Rod Dreher's Blog, page 519

Nora Is Nail-Biting!

My daughter Nora is a chip off the old block. She’s ten, and is keeping a map of all the electoral votes. “My leg is shaking!” she said. It really is. It’s so fun to watch the election returns with my daughter.

America: Mall or Stadium?

Ed West writes in the Spectator (UK):

I appreciate that, for American liberals in particular, patriotism is not about where your ancestors came from but an ideal, and an attachment to a set of values. This is heartfelt and genuine, and you are certainly right to abhor racism, but if you try to ignore human nature you will fail in whatever your goal is. Another result of multiculturalism is that the more diversity there is, the more white support there will be for radical right-wing parties at the national level. This is happening across Europe, and it can only be further accelerated when the multicultural party promotes identity politics, as the Democrats are masters of – because either no one does identity politics, or everyone does. This is where Trump comes along.

Donald Trump is not my cup of tea; he is the very antithesis of those mild-mannered northern European values I outlined earlier and as a human being does not seem to possess a single redeeming feature. But the nationalism he espouses, which seems like a derivative of Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 platform, would paradoxically make the United States in the long term far more like the egalitarian social democracy the Left likes.

How do people who like both equality and diversity square this contradiction? On the most part they don’t, because as Damon Linker observed recently in The Week, they have come to view any attachment to the local and real over the global and abstract as morally deviant:

Underlying liberal denigration of the new nationalism — the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but ‘racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia’ — is the desire to delegitimise any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic… cosmopolitan liberals presume that all particularistic forms of solidarity must be superseded by a love of humanity in general, and indeed that these particularistic attachments will be superseded by humanitarianism before long, as part of the inevitable unfolding of human progress.

Is it any surprise then, that across the western world the centre-left is sleepwalking to irrelevance? The proposition nation is a noble concept, and one against which the white identity politics of the Alt Right is hard to morally articulate, but it is very much a utopian one, and certainly something that has never been tried before in a democracy. Liberals boast that demography is on their side, which it certainly is, but when they achieve their goal they might not like what they have created. The more utopian dreams fail the more virulent its believers tend to become towards opponents, but it doesn’t solve the existential contradictions. As a child, I remember a superpower tried changing human nature to create a paradise on earth; that didn’t work out too well.

Here’s the problem, as I see it. Is the American nation (or any nation) more like:

The diverse crowd that gathers at the shopping mall on Saturday afternoon, or
The diverse crowd that gathers at the football stadium on Saturday night?

The difference is that the only thing the first crowd shares little more than a geographical space, but the second crowd shares not only a geographical space, but a purpose.

Our problem is that we want the solidarity and sense of purpose that the football stadium crowd possesses, but without its shared sense of a mission greater than the individuals engaged in it. I don’t think this is a problem that politics can solve, but it is certainly a problem that politics can exacerbate. As the next four years will demonstrate.

Instead of the Stadium as a symbol, I might have used the Cathedral, but of course America, as a foundationally secular nation, is better represented by a stadium. Plus, these days, Cathedrals function more like Malls, in the sense I mean in this post. There’s not much shared sense of purpose there, only a diverse group of people gathered in a particular geographical space to pursue private ends. The Mall really is the symbol of our place in this time.

After The Election Smoke Clears

Via the Browser, the English political theorist John Gray has some wide-ranging reflections on the demise of liberalism. It’s written primarily about the UK political situation, but there are some obvious parallels to the US scene. Note well that by “liberalism,” Gray is not strictly talking about the meaning of the term as commonly used in the US, i.e., the philosophy of the Democratic Party. He’s talking about the consensus governing philosophy of both the left and the right parties in liberal democracies. In that sense, in the essay, Gray spends a lot of time discussing how the Labour Party is dismantling its support for liberalism — a process that, at this point, can be primarily observed within the Republican Party, as the party base revolts against its elites. Here’s some Gray:

The liberal pageant is fading, yet liberals find it hard to get by without believing they are on what they like to think is the right side of history. The trouble is that they can only envision the future as a continuation of the recent past. This is so whether their liberalism comes from the right or the left. Whether they are George Osborne’s City-based “liberal mainstream”, or Thatcherite think tanks, baffled and seething because Brexit hasn’t taken us closer to a free-market utopia, or egalitarian social democrats who favour redistribution or “predistribution”, an entire generation is finding its view of the world melting away under the impact of events.

