Rod Dreher's Blog, page 50

Bush’s New War On Terror

The president who launched the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan had some words of advice for America yesterday:

Former President George W. Bush called on Americans Saturday to confront domestic violent extremists, comparing them to violent extremists abroad and warning that they are “children of the same foul spirit.”

In a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Bush said the US has seen “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.”“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit.”“And it is our continuing duty to confront them,” he added.Bush’s speech at the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, came eight months after violent insurrectionists breached the US Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.

Here’s a link to the transcript of the entire speech.It’s not a bad speech … until you realize that the man giving it is the one whose bad judgment about who the enemy was and what the nature of the fight was got us into one bad and wholly unnecessary war (Iraq), and one just war (Afghanistan) that turned into a twenty-year nation-building calamity. There was not one word in that speech about Iraq or Afghanistan. No regret — not even a hint of the awareness of tragedy. Just patriotic nostalgia. It wouldn’t have sounded like boilerplate had we actually achieved our goals in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and turned them both into liberal democracies.

There was not a sentence, or even a single syllable, indicating that President Bush has given any real thought to the meaning of the past twenty years, and his role in it. One doesn’t expect a man like that to stand in front of the American people and apologize for his grievous mistakes — mistakes that a lot of us (I accuse myself) supported at the time — but it is not unreasonable to expect some acknowledgement that we failed, and our failure cost a lot of people, Americans and otherwise, their lives, and made us poorer and weaker as a nation.

You may disagree, but I think George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man who suffers gravely from a prideful lack of introspection. I saw the same thing in my own dad, a deeply good and decent man whose Achilles heel of pride — he never apologized, and never second-guessed himself — led to lasting destruction. Bush also suffers from an an unsubtle mind. I think he really did believe his administration’s own propaganda — and still does. I think he probably honestly does think, preposterously, that the January 6 clowns are the Al Qaeda of our time. I don’t say this to excuse him, but to say that I don’t question his sincerity, only his judgment.

The reader who wrote to tip me off about the Bush speech said:

No accountability, no admission of guilt, introspection or culpability. Not even a basic reflection on the human and material costs of these last 20 years. I absolutely detest Trump as the cure for what ails us, but the utter corruption and lack of basic accountability for those at the top is what discredits the establishment and legitimizes bad actors like Trump.

And a foreign policy establishment that is fine with zero accountability for two lost wars has no right to bitch about Hungarian corruption. They are fine with corruption; it’s cultural conservatism that they find unacceptable.

I have not one good word to say about the people who attacked the US Capitol on January 6. They all deserved to be punished. But people, understand what is happening now when a former President of the United States identifies “violent extremists” as the new Al Qaeda. Bush is legitimizing the US turning the vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus he built to fight Islamist terror onto American citizens who dissent. To be fair, Bush’s remarks could have covered Antifa and leftist radicals too, but CNN interpreted them as referring to the January 6 sort of people, because Bush has been so outspoken against them. And CNN was probably right, given that Bush hasn’t to my knowledge said anything against Antifa, or the Black Lives Matter mobs tearing down statues (“defile national symbols”).

Anyway, CNN reports that President Biden praised Bush’s speech afterwards.

It is the duty of we who are old enough to remember what happened in the year and a half between 9/11 and the launch of the Iraq War to remember how the US Government and a compliant media manufactured public consent for that war. We have to remember it, and talk about it, loudly and often. We have to tell our children about it — about how the people in power told lies to make us deathly afraid of the people they wanted to punish, even though those people (the Iraqis) had nothing to do with 9/11. They were just pawns in a bigger game. It’s starting to happen again — and George W. Bush yesterday laid down an important marker in that speech.

Hear me clearly: I’m not saying that violent extremists (of the right or the left) deserve kid-gloves treatment by the state. I’m saying that the ruling class — Bush, Biden, and the rest — are laying the rhetorical groundwork for launching a war on their own people, in particular those who have been shat on particularly by Bush’s wars and economic policies, and Biden’s wokeness.

It’s coming. As the author of Live Not By Lies, a book that talks about how soft totalitarianism is here and growing, I read Bush’s remarks, and Biden’s approval of them, with a chill running down my spine. We have got to understand what’s happening, and build resistance while we can. I am not talking about anything violent! What happened on January 6 was idiotic, and anybody who takes up arms or violence against Leviathan is a fool who will be crushed. I have no problem with the state prosecuting violent political actors; I only wish they would be fair and balanced in how they go about it. For example, I wish the State of Oregon or the City of Portland went after Antifa with even a tiny fraction of the vigor with which the US Government is going after the January 6 rioters. I wish national and state governments regarded the defiling of statues and monuments by leftist mobs with even a scintilla of the seriousness with which they took the defilement of the US Capitol.

No, I am talking about building a non-violent movement of resistance.

For one thing: speak out against the demonization of dissent, and speak out against the state and the institutional powers in our society, especially the media, manufacturing consent to suppress dissenters. It has been happening within institutions (e.g., universities, corporations), but now it will expand at a national level. Whether he understood what he was doing or not, Bush gave this campaign his imprimatur, likening it to a new war on terror. Ask yourself: how well did Bush’s last war or terror go for us? Do you trust this man — and the elites who run the US Government — to identify the real enemy of our nation? Or are they more likely to attack the wrong people because they are blind, and/or because they have a different agenda?

For another thing, I am talking about building the habits of resistance into our lives, like the anti-communist dissidents I interviewed in the book advised. And I am talking about building cells (small groups) of resistance, and networks of these cells, like Father Tomislav Kolakovic did in pre-communist Slovakia, so we can help each other keep each other, and especially the life of the church, thriving under persecution.

To that end, on this Sunday morning, let me quote several lines from Live Not By Lies:

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

Go to church. Get your spiritual life in order. Purge yourself of weak-sauce therapeutic Christianity, of the kind that just wants to make you feel good. It will be of no use to you in the days to come. Cast out of your soul vulgar politicized Christianity, the sort that de facto deifies political leaders and that construes the fight between good and evil as one between conservatives and liberals, or black and white, or city and country, and so forth. Always remember Solzhenitsyn’s saying: the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart.

This is a serious moment that requires spiritually serious men and women, not those crippled by their affection for the world’s trivialities. Father Tomislav Kolakovic lived through a similar moment in Slovakia. He taught a method of contemplation, deliberation, and action to the disciples he was preparing to lead the underground church in the coming persecution: Think, Judge, Act. For us, it would go something like this:

Open your eyes and bend your knees in prayer, then think hard about what you’re seeing happen in our country.Talk about it among your friends, and judge what you are called to do in this moment, with an eye to the future.Then act, while we still have the liberty to do so.

UPDATE: It’s not just me who thinks so:

Liberals swooned emotionally all day yesterday for George W. Bush because they crave his War on Terror, but just want it unleashed domestically at their political opponents.

Hearing Bush link 9/11 with 1/6, and compare his War on Terror with their new one, was ecstasy for them. pic.twitter.com/mvxSORVIjS

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 12, 2021

Having the US Government treat the American Right the same way as it spent the last 20 years treating alleged "Muslim extremists" is — along with more censorship of the internet — one of the top political priorities of US liberalism, whose authoritarianism cannot be overstated. pic.twitter.com/363T0m934z

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 12, 2021

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Nostalgia And 9-11-2021

I thought about not writing about today’s anniversary. Not because it hurts — it doesn’t, not anymore — but because it seems to be the thing I never could have imagined on that day twenty years ago that this thing could ever be: banal.

Which seems obscene, given, you know. But I think the banalization of 9/11 must be a part of healing from its trauma. If we stayed in that moment, in the place we all were on this day two decades ago, we would never have been able to get on with life. I think of the living room of my sister’s house in the country. Ten years ago next week, she collapsed on the floor there and drowned in her own blood as her helpless husband tried to save her. It was useless; the tumor had finally cut through her aorta, and it was the end. On a warm September morning. She was 42, and left behind three children. Now that living room is just where the kids, now grown, watch TV when they come home to visit their father.

It’s horrible, but it’s necessary. After that day, my wife and I swore that we would never, ever forget. Even if the rest of the country moved on, we would keep faith with New York, we would keep faith with all the men from our neighborhood fire station who perished that day. We would keep faith with America. But here we are, like everybody else. This is life. When I reflect on where those feelings of solidarity, of anger, and of the burning desire for vengeance took me, I am not sorry to see it all in the past.

Over the years, I would sometimes meet new people, and if 9/11 would come up in conversation, and they would find out that I had been there that day, in New York, they would look shocked, and ask me to tell the story. The telling of the story became a kind of liturgy, one that I grew to detest because with each telling, another layer was added to the scar tissue. The telling of the story did not keep it alive, but rather the opposite: it helped to kill its emotional power, at least within me. I know that by the time I hear the line one day, Tell us, Granddad, about what it was like to be there on 9/11, I might as well be reading out of a history book written by somebody else. I can’t explain that.

Here, in brief, is what happened to me, and where it happened. On that morning, my wife, toddler son, and I lived at 391 Hicks Street in Brooklyn — just across the harbor from the Twin Towers, which were the first thing we saw in the morning when we opened our front door:

My father in Louisiana called that morning to say, “Look out your front door, the Twin Towers are on fire!” He was watching the Today Show at home, and knew before I did what was going on in my own city. I did as he said, and saw a shower of papers falling over us gathered on the street. The wind was carrying the plume of smoke from the burning north tower directly over us in Brooklyn, carrying papers from the tower’s offices on the current.

I was a columnist at the New York Post, and had been planning to go in at noon because I was going to write something about local elections scheduled for that day, and knew it would be a late night. But surely now I would be writing something about the fire. I went down into our basement living room and began to gather my things to head across the river to cover it. As I sat in my office chair next to the desktop computer pulling my sneakers on, I heard screaming from the street above, then an explosion that shook our building. My wife opened the front door to see what was the matter, and then yelled down to me, “They say a 747 hit the other tower!”

My first emotion was anger at the crowd. Of course it wasn’t a 747; that’s ridiculous. What is wrong with people? But when I reached the front door to see for myself, and saw the south tower engulfed in smoke, I knew they had been correct. With my pen and notebook in hand, I kissed my wife goodbye in the doorway, and said, “This is terrorism. I’m going to get as close as I can.”

I set out for the Brooklyn Bridge, headed into lower Manhattan. I stopped to interview people in the shell-shocked line of victims staggering away from the calamity. Some were bleeding from the glass. I delayed my progress inadvertently by halting to interview them. By the time I got to the pillars on the far side of the bridge, I ran into a Post colleague who was out riding her bike; she was not scheduled to show up for duty until the afternoon.

“I need to get down there,” I said to her, trying to excuse myself after a can you believe it? exchange.

“Don’t do it,” she warned. “Those things are going to fall.”

I looked at her like she had lost her mind. “They’re not going to fall,” I said. “That’s the Twin Towers we’re talking about.”

Forty-five seconds later, there was a horrible roar, a Niagara of glass, and down came the south tower. I felt electric pincers clamp my knees, and they buckled. A woman to my right leaned over the bridge railing and vomited. A stout young black woman in front of me threw her hands into the air, and shouted a verse from the Bible, “‘And every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess!'” she howled. “It ain’t over, people!”

I had the presence of mind to know that if I was going to get into lower Manhattan, I had better run for it, because the police were going to close the bridge at any moment. Everything in me said go for it. I knew there would never be a bigger story in all my life, and there I was, at the white-hot center. I thought of the adventure. I thought of the glory. The dust cloud roared down the canyons of lower Manhattan, and obscured the foot of the bridge. I just had a few seconds to get there by running towards the cloud. But I thought then about my young wife and baby boy back home in Brooklyn, and how if I died that day, she would be widowed and he would be fatherless. I was instantly overcome with a sense of shame at my selfishness. But I really wanted to run toward the disaster, not out of a sense of courage (I’m sorry to admit), but because I’ve always been the sort of person who wants to be right in the middle of the action. It’s why I became a journalist. For me, courage had nothing to do with it; it was sheer curiosity, and the overwhelming urge to write about what I saw.

Unlike the firefighters of New York, I had a choice that morning of what to do. I did not have time to think about this forever. The dust cloud enveloped us. I turned around and walked back to Brooklyn, reckoning that Julie and Matthew were more important than my adventure and my glory.

Later, when it became clear that I would not have died had I been on the scene, but not inside the towers, I regretted what I had done. But in that moment of decision on the bridge, I discovered who I was. I discovered that my wife and child mattered more to me than I did. Take that for what it’s worth.

When I got back home, I was well-dusted. My wife met me at the front door holding our son, and sobbing. She had not been able to reach me by mobile phone, because the system was down. For about an hour, she thought I was dead. I went into the house, washed up, then down to the basement to file a column. Later, I went to the next block to Long Island College Hospital to join the long line of people waiting to give blood for the victims. They turned us all away, in the end. It turned out that there were no wounded. You either lived, or you died.

That afternoon, I walked around my neighborhood to get a feel of the street. On Atlantic Avenue, there were at the time a number of Arab-owned businesses. Near the corner of Atlantic and Court Street, I passed an old Arab man in Middle Eastern dress, looking towards what we would come to call Ground Zero, muttering, “Allahu akbar” — God is great. I wanted to slug him, because I thought he was praising the terrorists’ deed. I had only heard that phrase in connection with bad Arabs celebrating slaughter. Later, I would learn that “Allahu akbar” is also the Arabic version of “Lord, have mercy,” or “Oh my God.” Thinking back on it, that moment of misunderstanding on the streetcorner was the first mistake of that kind I would make in this saga, though not the last.

It was a terrible autumn, but one that disclosed beauty the likes of which I will surely never see again. All the people in our neighborhood going to the fire station in Brooklyn Heights to give money for the families of the dead firemen, and to bring food for those left behind. Standing on the streets sobbing as a fireman funeral cortege passed by. Going to Ground Zero to stare into the mouth of hell, through a fence festooned with missing flyers, from families who were hoping that somebody had seen their loved one. The thing I remember is the intense kindness with which New Yorkers treated each other. It was as if in the light of the 9/11 apocalypse, we discovered who we really were — or at least who we could be, if we wanted to be.

It didn’t last. It couldn’t last. For me, all the intensity of that autumn and winter concentrated itself in an overwhelming desire for revenge. I don’t need to recap that story here. I’ve said many times in this space over the years how my passions overwhelmed my reason, and left me vulnerable to the manipulation of government leaders who wanted to make war on Iraq. I thought that only we who had been there at the center of the apocalypse understood what it was really about. Those people who were against the war were either fools, cowards, or innocently ignorant of the stakes. We knew. We had seen the towers fall with our own eyes. We had been christened with the dusty remains of human beings. We had been to the funerals. We knew.

We didn’t know.

The thing that is hard to convey to people who weren’t alive then, or who were only children, is how emotionally and psychologically overwhelming this all was at the time. When I’m feeling charitable towards George W. Bush and the government leadership, I recall that they didn’t stand aloof from all this either. They were caught up in the same dynamic as the rest of us. The way I felt as a New Yorker, about how privileged my knowledge and judgment was because I had seen 9/11 up close — they surely felt far more that way, as government leaders privy to all the intelligence. Once, years into the war, I spoke to a White House official who had left his job, about all that. He said to me that it was hell going to work every day, knowing what the intelligence agencies were telling the president about threats they were picking up. Can’t you imagine it?

