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Petra, Jordan

And a moment later:

Petra, Jordan

Putin, Our Tsar-Protector?

Let me do a related post to today’s earlier one, about the Church and globalism. 

The New York Times had a story the other day, talking about how white racists and other extreme-right leaders in the West have come to look to Putin as their leader. It was typical Times bias: leading with the (alas, undeniable) fact that some very nasty characters in the West look on Putin as an inspiration, as a way of getting into a story about Putin’s rising influence in the West. Excerpt:

But efforts by Russia, which has jailed some of its own white supremacist agitators, to organize and inspire extreme right-wing groups in the United States and Europe may ultimately prove more influential.

His voice amplified by Russian-funded think tanks, the Orthodox Church and state-controlled news media, like RT and Sputnik, that are aimed at foreign audiences, Mr. Putin has in recent years reached out to conservative and nationalist groups abroad with the message that he stands with them against gay rights activists and other forces of moral decay.

He first embraced this theme when, campaigning for his third term as president in early 2012, he presented Russia not only as a military power deserving of international respect, but also as a “civilizational model” that could rally all those in Russia and beyond who were fed up with the erosion of traditional values.

The Kremlin has also provided financial and logistical support to far-right forces in the West, said Peter Kreko, an analyst at Political Capital, a research group in Budapest. Though Jobbik, a neo-Nazi party in Hungary and other groups have been accused of receiving money from Moscow, the only proven case so far involves the National Front in France, which got loans worth more than $11 million from Russian banks.

Russia also shares with far-right groups across the world a deeply held belief that, regardless of their party, traditional elites should be deposed because of their support for globalism and transnational institutions like NATO and the European Union.

This story exemplifies the problem mainstream American media have trying to understand the forces changing our politics. It’s not that the story is wrong, necessarily (though it may be). It’s that the reporter seems to view greater sympathy for Putin and Putin’s Russia on the Right as confirmation that this is an expression of white racism and recrudescent fascism. Again, in the case of someone like Heimbach (a racist convert to Orthodoxy who was excommunicated by his bishop for his public racist activism), it plainly is. But framing Putin sympathy in such stark and alarmist terms — as the media tended to frame Trump sympathy — obscures far more than it illuminates.

For example, in the summer of 2015, when I was in Italy, I spoke to two young Catholic men who expressed sympathy for Putin. I don’t know the hearts of these men, who were strangers to me, but they looked extremely unlikely to turn up at a rally for the far right. From the context of our conversations, they were ordinary middle-class conservative Catholics who had come to believe that European governing elites did not have their interests at heart, and who (the elites) were committed to de-Christianizing Europe at every opportunity. These two men, in my judgment, looked favorably on Putin not because they were Russophiles or seeking to convert to Orthodoxy — they were quite firmly Catholic — but because they respected the fact that he is a strong leader who embraces his country’s Christian religious heritage, and seeks to defend it and its teachings, especially against cultural liberals whose views on sex and gender are destroying the traditional family.

And you know what? I agreed with them, broadly. I told them that as an Orthodox Christian, I am deeply concerned about the way Putin is using the Russian Orthodox Church to advance Russian nationalism. I oppose it when the churches in America enmesh themselves in nationalistic tropes and rhetoric, not because I fear that religion is going to influence the state, but the other way around. Similarly in Russia, though I am well aware that the historic relationship between the Russian church and the Russian state is radically different than that between an Enlightenment-era state (the US) and its churches. It’s absurd and unfair to expect the same separation of Church and State in older countries that we have in the US. Nevertheless, my belief is that we should always remain vigilant against the Church being compromised by the power of the State.

That said, one doesn’t have to believe that Putin is an angel in order to respect some of what he does, and even to be grateful for it. I am reminded of Megan McArdle’s column the other day about conservative Evangelicals who voted for Trump. Excerpt:

I’ve heard from a number of evangelicals who, despite their reservations about the man, ended up voting for Donald Trump because they fear that the left is out to build a world where it will not be possible to hold any prominent job while holding onto their church’s beliefs about sexuality. Discussions I’ve had in recent days with nice, well-meaning progressives suggest that this is not a paranoid fantasy. An online publisher’s witch hunt against two television personalities — because of the church they attend — validates the fears of these Christians.

When you think that you may shortly see your church’s schools and your religious hospitals closed, and your job or business threatened in the private sphere by the economic equivalent of “convert or die,” you will side with whoever does not seem to set its sights on your conservative beliefs. If that side is led by an intemperate man who more than occasionally says awful things … well, at least he doesn’t want to destroy you.

In that light, is it really so difficult to see why social and religious conservatives in the West would look favorably in some respects on Vladimir Putin?

Excerpts:

Even Christianity, where unity of belief is far more important, has tremendous philosophical diversity. The Catholic Church claims both the humanist Erasmus and the arch-reactionary anti-humanist Joseph de Maistre in its ranks. Now progressivism is an ideology, not a religion as such, and its claims aren’t spiritual in nature. That’s why people from a variety of religions can profess to it. But religious believers can also argue and contradict each other all they like, so long as their views don’t contradict the core beliefs of the religion. Neither religion nor ideology depends on total metaphysical agreement in order to unite a society.

