his hell-raising book about the collapse of American culture (especially academia), Prof. Anthony Esolen writes, “The ancients had memory.”

He goes on to detail our decline and fall. But this is not merely a lamentation. Esolen writes:

So we need to clear out the garbage, admit our errors, and rebuild. That requires humility, patience, and determination. But nothing else will do. When your only choices are repentance or oblivion, you repent. It is time to get to work, and that is what this book is about.

I am thinking tonight about Esolen’s chapter on higher education, for a reason I’ll tell you below. First, take a look at these excerpts from that chapter:

The old mottoes [of the Ivy League colleges] assumed the existence of God, the moral law, and the beauty of pursuing truth. It is beyond the scope of my essay here to argue the unity of the transcendentals, though I do assert that even a skeptic must find it powerfully suggestive to notice that the secularization of the colleges has been accompanied by a contemptuous denial of the very existence of beauty and by lassitude in the search for truth except as regards that narrow range of truths that can be reduced to the residue of a test tube or expressed in a neat mathematical equation. When you say that what is considered “good” is merely what the politically powerful call good for their own purposes, or that what is considered “beautiful” is merely the result of subrational neurological tics and spasms, you do not merely put obstacles in the path of the young mind. You kill the search for truth in the egg. If there is no truth to be learned from reading Homer, then why bother, except as an archaeological curiosity? If the lesson to be learned from Virgil is the same as that to be learned from the slogans of our time, why spend so much money and time struggling with the Aeneid? What is the point? And indeed professors and students now agree: there is not much of a point. If beauty is reducible to neural promptings, why bother to erect that scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel and lie on your back for months on end, with the paint dripping into your hair and eyes, yourself never farther than one moment of forgetfulness from falling to your death?

Walter Pater wrote that all art aspires to the condition of music. We might apply his words to the contemporary university and say that all knowledge aspires to the condition of an empirical experiment and its quantified results. That is what people now assume. Pater might have been correct in his assessment about art; I won’t argue the matter here. But it is certainly not true that the methods for acquiring knowledge of the anatomy of a toad apply also to acquiring knowledge of things that are not toads, as, for one example, what is good and evil.

This is not to say, though, that the colleges have abandoned moral considerations utterly. Relativism is an unstable equilibrium—imagine a pyramid upside down, placed delicately upon its apex. It might make you break out into a cold sweat to stand in its shade. The question is not whether some moral vision will prevail, but which moral vision. The colleges are thus committed to a moral inversion. High and noble virtues, especially those that require moral courage, are mocked: gallantry in wartime, sexual purity, scrupulous honesty and plain dealing, piety, and the willingness to subject your thoughts, experiences, and most treasured beliefs to the searching scrutiny of reason. What is valued then? Debauchery, perversion, contempt for your supposedly benighted ancestors, lazy agnosticism, easy and costless pacifism, political maneuvering, and an enforcement of a new orthodoxy that in denying rational analysis seeks to render itself immune to criticism. You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too.

So, what can we do about it? Esolen begins:

Some of the old colleges and universities can be injected with shots of sanity and truth-seeking, and those shots should be administered whenever possible. That is not a matter of healing a gangrenous limb here or there, but of searching the field of battle after a devastating defeat, and finding the few people still breathing who can be saved. So there are programs in Catholic studies at formerly Catholic colleges, or programs in Western civilization, or in the so-called great books, at colleges where the only people who did not know anything about Shakespeare or Milton were day laborers or immigrants still learning English, rather than tenured professors, administrators, accreditors, and trustees.

Sometimes we can put their ignorance to good use, for many people are so far past hating Milton for what he says about God and man, about marriage and sanctity, about liberty and virtue, they neither know nor much care what he says. We may then be like people administering antibiotics to heal the wounded, when the conquering army has forgotten what an antibiotic is, as they smile upon us for our foolishness in believing there is any special potency in a drug, as long as lice and dirty bandages and open sewers are doing their good work roundabout. What can be the harm in penicillin? Why should we worry if someone does the old-fashioned thing and learns about Dante?

Then there are those for whom “diversity” is not a slogan for clean- ing and sharpening a pedagogical guillotine but a real value in itself.