There’s no need to rehash the sorry story of what our government did, marching us to the forever war. I would just point out that it required a strong sense of judgment at the time to say no to the war. Pat Buchanan and the other founders of this magazine had it. So did others. But man, I tell you, the feeling in the country at the time was so pro-war. We had all been through 9/11, one way or the other, and we had all sat through Colin Powell’s presentation about Iraq at the UN, and the administration’s messaging about how the next 9/11 would involve a mushroom cloud if we didn’t wage war on Iraq.

Madness, all of it. I was taken in by it. So were most Americans. On this anniversary, I salute all of those, of whatever political conviction, who were not.

For me, I can’t separate 9/11 from the Catholic Church scandal. In a Rome speech delivered on this day three years ago, about the Benedict Option, Monsignor George Gänswein, the personal secretary to Benedict XVI, called the abuse scandal “the 9/11 of the Catholic Church.” I can’t forget that the Geoghan trial took place in January 2002, not four months from 9/11. That was what kicked off the scandal. By late summer, I was so consumed with rage and grief over both 9/11 and the abuse scandal that my wife begged me to see a therapist.

By 2005, I was gutted by the evil in the Church that I had learned of, and by the lies upon lies told by the bishops to cover their asses. That was the year that I learned from a good friend of mine who had been high up in the Pentagon about how Donald Rumsfeld had repeatedly and consciously lied about the war to the American people. That had shattered my friend, a military man who was a straight-laced Republican, but who never was again after that. And that was the year of Katrina, which revealed our government’s incompetence.

When I look back at it, 9/11 (and the Geoghan trial shortly after) was when the planes hit my personal towers, but 2005 was when they collapsed. I ceased to be able to believe in the Republican Party and in my government. I ceased to be able to believe in the Catholic Church. I fell into a deep depression, a crisis of confidence, and and I have never really come out of it. Then, in 2008, came the economic crash, and I stopped being able to believe in the competence and goodness of the people who run this country.

Still, you have to get on with life. “Stagger onward rejoicing,” said Auden. One does what one can, with a limp from war wounds.

Earlier this week in Italy, a Catholic friend of mine was telling me that all of us believing Christians have to figure out some way to live in the reality I describe in The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, without the reliable guidance of our leaders, especially our religious leaders. He’s right. I’ve believed that for a long time.

Twenty years ago, I thought that America would respond to the challenge of 9/11 with renewed patriotism and purpose, setting evildoers to rights and showing the world our righteousness. I really did believe that. I believed a lot of things back then. The past twenty years for me have been one of loss after loss, with one illusion after the other falling. As I mentioned above, next week marks the tenth anniversary of my sister’s passing. I moved with my wife and children from Philadelphia to my small Southern hometown with the hope and intention of renewing the family bonds. In fact, I learned that as far as the prodigal son was concerned, the image of a happy, harmonious family was a story everybody told themselves about who we were. That all dissolved too.

What’s left? I think about that a lot. Even when I try not to think about that, I think about that. I live in the shadow of the past twenty years. For the past year, I have been obsessed with the 1983 Andrei Tarkovsky Italian language film Nostalghia. In an interview about the movie, the Russian filmmaker, who died in 1986, explained that the word “nostalgia” means something different to Russians than it does to people in the West:

Nostalgia is a feeling of intense sadness over the period that went missing at a time when we forsook counting on our internal gifts, to properly arrange and utilize them … and thus neglected to do our duty.

I am nostalgic about 9/11 in that sense. I am sure that people older than me had Vietnam nostalgia in the same sense. America learned nothing from Vietnam. America will probably learn nothing from 9/11. Still: May the souls of the faithful departed — those who perished on this day, and those who perished in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere because of this day — rest in peace.

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The Miracle Of Montesiepi

[Readers, I do nearly all of my spiritual writing these days over at my subscription-only Substack newsletter site. I’m going to reproduce below a slightly edited version of a Substack entry from later this week, because I wrote a lot in this space last year about St. Galgano and Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia. At the end of my Italian book tour this week, I made a pilgrimage to the site of St. Galgano’s conversion, and to some of the sites in that Tarkovsky film. Here’s what I told my Substack readers about it. — RD]

I am just back in the United States, having landed a short time ago in Dallas, and making a connection to Baton Rouge in a few hours. In fact, I wrote this newsletter on the flight back from Italy. I couldn’t get the in-flight wifi to work, so I was unable to send it earlier. Forgive me. I have either been out of wifi range this week in my travels, or had such full days that I was too tired to write. But, here we are now. Let me tell you what happened. I ask your indulgence too, because what follows contains information about stories – a hagiography and a movie – that you subscribers have read before. I recap them here for new subscribers, but also because I’m trying to find the meaning in these stories, and it helps for me to retell them.

There will be spoilers about the movie, but if you’ve been reading me on Nostalghia, you know them already. Besides, this is a difficult movie that most people won’t see, or, to be honest, will be too bored with to finish. I don’t blame you for that. Tarkovsky demands a lot of his audience.

On Sunday night, I met my friend Giovanni in Siena for dinner. His name is not actually Giovanni, but as he wants to remain anonymous in this account, I have christened him so. Giovanni lives in Italy with his family, and is a faithful Catholic. He agreed to meet me in Siena and accompany me on my pilgrimage to the church of San Galgano, and to the ruined Abbey named for the saint.

As we departed Siena in his dusty old SUV, Giovanni turned up the radio. He was playing old cuts by the Rolling Stones, my favorite band. I gazed out lustily at the rolling Tuscan landscape, singing along with “It’s Only Rock And Roll (But I Like It)” on my way to pray at the site of a miracle experienced by a medieval saint, and I thought: this is a very Rod Dreher moment.

In time we reached Montesiepi, the site in rural Tuscany, southwest of Siena, where San Galgano lived. Why did I come? Well, in the spring of 2020, I was struggling mightily with melancholy. I stumbled across the Andrei Tarkovsky movie Nostalghia, and was deeply struck by how much I related to the protagonist, an alienated Russian writer who is in Italy on a search for a sense of wholeness, of home.

In the film, the writer at one point skulks across the nave of a ruined medieval abbey. Here’s the clip — it’s in Italian. You hear the voice of a woman (presumably the Virgin) asking the Lord to speak to the poor writer, who is in a bad way. The Lord says the writer wouldn’t be able to hear him if he did. She asks the Lord to reveal himself to the writer, who needs to know that he is there. God says that he reveals himself every day, but the writer cannot see:

I was so deeply moved by this movie, which I began watching only minutes after going to confession, and my confessor telling me to return to prayer. It felt like a revelation. After the movie was over, I searched online to find out where that amazing medieval ruin is. It turns out that it’s the Abbey of San Galgano. Who was St. Galgano? He was a medieval Tuscan who had led a passionate life, until he had two visions of St. Michael the Archangel. In the second, the Archangel told him to give up his worldly life, and devote himself to God. Galgano reportedly said that it would be easier for him to put his sword through a rock than to give up his worldly passions. He brought his sword down on a rock next to him — and it went through, almost up to the hilt. He immediately converted, and became a hermit. You can still see the sword in the stone inside the church the medieval Tuscans built in his honor. Later, some of his Cistercian followers built the great abbey dedicated to Galgano, though it later was abandoned.

Now, you don’t have to believe that the sword in the stone story is true (though I do) to understand the symbolism. Here’s why I bring it up. After discovering that the abbey in Nostalghia was St. Galgano’s, I believe I finally understood why an Italian engraver, Luca Daum, came to my 2018 talk in Genoa and gave me this, from his hand:

It’s called “The Temptation of San Galgano”. Notice how the serpent who tempts him to abandon his sacrifice comes from inside his head. From the rock where his cross-like sword stands impaled, a symbol of Galgano’s sacrifice, grows the Tree of Life. When he approached me in Genoa that night after my Benedict Option talk, Luca told me he had been praying earlier that day, and that the Holy Spirit told him to come to my talk and give me that engraving.

I found Luca Daum’s email address and wrote to him about it. He responded, in part:

On what you confide in me about St. Galgano, I tell you what I have always known in words, but then on the practical side it always amazes and surprises me, and that is how God acts despite and despite us, but nevertheless often through us.

God is truly a good Father!

He loves us as we are but He wants to lead us to the Beauty of the Project that must be realized in us.

You have been caressed by God, dear Rod, through the image of an obscure Italian engraver, who only wanted to show you his esteem, and certainly did not imagine anything else.

God used this, as He could use anything else, to embrace and comfort you, and, I humbly say, me too. We are generally so fragile and consequently superficial that we find it hard to recognize God’s hand in our troubled daily lives.

Yet Providence is there and acts, and every now and then it shakes us more clearly.

Dear friend, I am very grateful to you for putting me aside from your moving experience, I will remember you with greater affection, for I feel more deeply and mysteriously bound to you in a common destiny.

After all this, I felt so reassured by my return to prayer, and challenged to deepen my faith in this apocalyptic age. So, my message to you is: Watch. Pray. Practice inner stillness. Prepare yourself to see and to hear. Something is about to be illuminated. The world is filled with mystery. Do not seek to know what cannot be known — just receive it with awe and gratitude, and with the resolution to change your life.

Here’s the thing: this is what gets me out of bed in the morning — the theophanic pilgrimage of life, and the hope of stumbling upon inbreakings of grace and revelation. I don’t write about that much here, but it’s what I live by, and think about a lot. I think I need to find a way to write a book about it.

The previous paragraphs are a version of something I wrote here last year, in the spring of 2020. Since then, I have been somewhat obsessed with San Galgano and me. What does God want me to learn from the story of San Galgano? How can I see it and hear it, and not be stranded in my own head, and my own anxiety, like the fictional Andrei? I knew that I would have to make a pilgrimage to pray there, and to ask God for the answer. Nostalghia begins with one of its characters, a sophisticated woman from Rome, visiting a rural Tuscan church and walking in on a kind of liturgy in which modestly dressed peasant women are praying to have children. It seems primitive to the Roman woman, who tells the inquisitive sacristan that she is just there to observe. The sacristan tells her that she will never get what her heart desires unless she kneels. But she won’t kneel, or perhaps can’t kneel in her fancy clothes.

The point here is that sacrifice matters spiritually. The sacristan was telling her that if she seeks the Lord and His will, she needs to humble herself before His altar. The other women – the prayerful ones – are doing just that. She asks the old sacristan something about the purpose of a woman’s life. He says that he is just a simple old man, but he suspects it is to have babies and nurture them. At that, the Roman woman leaves in a huff. The sacristan calls to her, saying, “There is more to life than being happy!”

A powerful line, that.

Well, I committed to make the sacrifice of a pilgrimage, seeking to penetrate the mystery of San Galgano for my life. With thoughts about the movie, the story of the saint, and what all of it has to do with the will of God for me, I made it to Montesiepi late Monday morning. Unlike the film’s fictional writer Andrei, the beauty of Tuscany was not lost on me. I had never been to this part of the world, and it was instantly and vividly clear to me why people rhapsodize about it. Gio and I stopped at a shack under the trees, near the top of Montesiepi, to eat lunch before going in:

Just beyond those trees, on the top of the hill, was the round church, and at its heart, the sword in the stone. The place I had been thinking about for over a year was a hundred yards away. I was afraid to think too much about it. After lunch, Gio went to fetch something out of his car, and I prayed silently, asking Jesus Christ to walk with me there and open my eyes. I also prayed to St. Galgano, St. Benedict, St. Genevieve, St. Alexei Mechev, St. Sergei Mechev, and St. Michael the Archangel to accompany me. And then, holding my prayer rope, Gio and I walked up the final bend of the road.

Here is what faced us:

This church was built in the 12th century, around the hut where St. Galgano lived for about a year between his conversion and his death. The saint’s conversion involved a vision he had of a round church built on the mountain where he surrendered his sword to the stone, and his life to Christ. Here is what the oratory church looks like from the plain down below the mountain:

 

Gio and I walked into the little church, and there it was: the miracle of Montesiepi. I stared at the sword for a couple of minutes, silently praying, glory to God. Italian scientists two decades ago studied the sword in the stone, perhaps expecting to disprove it. Instead, X-rays showed that the blade is indeed lodged deep in the rock, and the sword’s metal is of 12th century make, consistent with the story.

I fell to my knees and prayed for a while. Gio took this photo:

What did I pray for? I had some particular intentions in my heart that are too personal to reveal here, but the gist of it is seeking to do the will of God under conditions when His will for me is not clear. There must be a reason why God sent St. Galgano to me in that Genoese church in 2018. There must be a reason I didn’t have a clear idea why he might have done so until I watched that Tarkovsky movie in 2020. I believe that things like this have meaning. I not only believe it, I have lived it before. My prayer included asking God for the faith to be able to receive His answer for me, and to recognize His voice when He speaks. I also prayed to St. Galgano, asking him to join me in prayer, and to give me the strength to place my sword in the stone, whatever my sword is, and whatever the stone God shows me.

The sword represents Galgano’s passions, which he sacrificed to God accidentally. Remember, he was trying to demonstrate to Jesus that he could not leave his life behind to follow Him. Can you imagine? Here was a young man so intensely wedded to the world that even when God Himself appears to him, he wants to argue. I think Galgano must be the patron of hot-headed, obstreperous young men who do not want to surrender their wills. I was like that as a young man, though not violent like Galgano. I loved the world, and even after I was confident that Jesus was real, and that He wanted me, I resisted it, because I thought it would be impossible for me to turn my back on the world. This is why I don’t believe people when they say that if God just showed Himself to them in a miracle or something like it, they would believe in Him, and change their lives. It’s hard to leave the world. Most of us spend a lifetime dying to it. Me, in my early 20s, I knew God was real, but I was in a real Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet phase of my life.

Still, I don’t know that I would have been as hard-headed as Galgano Guidotti was, arguing with Jesus like that, and unsheathing my sword in the presence of Almighty God, His mother, and the Apostles. But that’s what Galgano did, and the evidence of what Christ did with Galgano’s impudence is still there for us all to see inside that little country church off the beaten path in Tuscany. It is a symbol of a passionate young man’s mountaintop sacrifice to His Lord. Galgano gave Jesus everything. Though he came from a family of means, he built a hut next to the sword in the stone (or perhaps surrounding the sword in the stone), and lived there as a hermit for the rest of his short life. The glory of God was made powerfully manifest in the penitent Galgano, who worked miracles and healings, according to the Church’s investigation.

I did not have any woo-woo experiences in prayer there, nor did I expect any (though I did, oddly, feel the presence of St. Michael the Archangel, who figures powerfully in Galgano’s conversion, but whom I haven’t thought of much in my analysis). Finally, I stood up and stepped into the side chapel, where the church has kept on display the mummified hands of a vandal who tried to kill the saint, but who was killed by the wolves who lived near Galgano, and protected him.

A sign below the hands says that radiocarbon dating showed that these hands come from the 12th century, just as the tradition says.

Then I returned to the sword in the stone, fell to my knees again, and offered 100 prayers on my prayer rope. I tried to clear my mind so that my prayer would come from my heart, and be pure. After that, I stood and beheld the concentric circles in the church’s dome:

Perfection within perfection within perfection.