So what sort of agreement do they depend on? Well, as we saw above, what unites Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism is that each of them operates in society through certain rituals, creeds, and ideas. Specifically, certain behaviours, actions, and attitudes become considered desirable. If a religion becomes institutional and widely recognized, adherence to these norms becomes a necessity for social respectability. Personally, I prefer thinking of them as memeplexes. A memeplex is a system of memes (ideas or behaviours) which is internally consistent and self-reinforcing. Memes compatible with the system become selected for, while those incompatible with it are rejected. In daily life, this means that certain behaviours become socially respectable and others cause one to be ostracized. Some ideas and attitudes are good and proper, others are bad and dangerous. In Catholic Spain, piety toward God was praiseworthy. In Communist Russia, it was considered superstitious and condemned. Spain operated on one memeplex, Russia on another. In modern Russia, protecting the traditional Christian form of marriage is viewed by many as patriotic. In more and more of the West, it’s condemned as bigoted and loses people jobs. Now Russia’s memeplex has changed, and I’ll make the case below that the West operates on yet a third one.

Milton contends that the memeplex of secular liberalism has displaced the traditional memeplex in the West, and within secular liberalism, ideologically charged egalitarianism is shoving classical liberalism to the side. All that talk about more freedom is fast disappearing on the Left, as it has gained power within institutions. More:

This is where neoreaction asks an uncomfortable question: what happened to all that freedom?

After all, the goal of liberalism was to create a society where freedom of thought and expression was encouraged. Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t we meant to be beyond having the state impose its values on people? Wasn’t questioning orthodoxy something to be celebrated? With the memeplex idea, it’s easier to understand the shift. When a memeplex becomes culturally dominant, it becomes more and more difficult to empathize with those who disagree with it. After all, those who think or act differently from the memeplex are bad. Now, when society is divided 50-50 between those who believe in traditional Christian morality and those who don’t, each side has a choice: demonize half the population or just say “fine, but you shouldn’t impose that on other people”. If only 5% of the population believes that premarital sex is sinful or that valid marriage must occur between heterosexuals, then it’s easier to demonize them for holding the belief at all even when they pose no threat. When hippies were a derided minority, social progressives believed in freedom of speech at a cultural level, not just a political one. After all, it’s no fun getting fired because you want the troops back from Vietnam. But in our day, progressive rhetoric has changed. Now the goal is to restrict where free speech should apply to the legal minimum. In other words, as a memeplex becomes dominant, freedom becomes less important and uniformity increases. As it becomes institutionalized, it’s necessary to agree with the memeplex in order to be respectable. Even parents face these questions. Parts of the Chinese community in Vancouver have opposed cultural progressive influences in schools. The position of the schools is that children have to learn about things like LGBT issues somehow. The hidden assumption is that these programs will help them learn the right mindset. The good mindset. The mindset of decent and respectable people. Someone’s orthodoxy has to win out.

This is why neoreactionaries say that social progressivism acts as a religion. One more passage from Milton:

Like the Russians a century ago, this generation in the West has experienced the victory of a new memeplex. What makes this memeplex fundamentally different is that it doesn’t claim the authority which religion does, or even like other political ideologies do. It insists that tolerance and personal freedom, free from judgement, are the Most Important Thing. Can’t we all just get along? But this is a delusion. In order for societies to function, commonality of values and visions must exist. Even a society which values tolerance above all else draws the line somewhere. Inevitably, certain ideas win out. Certain attitudes gain cultural dominance. Others become unfashionable, disrespectful, or outright heretical. Only bad people say or do those things. True, the new memeplex isn’t necessarily a religion, united in a single institution. But when all is said and done, when new orthodoxies are in place and new groups of heretics are shamed, purged, and punished, the only major difference is that the Church knew what it was.

It’s quite rewarding and illuminating.

So: Vladimir Putin is a global leader who openly rejects and defies this memeplex, which dominates Europe even more than it does America. Finally, religious people may say, somebody stands up without apology to these people who are trying to crush us. If somebody’s orthodoxy has to win out, and the social progressives’ ideology is driving social conservatives, especially conservative Christians, out of the public square, then what kind of masochists would disdain Putin because the people who hate them also hate him?

It is vital that we on the Right work hard to remain clear-eyed about this. To that end, I want to present a blog entry by the Austrian sociologist of religion Kristina Stöckl, writing about the EU, Russia, religion, and fear.  Excerpt:

We know from historical research that religious diplomacy during Soviet Communism was little more than a propaganda tool, with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church offering expertise on such far-off topics like the neutron bomb in order to back up the Soviet leadership in the global peace movement. There can also be no doubt that the present Russian government has endorsed “the defense of traditional values” as ideological narrative to justify authoritarianism domestically and anti-liberalism internationally. And yet, the argument that today, just like then, religious actors are at the service of an omnipotent Russian government which employs them for their propaganda efforts, is too simplistic.

The reality of religious engagement in politics, in Russia as well as anywhere else, is more complicated than a command chain. In my book The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights, I have shown that over the last twenty years, the Russian Orthodox Church has made a prolonged effort to define its position vis-à-vis liberal democracy, secularism and the international human rights regime, long before the Russian government replaced the slogans of modernization of the Medvedev years with the traditional values of Putin’s third presidency. The language of traditional values as a counter-term to individual liberty had been around in the Russian Orthodox context for a while before the Kremlin picked up on it. Conservative Orthodox actors share this critique of liberalism and secularism with conservative religious actors elsewhere in Europe and the United States; not least with conservative Catholics in Poland, where the government of the Law and Justice Party is currently running its own traditional values agenda; only that in Poland, as EU member, this agenda stays largely domestic. As an observer that is acutely aware of the multivocality inside the Russian Orthodox Church, the fact that the present Russian political leadership boosts one specific religious traditionalism inside the Church, which consents into a marriage of convenience and power, is indeed worrying. But the fact that this norm contestation is taking place in the first place, is not.