These are the rather rare agnostics “in the middle of the journey of our life,” not contented with the dark woods but knowing nothing else, who suspect that if they are ever to get clear of it, they must at least entertain a wide range of points of view. These people are our qualified allies. They will look cross-eyed at administrators who on Monday cry “diversity, diversity” but on Tuesday write curricular guidelines that goose-step through Berlin in self-satisfied conformity. Why then not offer a real program in the development of Western civilization for those students who want to pursue those lines of inquiry? These are professors who can pretend not to know that the real object of a university education these days is not truth but power; and they can sometimes compel their politicizing fellows to pretend not to know it, too. We should consider that an hour spent reading Wordsworth can cure you of wanting to spend twenty hours reading contemporary inanities; as a single powerful experience of beauty, say the sensitive study of Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Pomegranate,” may make it hard for you to take seriously a “performance artist” smearing chocolate on her naked body. I tell my students that if they ever find me walking down the street reciting Welsh poetry, they may throw an odd look my way, but they needn’t worry about it, because it will still be within the bounds of possibility. But if they ever see me entering a modern sculpture museum, they should call the para- medics immediately, because I will clearly have lost my mind.

I should stipulate, here, that such programs should not be infested with professors who despise the material they are to teach. It is telling that I should have to say such a thing. For great art is human in this regard too: it does not give up its profoundest secrets except to those who love. Hatred clouds the eyes and hardens the heart. I do not like the Enlightenment, and I have my reasons; therefore I am not the ideal person to introduce students to Hume and Kant. Some people seem to believe that the only way to teach about Western civilization is as an exercise in self-loathing. Such people are not really critics—because the true critic still must love. You cannot have anything interesting to say about Racine and classical French tragedy if its severe moral analysis leaves you cold. Doctor Johnson loved Shakespeare immensely, and that makes his criticism of the bard’s pursuit of the “quibble,” the groan-rousing play on words, all the more impressive and revealing. Love reveals. It is an eye, as Richard of Saint Victor says. No love: no vision.

If these words of Esolen’s that I’ve quoted at length speak to your heart, then trust me, you really, really need to read Out Of The Ashes.  He goes on to say:

Ultimately, though, we must build new colleges. This is an absolute necessity. We have exemplars in our midst.

And he lists those exemplars, and explains why he chose them. Order the book and read for yourself. The point I want to make here is that there are not remotely enough of those colleges for a country this size. We need to build more. To put it in a MacIntyrean way, small-o orthodox Christians and all — including secular people — who treasure the traditional humanities need to “stop shoring up the academic imperium” and create new institutions within which the life of the humanities can thrive amid the barbarism of the contemporary university (and I’ll have a lot more to say about the events at Middlebury College in a separate post).

All of this came to mind today after a long, pleasant lunch with a couple of friends I haven’t seen in a while. N., the husband, is finishing his PhD in a humanities field at an esteemed university, and is back in Louisiana temporarily to take care of family business. N., who is a believing Christian and a cultural conservative, told me that he has become so discouraged by the environment within academia that he is having trouble contemplating giving the next 40 or 50 years of his professional life to making a place for himself within the university. He gave examples of the chronic political correctness that he says is suffocating the life of the mind within the university. He talked about a friend of his within the academy, an ethnic and religious minority who is quite progressive, but who will not use social media for fear that progressive things she might say today will be deemed intolerable bigotry tomorrow, and cost her her job, her professional reputation, and more.

“You know, these people come after your personal life, even your family,” said my friend.

N. doesn’t just want to run away from something corrupt. He wants to run toward something good. He just wants to teach, to pass on real knowledge and wisdom, to honor the tradition he has devoted his scholarly life so far to learning. His field has nothing to do with Christianity, just so you know. He is afraid that ideological tyranny in academia, plus the deliberate forgetting of traditions within the humanities, are causing precious things to die.

N. said that he hasn’t done all this work, learning a subject that he deeply loves, to have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for the academic commissars, and to try to make a place for himself in institutions that don’t value true learning and real scholarship. (N. reads this blog; if I’ve distorted any of this, N., please chime in to correct me.) Plus, he said, he can see that the current university model is going to crash, and crash hard, under a mountain of unsustainable student debt.

N. said he’s thinking about doing something entrepreneurial with higher education when he gets his doctorate. What this is, he doesn’t yet know. But he’s eager to build something good, true, and beautiful.

“You need to be in touch with my friend John Mark Reynolds,” I said.