If Gio had not been with me, I would have stayed in the cool of that round 12th century brick church all afternoon, praying and marveling. Maybe I will have the opportunity to do that in the future. Having made the sacrifice of my visit and my prayers, and confident that He will answer me in His own time, and fashion, Gio and I descended the mountain, climbed into his SUV, and drove the short distance across the plain to the ruined Abbey.

Christians have been coming to these places on pilgrimage for over 800 years. It felt so good to be in their number. Inside the nave of the remains of the abbey church, Gio and I talked about what it must have been like in the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance periods, when the stones around us absorbed Gregorian chants from choirs of Cistercian monks living there. How cruel is the passing of time! This once-beautiful church is now just a shell of itself, yet the shell too is beautiful, though in a different way. It is an instantiation of the medieval past in the present day. What is it saying to us? What is God saying to us through its enduring presence? Do we have eyes to see and ears to hear? It was in this church, after all, that God and the Holy Virgin had their pained dialogue about Andrei’s unwillingness to see and hear what God was trying to say to him.

I made the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel the cover of The Benedict Option because it appears in the final scene of Terence Malick’s film To The Wonder as a sign of God’s constant presence in history, calling us home, calling us to repentance. If Andrei had gone to the Abbey of San Galgano to pray instead of to observe, might he have opened the door to God? Unlike Eugenia in the earlier church, he doesn’t even observe; as we see Andrei move across the abbey nave (I’ve cued the clip here to that scene), he is not looking up at the glories of God around him, but has his gaze fixed firmly on the ground, and is smoking.

You can see why God cannot help Andrei: Andrei needs Him, but is not looking for Him. Andrei is not even walking towards what would have been the altar – in this case, a symbol of God – but only in a just-passing-through way, across the nave. God could have manifested himself in an extraordinary way, as He did with San Galgano, but this only very rarely happens, and for reasons we can’t explain. The ordinary way is the way most of us came to Him, and maintain our relationship with Him: through prayer and spiritual discipline. San Galgano’s case is one of a young man who was not seeking, yet found. For the rest of us, we have to seek – and we have to sacrifice.

In the movie, Andrei finally does make a sacrifice, as a sign of solidarity with his friend Domenico, the Holy Fool. Domenico asked Andrei to do something that he, Domenico, has long wanted to do, but has never been able to manage: walk from one side to another, across the ancient thermal bath at Bagno Vignoni, with a lit candle. It’s a seemingly senseless ritual, but the madman – who is alienated from the world because of his morbid obsession with an apocalyptic future – asks it of Andrei. Just as Andrei is about to leave Rome for the flight back to Russia, he gets news of Domenico’s death, and asks his driver to take him to Bagno Vignoni so he can carry out the ritual for Domenico.

It is a real sacrifice. First, Andrei really wants to get home to Russia, but now he’s delaying his return to do a favor for a crazy man he barely knows. And Bagno Vignoni is almost three hours’ drive from Rome. But off they go. The water has been drained from the thermal bath, which allows Andrei to walk across without getting wet.

This scene, which is the climax of Nostalghia, is one of the most famous in film history. It’s nine and a half minutes, uncut, showing a man walking across a pool with a lit candle, trying to keep it from going out. The concentration this requires of Andrei (and of Oleg Yankovsky, the actor who plays him) is total. It’s a riveting scene because you are drawn into the drama of the moment: will he make it? At last, Andrei arrives there, and plants the candle of the side of the pool, as an offering. He has done this for no reason other than as an act of love for the poor madman. For the first time in this film, Andrei has forgotten himself, forgotten his obsession with the past, and is thrust into total absorption of the present moment out of compassion for Domenico. His placing the candle on the side of the pool recalls the scores of candles placed next to the altar in the church at the film’s beginning, by the women who are there to pray for fertility.

Then Andrei is seized by a heart attack, and dies.

Yankovsky, the actor who plays Andrei, later told an interviewer how Tarkovsky prepared him for that scene:

I had just arrived in Rome. I was met by Tarkovsky, who I knew only slightly. That in itself was a miracle in those days: I suddenly found myself in Rome–not as a tourist, I had come to work, “out of professional necessity.” To act not just anywhere, for not just anybody and not “just to get to Rome,” but for Tarkovsky. He had invited me to play the leading role in Nostalghia, his first “non-Russian” film, without any screen tests.

After a short and somewhat aimless walk through the narrow side streets of Rome, we finally sat down at a table outside a small cafe on the Piazza di Spagna. It was midday, warm and quiet; spring was in the air.

“Oleg, know what,” began Andrei in a roundabout way. “I had this idea of filming a man asleep in one continuous sequence, without any editing–from the moment he falls asleep at night to the moment he wakes up in the morning. Imagine what a subtle and grandiose range of human emotions would be reflected on his face in that time! Especially if he dreams.”

“I’ll have dreams in the film?” I cautiously inquired. “Oh, no,” said Andrei and waved his hand, even looking rather irritated at my question. “This has nothing to do with dreams. Okay, I’ll put it a different way. The thing is, could you–yes! yes! you, Oleg!–display an entire human life in one shot, without any editing, from beginning to end, from birth to the very moment of death?”

“Me?” I foolishly asked, not knowing what to say. “I don’t really know. Never crossed my mind. You mean, that’s what I’ve got to do?”

“Well, yes,” said Andrei. “We tried to find you a simple scene to begin with. Since you’ll have to act the role in Italian–and that’s difficult when you don’t know Italian–we chose this scene without words for you, an entire human life from birth to death. In fact the leading character promises a deranged man he will carry a burning candle through the waters of the Saint Catherine pool, and in so doing heal him.”

“Why a candle?” I queried. “Because of the flame, the unprotected fire. Remember the candles in Orthodox churches, how they flicker. The very essence of things, the spirit, the spirit of fire. Well, as for the pool,” continued Andrei, “They drained it unexpectedly. Foul-smelling bubbles rise from the ancient lime oozing with mud and slime and burst on the bottom of the pool, then the leading character–you, Oleg–lights a candle. It’s a thin, uncertain, weak flame, and you cover this flame with your hand, the hand of a strong, grown man. And you walk across the foul bed of the pool, trying not to slip or stumble, and all your will is concentrated on one thing: to save this weak flame, to keep it burning. But it goes out and you return to where you started, and again you light this uncertain, quivering flame, once again you shield it with your palm and set off. You are more than halfway along the path you must cover to bring the miracle into being. But the flame goes out again. You feel your last strength is leaving you and you will be unable to find the spiritual or physical strength to start over again. But you do. You return to the place you already set out from twice before, light the candle again, cover it with your hand and venture out on this endless journey, carefully picking your way. You walk on and carry the candle to the end. Then you leave it at the edge of the pool, understanding that not only has a human life been saved, but that now a hand will always be found to protect the flame when you are no longer there. This is when the leading character understands he has carried out the most important task in his life. He slowly sinks to the foul-smelling bottom of the pool and dies.”

“You see,” and Andrei suddenly changed to the familiar form of “you” in Russian, “if you can do that, if it really happens and you carry the candle to the end–in one shot, straight, without cinematic conjuring tricks and cut-in editing–then maybe this act will be the true meaning of my life. It will certainly be the finest shot I ever took–if you can do it, if you can endure to the end.”

I could hardly speak: this was some “simple scene!” “Fine, I’ll try, do my best.”

For three days Italian workmen laid rails across the bottom of Saint Catherine’s pool under instructions from Tarkovsky. For three days Tarkovsky rehearsed the panorama with the technical crew, as if he hadn’t noticed me aimlessly wandering along the edge of the pool. Finally the fourth day dawned–the day for the shoot. They dressed me in a suit, made me up and helped me jump to the bottom of the dry pool, where Tarkovsky was waiting for me.

“You walk from over there, to that point there.” He pointed down the rails. “This is where the candle goes out the first time. You go back, relight the candle, and get this far.” Andrei showed me the place I had to get to the second time. “Here the wind blows it out again. Then you find the strength to return yet again, and the third time you get to the end. No need to rehearse it,” he said and kissed me. “Of course I could help you by editing, cut-ins–but there’s no need. I feel there’s no need. You’ll do it. Good luck, good luck. And remember: we’ve only got one take.”’

I heard the command “Shoot!” as if through water, lit the candle, saw the thin, flickering flame and cupped it with my hand. I carried on right to the end, sank to the bottom of the pool and died. The candle was still alight on the edge. Applause came from every direction. I had done everything I promised him.

Later I heard applause in Cannes, Moscow, Tokyo, and Venice, but it wasn’t important any more. The main thing was that I found the strength to do everything then, back there.

What could Tarkovsky have meant by that? Here’s what I think: that every life is meant to be a sacrifice. That it takes great care and attention to make our way through the perilous journey of life without the flickering flame of life going out. But there is no way to live a meaningful life without sacrifice. Sacrifice will not make us happy, necessarily – but there are more important things in life than our happiness.

The final image of Nostalghia shows Andrei in the nave of the ruined abbey, with his dog and his dacha behind him. It is a symbol of completeness. In death, all things were restored to Andrei. He has entered into eternity, where time is one. The holy fool has written on his wall: 1 + 1 = 1. Could this mean that when we cease to live in linear time, all the scattered parts of our lives will be unified and returned to us? Perhaps Tarkovsky, who was an Orthodox Christian (though at times he claimed to be agnostic), is saying that the ultimate sacrifice we all must make is dying to ourselves – and that we begin to do that with holy sacrifices. It’s hard to say. This is a difficult film. I’ve seen it three times, and I still haven’t unraveled all its mysteries.

San Galgano died to himself so he could live in Christ. Every Christian is called to die to himself to that he can be born again in Christ. We spend the rest of our lives on a pilgrimage of sacrifice so that we can continue to die to our worldly passions, and make way for the light of Christ to burn more brightly within us.

What does all of this have to do with me, though? That is what I prayed to know. My sense is that it is going to involve abandoning happiness. Dr. Silvester Krcmery, whom I wrote about in Live Not By Lies, wrote in his memoir of his experience as a political prisoner of the Communists, that he had to resolve going into prison that he would never pity himself, that he would regard all the sacrifices he made there as gifts to Jesus Christ, and further, that he would count it a privilege to suffer for Christ. Me, I am so far from being able to do this that it’s almost a joke.

But what if that is what I’m going to be asked to do? What if God is preparing me? It’s frightening to think about – but not as frightening as missing the call of Our Lord, or, in my own weakness, refusing it.

Gio and I talked about these things as we walked around the ruins of San Galgano Abbey. We also talked about how seeing miracles, like a sword in a stone, are worthless if not answered by repentance, that is, by a turning away from the path we were on, and re-orienting ourselves to Christ.

Walking back to our car in the parking lot, I had to laugh at the shadow cast by the security camera. It looks like the hilt of Galgano’s sword in the stone:

As we drove towards Montalcino for a visit to a wine producer, Gio and I resumed our discussion of deep spiritual things. I couldn’t possibly begin to recall them here. One thing that lingers in my mind, though, is our discussion of the deep disorder of the world today – of the loss of Logos. In Christian thought, Christ himself is the incarnate Logos, which is to say the principle of order that permeates the cosmos. The loss of Christianity in the West is not simply a matter of losing our religion. For us, it has become too a matter of losing the belief that there is any Logos at all in the world. That is to say, we in the modern West have lost the belief that there is any order inherent in Nature. If there is a natural order, then there must be limits to the exercise of our will. This we reject in a million ways. We have set ourselves up as the Masters of the Universe, as the imposer of Logos onto chaos, especially through technology. We have abandoned belief is transcendentals. Our culture-makers are training us to despise the past because if the past has any relevance to us, it puts limits on our future – and that is intolerable today.

All of this is to say that Gio and I talked about whether or not we really are at the End of the World. He suggested to me that I watch a Jonathan Pageau video (“That man and his brother are touched by God,” Gio said) in which Pageau explains the meaning of 666. If I recall Gio correctly, he said that in the ancient world, six is the number of perfection. Three times six is the number of a man who divinizes perfection. The Antichrist will come as a man who will present himself as one who can keep us safe from chaos and sacrifice. He will use technology to make us safe by exercising total control. The cost will be our liberty. The cost will be our souls.

Well, after that, it was a pleasure to arrive at a Tuscan winemaker, Talenti. The small parking lot of this winery was bounded by vineyards. Here it is:

Look at how fat these Sangiovese grapes were, ready for the harvest, which was going to take place the next day.

We did a tasting of Brunello and Rosso di Montalcino, the wines produced in this region. Brunello is considered to be the most distinguished Italian wine, I’m told (and not just by the man pouring it for us). It was so rich and luscious. We both bought two bottles — not cheap, but this wine is very special — then headed to Bagno Vignoni to look at the thermal pool that had figured in Tarkovsky’s film.

The bath has been there since Roman times. Even St. Catherine of Siena took the waters there. We arrived in the town, and found it to be far more touristy than we expected. It reminded me of Carmel, Calif., to be honest. When we found the bath, what had seemed mysterious in Tarkovsky just looked like a swimming pool – one within which the owners had placed a ridiculous metal sculpture of some sort.

Well, we took pictures and left quickly. It looks much nicer in real life, but much more alluring in Tarkovsky’s movie.

We settled for the night in Montalcino, a lovely little Tuscan hill town. I tell you, Italian hill towns are not made for fat guys like me. The gradients of the cobblestone streets are quite challenging.

The next morning, I went down to a café and met Gio for coffee. We settled the bill at the hotel, and then took off for Rome, and his family home. He and his wife and young children live about 45 minutes outside of Rome, in a house filled with books. The kids were a bit shy with me at first, but then warmed up considerably. They were marvelous children, really amazing, and it made me genuinely nostalgic for the days when my kids were so young.

After supper out on the patio, Gio told his kids that it was time for evening prayer. He invited me to join them, which of course I was pleased to do. As Gio’s wife and I dawdled outside, he called to me to come quickly to see something.

The children had been playing with toy swords earlier, and had laid them neatly in front of their home altar, as if in sacrifice. These swords have the same hilt design as San Galgano’s:

Gio smiled broadly, and so did I. God was winking at us.

It was so beautiful to watch this family pray together, and then to see the children fall on their knees at the end so their father could bless them. At bedtime, the youngest one, a toddler who doesn’t yet speak, held up her arms in a signal for me to pick her up. I did, and stood there in her bedroom holding her on my shoulder as she rested, and I experienced the old familiar feeling of a child growing heavier as sleep overtakes them. As I swayed rhythmically, remembering somehow how to help a little one sleep, I whispered to the little girl’s mom, “I cannot wait to be a grandfather!” I meant it, too.

Gio, his wife, and I finished one of the bottles of Brunello I bought, then it was time for us to go to bed too. Morning came too early, but there was a flight to catch. As Gio drove me to the airport, I praised him for the way he and his wife were raising their children, especially the family prayer. We talked for a while about the Catholic Church scandal, and what a mess the Catholic Church is. This is something that grieves Gio a great deal. He knows something too about the Orthodox Church in Russia under Bolshevik captivity, and said to me that having read Live Not By Lies, he thinks a lot about how faithful Russian Christians had to live while knowing that they could not trust their priests or bishops, as the bishops (for sure) were KGB.

Gio said that we in the West, whatever our confession, have to figure out how to live like that. Our religious leaders aren’t agents of the secret police, he said, but they are far too often agents of a corrupt and unchristian worldview. In any case, we have to figure out how to live out the faith, and pass it on to our kids, without being able to count on them. Yes, I told him, that is true – and the way you and your wife pray with your children at night is doing exactly that. It did my heart so much good to see, I told him.