There’s a lot to unpack on her full post, but as someone who is probably a lot more sympathetic to the Russian line than Stöckl is, I am grateful for her insight here. We have to keep our eye on the ball here: that the Russian state really is using culture and religion as a propaganda weapon against the West. But that doesn’t make the moral and religious ideas the Russian state weaponizes wrong or illegitimate! Never forget that the United States does the very same thing to advance secular liberalism, especially LGBT advocacy (see here and here for only two examples). Again, as an Orthodox Christian, I worry about what the Russian government is doing with religion because of the risk of corruption of the Church — and, with the Yarovaya Law, actively persecuting Protestant forms of Christianity in Russia — but I am not at all bothered by the fact that the Russian government is active in the West in promoting traditional values over and against the post-Christian (and at times anti-Christian) dominant Western memeplex. In fact, though I am cautiously encouraged by it, because we’re getting pummeled here.

In the same way, I’m not excited about a Trump presidency, but I’m very, very grateful that for at least four years, my government will no longer act as an aggressive enemy of the faith and the faithful. That’s not nothing. So too with the Russian government. Nevertheless, I agree entirely with Prof. Stöckl that this “norm contestation” is taking place. I encourage socially liberal readers (even those who identify as Republicans) to imagine yourself in the position of social and religious conservatives in the West. If you do, you ought to be able to grasp why, exactly, we feel so threatened by progressive culture war aggression. You don’t see yourselves as advocates for a kind of religion, but that’s exactly what you are — and the fact that you don’t express your essentially religious convictions in the language of theology but of human rights and liberty doesn’t make them any less religious in the “memeplex” sense.

I don’t expect you to give up your convictions, but if you consider that to many of us religious conservatives and traditionalists, it’s clear that we are up against a “memeplex” that is every bit as fierce in defending its universalist truth claims as any religion, and that we are targeted for marginalization by faithful espousers of that memeplex, because we are not True Believers in it — well, that insight will help you understand better why the culture war continues. If you think, as the Times seems to, that this is only about white supremacists and neofascists rallying to Putin’s side, you are engaging in a kind of confirmation bias that keeps you from seeing what’s really going on.

And by the way, the “memeplex” idea as applied to this conflict will help American conservatives better understand the nature of this conflict too. The question that interests me more is not, “Why is Putin emerging as an advocate of traditional faith and morals?” but “Why do more and more Western Christians feel that they have no leaders in their own societies to look to for the same?”

Remember me telling you that after the Indiana RFRA debacle, we conservative Christians could not count on Republicans to protect our religious liberty? Well, well, well:

Senate Republicans agreed to remove a religious liberty amendment from a defense bill earlier this week, after a fierce campaign was waged against it by secular groups.

“The leadership of the 115th Congress must double down against, not concede to, ridiculous, fact-free accusations meant to derail legitimate lawmaking,” Kristina Arriaga, executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, stated in response to the news that the Russell Amendment was pulled from the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.

Back in 2014, President Obama signed an anti-discrimination executive order that prohibited any federal contractor from making employment decisions based on someone’s sexual orientation. There were no religious exemptions.

Thus, any religious group or charity contracting with the government might have to recognize same-sex marriages, for example.

In response, the Russell Amendment, named for the sponsor Rep. Steve Russell (R-Okla.) established protections for religious groups against this order.

For instance, under the proposed amendment the government would not be able to cancel a contract with a Christian group just because they only hired persons who lived in accordance with their church’s teaching.

However, Senate Democrats threatened to hold up the $618.7 defense authorizations bill unless the amendment was removed. Secular advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union also pushed for its demise.

President Obama, an extremist on such matters, threatened to veto the entire bill if it contained this religious liberty provision. I suppose it is possible that Senate Republicans have assurances that the incoming president will restore the religious liberty protections that Obama removed by executive order in 2014, and they passed the bill without the Russell Amendment just to get it done, trusting that Trump will undo it. I hope that’s what happened. Still, note that Senate Republicans did not fight for the principle of religious liberty in this instance. We will know soon after President Trump takes office whether or not the Senate GOP move was motivated by justified prudence, or cowardice. The point, though, related to the themes of this post, is that hostility to traditional Christians, to the point of marginalizing us in society and commerce as evil bigots, is very powerful. Not so in Russia. Some of us notice that, and wonder why.

Globalism & Christianity

From the Perceptio blog, these challenging remarks about how the Catholic Church leadership embraced globalism. The blog’s author says that Catholics who think their Church’s embrace of globalism at the senior level is something that arose with Pope Francis are mistaken. Excerpts:

Francis is following along John Paul II’s trajectory. The historical record does not leave much room to interpret otherwise and only carefully applied amnesia can help us find any other conclusion. What is unique is that where previously neo-conservatives found the Roman Church open to globalism, Francis has successfully presented globalism as aligned with the concerns of liberals who opposed it a decade and a half ago.