Today’s liberals differ widely about how the wealth and opportunities of a market economy should be shared. What none of them question is the type of market globalisation that has developed over the past three decades. Writing in Tribune in 1943 after reviewing a batch of “progressive” books, George Orwell observed: “I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases that were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are ‘the abolition of distance’ and ‘the disappearance of frontiers’.” More than 70 years later, the same empty formulae are again being repeated. At present, the liberal mind can function only to the extent that it shuts out reality.

In our country, it’s easier to see this process advanced within the GOP than within the Democratic Party. After Trump loses, as appears to be his fate, expect to see the Republican Establishment — party leaders and officials, think tankers, conservative media figures — rally around a “we told you so!” stance, and proceed to club the Trumpkins. It’s not going to work. If the GOP had nominated a figure who had Trump’s stances on issues without Trump’s massive personal liabilities, it would be on the verge of winning the White House. Personally, I know people who would have voted for a Trump platform, minus Trump. I am one of those people. The idea that people who voted Trump, and people who didn’t vote Trump but are otherwise sympathetic to what he represents, are going to be satisfied with a return to the Republican status quo (e.g., a revived Bushism) is daft.

One problem is that Trump will have left no obvious successors. It will be easier than it ought to be to dismiss the ideas that animated his campaign because there will be no one there to advocate for them, or at least we can’t see a person like that on the horizon. Trump’s crude nativism won’t ever be a majority position in the US, given how we are changing demographically (and will change, even if the border were closed tight tomorrow), but it is not hard to envision a non-toxic, non-ethnic form of national solidarity coming from a right-of-center politician who was charismatic and likable.

The economic front is the main one, though, and given that Trump’s position, popular though it is among Republican voters, is anathema to the party’s deep-pocketed donors, it is hard to see how it gains much traction among the GOP elites. The one thing it has going for it, though, is that it’s popular, and, if Gray is right, will only grow more popular. One thing against its prospects for success, though, is its ideological incoherence (this, says Gray, is a big problem for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party). On Gray’s account, Labour is now little more than a mustering of the aggrieved.

Get this:

Corbyn’s “inclusive” attitude towards Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA fits in with a left-liberal world-view that supports ­anti-colonial struggles in a general embrace of identity politics. Fashionable nonsense about cultural appropriation may not matter much, as it has been largely confined to increasingly marginal universities. However, it expresses what has come to be seen as a liberal principle: the right of everyone to assert what they take to be their identity – particularly if it can be represented as that of an oppressed minority – by whatever means are judged necessary. If free speech stands in the way, the practice must be discarded. It terrorism is required, so be it. This represents a fundamental shift in liberal thinking.

We are seeing this sentiment gain respectability in the Democratic Party. It is powerful on college campuses, as we see, and there is no reason to think that it will not take hold, and eventually take over, the Democrats themselves. I don’t think Hillary Clinton and her Establishment Democrats believe these things, but I also think they lack the conviction to stop it. Whatever comes after Hillary for the Democrats, the militant, anti-liberal politics of identity is going to be much stronger. You can see it now in the Democrats’ hostility to religious liberty. You will also see it become more entrenched in the US Establishment with a series of decisions made by a Supreme Court dominated by Democratic appointees — as will be the case after four years of Clinton — who have absorbed the identity politics ethos of the law schools.

What this is likely to do to American politics is not clear, but it can’t be good. Aside from educated, self-hating liberals, white voters will not acquiesce in the injustice of their own racially-motivated dispossession. And we will probably see fierce clashes erupt between Latinos and African-Americans within the Democratic Party, which will have defined itself by anti-liberal identity politics. All of this is in the future, but it’s a future that’s much closer than people think.

More Gray:

Popular revulsion against established elites has produced some curious responses. There is constant talk about reason being junked in an emotional rejection of experts, as was supposed to have happened in this year’s EU referendum campaign. Yet the record hardly justifies any strong claims on behalf of those who claim special insight into economics or politics. Much of what has passed for expert knowledge consists of speculative or discredited theories, such as the sub-Keynesian ideas that support quantitative easing as a permanent regime and the notion that globalisation benefits everybody in the long run. When rattled liberals talk of the triumph of emotion over reason, what they mean is that voters are ignoring the intellectual detritus that has guided their leaders and are responding instead to facts and their own experiences.