As we drove, he played an American song for me, “Spanish Pipedream”, a tune by John Prine that I had never heard. He told me this pretty much is how he tries to live his life:

What a great traveling companion Gio was at the end of my trip. He was prayerful, intellectually deep, and has great taste in American music. It was a very good pilgrimage. Now I await word from Our Lord about what he wants me to do with this life he has given to me, and to which I am bound to offer back to him.

Final image from ‘Nostalghia’

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The post The Miracle Of Montesiepi appeared first on The American Conservative.

Their Religious Wars, And Ours

My friend David Brooks writes today about dictators and God. He begins:

What is the 21st century going to be about? If you had asked me 20 years ago, on, say, Sept. 10, 2001, I would have had a clear answer: advancing liberalism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, a set of values seemed to be on the march — democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, individual freedom.

Then over the ensuing decades, democracy’s spread was halted and then reversed. Authoritarians in China, Central and Eastern Europe and beyond wielded power. We settled into the now familiar contest between democratic liberalism and authoritarianism.

But over the last several years something interesting happened: Authoritarians found God. They used religious symbols as nationalist identity markers and rallying cries. They unified the masses behind them by whipping up perpetual culture wars. They reframed the global debate: It was no longer between democracy and dictatorship; it was between the moral decadence of Western elites and traditional values and superior spirituality of the good normal people in their own homelands.

The 21st century is turning into an era of globe-spanning holy wars at a time when the appeal of actual religion seems to be on the wane.

He mentions Xi Jinping, who is reportedly cobbling together some pseudo-religious mishmash of anti-Western beliefs, and Vladimir Putin, who has infused Russian Orthodoxy with nationalist passion. He alludes to unnamed religious authoritarians who weaponize religion for the culture wars, both in America and in other countries. Brooks goes on:

The pseudo-religious authoritarians have raised the moral stakes. They act as if individualism, human rights, diversity, gender equality, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and religious liberty are just the latest forms of Western moral imperialism and the harbingers of social and moral chaos.

Those of us on the side of Western liberalism have no choice but to fight this on the spiritual and cultural plane as well, to show that pluralism is the opposite of decadence and is a spiritual-rich, practically effective way to lift human dignity and run a coherent society.

This is an important column. It’s partly wrong, but in being wrong, it tells us something important about the current moment.

First, Brooks is right that some leaders around the world are marshaling religion for their own political uses. What he doesn’t seem to recognize, though, is that this is not always cynical, or at least not always entirely cynical. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has spoken about his desire to revive Christianity in Hungary, which Communism left heavily secularized. I have been told by people who know him that Orban was not very religious as a young man, but that his faith has grown as he has aged. I couldn’t possibly say, but I believe him to be sincere when he talks about the impossibility of Hungary having a future as Hungary without its ancestral Christianity as a spiritual and cultural foundation. He has said that Hungary came into being as a nation when St. Stephen the King was baptized, and united the Magyar tribes. If a would-be authoritarian leader wanted to unite the Magyar nation today, there are easier ways to do it than to appeal to a religion that is scarcely practiced by contemporary Hungarians.

I don’t know how sincere Orban’s heart is — that’s between him and God, I guess — but I know that the policies he follows, and his political vision, are based in Christian thought and tradition. He is taking an unpopular stand for Christian virtues and teachings — for example, his government’s acts to protect children from LGBT propaganda is causing Hungary a world of hurt in the European Commission — in a time when almost no other European governments will do so. It’s hard to see the advantage of this if he doesn’t in some sense believe it. Anyway, some things are true even if Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin say and do them.

Secondly, Brooks recognizes that ultimately the liberal West really is engaged in a religious war. I’m very pleased that he has done this, because it’s true, and it vindicates the views of those outside the West (and of those like Orban who are inside the West, but oppose Western-style liberalism), that the post-Christian West really is engaged in an imperialistic attack on them.

It’s strange how Brooks faults these supposedly bad authoritarians for construing this post-Christian liberalism as “Western imperialism,” but in the next paragraph calls the West to attack these rival cultural visions with an eye towards defeating them. Well, which is it?

I can tell you for a fact that in Poland, Romanian, and  Hungary, I have had many conversations with people who are convinced that they are under attack by cultural imperialists from the West who despise their local Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian cultures as backwards, and who are using various means to conquer them and dispossess the locals of their traditions. And they’re right! The fact that good and decent people like David Brooks don’t think of this as imperialism, but as enlightenment and liberation, makes it no less imperialistic, and no less aggressive.

Besides, is the lesson the United States has for the world really “that pluralism is the opposite of decadence and is a spiritual-rich, practically effective way to lift human dignity and run a coherent society”? How could anybody call contemporary America a “spiritual-rich” [sic] place? Christianity is collapsing, but people are not signing up for other religions. The only forms of religion that seem to be declining more slowly are the conservative ones; those that accept the values Brooks extols are declining faster than the rest. Besides, we live in a legal and social regime that is increasingly determined to persecute any religious expression that conflicts with homosexuality. This is “spiritual-rich”? No, it is spiritual impoverishment of an acute kind.

How is the moral chaos we have “practically effective” in social terms? We are wrecking the psychologies of our youth with gender ideology. The pseudo-religion of Wokeness, which has conquered all the institutions of our liberal democracy, is training people to despise others on the basis of race. The Chinese, the Russians, and others correctly see that we Americans are destroying our country. Brooks talks about “those of us on the side of Western liberalism,” but he apparently misses that old-fashioned liberalism is being eviscerated right here in America by the progressives that liberals refuse to confront.

There is no spiritual richness in this ideology. There is no practical effectiveness. It is decadence, it is chaos, it is self-loathing, it is a culture of death. Any sane academic system outside of the West would do well to wall itself off from the madness that is eating our universities from within. At Princeton, the pogrom against Classics professor Joshua Katz is being led in part by Classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, on a video produced by the university to orient incoming freshman, said that it is the role of the university to give students “the tools to tear down this place.” See here.

We are increasingly ruled by nihilists. It is simply dizzying to imagine why anybody in the world would see what we are becoming in America today as an example to them of how to organize a spiritually rich, practically effective society. This is certainly not to say that Russia, China, Hungary, or any other country on earth is utopia. But they are wisely looking to woke America as an example of what not to do.

Look, I have Orthodox friends in Russia who are discouraged by the partnership between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Putin government. They are discouraged because they believe it corrupts the Church. I am inclined to agree with them, though I can’t say much because I really don’t know the religious situation in Russia. About Hungary, though, I can say that from a traditional Christian point of view, you have less to worry about in Orban’s country than you do in the countries of Western Europe. This summer, I heard some Hungarians musing that some Christians from Western Europe may one day seek asylum in Hungary, for the sake of religious liberty. It is by no means a silly notion. Talk to traditional Western European Christians about this if you don’t believe me.

Daniel McCarthy’s column today casts Brooks’s piece in a particular light. McCarthy says that whether the West wants to recognize it or not, it has been fighting a holy war for at least twenty years. Excerpts:

To say that the War on Terror is unwinnable because it’s a war on an abstraction is true enough. In practice, however, the War on Terror is simply a name that’s been slapped on America’s post-Cold War engagement with hotspots in the Islamic world. That isn’t a war on an abstraction, but it is a war of a curious character. It’s not like war with Japan or the Cold War with the Soviet Union. So what sort of conflict is it?

It’s a war of religion. And like a classic war of religion, its objective is the claiming of territory for the faith and ultimately the conversion of the people who live there. This is what it means to bring liberalism and democracy to Iraq or Afghanistan, or indeed to the Islamic world as a whole. The 1991 Gulf War had more limited objectives, of course, but those objectives proved to be self-unlimiting. We rescued Kuwait — and maybe by proxy Saudi Arabia — but this left a lingering question of what to do about Iraq. The only answer, according to the secular religion of America’s leadership class, was conversion. Iraq must become liberal and democratic one way or another — by sanctions, by threats, by invasion, by occupation. This would redeem Iraq, and Iraq would redeem its neighbors, above all Iran.

The reality, of course, is that Shi’ite militias wield much of the power in democratic Iraq, and Iran exerts a considerable influence on its neighbor, not the other way around. In Afghanistan, where the American work of proselytizing was ongoing for 20 years, the old heathenism was never stamped out and speedily reasserted command once the armed missionaries left.

More:

Terrorists like bin Laden have often sought to justify their crimes by claiming to act in defense of their faith. Bin Laden was even known to claim that al-Qaeda’s existence was partly inspired by the sacrilegious presence of US troops in the holy land of Arabia. The mundane truth is that bin Laden wanted power, and anti-Americanism was a path to that. A garden-variety dictator like Saddam Hussein had power in one sense, but bin Laden wanted something different and potentially greater — al-Qaeda was internationalist in orientation from the beginning. Its founder wanted to be a revolutionary. His religion was entwined with that.

Perhaps ironically, Western policymakers are the opposite: they think of themselves as revolutionaries, when they are more like theologians. They believe that their faith is the end of history itself, and if only a strange people can be introduced to it, they will invariably adopt it. How can they fail to, when its truth is so obvious? Western leaders were not always like this, but the end of the Cold War taught a new generation of leaders — baby boomers like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — all the wrong lessons.

The wars John F. Kennedy fought, the Pacific War in which he served and the Cold War he waged as president, had attainable ends, however idealistically they might be portrayed in propaganda. The wars of the post-Cold War era have drifted toward unattainable visions, whose academic and technocratic articulation only serves to distract from their basically eschatological character. So these wars are never won — not 30 years after the Gulf War and 20 years after 9/11.

Read it all. 

I would love it if David Brooks would immerse himself in the novels of Michel Houllebecq and see if they affect his view on the pseudo-religion of Western liberalism. If you can only read two, start with Submission, and then read The Elementary Particles. Houellebecq is not a religious believer, but he sees clearly that the godless society we have created in the West, one devoted to individualism and hedonism, cannot sustain itself. A great book to read is Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror, by the American literary critic Louis Betty. I interviewed Betty by e-mail a couple of years ago; here is an excerpt:

[Louis Betty:] One of Houellebecq’s most remarkable qualities is his consistent anti-liberalism—“liberalism” meant here in the classical sense as an idea about human moral and

Louis Betty

economic freedom that emerges from the Enlightenment (I’m not referring to left-liberalism in the US). On the one hand, his novels paint a gloomy portrait of the consequences for family and community of the sexual revolution; essentially, they expose the underbelly of a social movement, championed by the modern left, that fancies itself sacrosanct and morally unassailable. So, in the moral sense, and especially vis-à-vis moral concerns surrounding sexuality, his treatment of the sexual revolution has a way of shocking left-liberal sensibilities.

On the other hand, MH is no great advocate for unfettered economic freedom. His novels suggest (or even demonstrate, if that’s a proper term for describing the work fiction does) that moral and economic liberation go hand in hand, and that it’s the very ideas and conditions that allowed for human economic emancipation centuries ago that eventually gave us the sexual revolution and the moral dissolution that arguably followed it (i.e., an increase in the divorce rate, more children born outside of marriage, etc.). The modern right, which likes to sing the praises of the free market but tends also toward moral and religious conservatism, isn’t primed to appreciate this rapprochement of material and moral license.

Ultimately, Houellebecq’s fiction points to a fundamental incoherence in modern, liberal political thought. You don’t get sexual freedom without the sort of economic emancipation free markets allow (it’s hard to multiply sexual partners when, say, you’re totally beholden economically to a spouse. That is, at least not without significant danger to yourself—just read some 19th-century social novels and you’ll see what I mean!). At the same time, you don’t get economic freedom and self-determination without a loosening of the moral constraints that material necessity used to hold in place. In any case, whatever side you’re on politically, the most important thing to understand as far as reading MH is concerned is that both of these visions—human flourishing understood either as economic or moral-sexual liberation—are materialistic and reductive.

And, rather obviously, they also fail adequately to address human beings’ metaphysical needs, which liberalism is content to leave up to the individual. Religion’s purpose, as I see it, is to order collective life sub specie aeternitatis, but you don’t get that when the hard work of metaphysical consolation becomes a private affair. In the vacuum, alternatives inevitably arise, some of the most pernicious of which we see today: ethnic and racial identitarianism, religious extremism and terrorism, and a tolerance and even embrace of totalitarian rhetoric across the political spectrum. I’m synthesizing a bit on Houellebecq’s behalf, but I think this vision can help us make sense of much of the tension we’re seeing today.

As distasteful as he can be, I would rather read Michel Houellebecq on the state of the Western soul than establishment liberals, because Houellebecq sees things that they do not and cannot. We live in a country where the ruling class is having to turn the country into a soft totalitarianism to suppress dissent from the Weimar America dystopia it is creating. I don’t see that any other country in the world has figured out the secret to creating a good, just, and stable society — but they can surely see that importing the ideology from contemporary America is a recipe for decadence and decline. It is awfully rich for Western liberals to lament the authoritarianism of other countries when the United States is fast becoming a country where religious traditionalists and social conservatives are being shoved to the margins of society, and face job loss and professional ruin for contradicting the views held by the people in David Brooks’s class.

Contrary to what Brooks says, we are not settling into a contest between “democratic liberalism and authoritarianism,” but rather between different kinds of authoritarianism. Alas, he has fallen into the old liberal claim that foreign bad guys “unified the masses behind them by whipping up perpetual culture wars.” It is impossible to get a Western liberal to grasp how aggressively Western liberals whip up perpetual culture wars, both at home and abroad. Their belief in the righteousness of their own ideology is such that to resist it in any way, or even to regard it as aggression, is a sign of wickedness. To borrow a line from Daniel McCarthy, how can they fail to accept Western liberalism, when its truth is so obvious?