It is advisable to avoid any allegations of conspiracy in this area, where incompetence can easily provide explanation. In virtue of the developments under Pope Pius XII, the Roman Church finds itself fully participating in globalism through its financial holdings. It is not a conspiracy that Catholicism offered an open avenue for full acceptance of globalism. Rather, it is the inability to step back from the institution’s stakes in the venture to provide some prospective.  Much like the adoption of modernity at Vatican II, the Roman Church believes it can pick and choose what it wishes from globalism. Sixty years ago the dominant thought was that there was “good modernity” and “bad modernity” and the Roman Church could become thoroughly modern and safeguard itself from disruption be choosing the “good modernity.” Soon thereafter it would be discovered that “modernity is modernity” and once you open an entire religion to that perception of reality, you effectively adopt modernity in toto. Similarly, the last three pontiffs have operated on the presumption that  Roman Catholicism could pick and choose what it likes from globalism.

Much like modernity, globalism is an all or nothing proposition. The difference, perhaps, is that in this instance we are living contemporaries with the engineers of globalism. We live among the entities and interests that have forged globalism and end point of society and economy it envisions – it is one in which the traditional religions of the West are increasingly obsolete and  are opposed to the new definition of humanity presented in this new system of things. It is a profound indication of failure on the part of ecclesiastical authorities that adherents (in large part) have so thoroughly succumbed to many of the greater cultural propositions embedded in globalism, both material and (even) spiritual. It is a thorough condemnation of the poor reasoning among ecclesiastical authorities that gambled (once again) on being able to mediate the impact of all encompassing worldview which seeks to displace any remnants of the former cultural paradigm and, in so far as it can, create a new referent for matters of religion and spirituality as part of a redefinition of humanity and culture.

The author goes on to say that this is not simply a problem in the Roman church, but also in Mainline Christianity, and, among the Orthodox, the Greeks in particular.

The adoption of globalism and (among Western churches) the prior adoption of modernism, test notions of the indefectibility of the church. Although doctrinal statements may not necessarily be at issue (in so far as it is not a matter of mass apostasy), nevertheless, the notion that ecclesiastical authorities could willingly choose to adopt systems with embedded hostility to Christian dogma and anthropology, and furthermore persist in failing to recognize the impact such adoption has had upon their religion, brings most adherents to a crisis point in relation to their ecclesiastical structure. The perception that comes to mind seems to suggest that the ecclesia can err and err severely. The institutional structure is either bereft of the surety that the adherent expects for continued observance, or the surety persists, with culpability being assigned to external factors or select elements in the institutional structure (the passing of which will enable revitalization of the institution). More often than not, it is a cross denominational segment of believers who come together in their willingness to deviate from the institutional line and persist in the criticism of failure in leadership that has resulted Christianity being engulfed by a system that would displace it as it seeks to displace every remnant of the older of things.

This is not to say that future of Christianity involves a loss of its institutional make-up. That is simply not how religions work. It is to suggest that Christianity has no future worth pursuing if the cross-denominational criticism of globalism and modernity does not result in a cross-denominational movement to rediscover and re-implement the praxis of Christianity.

Read the whole thing.  In other words, the Benedict Option, and an antimodern ecumenism particular to the Ben Op. The idea of an “antimodern ecumenism” is a weird one, given that the ecumenical movement is an expression of ecclesiastical modernism. Ben Op ecumenism, as I see it, involves traditionalists (or at least anti-modernists) within the various churches choosing to hold to their denominational and ecclesial particulars, while at the same time working together, when possible, to support each other, recognizing that in the post-Christian West, we all face a common threat that’s much greater than any threat we pose to each other.

Christianity, obviously, is a global religion. God does not love Americans more than He loves Russians, or Chinese, or any other people. Christianity understands itself as having a mandate to convert the world. So what is “globalism” then, if it’s a threat? Broadly speaking, it’s “globalism” in the sense of the old customs, traditions, and verities being abandoned for the cause of assimilating into a global order hostile to Christianity (and to traditional religion in general). Are there racists, hysterical nationalists, and various far-right nuts among anti-globalist Christians? Yes, just as there are plenty of far-left nuts among Christians who generally embrace globalism. This fact, however unpleasant, does not settle the very real issues that globalism and modernism — religious and otherwise — pose the the survival of the Christian faith.

I think we should all recognize, at the very least, that the present cultural and geopolitical moment, and the age we are now entering, pose rather different questions than the one we have very recently left. The main questions are: Can modernist Christianity survive in liquid modernity? If not, what form, or forms, of Christianity can?  And how can they avoid their Christianity being destroyed by reaction? 

Again, very broadly speaking, and jumping off of the Zygmunt Bauman essay I linked to in that last paragraph, it’s going to have to be a Christianity that teaches us, not only abstractly but in our practices, that we are not tourists in this life, but pilgrims. We Christians used to know that.

Happy Feast Of St. Nicholas

 

What’s that? Don’t you know? Look:

In AD 325 Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, the very first ecumenical council. More than 300 bishops came from all over the Christian world to debate the nature of the Holy Trinity. It was one of the early church’s most intense theological questions. Arius, from Egypt, was teaching that Jesus the Son was not equal to God the Father. Arius forcefully argued his position at length. The bishops listened respectfully.

As Arius vigorously continued, Nicholas became more and more agitated. Finally, he could no longer bear what he believed was essential being attacked. The outraged Nicholas got up, crossed the room, and slapped Arius across the face!

Whole thing here. Keep Christianity weird, brethren!