Who is John Mark Reynolds, and why is he relevant to our discussion? He was the founder of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, then the provost at Houston Baptist University, and more recently founded an classical school in the Orthodox Christian tradition. I write about him in The Benedict Option:

Christian graduate students in the humanities tell me that they can read the handwriting on the wall in academia and see no future for themselves as college professors. In the fall of 2016, some younger members of the Society of Christian Philosophers publicly assailed Richard Swinburne, one of the most eminent living philosophers, as a bigot for briefly defending the orthodox Christian teaching on homosexuality. Prominent non- Christian philosophy professors from Yale, Columbia, and Georgetown piled on, insulting Swinburne and his defenders in lewd, profane terms. This kind of thing is why one Christian Ph.D. candidate in English literature at a prestigious American university confided to me that the total left-wing ideologization of literary scholarship caused him to give up plans for an academic career.

The ground is moving swiftly and decisively under our feet. It’s time for Christians to recognize the danger and begin creating a Christian academic counterculture. John Mark Reynolds is preparing for that shift. When he left the provost’s job at Houston Baptist University a few years back, he was offered the presidency of a college. He turned it down, even though it was a prestigious job that paid much more money than he’s making as head of the Saint Constantine School, the classical Christian academy he founded.

He wears a number of hats at the fledgling Houston school—even part-time janitor. It’s a bit of a blow to his pride, but he says it has been good for him to realize how coddled he was in conventional Christian academia— and how much it made him dependent on a higher education model that he believes is financially unsustainable, and will collapse.

Reynolds explains that even Christian colleges are living on the edge of a financing bubble that is bound to burst. When he was a Christian college provost, less than one-third of the school’s budget went to academics.

“College as we know it must die,” he says. “I’m not willing to have an inner-city kid come to school and borrow a hundred thousand dollars to get a baccalaureate degree that may or may not lead to a job, where they don’t see a full-time professor for two years. That’s the real world.”

The Saint Constantine School model will eventually include a four-year liberal arts college. The school is tied tightly into local churches, and its college component, when launched, will be closely affiliated with the King’s College, a Christian institution in New York City. The reason, according to Reynolds: “Those Christian institutions that were accredited before the troubles that are coming will be the last to be challenged.”

The Saint Constantine president reports a surfeit of excellent résumés on file, including a number from master’s degree and Ph.D. holders. “There are lots of smart, conservative, orthodox Christian teachers out there who need work,” he said.

Anthony Esolen agrees. A well-known literature professor, Dante translator, and orthodox Catholic, Esolen came under intense fire in the fall of 2016 within his own school, Catholic-run Providence College, for speaking out against what he believed was the administration’s attempt to gut its Catholic identity for the sake of multiculturalism.

“It’s long past time for administrators at Christian colleges to abandon the hiring policies that got us in this fix to begin with,” Esolen told me. “We know that there are plenty of excellent young Christian scholars who have to struggle to find a job. Well, let’s get them, and get them right away. We should be establishing a network for that purpose.”

I had a much longer conversation with John Mark than I was able to use in the book. Take a look at this page on the Saint Constantine School website to get an idea of their vision for a liberal arts college program, which they are going to begin this fall. John Mark’s idea is to get back to basics, offering traditional humanities studies in an authentically Christian environment, at an affordable cost. You can do that when you serve students who are there for the sake of real learning, not for a four-year vacation at a spa with a football team attached.

Will the Saint Constantine School model work? We will find out. But in my view, this is the Benedict Option in action: men and women of faith, conviction, and learning responding to the cultural and civilizational crisis creatively and entrepreneurially. The Saint Constantine School is modeling the future of humanities education in America. I’ve heard it said by others that we’re fast getting to the point where the only places you’ll be able to get a traditional humanities education, the kind that steeps students in the Western tradition, are Christian colleges and universities. That’s true of Saint Constantine — and, if they pull it off, they’re going to make it affordable.

 

N. told us that he was assisting a professor in an upper-level undergraduate class in his discipline and was shocked to see that none of the students could write a coherent argument across several paragraphs, Most of them couldn’t even lay out a basic argument in a single paragraph.

Someone at our table on staff at a classical Christian school chimed in to say that the military service academies told their headmaster that they prize graduates of these schools because unlike so many of the graduates of mainstream high schools, the classically educated kids know how to reason.

Anyway, I told N. I would introduce him via e-mail to John Mark Reynolds. Surely there are a lot more younger Christian (and not Christian!) scholars who love art, literature, philosophy, religion, history, and so forth, and who dread the thought of spending the rest of their lives dessicating in the husks of what were once havens of the humanities. My hope is that The Benedict Option inspires a small army of John Mark Reynoldses, and — this is important — the benefactors who can put the resources behind building these new institutions (and strengthening already existing ones that are fighting the good fight).

Why not? What else is there? Do you really want to keep shoring up the educational imperium?