UPDATE: An Asian American reader writes:

I take it you’re familiar with the late Samuel Huntington? In his last (and, arguably, most important) book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Huntington makes a number of provocative claims, but his overall claim is that America possesses a unique national identity rooted in English heritage. This runs counter to conventional wisdom, which is that America’s a “salad bowl” (not a “melting pot”) which all the cultures of the world had to come together to create and which the absence of even one of those cultures undermines the American experiment completely.This, of course, is false. This isn’t to say other cultures haven’t enriched America. But they didn’t create it. Huntington says:Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.Huntington was a liberal, but what he says above was controversial in 2004 (when the book was published) and would be grounds for cancellation today. But where’s the lie? Huntington isn’t making a racial/ethnic argument, he’s making a cultural one. Cultures define societies and give them that very identity. Huntington singles out British Protestants as responsible for the founding of this place called “America,” not White Europeans broadly. To more bluntly underscore the point, had the Chinese discovered America, what sort of country would it be today?How does this relate to David Brooks’ op-ed? He says this:The pseudo-religious authoritarians have raised the moral stakes. They act as if individualism, human rights, diversity, gender equality, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and religious liberty are just the latest forms of Western moral imperialism and the harbingers of social and moral chaos. Who created the first nation-state rooted in individualism and religious liberty? Sure wasn’t the Spanish Empire. Those of English heritage who adhered to Protestantism did. And, though they didn’t realize it at the time, the Founders left plenty of room to promote human rights, permit diversity, achieve gender equality, and afford the LGBTQ the same rights as anyone else.But, as far back as 2004, we’d strayed away from that national heritage in favor of the salad bowl and universalism. In doing so, the country forgot where it came from and increasingly came to believe the lie that what goes here must go everywhere. It’s interesting how the Left and universalists like David Brooks (I know he considers himself conservative, but he’s a universalist) virtue-signal constantly about diversity, etc., but it’s the traditional-minded folks and the truly conservative who recognize many things can exist in this world, but it doesn’t have to exist here. America is what it is – a liberal nation that not only secures individualism and religious liberty, but thrives because of it – because it’s not just any other country. Certain people of a certain tradition who thought a certain way created this land. Not anyone else. That hurts the pride of a lot of people out there, but we speak truth to power, right?None of this is to say only those of English heritage have any stake to claim in this country. But it is to say you cannot divorce the United States from that English heritage and still call it “America.” We don’t ask a lot – as Huntington suggests in Who Are We?, anyone who wants to live here should embrace our customs, history, and language, identify first as Americans above all other identities, and (you might like this) root our culture in Protestantism. This doesn’t mean Jews and Muslims must become Methodists, but it does mean, even in a religiously pluralistic society, a nation cannot exist without an overarching culture. This is what a melting pot is. I guess this doesn’t make us that different from Hungary, in that there’s a certain Christian heritage to this country also.Oh wait, we are different still from Hungary. You said yourself you could become a Hungarian citizen, but never actually be Hungarian. Not so in America. Your citizenship makes you American, no matter where you came from. But your citizenship means something only if you give yourself to this country’s culture and heritage. I’m not a believer, but this reminds me of Matthew 6:33:

But seek ye first the kingdom of God,and his righteousness; and all thesethings shall be added unto you

The post Their Religious Wars, And Ours appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down

The friend with whom I stayed at the end of my Italian trip has excellent taste in American music. As he drove me to the airport, the mix tape on his car radio included The Band’s immortal 1969 ballad “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. Watch this, especially if you haven’t heard it in a while. It’s a clip from “The Last Waltz”:

We were driving through exurban Rome, and there I was listening to a song that makes me love my Southern home like no other. I was right back there, even though I was on the other side of the ocean, and about 20 hours away. I have always loved that song, and I still do. It is a song of defeat, of what it can mean to lose a war: it means losing your brother, it means going hungry, it means watching everything that gave meaning to your life crushed to dust. Here are the lyrics:

Virgil Caine is the name
And I served on the Danville train
‘Till Stoneman’s cavalry came
And tore up the tracks again

In the winter of ’65
We were hungry, just barely alive
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell
It’s a time I remember, oh so well

The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

Back with my wife in Tennessee
When one day she called to me
Said “Virgil, quick, come see,
There goes the Robert E. Lee!”

Now, I don’t mind chopping wood
And I don’t care if the money’s no good
You take what you need
And you leave the rest
But they should never
Have taken the very best

The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

Like my father before me
I will work the land
And like my brother above me
Who took a rebel stand

He was just 18, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can’t raise a Caine back up
When he’s in defeat

The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, na”

It’s told in the voice of a Southern man who survived the end of the Civil War. He was not a patrician or an officer, but a small farmer. The song is a dirge. Towards the end of the war, Gen. Stoneman’s troops were under orders to wage total war on the Southern population, including destroying their food supply to starve Lee’s army defending Richmond. This is what Virgil Caine means when he says they were starving nearly to death at the end. The Confederacy surrenders, and he returns home to his wife, but the tragic figure of Robert E. Lee still draws respect and awe. His young brother died fighting, and his lament about how they “have taken the very best” is a bitter protest against the waste of war.

I always thought that the line “you can’t raise a Caine up when he’s in defeat” was just a bad pun, but thinking about it, I think it has a deeper meaning. To “raise Cain” is an expression meaning to be rowdy and violent. This seems to be Robbie Robertson, the songwriter, saying that the South’s defeat has been so thorough that it will not rage again. The pun of “feet” and “defeat” can be read as saying that Virgil’s brother is dead and buried, and there will be no resurrection of him or of the Confederate cause. Plus, if you think of the Civil War as a war between brothers, as it is often described, Abel slew Cain — the righteous brother slew the unrighteous one, in a reversal of the Biblical story. In any case, the death of Virgil’s brother has resigned him to accepting the loss of old Dixie.

What could he mean by saying “all the bells were ringing”? Again, I think Robbie Robertson rather brilliantly gives us a double meaning: in the South, the bells were tolling for the death of the lost cause, but in the North, the bells were sounding victory for the defeat of slavery and the defense of the Union. The fact that the bells of victory could sound like bells of defeat, depending on where you lived in America, captures the tragedy of civil war.

Though I am a white Southerner, from the time I was old enough to understand what the Civil War was, I have believed that the South deserved to lose. It was a bad war, fought for a bad cause. Nevertheless, these were my ancestors who fought in the war, and the ancestors of the (white) people I grew up with. And those ancestors fought in a cause that enslaved the ancestors of the black people I grew up with. History is heavy, and history is tragic. It’s as tragic as hell.

Robert E. Lee is the ultimate embodiment of that tragedy. He was the best of the South, an iconic Southern gentleman. He did not believe in slavery, and he did not believe in secession. But once Virginia decided to secede, he saw it as his duty to fight for his people, even though he thought they were wrong. Having good intentions is not a moral excuse, as we know. But what would I have done in Lee’s position? If you know for sure what you would have done, you are almost certainly wrong. If there were a civil war in America today, for whom would you fight?

A couple of years ago, a cousin of mine sent me a bound volume of a memoir that some distant relative had printed. It was a manuscript left behind by a Southern relative who was too young during the Civil War to serve in the military, but who had vivid memories of it. His older brother served. I guess he would have been just a little bit younger than Virgil Caine. He lived in southern Mississippi, near the Louisiana border. His family were small farmers. His description of everyday life was so prosaic. They were fairly poor. Everybody had it hard, except the rich. He did not mention slavery, and barely mentioned the presence of black people. You could fault him for that, but the fact was that for a small white farmer back then, slavery was simply a fact of life. When my kinsman wrote about his brother joining the Confederate Army, there was no sense that this caused any moral anguish, and I’m sure it did not. Few non-rich white men had the luxury of choosing which side they wanted to fight for, or if they wanted to fight at all. Besides, of course you would have fought for the side your people were on, North or South. To have taken up arms for this abstraction called the Union (or, alternatively, if you were a Northerner, for the Confederacy in far-off Richmond), would have made no sense. Most people back then who were not wealthy never traveled far from where they lived. To have had the presence of mind to have been able to morally imagine that you could choose to fight against your own kin and neighbors would have been impossible in the 1860s.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” doesn’t make me sympathetic for the Confederacy, or to the Confederacy, and never did. It conveys to me the pain of defeat, and of the tragedy of giving everything you have to a losing cause. There’s nothing in the song to indicate that Virgil Caine believes slavery was wrong, but to have put that sentiment into the mouth of a Southern veteran of the Civil War would have been anachronistic. The song speaks for itself about what it means to love your land, even in defeat — and even as you forswear vengeance as futile (“you can’t raise a Caine when he’s in defeat”).

On The Band’s website, record producer Jonathan Taplin recalls:

It was May and they’d just finished it the night before. They said it’d come out fast and hard and clean. It was just the most moving experience I’d had for, God, I don’t know how long. Because for me, being a Northern liberal kid who’d been involved in the Civil Rights movement and had a whole attitude towards the South, well, I loved the music but I didn’t understand where white Southerners were coming from. And to have it all in just three and a half minutes, the sense of dignity and place and tradition, all those things … Well, the next day after I’d recovered, I went to Robbie and asked him, “How did that come out of you?” And he just said that being with Levon so long in his life and being in that place at that time … It was so inside him that he wanted to write the song right at Levon, to let him know how much those things meant to him.

Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer and the singer of that song, was from small-town Arkansas. His father was a cotton farmer. Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, got the idea for the song after visiting Helm’s parents.

Taplin is right, though: “the sense of dignity and place and tradition, all those things.” I have spent much of my adult life living outside the South, and have understood the contempt that many of the people I’ve worked with there would have for my family and my people (meaning, those I grew up among) if they knew everything about them. I don’t know if it’s an American thing, or a Northern thing, but the lack of a tragic sense is a terrible thing to see. Me, as I’ve looked back over my younger life, and think of all the old folks, most of them now dead, who formed me, I recognize how terrible the race hatred they had was. And yet, that race hatred wasn’t the whole of them. They could also be so good, even heroic. And always complicated.

I think of my own late father. He and I did not talk about race, by unspoken mutual consent, but I’m fairly certain that he had all the prejudices of white men of his time and place. One of my most vivid memories of him was his telling the story of Calvin McKnight, an older black man who lived on a shack on our family’s land. My father farmed that land — about 50 acres — with only Calvin to help him. Daddy had a desk job, but it barely paid, and he wanted to be able to afford a family one day. In 1965, a year after my father married, he had to have back surgery. Doctors warned that it might leave him paralyzed.

Calvin walked all the way up to the house to speak to my mother, my dad’s new wife. He was wearing his dusty overalls, and crying. He gave my mother a silver dollar. “I want to help pay for Little Boss’s operation,” he said. That was the only money Calvin had saved up. My dad told that story to me maybe twice in his life, and he wept both times.

Those two men lived in a time of white supremacy, both de facto and de jure. Calvin could not vote, and could not eat at the same lunch counter as my father. I doubt very much that my father recognized that at the time as an injustice. I could be wrong, and hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I’m wrong. My dad was not mean to Calvin, as far as I know, but Calvin should have hated my father as a representative of white supremacy. And yet, he loved my father, and my father loved him, and honored his memory. Who can explain this? Who can explain the human heart?

Thus the humanity in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. Thus the agony of Virgil Caine’s lament. He was just a working man. His brother was shot to death in this senseless war. He and his companions were nearly starved to death. His supreme commander, the embodiment of the South, was humiliated, yet still revered for his nobility in defeat. The waste of it all — all that blood and honor poured out for the sake of defending an evil thing.

We used to be a people who understood this stuff. Levon Helm was a liberal, but he sang that song. Joan Baez had a Top 10 hit by covering the song in 1970. Does anybody think Joan Baez was a Confederate sympathizer? She saw it as a story of pain and tragedy. The Yankee who laid Virgil’s brother in his grave — that was Virgil’s other brother Abel. It would have been great to have heard a song written from the point of view of the Yankee soldier who shot the Caine boy. But we are incapable of writing such a song today, because we discourage young people from recognizing that life is tragic, and that the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart. Southern whites can only ever be simple bigots who deserve what they get.

So, they took down the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond last week. Here’s how NPR reported it:

One of the largest Confederate monuments came down Wednesday in Richmond, Va. Now, the state is announcing new plans for the base that used to hold the massive statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

They’re going to remove a 133-year-old copper time capsule inside the pedestal and replace it with one that they say will reflect the current cultural climate in Virginia.

More:

According to the governor’s office, a group of historians, educators, artists and state officials worked together to select nearly 40 submissions to be placed inside the new time capsule.

Some of the items include a photo of a Black ballerina taken by a local Richmond photographer in front of the statue, Kente cloth worn at the 400th commemoration of 1619, a “Black Lives Matter” sticker, “Stop Asian Hate” fliers, an LGBTQ pride pin, and an expired vial of Pfizer’s COVID-19vaccine.

God. The utter triviality. We tear down a statue of a tragic figure like Robert E. Lee and replace it with this.

Four years ago, at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson made a case for leaving the Confederate monuments. Part of what he said was that this was not really about punishing the Confederacy, but a much broader and deeper campaign. Excerpt:

For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we’ve seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future. That’s why Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.

The modern-day American Left isn’t as bad as all that, but its ideology about the past is more or less the same. Hence the statement issued Thursday by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray calling for the removal of all “symbols of hate, racism and violence that exist in our city.” Murray is at least consistent, as he includes not just Confederate symbols but also a well-known statue of Vladimir Lenin. These symbols, Murray says, represent “historic injustices,” and “their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities.”

He is not interested in the history of the statues themselves, the people or events they depict, or “what political affiliation may have been assigned to them in the decades since they were erected.” Don’t be fooled by the therapeutic language about causing pain. The statues must go because they remind us constantly of a past that needs only to be overcome and forgotten.

A more mature society would recognize that the past is always with you and must always be kept in mind. There’s a reason Christians in Rome didn’t topple all the pagan statues and buildings in the city, or raze the Colosseum. Edmund Burke had strong words for the French during their revolution, while they were doing their best to destroy a rich past and slaughter one another in the process:

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you… If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired.  Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourself. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.

That is part of why these memorials and statues are important. Perhaps not all of them need be preserved, but giving into the iconoclasm of the Left, with temperatures running high, will mean we lose far more than we gain by hiding these physical reminders of our nation’s troubled past.

Let them stand as a memorial of our ancestors who died, a challenge to understand their time and its troubles, and a warning for the present day.

I hate slavery. I thank God that the Confederacy lost. Though I generally hate iconoclasm, I could not muster strong feelings in favor of leaving Confederate statues in place. Now I see that John Daniel Davidson understood all of this better than I did. I was wrong. I apologize. We now live in a country in which the specialists in charge of the National Archives have put trigger warnings on the Constitution and other national documents. I’m not making this up. From the National Archives page:

The Catalog and web pages of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provide access to many millions of descriptions and digital copies of the permanent records of the United States federal government.

The Catalog and web pages contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view. NARA’s records span the history of the United States, and it is our charge to preserve and make available these historical records. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved for their historical significance.

The National Archives is committed to working with staff, communities, and peer institutions to assess and update descriptions that are harmful and to establish standards and policies to prevent future harmful language in staff-generated descriptions.

More:

What harmful or difficult content may be found in the National Archives Catalog and our web pages?

Some items may:

reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;

be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;

include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more;

demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.

Do you know what “misogynoir” is? I had to look it up. It’s a woke word coined by an activist in 2010 to describe hatred towards black women. This woke crap has even corrupted those with the privilege of archiving national records. What a pathetic country we have become.

That we take down a statue of a great but tragically flawed American like Robert E. Lee, and replace it with a time capsule containing these items (check out the list — it includes an LGBTQ walking tour of Richmond, a Teen Vogue article, and a copy of verses titled “Post-Colonial Love Poem”). The whole list signals that the Democratic governor of Virginia and the woke Left wants to rub the noses of cultural conservatives in our defeat. You might not have had anything good to say about Robert E. Lee, but if you are unwoke, you need to understand that the attack on this monument was aimed at you too. If you are a Virginian who is not part of a minority sacred to the Left, then there is nothing in this new time capsule for you, or about you. You are erased. This is the base upon which the new ruling class is constructing a new American identity.

After the Civil War ended, Lee worked hard for the cause of national reconciliation. Still, we should not pretend that the statue of Lee in Richmond was regarded by all Virginians, black and otherwise, as something positive. But its removal, and replacement within its base with a time capsule that can only be read as a triumphalist act by the Left, signals the renewal of hatred. And for what? The message from Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and all those who support this is: hate your fathers, hate your people, damn them in your memory. 

This is supposed to unify the nation? Like it or not, Robert E. Lee was an American. He contributed to the making of who we are. He was our brother. So was John Brown. So was U.S. Grant. So was Harriet Tubman. So was Stonewall Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. So were all of these men and women, caught up in that terrible drama that taught a nation who it was.