Zombie Catholics Of France

This, from Foreign Policy, is fascinating:

Having decisively defeated several rivals in his party’s primary this past weekend, François Fillon will carry the standard for Les Républicains in France’s presidential election next spring. Competitors and commentators — indeed, many voters — were surprised by this outcome. Surprised because Fillon had long trailed in the polls; surprised because Fillon, a former prime minister, was long dismissed as the “eternal No. 2”; surprised because Fillon has promised, if elected, to starve the beast that the French fondly call l’état providence — the welfare state — a move that in France has not typically been a winning campaign strategy. But surprised, too, because, as the rest of the country is now discovering, Fillon is Catholic. Very Catholic. So Catholic, at least to the secular left, that a headline in the newspaper Libération screamed: “Help, Jesus has returned!”

Yeah, Robespierre, and boy, is he mad. Turns out that even though France is very, very secular, there are a lot of people who don’t practice the Catholic faith who nevertheless are voting for a candidate who does. They come from the parts of France that historically stayed more faithful to the Church — “places where the church has vanished but its practices and values persist.” More:

These men and women are, in the controversial term coined three years ago by the sociologists Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras, les zombies catholiques of France. In their book Le mystère français, Todd and Le Bras tried to explain why, in a country where barely five citizens in 100 attend church, the weight of Catholicism is still evident. From the millions of parents who took to the streets in the mid-1980s to protest the Socialist government’s effort to merge private (and overwhelmingly Catholic) schools with public schools to the millions who, 30 years later, took to the same streets to protest the new (but hardly different) Socialist government’s effort to legalize gay marriage, these armies of French “zombies” would have overwhelmed the likes of Brad Pitt, let alone government ministers.

But this is less World War Z than the newest chapter in the guerres franco-françaises — France’s long series of civil wars fought over the legacy of the French Revolution, which pit a secularist left against a traditionalist right. Todd and Le Bras marvel over the persistence of Catholic habits and values in regions where Catholicism has more or less vanished as an institution. “The most astonishing paradox,” they note, “is the rise of social movements shaped by a religion that has disappeared as a metaphysical belief.” Unable to resist the French weakness for paradox, Todd and Le Bras conclude: “Catholicism seems to have attained a kind of life after death. But since it is a question of a this-worldly life, we will define it as ‘zombie Catholicism.’”

Whole thing here. 

I dunno, maybe the old girl, the eldest daughter of the Church, still has some fight left in her. May it be so!

The Pentagon: Part Of A Broken System

Whenever I hear a politician say he’s going to save money by tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse,” I think, “yeah, whatever,” assuming that he’s avoiding hard choices. But here is an example of spectacular waste, one that I hope Trump will lay into hard:

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

More:

But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

The Pentagon wanted to save money, allegedly. This report found great ways to save a gob of it. So the Pentagon killed it, because they were afraid that people would assume that they were wasting money. Which they are.

Why doesn’t Congress want to know how much money is being wasted by the military-industrial complex? From the story:

Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine general and former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said lawmakers block even modest attempts to downsize the Pentagon’s workforce because they do not want to lose jobs in their districts.

Without backing from Congress, “you can’t even get rid of the guy serving butter in the chow hall in a local district, much less tens of thousands of jobs,” he said.

Read the whole thing. Notice how senior bureaucrats within the Pentagon worked to shoot it down. Note also that for that $125 billion in mere waste and inefficiency at the Pentagon, you could run HHS, the EPA, and the Justice Department for a year. The entire 2017 budget for Veterans Affairs is $70 billion. But heaven forbid that anybody ask the Pentagon pencil-pushers to tighten their belts.

Reading that report, I thought of Bret Stephens’ great column in the Wall Street Journal today. Stephens says that the huge political changes going on around the world have less to do with globalism and more to do with people being fed up with injustice. He writes:

In other words, the “system,” with its high-toned rationale and its high-handed maneuvers, struck millions of people as unaccountable and unjust. It might have been a good thing that the sky didn’t fall on everybody [in the financial crash of 2008], but shouldn’t it at least have fallen on somebody? Bernie Sanders got remarkably close to winning the Democratic nomination by calling Wall Street a fraud and demanding prosecutions. Hillary Clinton lost the White House by so perfectly typifying the system that supposedly worked so well. Donald Trump is what he is, and readers know what I think of that. But Mrs. Clinton’s unforgivable sin was her outsized—and unearned—sense of entitlement.

Look again at this year’s other big political surprises.

Colombians rejected the peace deal because they would not abide having terrorists lightly let off for their crimes. Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte because they wanted to exact moral justice against drug dealers, never mind the finer details of legal justice. Britons disregarded dire warnings about the consequences of leaving the EU because the powers of Brussels violated their sense of democratic sovereignty. Italians told Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to shove off because they weren’t sympathetic to plans they see as having been made in Berlin for the benefit of Germans.

The populist wave now cresting across much of the world is sometimes described as a revolt against globalization: immigrants failing to assimilate the values of their hosts, poorer countries drawing jobs from richer ones, and so on. But the root complaint is not about economics. It’s about justice. Why does the banker get the bailout while the merchant goes bankrupt? Why does the illegal immigrant get to jump the citizenship queue? What right does a foreign judge have to tell us what punishments our criminals deserve? Why do our soldiers risk their lives for the defense of wealthy allies?

Those of us who believe in the liberal international order (now derisively called “globalism”) ought to think about this. There are powerful academic arguments to be made for the superiority of free trade over mercantilism, or of Pax Americana over America First. But liberalism’s champions will continue to lose the argument until we learn to make our case not in the language of what works, but of what’s right.