In our country, Trump voters are responding to their own experiences of insecurity. These are real. What is much harder to discern by voters is the extent to which the causes of their insecurity are external (and therefore addressable by politics) or internal — that is to say, their own fault, and addressable not by politics, but only by personal reform. Kevin D. Williamson and I have publicly disagreed on what you might call “J.D. Vance issues,” but he’s not wrong here:

Beyond your own endowments, a great deal of your happiness and advancement in life is going to be influenced in one way or another by the family in which you are raised. How much money your family has is a part of that, but it is not the only part, or even the most important part. Some of you have wonderful families that will encourage and advise you intelligently, helping you to make good decisions and to make the most of the gifts you have. Some of you have horrifying families marred by addiction, neglect, abuse, and worse. Government can step in and remove minors from the most extreme situations — putting them into foster homes or institutions that may or may not prove an improvement — but, for most people, the family you have is the family you have, a lifelong blessing or burden.

In other words, many of our problems are pre-political, and the idea that we can successfully ameliorate them through politics is a dead end. This is simply true, but it is a truth that very many of us, both on the left and the right, will fight hard to avoid acknowledging.

Meanwhile, the wisest among us will do what we can politically to create conditions in which small countercultural communities of virtue can flourish. Apparently the Radical Orthodoxy folks in the UK are advocating something more explicitly political.  From Gray:

What British voters are not doing is repudiating the society in which they live. For some critics of liberalism, what is needed is a rejection of individualism in economics and culture. This is the message of John Milbank and Adrian Pabst in The Politics of Virtue (reviewed by Rowan Williams in this paper on 14 October). The book promotes a neo-medievalist vision of organic community that would be familiar to Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton, whom Milbank and Pabst cite approvingly. Post-liberalism of this kind is, in my view, a dead end in politics. Most people in Britain do not want to live in organic communities. They are not nostalgic for an imaginary past, and show little fondness for the claustrophobic intimacy of unchanging, homogeneous neighbourhoods. They want what Thomas Hobbes called commodious living – in other words, the amenities of modern economy – without the chronic insecurity that is produced by unfettered market forces. Rather than rejecting market individualism, they are demanding that it be constrained. They would like to inhabit a common culture but are happy for it to contain diverse beliefs and lifestyles.

I am far more interested in reading the Milbank and Pabst book than Gray is, and my interest is piqued by Rowan Williams’ review of it.  That said, I suspect that Gray is correct about the short-term political feasibility of the (crunchy-connish, Benedict-Optiony) proposals Milbank and Pabst are said to promote. People want what they — what we — cannot have: all the material blessings of the free market and maximal liberty to determine one’s own values, without having to make any sacrifices. It can’t happen. But this is a topic for another day.

Gray has an undefined vision for the post-liberal society, one in which the best the state can do is to manage the economic disruptions ahead:

New technologies will disrupt settled patterns of working and living whatever governments may do. Popular demands cannot be met in full, but parties that do not curb the market in the interests of social cohesion are consigning themselves to the memory hole. The type of globalisation that has developed over the past decades is not politically sustainable.

To expect liberals to comprehend this situation would be unreasonable. For them, it is not only the liberal order that is melting away, but any sense of their own place in history. From being the vanguard of human progress, they find themselves powerless spectators of events. But they insist that the solution to the crisis of liberalism is clear. What is needed is more of the same: a stronger infusion of idealism; an unyielding determination to renew the liberal projects of the past. The notion that any of these projects needs to be revised or abandoned – global free trade, say, or the free movement of labour across national borders – is unthinkable. The only thing wrong with past policies, they will say, is that they were not liberal enough.

Read the whole thing. That final paragraph predicts the recriminations debate that is about to overtake the Republican Party, and that at some point will engulf the Democrats, once they realize that the answer to the nation’s problems is not more Clintonism, and more “diversity.”

Enjoy your Election Day. 

Fr. Frank Pavone Loses It

The prominent pro-life activist priest Father Frank Pavone has apparently lost his mind. In a stunt designed to convince people to vote for Donald Trump, he put the body of an aborted baby on an altar, and filmed it. Here’s a link to the video, though I warn you, it’s horrifying. Pavone writes:

Today I am showing you a child who was killed by abortion and entrusted to us by a pathologist for burial. We have had a funeral for this baby, who rests in a Memorial Chapel – -but today I am showing him to you because in this election we have to decide if we will allow this child killing to continue in America or not. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform says yes, let the child-killing continue (and you pay for it); Donald Trump and the Republican platform says no, the child should be protected.

Catholic Deacon Greg Kandra, who is strongly pro-life, Scott Eric Alt comments:

I am going to be, excuse the pun, frank: What Fr. Pavone did was a sacrilege. It is a violation of canon law, which states that the altar is consecrated for one purpose and one purpose only. It is consecrated for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is not consecrated so that a dead child can be placed there as part of a political stunt to lobby for a favored presidential candidate.