So were men like the fictional Virgil Caine, whose descendants are now being taught to despise him and all that he loved, as the cost of being decent people. They’re doing this not because they despise Virgil Caine or Robert E. Lee. They’re doing this because they despise us. Virgil Caine was not a human being. He was a monster who fought for a treasonous regime in a wicked cause. He deserves his suffering. We used to be the kind of country where a left-wing folk singer who marched for Civil Rights could sing Virgil Caine’s story, and score a Top Ten hit. But we are so much more enlightened now.

This will not end soon, or well. They won the culture war, and are bouncing the rubble.

Levon Helm, the singer of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” died of cancer some years back. Helm was no conservative. In his tribute written on the eve of the great man’s death, magazine writer Charles P. Pierce recalled the 1968 Band album “Music From Big Pink,” and Helm’s contribution to it. Pierce wrote, in part:

The inner sleeve of the album was as radical a statement as you could make at the time. The Band stood there with their relatives all around them, as if to say that the idea of family and friends and neighbors was not the exclusive property of the people who bleated about it while unleashing the cops on their children. It was a summoning of the idea of the American community, which has never been about conformity, either to fashion or to the politics of the moment. And, if you didn’t get the point, there were some sly hints on the record that pointed you back towards what was important, that made you realize that there was an America worth the effort of finding, that there was a country to which it was worth coming home.

“There’s no need to slave / The whip is in the grave.”

This was healing music, but it was in no way peaceful. Levon’s voice made sure of that. It was tough and sound and brooked no easy answers. (When, an album later, he voiced the story of Virgil Kane, a grunt in the Confederate army, he managed to push the story beyond politics. You swear by the mud below your feet and you make a pact with the land that nothing can break.) It was a Southern voice, certainly, but there was in it that universal sense that we are all in this great experiment together, that we hold a number of truths to be self-evident and the ones that Mr. Jefferson listed were only the very beginning of them. That there is a commonwealth that binds us, through the worst of what we can do to each other, and the worst of what we can make of our promise. For all the wild rhetoric and the political posturing, and for all the horror that extended from My Lai to the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and back again, that we all had an America to come back to, no matter how long we were away, no matter even if we were half-past dead. Because that America was the America of the tall tale, the underground history, the renegade, buccaneer country that belongs to all of us. Levon Helm told those stories. He gave that history a voice that we could all hear over the din of the times.

He managed to push the story beyond politics. We could use a Levon Helm now. But they would never let him push the story beyond politics. They never let anybody do that anymore.

Listening to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” so far away from home, under these circumstances, was clarifying about the civil war that They are bound and determined to start. Don’t you think for one hot minute, reader, that They are only wanting to drive old Dixie down. This is about old America.

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Soft Totalitarians Vs. Semi-Christian Schools

Here’s one for the Law Of Merited Impossibility file. As you will recall, the Law explains the deception that the Left employs to disarm conservative opposition. The Law holds that “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” That is, whatever worst-case scenarios conservatives raise in response to a progressive proposal, they are totally exaggerated … and when they actually happen (as they inevitably do), well, hey, what do you bigots expect? You had it coming.

I’m old enough to remember almost twenty years ago, when a group of us were warning that they way the law and American culture were heading on LGBT issues was going to be a disaster for traditional Christians and other social conservatives. It was going to take away our religious liberty to a substantial degree. As far ba

 

ck as 2006, a number of legal scholars — including pro-LGBT activist law professor Chai Feldblum — were saying that this was going to happen. But nobody in the media wanted to hear it, because if it was true, then that might arouse opposition to the full panoply of gay rights. “I don’t see how my neighbor’s gay marriage is going to affect me,” Everyman said. When people like me tried to explain it, we were shouted down as bigots.

And now, according to liberals, we’re getting what we deserve. This happened in North Carolina the other day:

A federal judge in North Carolina ruled Friday that a Roman Catholic school wrongfully fired a gay substitute teacher after he announced his plans to marry his partner in 2014.

U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn ruled against Charlotte Catholic High School, Mecklenburg Area Catholic Schools, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Charlotte. He wrote that Lonnie Billard’s termination went against Billard’s federal protections against sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A trial will go ahead to determine the relief for Billard; the judge ruled he is entitled to damages but did not set the amount.

Cogburn ruled that religious protections did not apply to Billard’s role in teaching English and drama because he held a secular teaching position.

“Plaintiff is a lay employee, who comes onto the campus of a religious school for the limited purpose of teaching secular classes, with no mandate to inculcate students with Catholic teachings,” Cogburn wrote in his decision.

He added that the school even encouraged Billard and others who taught nonreligious topics not to discuss such religion in their classes.

“Today’s decision is one of the first applications of the Supreme Court’s ban on sex discrimination to employees of private religious schools,” said Irena Como, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, in a press release. The ACLU was one of the groups representing Billard. “The court sent a clear message that Charlotte Catholic violated Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination when it fired Mr. Billard for announcing his engagement to his same-sex partner.” In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is sex discrimination under Title VII.

Here is a link to the text of the judge’s decision. I would appreciate it if readers who are lawyers competent to discuss the ruling would weigh in. From the ruling:

The Court respects the sincerity of the Catholic Church’s opposition to Plaintiff’s actions. With a slightly different set of facts, the Court may have been compelled to protect the church’s employment decision. However, where as here, Plaintiff lost his job because of sex discrimination and where he was working as a substitute teacher of secular subjects without any responsibility for providing religious education to students, the Court must protect Plaintiff’s civil and employment rights.

That’s significant — the statement that begins, “With a slightly different set of facts… “. More from the ruling:

Importantly, Charlotte Catholic discourages teachers of secular subjects from instructing students on any sort of religious subject. The school asks that teachers who teach secular subjects refrain from instructing students on Catholic Doctrine. (Doc. No. 28-5 at 28). Secular teachers do not have to undergo religious training, do not have to be Catholic, and do not have to be Christian. (Doc. No. 28-3 at 58). The administration at Charlotte Catholic does not know the percentage of teachers at the school who are Catholic and does not ask if candidates are Catholic
during job interviews. (Id. at 11, 14-15).

Another point:

As of now, religious employers have strong legal protections for hiring and firing employees who have a role in promoting their religion’s message if the employment decision is religiously motivated.

The judge decided that because the Catholic school made a point of separating out religion from literature classes, it had no legal leg to stand on to defend its firing of Lonnie Billard. Obviously I’m not trained in the law, but reading the decision, it does seem that the judge had no choice, under the Bostock precedent, but to rule as he did in this case. The judge takes pains to point out that he can only rule on the law … and Congress has not provided Charlotte Catholic with the grounds it would need to prevail in this matter:

If Congress wished to allow religious employers to do all of these things, it could have. But instead, it wrote narrow exemptions in the form of Sections 702 and 703. Under the current statute, religious institutions may employ those with similar faiths, but they may not discriminate against other protected classes. This Court therefore agrees with judicial precedent that Sections 702 and 703 are narrowly drawn and holds that those exemptions do not apply to shield Defendants from liability in this case.

Furthermore — and this really is crucial — the judge points out that the “ministerial exception” established by the SCOTUS decision in Hosanna-Tabor would not apply to the Lonnie Billard case. If Billard could be considered a “minister” of the Catholic Church, even broadly, then the defendants would likely have prevailed. But it’s absurd to consider him to have been a minister, says the judge, when the subjects he taught (drama and literature) were not religious, and when the school did not require him to be Catholic, or even Christian, to be hired. More:

Finally, Plaintiff’s position as substitute English and drama teacher did not directly “[reflect] a role in conveying the Church’s message and carrying out its mission.” HosannaTabor, 565 U.S. at 192. Charlotte Catholic High School teachers do not have to reference Catholic principles. (Doc. No. 31-17 at 74:2-17). The High School administration prefers that secular teachers, like Plaintiff, avoid discussing Catholic doctrine. (Doc. No. 31-16 at 28:2-15). Unlike all three teachers in Hosanna-Tabor and Our Lady of Guadalupe, Plaintiff did not teach religion in his classes and was not tasked with preparing students for participation in Catholic worship services.

In short, unless I’m missing something, the judge delivered the correct ruling here. I don’t like the ruling at all — but then, I didn’t like Bostock either. I would dispute the judge’s claim that only classes that are specifically religious qualify as having religious content; my wife teaches in a school, and my kids attend that school, where a Christian ethos is intentionally made present in all the classes. For example, literature is discussed in the context of our Christian faith and heritage. They don’t have drama classes, but if they did, it would be impossible to separate drama from the Christian faith (e.g., the techniques of acting would be non-religious, but the discussion of what drama is would necessarily take place within a Christian ethos).

Nevertheless, it seems to me that Judge Cogburn called out Charlotte Catholic for being Catholic In Name Only. According to the facts of the case, as cited in his ruling, the administration of the school knew that Lonnie Billard was in a gay relationship, but were happy to tolerate it as long as he didn’t make a public show of it. In fact, I think that hypocrisy is generally a humane way to handle things like this. I wouldn’t defend it in all cases, but I wouldn’t rule it out either. But for it to work, the school has to presume that the gay teacher is willing to play by the same set of “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules. That is far too risky today.

Again, I am willing to be corrected by readers who understand the law better than I do, and who believe the judge erred in his decision. But failing that, what this federal ruling says is that Christian schools that want to uphold Christian teaching on LGBT matters had better be truly Christian in all things, and can’t just be de facto secular schools role-playing as Christian.

We have been warned. The soft totalitarians are going to use every means at their disposal to crush any opposition to full LGBT affirmation. They do not intend to be tolerant, and never did. The irony here is that by compelling Christian schools and institutions that want to protect their religious liberty from hostile LGBT litigation, they are forcing these institutions to be much harsher and less merciful than they might want to be.

UPDATE: A lawyer writes:

Rod, my take on the NC case is that the school handed the judge the fact pattern he needed to nix their ministerial exception argument, but on both the Title VII religious exemption and RFRA arguments, the judge adopted what I view as an incorrectly narrow interpretation of those protections.

UPDATE.2: Another lawyer reader:

I want to echo what a previous reader said – this was a spectacular “own-goal” by the school in admitting to there being “secular” subjects. The good news: this gives a roadmap for any other schools wishing to avoid the same fate to simply incorporate some measure of theology into every subject taught. Of course, Christian schools need to be preparing to lose accreditation in blue states (which will most certainly happen by 2030).

I know you’re no fan of Doug Wilson, but the college and secondary school(s) associated with his ministry incorporate the faith into every subject taught, and they would have had a better chance of prevailing in a similar suit.

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Me, An Old-School Christian Democrat

A Spanish conservative friend of mine said to me recently, “You are really a European conservative.” We talked about that, and I ended up agreeing with him. I’m very conservative socially, but I am in principle more in favor of the state than most American conservatives — not because I’m a liberal, but because of the kind of conservative I am. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has described his own politics as Christian Democrat, but from the days when the Christian Democrats were actually Christians. I guess that’s me.

Well, here’s some evidence that my Spanish friend was right. I took this New York Times quiz — twenty questions that map you onto a grid of American politics:

As you can see, no major political grouping in the US occupies my space. The closest one is the Patriot Party, described like this by the Times:

The Patriot Party is the party of Donald Trump’s 2016 primary campaign: the coalition of the small town, white working-class Americans who feel left behind by globalism and condescended to by cosmopolitanism. It is economically populist and strongly anti-immigration. Its strongest support among lower-income conservatives comes from exurban America.

Its potential leaders include Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Tucker Carlson. Based on data from the Democracy Fund’s VOTER survey, this party would be the best fit for about 14 percent of the electorate.

Yes, I would have been enthusiastically pro-Trump, had I thought Trump was competent and morally sound.

Here are the Patriot Party demographics:

So I’m a traitor to my educational and economic class.

Take the quiz yourself, and in the comments section, tell us how you scored. Are you surprised? I was surprised to be rated so far to the left on economics, frankly.

UPDATE: Fellow inhabitant of the Forbidden Quadrant:

Boy there sure seems to be a whole entire quadrant with more people in it than in the corresponding diagonal quadrant that doesn’t even get an imaginary political party according to the good ol New York Times pic.twitter.com/qgNfUeYn1A

— 𝔖𝔲𝔰𝔞𝔫𝔫𝔞𝔥 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨 (@suzania) September 8, 2021

There is an actual political party for people like us: the American Solidarity Party.

UPDATE.2: Gosh, it’s starting to look like a lot of my IRL friends are here:

Ah, a quadrant of my own: https://t.co/E4Rz87quMt pic.twitter.com/Oy3kIehjFS

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 8, 2021

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The Courage Of Peter Boghossian

I landed in the US this afternoon to discover that the philosopher Peter Boghossian had submitted his resignation to Portland State University. You might know his name from his role in the hilarious Grievance Studies Affair, in which he and his co-conspirators Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay pranked scholarly journals with ridiculous papers written in academic jargon — this, to prove how absurd wokeness is, and how it had conquered academia.

Boghossian is an atheist and a man of the Left, but he is very much a man of the anti-woke Left. This is something that Portland State refused to tolerate. He published at Bari Weiss’s invaluable Substack newsletter today the resignation letter he sent to the university provost, Susan Jeffords. Here it is:

Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,

​​I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.

Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.

I never once believed —  nor do I now —  that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.

I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view.  Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.

At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?

Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud and in public.

I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite. The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.

I began networking with student groups who had similar concerns and brought in speakers to explore these subjects from a critical perspective. And it became increasingly clear to me that the incidents of illiberalism I had witnessed over the years were not just isolated events, but part of an institution-wide problem.

The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced.

Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation.  (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.

With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”

Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.

I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers — no matter how absurd — could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.

So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.

Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.

I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.

Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct” based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.

Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.

For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.

I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.

This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty.

Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas.

This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?

Sincerely,

Peter Boghossian

This is beyond infuriating, but it is courageous of Boghossian to resign in the face of this disgusting harassment, and in an academic job environment in which he is going to find it hard to find employment. I hope to the God he does not believe in that Boghossian will file a massive lawsuit against the university for the harassment it allowed to continue against him. Boghossian’s action here is a Live Not By Lies moment: he quit rather than endure the hatred.

Where is the Oregon legislature? This is a state university after all. If this is how that university treats a left-wing atheist professor who has the gall actually to be a professor instead of an ideologue, how do you think conservatives fare?

It is time to blow institutions like Portland State up. They cannot be saved. Colleges and universities that have not yet gone fully woke might yet be rescued. But they’re not going to rescue themselves. Legislators, trustees, alumni — where are you? Live not by lies!

Sometime in the next few days, the New Yorker is going to publish a piece that the writer Ben Wallace-Wells will have written about me and my interest in Hungary, and Viktor Orban. I participated in this piece, because I trust Wallace-Wells to be fair (he was to Sohrab Ahmari and Christopher Rufo when he wrote about them). Ben and I both spoke and e-mailed as he was working on it. He put the charges liberals make against Orban’s government to me, including that the Orban government is hostile to liberal academics. You’ll see what my response is if he chooses to include it. One thing I told him, though, is that I have no time at all for liberal Western academics who wail about Orban driving George Soros’s university out of Budapest, while remaining quiet, or actively encouraging, the hounding of professors like Princeton’s Jonathan Katz out of the universities for simply resisting wokeness. I would now add Peter Boghossian’s name to the list. See how many academics support him publicly.