Read the whole thing. A system that allows a bloated Pentagon bureaucracy to spend $125 billion on things it doesn’t need, and suppress a report that suggests ways to cut that waste — in what sense does it work?

UPDATE: A reader rightly sends us to Kevin Drum’s piece in Mother Jones — hardly a newsletter for Pentagon apologists — saying that he suspects that this report is typical consultant b.s. Excerpt:

He simply concluded that their report was shallow and uninformed, and I can’t say I disagree. The Powerpoint deck looks like it’s little more than boilerplate that’s lightly massaged by a 22-year-old “senior analyst” for each client.

I can sympathize with anyone who thinks the Pentagon could make its back-office operations more efficient, but can’t do it thanks to bureaucratic inertia. I don’t doubt for a second that this is true. But if you want to change this, you’d better do more than bring in a few McKinsey suits to provide you with the exact same recommendations they provide to everyone else, using the exact same swarm of buzzwords. This report sounds like dreck.

The Wall America Needs

If you ask me, the only wall America needs its new president to build is between my car and anyone who would rear end it. That’s my conclusion after last evening’s unpleasantness. Julie and I spent about six hours in the ER being checked out after the crash. Our doctor ordered us to do it, given our mutual history of back and neck problems, which is much, much more serious with Julie (the discs in her neck are more degenerate than a Nazi art exhibit). We didn’t get home till 1:30 a.m.

I was supposed to be on a flight to New York now, headed up for a presentation tonight at a Tikvah Fund gathering. My doctor said he did not want me traveling. I’m really bummed about missing the Tikvah event, and about a couple of other things I had planned, including meeting Jon Haidt. Oh well. It is not a pleasant thing to be struck from behind by a metal object traveling at 30 miles per hour, even if there is half a car between you to absorb the blow. But it could have been so very much worse, obviously.

Funny, but it was raining all day here yesterday. Lucas and I went to a wake in St. Francisville, and I talked to him all the way up there about the importance of defensive driving. In the town, a careless driver very nearly hit us when he pulled into our lane. I leaned on the horn and we narrowly avoided collision.

“How were you so cool about that?” Lucas asked.

“Defensive driving instinct,” I told him. “It helps if you look out for what the other guy might do. You can’t anticipate everything, but sometimes you can avoid problems.”

“But it would have been his fault if we had crashed.”

“True, but we could have been hurt, and our car still would have been damaged.”

On the way back to Baton Rouge, we saw police clearing a wreck in which a pickup had gone under an 18-wheeler trailer and sheared its top off. And we saw one more almost-wreck. This occasioned more defensive driving talk.

And then later that night, Julie and I got struck from behind by a careless driver (who was very apologetic, I must say).

I’m very sore this morning, so I’m going to take it easy from posting. Julie is still sleeping, but given how fragile her back and neck are on a good day — and yesterday was not a good day — I imagine she’s going to need a lot of help today. To that end, I think I can count on the support of the ER doctors, as well as you readers, when I say that now is the time for me to implement my plan to hire a Brazilian au pair. Yes?

UPDATE: Sorry to have misled you readers — I’m totally joking about the Brazilian au pair. I can just hear me saying to my sweet rose of Texas, “Honey, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to take the burden off of you by hiring a Brazilian au pair, don’t you?” The scene that would follow that would be like something off The Itchy & Scratchy Show, with me as Scratchy, or what’s left of him. Now, if I offered to bring in a Russian babushka…

 

Decorum

Yesterday I took a couple of my kids to a symphony Christmas concert. During the performance, a woman and her daughter, a girl who looked to be about 12 or 13, sat in front of us fiddling with their smartphones — this, throughout the entire concert. It was shocking. When I tell you “the entire concert,” I mean that literally. The mom put her phone down to stand for the Hallelujah Chorus (perhaps because she saw everyone else standing), but she allowed her daughter to remain seated, texting. Other than that, they both stayed on their phones throughout the entire two-hour performance.

The pair Facebooked, Instagrammed, e-mailed, and texted. I tell you this because it was impossible to avoid seeing the light on their screens from where I was sitting.

Why on earth had they dressed up to come to the concert, when all they did was focus on their phones? Has obsessive use of smartphones and social media destroyed their ability to sustain attention to the world around them for two hours? Tim Wu’s smart, insightful, at times even scary book The Attention Merchants  is a history of how advertisers, from the beginning of the mass media era in the 19th century, have developed ever more ingenious techniques for capturing the consumer’s attention. Wu ends the book by calling for “a human reclamation project.” He writes, “Over the coming century, the most vital human resource in need of conversation and protection is likely to be our own mental space.” To judge by their bizarre display yesterday, that woman and her daughter are addicts.

The kids thought the mother-daughter couple’s behavior was strange. I told the kids on the way out that that’s exactly why mom and dad limit their time with electronics. We don’t want them to become people who go to concerts but who are so addicted to their smartphones that they can’t tear themselves away long enough to enjoy the music and the moment.

There’s a second point, I think: the loss of a sense of public decorum. Had the concert bored me out of my mind, I still would not have pulled my smartphone out of my pocket and checked out, simply because that is not how one behaves at the symphony, or at the theater. To have done so would have been to have revealed myself as ill-mannered, mostly because it expressed a lack of respect for others around me in the audience, as well as for the performers, and for the occasion. We had a manners lesson on the drive home from the concert. I told my kids that it doesn’t matter what everybody else around you is doing, you behave in the correct way because you know who you are. Respecting others and the occasion is a way of respecting yourself.