More than that, what Fr. Pavone did is the opposite of pro-life. Being pro-life is about respecting the dignity of the human person. It is the antithesis of respect for the dignity of the human person to use a dead child as a political prop to lobby for your presidential candidate the day before an election. This does no honor to the dead.

In consequence, Fr. Pavone’s ordinary should suspend his faculties–at least his faculty to celebrate Mass. There is no other way to put it than that this is a sacrilege and a scandal. The human person is not a prop for a political stunt. This is an offense to the purpose for which priests are ordained to use the altar.

A sacrilege and a scandal it is indeed. To use the body of an aborted baby as a political prop is beyond ghastly. That priest has lost all sense of proportion, to put it mildly. What a terrible thing, all the way around.

Politics, Family, & the Benedict Option

Ross Douthat had a column yesterday talking about how the decline of the family brought us to this particular miserable place in the presidential election. Excerpts:

How did we get here? How did it come to this? Not just to the Donald Trump phenomenon, but to the whole choice facing us on Tuesday, in which a managerial liberalism and an authoritarian nationalism — two visions of the president as essentially a Great Protector: a feisty grandmother or fierce sky father — are contending for the votes of an ostensibly free people?

Start with the American family. Start with my own family, as an illustration — white Protestants for the most part on both sides with a few Irish newcomers mixed, rising and falling and migrating around in the way of most families that have been in this country a long time.

His was a big family, until:

Then the social revolutions of the 1970s arrived. There were divorces, later marriages, single parenthood, abortions. In the end all those aunts and uncles, their various spouses and my parents — 12 baby boomers, all told — only had seven children: myself, my sister and five cousins.

So instead of widening, my family tree tapered, its branches thinned. And it may thin again, since so far the seven cousins in my generation have only three children. All of them are mine.

The column ends like this:

In either case, the demagogues of the future will have ample opportunity to exploit the deep loneliness that a post-familial society threatens to create.

This loneliness may manifest in economic anxiety on the surface, in racial and cultural anxiety just underneath. But at bottom it’s more primal still: A fear of a world in which no one is bound by kinship to take care of you, and where you can go down into death leaving little or nothing of yourself behind.

Read the whole thing.

There was some online reaction yesterday along the lines of “sheesh, get a load of that right-wing Catholic rant about the evils of contraception.” That is completely misguided. Douthat’s point is profound. It’s about the loss of community and communal purpose, and the effect this has on our politics. It’s not just about America, either.

Douthat wrote the introductory essay to ISI’s 2010 reprint of Robert Nisbet’s classic 1950s study The Quest for Community. In that intro, Douthat described the book “not as a policy manifesto for a movement or a party, but as a thoughtful, elegant, and persuasive statement about human nature, and the kind of politics that’s best suited to the cultivation of our common life.”

Nisbet’s book is due for a re-reading. Consider these passages in light of the choice the nation faces tomorrow. The first lines:

One may paraphrase the famous words of Karl Marx and say that a specter is haunting the modern mind, the specter of insecurity. Surely the outstanding characteristic of contemporary thought on man and society is the preoccupation with personal alienation and cultural disintegration.

Nisbet wrote those lines in 1953. This didn’t just happen to us yesterday.

Modernity, he writes, is about the steady emancipation of the individual from the dead hand of the past. We have achieved this to an extraordinary degree, but we have found ourselves surrounded “by the sense of disenchantment and alienation.”

Mary Eberstadt wrote a good book a few years ago putting forth the theory that the West lost God because it first lost the family. This idea shows up in Nisbet, who says that when our relationship to God is not mediated through “the concreted facts of historical life,” then “the relation with God becomes tenuous, amorphous, and insupportable.

For more and more theologians of today the solitary individuals before God has his inevitable future in Jung’s “modern man in search of a soul.” Man’s alienation from man must lead in time to man’s alienation from God. The loss of the sense of visible community in Christ will be followed by the loss of the sense of the invisible. The decline of community in the modern world has as its inevitable religious consequence the creation of masses of helpless, bewildered individuals who are unable to find solace in Christianity regarded merely as creed. The stress upon the individual, at the expense of the churchly community, has led remorselessly to the isolation of the individuals, to the shattering of the man-God relationship, and to the atomization of personality.

Check this out, keeping the Trump voter in mind:

Material improvement that is unaccompanied by a sense of personal belonging may actually intensify social dislocation and personal frustration.