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My Verona

I have been traveling in Italy and out of wifi range for the past couple of days. I just landed back in the US from Rome, and will be working on a fresh post while I wait to connect to Baton Rouge. Here is a recent dispatch I sent to readers of my Substack subscription-only newsletter, which focuses primarily on spiritual matters, though I did have some travel stuff on it when I was in Italy. It will give you and idea of what I’ve been up to. — RD

Hello friends. It has been a busy week. Had a meeting about Live Not By Lies in Rome with some journalists and intellectuals, then jumped on a train to Milan. Spoke to a large group at a movie theater there, and the next morning did an interview with a local journalist. Over lunch, I saw that an interview I did with a journalist in Rome was published (see above photo).

There was gelato too. Lots of gelato. Two of the happiest words in my vocabulary are “nocciola” (hazelnut) and “pistacchio” (pistachio).

Then on to Ferrara, a lovely city, with an early Renaissance castle at its heart. It was the first Italian city of the Renaissance to be developed according to an urban plan. This is urbanism at its finest; I don’t think we have improved on what the Italians of the Renaissance accomplished.

Ferrara was the birthplace, in 1452, of Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery Dominican known for preaching fire and brimstone in Florence. He railed against clerical and civic corruption, and the exploitation of the poor. He defied the corrupt pope, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, the most decadent of all the Renaissance popes), and launched what is known today as the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which penitent Florentines were called upon to bring out objects that tempted them to sin – things as minor as cosmetics, up to books and paintings — and throw them onto a bonfire. Savonarola was a fanatic and a theocrat who eventually wore the city out, and was burned at the stake. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the Medici family, his sworn enemies, and the rottenness of the Church at the time gave Savonarola a lot to work with. He didn’t come from nowhere.

Here’s a statue of Savonarola outside the Ferrara castle.

You half expect to see lightning bolts issuing from his fingertips. Savonarola is not to the taste of a weak old aesthete like me, but in all honesty, today we could use a bit of what the old boy had.

Yesterday we took the train from Ferrara to Verona. I had never before been to this northern Italian city. Francesco Giubilei, my publisher, took me on a brief walkabout before my speech. After dinner last night, my host, an Italian MP from the city, and his wife took Francesco and me on a longer walking tour of the historic city center. Lord have mercy, I was reduced to babbling like a child at a Christmas market by the time it ended. The only more beautiful city in this world, in my experience, is Venice, but Venice is not of this world at all, so Verona is it. I thought Siena was unsurpassable, but, well, go to Verona.

Here is a view from the old Roman bridge. Imagine living in this apartment overlooking the Adige River:

In the city center, the first thing I noticed was the presence of a massive Roman arena, right in the heart of the city. I didn’t know these things still existed. It’s as if a Caesarian mothership transported itself through time and landed on the town square.

Me with Francesco Giubilei

Get this: it’s not a ruin, but is still a working venue. Last night they performed “Turandot” there. We heard the orchestra and the singers from the street. As we passed by, we caught some cast members out back on a break, checking e-mails between acts:

The main street in the old town is a pedestrian-only zone, and – incredibly – it is paved with marble. The sheer gracefulness of this venerable city filled the air, almost like perfume. We stopped for gelato, of course. The gelato maker had some fig sorbetto, which, given my love of figs, I had to try. It instantly put me back under my father’s fig tree. I bought a cornetto topped with a scoop of fig, and a scoop of fior di latte gelato. It is something else to confront the amazing fact that you can buy so much joy for so little.

My host had been told that I am an admirer of Dante. The poet took refuge for a time in Verona, in exile, at the home of Cangrande della Scala, an illustrious local big dog. We saw the family castle where Dante lived, right in the heart of the city. This statue graces a square outside the Palazzo Cangrande, Dante’s home for a few years.

One impossibly charming square opened onto another in Verona…

… and I found myself gape-mouthed that humanity was ever capable of producing urban spaces like this. We are far richer than the Veronese were at the height of their powers, but we can only produce mediocrity, or worse, ugliness. Verona is a palimpsest of Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern architecture, all of it harmonizing in a gorgeous polyphony that ravishes the senses and elevates the spirit. If you despair of humanity, go to Verona, and see what we can be.

We passed the house that supposedly belonged to Juliet, of Shakespearean fame. There is a balcony there where Juliet is said to have stood. It’s nonsense: the balcony was added in the 20th century. From what I can tell, we don’t really know that this was the house, nor do we know for sure of Romeo and Juliet existed. But we can say that the Montecchi and Cappelletti clans – the models for the warring Montagues and Capulets – were often at each other’s throats in the nearby Piazza della Erbe. In fact, Dante puts them in the Commedia. It doesn’t really matter. Verona is a fine setting for the tale of the star-crossed lovers. Too much reality should not spoil the fantasy.

In this detail of Piazza della Erbe, notice the Lion of Venice atop the pillar. Verona was once part of the Republic of Venice:

I vowed repeatedly, and most sincerely, to my host to return to his city as soon as I can. When I do, I want to visit the Cathedral of St. Zeno, Verona’s patron. Incredibly, I didn’t know who St. Zeno of Verona was until last night. He was a Christian born in Mauretania (Roman Africa) in the year 300. It is thought that he was a follower of the Alexandrian patriarch Athanasius, who visited Verona in 340. However he arrived in the city, he lived there as a monk until 362, when he was made bishop. He died in 371, likely a victim of Julian the Apostate’s persecution. Today, you can visit the bishop’s body kept inside a glass crypt in his cathedral. He is dressed in episcopal finery. The saint’s body is a fleshly link to the early church. When I return to Verona one day, I am going straight to the altar and pray before his relics.

As an American Christian, I never tire of the opportunity to pray in settings like this. The body of St. Zeno is a material link to the ancient church. The fact that it has been preserved for seventeen centuries by the faithful of Verona is a testimony to the importance of the Incarnation. We revere the earthly remains of this holy bishop because he was an icon of Christ, the Son of God, who raised the dignity of our flesh by taking fleshly form.

St. Zeno is often depicted with a fishing pole. He is said to have enjoyed fishing in the Adige for his own supper, but I read that the pole is more likely a reference to his great success at winning converts to the faith. I understand why, theologically, Protestants have trouble with the cult of the saints, and of relics, but if I were an Evangelical, I think I would still marvel at the opportunity to spend time near the body of a great evangelist from the early church. We Christians have been around for a very long time.

Now: on to Tuscany, where I will be visiting a friend and going at last to pray at the Abbey of San Galgano, and at the site of the miracle of his sword in the stone.

Learning To See

After my speech in Ferrara, I met a very anxious man, Andrea. He was my age, though his silver mop of hair suggested someone older. His son is 18, and he frets about the young man losing his faith. The boy hasn’t done it yet, but Andrea said that his heart breaks for the kid, because it’s so hard to be a faithful Christian when almost nobody around you in your peer group believes.

“What can I say to him?” Andrea said. I don’t think he was really asking me for advice as much as he was lamenting the impotence of words.

I mentioned to him my favorite observation from Benedict XVI: that the best arguments the Church has for itself are the art it produces, and the saints. The point is that an encounter with radical beauty and/or radical goodness, both inspired by God, can open a person’s mind to the propositional truths of our faith. Conversion begins with the experience of awe. Stealing a line from the philosopher Elaine Scarry, I said, “Maybe our jobs as fathers is to do our best to make sure our children are looking at the sky when a comet passes.” What else can we do?

This week I’ve been making my way slowly through Philip Sherrard’s Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition. I can’t remember which one of my friends or readers recommended it to me as research for this new book I’m planning to work on, but it was absolutely the right thing. It’s dense but very, very rewarding.

As I mentioned the other day, Sherrard was an English convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a man of profound insight. In the first chapter of this book, he writes:

Everything in human life, as regards it being done rightly or wrongly, depends on our religious beliefs. Clearly, unless we first know ourself we cannot know anything else either, and in that case we are bound to act towards other things in a way that will violate and abase them.

Sherrard said we have forgotten that we are sacred beings formed in God’s image. “Having in our own minds desanctified ourselves, we have desanctified nature, too, in our own minds.”

The fundamental error, according to Sherrard, is to understand nature as somehow separate from God. The purpose of art is to reveal spiritual realities and make it possible for us to commune with them, because they – originating in God – are the source of all vitality. To know this and to not make the search for God the center of one’s existence, says Sherrard, is to manifest poor judgment.

Why have we moderns become so insensate to the presence of the Divine? The fact that we have done so, and have reduced ourselves to a state that was not known to men of past ages, is a sign of crisis. He writes:

This might not be of great importance if the reality in question were merely one alternative among many possible levels of reality, each of an equal or neutral value. But when what is at issue is a matter of existence – our life or death – and when what has been lost is the capacity to commune with the sources on which that existence depends, then there is a consequence for us which cannot be dismissed. If the values according to which we have formed the modern world are those which have led to this state of affairs, it is surely important that there should be some reassessment and, if it is not too late, some fundamental change of mind.

In other words, repentance.

But what kind of change of mind? Changing from what to what?

Drawing on St. Maximus the Confessor, Sherrard says that all created things are ontologically “rooted in the one divine and universal Intelligence, that is to say, in the divine and universal Logos.” He goes on:

Through what is sensible we may perceive what is intelligible, provided we have cleansed our organs of perception. But any real knowledge of the sensible realities must depend entirely on our knowledge of their intelligible or spiritual essences. Indeed it may even be said that he who only sees what is sensible does not really see anything at all.

In simpler terms, Sherrard is saying that the divine is immanent in created things, things we can know through our senses (“the sensible”), but we can only perceive that if we have purified our ability to perceive. If the only thing you can see when you look at the world are mere things – that is, if the grove of trees there in the near distance is only a grove of trees – then you are not seeing what is really there.

This, of course, is the challenge of my book, as I see it now: to teach us (including myself) how to see what is really there.

Sherrard draws a distinction between “the spiritual intellect and the natural reason.” The former is in the heart (speaking symbolically); the latter is in the head. The heart (in this symbology) “is not simply a classifying faculty but is the mirror of the divine Intelligence, which fills it with the knowledge in the light of which it perceives the underlying spiritual identify of visible, material things.”

This immediately brings to mind Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s writing on the left brain and the right brain. You’ll remember from recent newsletters that the psychiatrist claims we in the West have become far too dependent on left-brain reasoning, and have allowed our intuitive, right-brained faculties to atrophy. It seems to me that McGilchrist and Sherrard are getting at the same point with different language.

For Sherrard, the heart (spiritual intellect) “is capable of a direct perception of the intelligible and inner, or real, nature of everything that is, of which the sensible [material] form is but the outward manifestation. Its way of knowing is through spiritual experience and intuition and not through concepts and discursive reasoning.”

How can we awaken our spiritual intellect? According to Sherrard – and this is just basic Orthodox spirituality – we can’t hope to do it unless we first of all free ourselves from

alien hostile attachments and persuasions, false and self-centered ideas and habits, and submit ourselves to what surpasses us, to the source of light and of the divine ideas which only then can illumination our mind. When the mind is cut off from this source, when it has lost its roots in the heart (and this is the condition of our “fall” and of our “fallen” state), our experience and intuition of what always is, really and unchangeably, is lost, and all that is possible are purely conjectural and hypothetical theories about things.

…[T]he condition of any real knowledge is our purification of ourselves to the point at which our intelligence becomes again receptive to the light of the divine Intelligence, to the grace fo God, the point at which the mind, satellite of the heart, is brought back to the heart, where it is truly rooted in the source of light and fully vivified by its power.

If we lose direct contact, through our hearts [that is, through our intuitive faculty], with God, we cannot participate in His life. We begin to regard ourselves as self-sufficient, as having no need for God. Man, not God, becomes the measure of all things. Sherrard:

It is possible to trace, through those three crises of modern Europe which we still call the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment, this movement of a mind which has broken with a reality of a spiritual or metaphysical order, and has more and more asserted its own self-sufficiency.

For Sherrard, Solzhenitsyn’s claim that the civilizational catastrophe of the Bolshevik revolution happened because “men had forgotten God” is precisely true. When a people forgets that its life is rooted in participating in the life of God, then it will fall apart. Sherrard talks about this happening to a society, but I think it also happens to individuals. Sherrard:

And this is but another way of saying that such a decline is inescapable when once the thoughts and actions of the members of a particular society are no longer determined above all by their allegiance and adherence to the norms of a sacred tradition. When these norms cease to be effective for the majority of its member, society simply disintegrates. In other words, the integrity of a society and the communal effectiveness of a sacred tradition are inseparable.

Why is this the case? Sacred tradition in the highest sense consists in the preservation and handing down of a method of contemplation. A method of contemplation, in its turn, is what makes it possible for us to transcend our bodily, psychic and merely ratiocinative life, to go beyond our sensations, feelings and argumentative logic, in order to attain through intellectual vision a knowledge of and communion with the Divine, the source of all things. A corollary of this is that it permits us to perceive physical things as symbols of what lies beyond them. It permits us to perceive the hidden workings of reality, the spiritual essences that all things enshrine and of which they are the visible and tangible manifestations.

Heavy stuff. These words reveal why Orthodox Christianity is less a body of thought or an institution than a contemplative way for all Christians, not just monastics. It throws me back onto my little quest on this journey to the site of San Galgano’s conversion. He resisted the call to leave the world to devote himself to the contemplation of God, until he was thrown off his horse. According to the story, Christ called him to leave the world, but he said it would be easier for him to plunge his sword into a stone than to leave the world. Yet, by the grace of God, he miraculously did just that.

Maybe God is calling me to purify my own eyes and ears by an act of sacrificial faith. We’ll see. It kind of scares me, to be honest. To be unhorsed against my will.

[Readers, that’s the end of the Substack newsletter. If you’d like to subscribe, click here. — RD]

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Empire And ‘The Desolation Of Reality’

Hello all, from Siena, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I’m spending the night here before heading out tomorrow with a friend to make a pilgrimage, more on which tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ross Douthat’s column today makes for extremely sobering reading. He writes that America looks like a declining empire (an observation that I have heard again and again over the last eight days from worried European conservatives):

The American imperium can’t be toppled by the Taliban. But in our outer empire, in Western Europe and East Asia, perceived U.S. weakness could accelerate developments that genuinely do threaten the American system as it has existed since 1945 — from German-Russian entente to Japanese rearmament to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Inevitably those developments would affect the inner empire, too, where a sense of accelerating imperial decline would bleed into all our domestic arguments, widen our already yawning ideological divides, encourage the feeling of crackup and looming civil war.

Which is why you can think, as I do, that it’s a good thing that we finally ended our futile engagement in Afghanistan and still fear some of the possible consequences of the weakness and incompetence exposed in that retreat.

Oh look, it has just been reported that the Taliban are holding American hostages:

More humiliation of America is on the way. If you were alive in 1979 for the Iran hostage drama, you surely have a sinking feeling in your gut.

Are we Rome? I have had that question front to mind for at least twenty years, I guess. Sixteen years ago, when I first started writing about the idea that became my book The Benedict Option, the concept of America as an exhausted imperial power seemed kind of insane. We were the globe’s hyperpower, and though we had walked into a buzzsaw in Iraq, most people would not have taken seriously the late Imperial Rome comparison. To refresh your memory, what gave me the Benedict Option concept was philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s comparison of our time to the last days of the Roman West, and his claim that people of virtue today – those who want to hold on to the old traditions of the West – should make an exit of this dying civilization and form communities within which those virtues can be lived out.