Does that sound old-fashioned to you? So I’m old-fashioned. I’ll take that as a compliment.

Last week, we checked out of the library a DVD of the pop singer Adele’s concert at The Royal Albert Hall in London. My kids like her songs, and so do I, when I’ve heard them. I also love the fact that she’s a working-class Londoner who has become a worldwide success on the basis of her extraordinary talent. She has seemed so likable in the few interviews I’ve seen with her on TV.

This was a hard concert to get through with the kids, because Adele has a very foul mouth. Frankly, if the kids weren’t watching, it would have been hard to get through because I was embarrassed for the singer, talking like a pub slattern from the stage of The Royal Albert Hall. I am not a prude about language, as my male friends will attest. But there is a time and a place for that kind of talk, and onstage at The Royal Albert Hall is not it, at least not if you are a gorgeous singer of pop ballads like Adele. Her fans didn’t seem to mind it at all, to be clear, but I every time she dropped an f-bomb, I kept thinking, You are so beautiful, so enormously talented, such a gifted artist, and here you are, in The Royal Albert Hall, a high temple of musical performance, in a moment of  complete triumph, and … this is how you talk? 

It didn’t make me mad, really, only sad for her, and for a popular culture that doesn’t know how to behave in a place like The Royal Albert Hall, or anywhere else that’s not a rodeo arena, pretty much. Can you imagine being elderly Adele, looking back on a career of fame and accomplishment, screening your performance at The Royal Albert Hall for your grandchildren, and having to listen to your younger self, speaking like that? It’s as if the cardinal archbishop of Paris showed up to celebrate Easter mass at Notre Dame wearing a faded Def Leppard concert t-shirt. I’ll admit that I don’t want to hear Adele swear anywhere (or the cardinal archbishop of Paris wear concert t-shirts), but it wouldn’t bother me so much if she were doing it in a louchier venue. Context is 90 percent of it.

You don’t judge The Royal Albert Hall. The Royal Albert Hall judges you. That principle works everywhere.

Destroying An Institution From Within

A college professor in the humanities, responding to the Authority post from earlier today (which I thought I’d first posted days ago, but maybe not), writes:

For a couple weeks now I’ve been singing the praises of The Crown to anyone who would listen, praising it as a great exemplar of moral conservatism and of the importance of institutions and tradition. What the show makes so wonderfully clear is how difficult it is to put the self second, behind and below the concerns of tradition and institutions. This used to be done commonly, not just in faith and government but in business and in family. Now the opposite is the common currency of our culture: the imperial self reigns supreme in film, literature, advertising, and so on. The Crown is the exception that proves the rule. Its conservatism is so prominent because it is so unusual.

The only institution I can speak on with any familiarity is academia, and I can tell you from the viewpoint of the humanities it is no longer an institution at all. You could probably name on one hand the colleges that see themselves as stewards of tradition (St. John’s, Hillsdale, Christendom, Claremont, et al.). All others have succumbed to the “disrupt” ethos that migrated from the business world — an ethos that, perhaps ironically, migrated from perverse iterations of neoclassical economics at places like the University of Chicago. Compounding this microeconomic view of all things, in which the self is wholly inviolable and is the measure of all action, is the obsession in the humanities with emancipation. You might recall I emailed you last year about the power of Michel Foucault’s thought . It has only gotten worse in the wake of Trump. Consider yesterday’s Times piece by George Yancy, a philosophy professor at Emory. He responds to the Professor Watchlist imbroglio and, essentially, doubles down on his “responsibility” to unshackle his students from the oppressive bonds of tradition. Sample:

So, in my classrooms, I refuse to remain silent in the face of racism, its subtle and systemic structure. I refuse to remain silent in the face of patriarchal and sexist hegemony and the denigration of women’s bodies, or about the ways in which women have internalized male assumptions of how they should look and what they should feel and desire… I refuse to remain silent when it comes to transgender women and men who are beaten to death by those who refuse to create conditions of hospitality.

Etc., etc., ad infinitum. What a banal recitation this has become. And it’s very easy for people outside academia to roll their eyes at this, but I am telling you: this is really how humanities professors see themselves.

I go to faculty meetings with these people and listen to English and History professors congratulate themselves for the “unlearning” they do, and cheer each other for “freeing” their students from Judeo-Christian tradition. This is the whole point of the Critical Theory movement: professors are to always and everywhere fight discourses of power, and the best place to do that is the classroom, where they still hold some semblance of authority. It’s especially bad at conferences and in journals, where total groupthink has taken hold. I do a lot of scholarly writing on conservative thinkers, and I’ve had journal editors tell me flat-out that they will not publish anything that does not explicitly challenge conservative thinking because the backlash from other professors is so brutal: such journals would be seen as being complicit in oppression. I mean that totally seriously.

Consider the terms of choice among humanities professors in how they describe their work: trouble, interrogate, destabilize, critically examine, problematize, and on and on. These are not the terms of people who see themselves as part of an institutional tradition. I cannot stress this enough: they see their core mission as disrupting that very institution.

So what we are left with is essentially an insurrection. And it will come crashing down, of course: as we saw in the French Revolution, you can’t preach the subversion of all authority from an authoritative position and expect to remain in that position forever.

I was literally sitting here at my kitchen table going over the page proofs for the Education chapter in The Benedict Option when I stopped to check e-mail and saw this sobering e-mail from the professor. There’s a passage in the Education chapter in which I talk about how contemporary education severs students from our tradition, our history, and the roots of our civilization. Leading up to this excerpt, I talked about how shocking it was later in life to realize how little my education, especially my college education, taught me about Western religion, philosophy, history, art, literature, music, and culture. I can’t blame the tenured radicals the professor speaks of in his e-mail. It was

We are going to have a counterrevolution in this country’s educational institutions. The classical school movement has arisen in part to address the needs created by our mainstream educational institutions failing to transmit knowledge of the Western tradition. It is my hope and my prayer that we will see more colleges arise that reject the nihilistic garbage the professor sees, and explicitly set themselves up as passionate alternatives. People have to wake up and understand what is happening, and is failing to happen, as standard high schools, colleges, and universities — even at some that think of themselves as Christian. We have to do much better by our kids.

The Democratic Party’s Tearer Downers

Megan McArdle, writing on the harassment of Fixer Upper hosts Chip and Joanna Gaines by the persecutorial left, is so, so right. Excerpt:

What message does this send? “Sure, the government won’t actually shut your church down. But the left will use its positions of institutional power to try to hound anyone who attends that church from public life. You can believe whatever you want — but if we catch you, or if we even catch you in proximity to people who believe it, we will threaten your livelihood.”

I’ve heard from a number of evangelicals who, despite their reservations about the man, ended up voting for Donald Trump because they fear that the left is out to build a world where it will not be possible to hold any prominent job while holding onto their church’s beliefs about sexuality. Discussions I’ve had in recent days with nice, well-meaning progressives suggest that this is not a paranoid fantasy. An online publisher’s witch hunt against two television personalities — because of the church they attend — validates the fears of these Christians.

When you think that you may shortly see your church’s schools and your religious hospitals closed, and your job or business threatened in the private sphere by the economic equivalent of “convert or die,” you will side with whoever does not seem to set its sights on your conservative beliefs. If that side is led by an intemperate man who more than occasionally says awful things … well, at least he doesn’t want to destroy you.

Had I voted for Trump, that would have been precisely why. In fact, had I lived in a swing state (instead of a state that Trump won easily, as predicted), I might well have done so in the privacy of the voting booth, for this reason and no other. Trump is not one of “us” (i.e., a religious conservative) and scarcely pretends to be. The one thing we can probably count on is that he doesn’t want to destroy our institutions and drive us from public life. Unlike his opponents and the side she represents. The Law of Merited Responsibility has not yet been repealed. They will say that they don’t want to do anything like that, but they almost always end up doing exactly that, and justifying themselves on the grounds of higher morality (anti-discrimination).

The progressive writer Freddie de Boer:

Maybe, just maybe, constantly calling everything fascism made it harder for us to get voters to take Trump’s fascist elements seriously.

— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) December 5, 2016

Similarly, treating aspects of ordinary, everyday life — such as attacking people for going to a church where the pastor preaches things that attackers don’t agree with — as an occasion for monstering innocents is a great way to drive reluctant people into the arms of Trump, if only out of self-preservation. This is going to continue over the next four years, you watch.

On another thread, a commenter named “Lisa” remarks:

As a Canadian leftist and progressive, what I have seen in the US has been devastating to any remaining faith I had in my “side”.

I once believed that hate speech laws were necessary and would not be overly abused, because surely people could distinguish when human life was at risk vs simply silencing offensive or hateful opinions.

During the Rwandan genocide, which took place when I was in fourth grade, Hutu Power Radio broadcasted day and night, calling Tutsis cockroaches, traitors, dangers to the country, etc. This was obviously building to something, and in fact, the order to actually kill Tutsis – “cut the tall trees” – was broadcast by the same station. The locations of people in hiding were also broadcast so they could be found and killed. The American government refused to jam the signals at any point because it would violate the principles of free speech. I was appalled by this and still am.

I believed hate speech laws were necessary to prevent the vilification of vulnerable minority groups, who could be put in physical danger as a result.

Now it has become clear that hate speech laws are being wielded as weapons. I saw feminists at an anti-rape protest claim that people holding signs decrying the concept of rape culture were engaging in hate speech and should be arrested.

I saw a man wearing a #buildthewallshirt (a sentiment I find ignorant and foolish) be harassed and threatened for ten minutes, despite him refusing to engage:

This is not how you win hearts and minds. It is not how you conduct yourself, even with people with view you find immoral or despicable. I’m vegan and my personal view is that the meat industry is the biggest “evil” in our time. I have never, ever approached anyone eating meat to tell them this, nor told anyone to become vegan – not because I don’t think they should (I do), but because I know damn well it will result in nothing but defensiveness and backlash.

You change people by being a positive example. You engage respectfully when questioned. You show people what CAN be and you live out your principles in a way that makes people say, “I want to be like that, too.”

Leftist SJWs are the anti-inspiration. They inspire nothing but contempt, even from me, and I agree with their positions 95% of the time.

There is no place for me anywhere, anymore. I will not abandon what I think is right, but I’ll be damned if I jump on this hateful, anti-speech bandwagon the regressive left is championing.

The regressive left is on track to ruin their brand with sanctimonious, imperious crap, just as the religious right did. You can already happening. And the innocent people who they rightly advocate for are going to suffer the consequences.