When he said that we await a new and doubtless very different St. Benedict, he meant that we need a figure like Benedict of Nursia, who can respond creatively to the crisis of our time, and forge a new way of living fruitfully under these circumstances. My own claim is that all of us faithful small-o orthodox Christians must be Benedicts of the 21st century. This dying empire is not going to be saved, so the best we can do is figure out concrete ways to keep the Christian faith alive through this new dark age, preserving the light for the rebirth we pray will come, though surely long after we pass from this earth.

My project received what I counted as a tremendous vote of confidence in 2015 when, visiting the Benedictine monastery in Norcia (the saint’s hometown), the then-prior, Father Cassian Folsom, heard me out, then said that any Christian family who expects to endure through the coming storm will have to follow some version of the Benedict Option.

I published the book in 2017, as you know, and it engendered immediate controversy. I expected that, and some of the debate was good. After all, I could be wrong, and if so, I want to know it. But most of the griping was from people who had not read the book, and were sure that I was simply saying to head for the hills and pull up the drawbridge. As I made clear in the book itself, I don’t believe that there is any real head-for-the-hills escape available to us, but we must nevertheless figure out ways to live with a disciplined faith even as we remain embedded within society.

The example I point to is Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, the three young Hebrew men from the Book of Daniel, who were so embedded within Babylonian society that they were advisers to the king. But when that king ordered them to worship an idol, they all chose the prospect of martyrdom before apostasy. For us, the Benedict Option lesson is to figure out how those faithful Hebrew men lived in Babylon without letting Babylon live in them. If we can master that, we have a chance.

A year ago, I was in Nashville to speak at a Q conference. Backstage, I met a young megachurch pastor from Portland, Oregon. He told me that when The Benedict Option first appeared, most people in his circles thought it was too extreme. “Now, it’s our reality,” he said. He explained that in just three short years, his congregation had gone from being tolerated in Portland as harmless eccentrics to being despised as wicked. He added that what happens in Portland will not stay there – that this is coming for all of America eventually. He is now a proponent of the Benedict Option.

In 2021, the late Roman metaphor is a lot less extreme than it seemed in 2005, or even in 2017. Again, read the Douthat column. I fully agree with him that the US had to withdraw from Afghanistan, but that the withdrawal, and the hubris that led America to attempt nation-building in the first place, reveals us to be a nation in imperial decline. One can be grateful that we are moving away from empire – I certainly am – while also recognizing that such a decline will have seriously bad consequences, or at least is closely associated with seriously bad consequences.

It seems increasingly clear that this century belongs to China. I don’t like this at all. China has figured out what neither Mao nor Stalin knew: how to be rich and totalitarian. The Chinese also seem to be figuring out from watching us how to avoid some of the things that are leading to our own disintegration. Did you notice that the Chinese have now banned young people from playing video games for more than three hours a week during the school week? When I read that, I thought about my physician friend telling me a couple of years ago that he is starting to see in his office a parade of young men from good middle class families who are failing to thrive. All they want to do is play video games and smoke pot. The Chinese also have taken a harder line against LGBT thought and expression, banning LGBT accounts from the WeChat service.

Recently in Hungary, I spoke to a middle-class Catholic woman who was deeply distressed about her son. She said he’s 19, and pays attention to no media other than English-language news and entertainment. Consequently, his views are all informed by the biases and convictions of the US and UK media class.

She says he asked her recently if she had ever kissed a girl. She told him of course not, and expressed shock that he asked her such a question. He shrugged, and said there’s a lot of same-sex experimentation among his peers. They have all bought into gender ideology, and believe that sexual desire is and should be fluid, and so should gender identity. Mind you, this is in Hungary, a country that is more socially conservative in these matters than the US. The Orban government passed a law this past summer forbidding LGBT propaganda from being broadcast or otherwise disseminated among young people, but the truth is, in an era where the young learn English, and the Internet exists, a law like that – and it’s a law I support — is going to be of limited effectiveness.

One worries about this behavior because that sort of instability makes it harder to form stable families, which are necessary for the continuation of civilization. But that’s not all of it. The Hungarian woman told me her son and all his friends say that they don’t want to have children. They are all terrified of climate catastrophe. Imagine that: this boy’s grandparents and great-grandparents endured World War II; his grandparents and parents endured Communism. He was born into a free Hungary, one that was growing more prosperous than the previous two generations could have dreamed, and yet he, and his generation, are losing the will to live, and dissipating themselves in hedonistic chaos and despair.

A year ago, I cited in this space information from the Democratic data guru David Shor indicating that 30 percent of adult American women aged 25 and under consider themselves to be LGBT. Unsurprisingly, the fertility rate in the US is at an historic low. There is a connection. Presumably some of these women who identify as lesbian will want to have children at some point. Those who identify as bisexual may marry and want to start families (though good luck finding a man who wants to commit to raising kids with a woman who might leave him for another woman), but notice that this sexual confusion occurs during the prime childbearing years of these women. The most important thing that any generation can do is produce the next generation. No families, no children, no future.

China is facing a population crash. Its leaders understand that the future of their country depends on its people being willing to produce future generations. They do not want to encourage Western ideologies that make that task more difficult.

In 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman, head of Harvard’s sociology department, published his book Family And Civilization, which deserves to be rediscovered. In it, he traces in history the connection between family structures and civilizational thriving and decline. Zimmerman found that the strongest family form is what he called the “domestic” family: one that offers more freedom to the individual than its predecessor, the “trustee” family (i.e., the clan), and one that is stronger than its successor, the “nuclear” family. In studying ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, Zimmerman found that family structure goes in cycles: trustee à domestic à nuclear. Then there is civilizational collapse, after which the cycle begins again. Zimmerman writes of our own time:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind [by which he meant Western man] has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

He goes on:

The only thing that seems certain is that we are again in one of those periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work. The problem has existed before. The basic nature of this illness has been diagnosed before. After some centuries, the necessary remedy has been applied. What will be done now is a matter of conjecture. We may do a better job than was done before; we may do a worse one.

Zimmerman wrote this in 1947. He missed the Baby Boom, but otherwise he is right on target. Moreover, as I wrote last year, David Brooks authored an essay pointing out that we are living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. Brooks quotes academic experts who observe that in America (and I would say the West generally), people see marriage now in terms of adult self-fulfillment, not primarily about raising children.

To that I would add that we have taught our children to regard sex itself as primarily a matter of self-fulfillment. We don’t think that sex is for anything other than making one happy in the moment. This is sexual nihilism. We have reached the point where we instruct our young that freedom means the liberty to mutilate themselves sexually, and destroy their capacity, both biologically and psychologically, to reproduce and raise morally sane, healthy children.

Ours is a culture that wants to die.

Similarly, I am always struck when I visit Europe by how passive most Europeans are in the face of waves of migration washing over their continent – waves that are going to turn into a tsunami in this century, given the African birth rate. We saw this in ancient Rome too, with the barbarian invasions. Romans lost the capacity and the will to prevent other peoples from taking their lands. Central European peoples – Hungarians and Poles, in particular – seem to be the only ones who are willing to fight for their own existence as a people.

Three years ago, in a speech to university students, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said:

A situation can arise in one country or another whereby ten percent or more of the total population is Muslim. We can be sure that they will never vote for a Christian party. And when we add to this Muslim population those of European origin who are abandoning their Christian traditions, then it will no longer be possible to win elections on the basis of Christian foundations. Those groups preserving Christian traditions will be forced out of politics, and decisions about the future of Europe will be made without them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the situation, this is the goal, and this is how close we are to seeing it happen.

I’m telling you, Viktor Orban is perhaps the only Western leader who has such a clear vision about the crisis of our time. It is not just a political crisis. It is an existential crisis for Western civilization. The fact that Orban understands what so many of the rest of our leaders do not, or will not, and the fact that he has the courage to say these things in public, tells you why I think that the future of the West, if we have one, depends on Hungary more than we know. Americans who don’t know a thing about Hungary repeat the moronic allegation that it’s a “fascist” country — something even Orban’s Hungarian critics don’t do.

Unlike Orban, who is not ashamed of his culture, Western European elites – and American ones too – can only describe Western civilization as a catalogue of horrors leaving suicide as the only honorable option available to Westerners. For example, I learned just the other day that Cambridge University, one of the oldest and most venerable in the West, is on its way towards “decolonizing” its Classics department. 

If the Soviets or the Nazis had invaded Britain and forced this on Cambridge, we would know exactly what we were seeing: an attempt to subjugate the United Kingdom for a totalitarian ideology by erasing its historical memory. This is happening now – and it is being done by people inside Britain – by a thoroughly corrupt elite that seeks to destroy the foundations of their own civilization in the name of utopia.

For civilizations, patricide is suicide. We know this. We are watching it happen. We execrate the fast and abandon the future. We have concluded that ours is not a civilization worth defending, and propagandize our young to believe the same thing.

I will not defend a social and cultural order that despises the Christian faith, despises the traditional family, despises our common civilizational heritage, and that is working to punish, even persecute, those who will not take a knee before its idols. I will not fight for this culture of death. Will you? Should you? How can we defend America, our home, as patriots, without defending what decadent America has become? Is it possible?

These questions are going to come rushing to the fore domestically as American power recedes. In Italy these past few days, and again in Hungary this weekend, I have heard the same refrain from Catholics: the belief that Netflix in particular and American popular culture in general is corrupting their children. They grew up admiring America, and what we stood for; now they see us as an agent of their own destruction. How are they wrong? The culture producers who are doing this to the Europeans are doing it to us Americans too, and doing it to the whole world. Two years ago, at a Benedict Option conference in Massachusetts, I heard a Nigerian Anglican bishop talk about why his country needs the Benedict Option. I found this hard to understand, but he explained that the influence of US popular culture, pumping its morals into the heads of Nigerian youth through their smartphones, was alienating the next generation from the Christian faith, and Christian morality.

I want to say one more thing about Viktor Orban, drawing on that 2018 speech I cite above. When I tell you that the American media lie constantly about what Orban is, this is what I mean. They say he’s a fascist. Tell me, does this sound like a fascist to you?

The upcoming elections are therefore of the utmost importance. In these elections we must demonstrate that there is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy. And we must show that the liberal elite can be replaced with a Christian democratic elite. Of course in Central Europe there are many misconceptions related to Christianity and politics, and so here I must make an incidental observation.

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith – in this case, Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family, and the nation – because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations. Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities. This – and not the protection of religious articles of faith – is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban went on to say that Christian democracy is “illiberal” in these senses:

Liberal democracy favors multiculturalism, while Christian democracy prioritizes Christian cultureLiberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigrationLiberal democracy favors “adaptable family models,” which Christian democracy “rests on the foundation of the Christian family model.”

You can say this is illiberal – and Orban would agree with you. But “fascist”? Give me a break.

You see maybe why I think that with the possible exception of the Poles – I don’t know enough to say one way or the other – Viktor Orban is the only Western leader who reads the signs of the times, and is prepared to fight against the dying of the light. American conservatives ought to stand with him, and with Hungary. The alternative is the decadence and dissolution we see around us – and that is also coming to Hungary, borne by pervasive Anglo-American pop culture. Maybe Hungary too will capitulate. But it’s not going down without a fight.

Part of that fight has to include the formation of Benedict Option-style communities, as places of spiritual and cultural regeneration. To that end, I was thrilled to see that PM Orban recommended the Hungarian translation of The Benedict Option to his people. That’s it, second from top:

We need to do this too in America. Eventually reality will reassert itself, but until it does, we have to create families and communities strong enough to resist the onslaught. And we need to elect political leaders who are prepared to fight, and fight intelligently, instead of grift and own the libs, while the libs move from strength to strength.

Finally, on the drive back to Italy today from Hungary, I made it halfway through Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, by Philip Sherrard, the late English convert to Orthodox Christianity. I’m reading it for research into my next book project. Sherrard says in the book that the recovery of our sacred tradition is a matter of civilizational life and death:

It is a matter that concerns our survival in every sense of the word, spiritual, cultural, physical. For the rot has eaten so deeply into the fibers of our world, has so weakened all the threads of the social fabric, every established bond of authority and institution, of family or state, and has so exposed the emptiness of our man-made, man-centered ideas, our illusion of human happiness and prosperity, our calculations of self-help and mutual aid, that everything to which we have been used to look for support or guidance is now, if not actually destroyed, at least so insecure that we can have no confidence in it. Whether we like it or not we have come into the desolation of reality. We are set down naked beneath the stars. Nothing stands between our poor, forked, famished human condition and the great spiritual principles we have tried for so long not to confront. We known now that we cannot escape, and that it is useless to pretend to take refuge in any less absolute predicament.

That insight gives a certain perspective on the famous MacIntyre paragraph:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.  Nonetheless certain parallels there are.  A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.  What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not recognizing fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.  If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.  What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.  And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict.

MacIntyre is not telling us to created these little communities for the sake of shoring up the imperium. He is saying that the crisis is too deep for that. Read in light of Sherrard’s lines, we see that to save what we can, we have to begin with our own repentance, our own turning away from the wicked city of the plain that is in the process of destroying itself.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I think you may not understand (as do a lot of conservatives who aren’t single) into how fast the culture has changed with respect to female sexuality and the multiple paths of lesbianism in this regard that has led to the rapid expansion of its membership among women.

If you have young women who are conventionally attractive in mainstream culture, they are going to be aggressively encouraged to engage in sexual conduct by peers for male attention, and there will be similar pressure to eroticize female friendships to open up the possibility for a threesome.And of course if they aren’t attractive, and don’t want to participate in the male harem fantasy subculture, they can go the radical feminist lesbian standpoint where they don’t need to cater to conventional standards of beauty or appearance.As far as why men seek out such women, it is because our current culture places high emphasis on the idea of achieving a threesome. The argument that makes a mockery of the Christian ideal of marriage is that achieving that is the brass ring.There is of course no mention of all the jealousy, destroyed trust, skewed emotions, and all the rest that comes along with this.This also drives the incel phenomenon, because you end up in the situation where a relatively small subset of men are able to achieve these “ideals” and the rest are left out in the cold and feel anger, resentment, and bitterness because culture has said you are a loser unless you can land a gorgeous woman.It also massively skews the self-image, emotional development, and general status of young women because they are expected to act and behave like prostitutes and porn stars to land a socially desirable man. The whole idea of situational sexuality as a desired trait among middle and upper class women is likely to strike those outside the West as just as incomprehensible as we see Greek pederasty.

The other commentary on the Douthat column is that Rome could tolerate losses on the frontier because they still had the fundamental idea of Romanitas, the common culture, and solidarity that was sufficient to conquer the ancient world.We don’t have a modern equivalent. Our closest thing to common culture is in fact an anti-culture where any kind of solidarity is discouraged and discarded, which is why only 1/3 of Americans know or care who their neighbors are.

The outer empire doesn’t matter from the broader security standpoint, it does however matter to keep the cheap flow of goods and resources that sustain the bread and circuses of the masses. You lose that and then the simmering tensions at the core erupt, much like they did in ancient Rome when the Egyptian grain supply required to maintain the public ration was threatened.

Readers, please be patient — I am going to be away from the keys all day, and I won’t be able to approve comments till tonight.

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