“The true hallmark of the proletarian,” Toynbee warns us, “is neither poverty nor humble birth, but a consciousness — and the resentment which this consciousness inspires — of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society and being unwanted in a community which is his rightful home; and this subjective proletarianism is not incompatible with the possession of material assets.”

Here’s something else:

For an ever-increasing number of people the conditions now prevailing in Western society would appear to have a great deal in common with the unforgettable picture Sir Samuel Dill has given us of the last centuries of the Roman Empire: of enlarging masses of individuals detached from any sense of community, status, or function, turning with a kind of organized desperation to exotic escapes, to every sort of spokesman for salvation on earth, and to ready-made techniques of relief from nervous exhaustion. In our own time we are confronted by the spectacle of innumerable individuals seeking escape from the very processes of individualism and impersonality which the nineteenth-century rationalist haled as the very condition of progress.

I’ll quote one more bit before moving on:

Why has the quest for community become the dominant social tendency of the twentieth century? What are the forces that have conspired, at the very peak of three centuries of economic and political advancement, to make the problem of community more urgent in the minds of men than it has been since the last days of the Roman Empire?

It has been some time since I read this book (I am pulling quotes from my own marked-up copy; the ones you see here are among the many I underlined), but I recall that the most dated part of the book is Nisbet’s assumption — common among 1950s conservatives — that the Leviathan State was the chief enemy of true community. What Nisbet did not anticipate was that unrestrained market capitalism was also an enemy of same. I thought this Thomas Frank essay yesterday in The Guardian bashing both Republicans and Democrats for failing blue-collar America was half-brilliant, in the way Thomas Frank is. Excerpts:

But what makes Trump the ace is that he has successfully captured the anger of average people who see themselves on the receiving end of a “rigged” system, to use the cliche of the year. He has turned the tables of class grievance on the Democratic party, the traditional organisation of the American left. How did this happen?

Let us start with the Democrats. Were you to draw a Venn diagram of the three groups whose interaction defines the modern-day Democratic party – liberals, meritocrats and plutocrats – the space where they intersect would be an island seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard.

It is, says Frank, the habitat of wealthy technocratic liberals who think of themselves as representing the underdog. But they’re wrong. Here’s more, with Frank quoting a union activist:

“And they understand,” he continued, “that they’re working two and three jobs just to get by, a lot of them can’t own anything and they understand seeing Mom and Dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they’re working at Hardee’s or McDonald’s to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that.”

Those awful words are a fairly accurate account of the situation faced by a vast part of the population in America, a population that was brought up expecting to enjoy life in what it is often told is the richest country in the world. It is not really the fault of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton that things have unfolded in such a lousy way for these people. As everyone knows, it is the Republicans that ushered the world into the neoliberal age; that cut the taxes of the rich with a kind of religious conviction; that did so much to unleash Wall Street and deregulate everything else; that declared eternal war on the welfare state.

And, as usual, here is where Frank skews things. You can certainly blame Bill Clinton for things going wrong, as well as the Republicans. That’s the whole Clinton thing: Democrats who have made their peace with free market economics. Anybody who thinks the economic cock-up was entirely a Republican plot ought to spend some time watching the PBS Frontline documentary about Brooksley Born. I don’t think it’s available to watch online anymore, but you can certainly read transcripts of the interviews. Here’s a clip from the interview with Born’s colleague Michael Greenberger, explaining why Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and the Clintonistas shut her down in 1998 when she warned them that the big banks were out of control:

But at that time, why do the banks have such clout inside the Clinton administration?

It’s a very interesting question. But I think one of the driving forces, politically at that time, was that the financial services industry was essentially a Republican-captured institution and that these were the New Democrats that were going to prove to the financial services industry that they could do better. The economy is booming. You’ve never made so much money. Don’t look to the Republicans as your saving grace. Look to the Bob Rubins of this world, who are melding Democratic politics with a growth economy. …

Trump is right about this: when it comes to Wall Street and big money, there is only one party in Washington. If you expect Clinton Democrats to be better than Republicans, you’re fooling yourself.

Anyway, back to Thomas Frank:

But history works in strange ways. Another thing the Republicans did, beginning in the late 60s, was to present themselves as the party of ordinary, unaffected people, of what Richard Nixon (and now Donald Trump) called the “silent majority”. They cast the war between right and left as a kind of inverted class struggle, in which humble, hard-working, God-fearing citizens would choose to align themselves with the party of Herbert Hoover.

And so Republicans smashed unions and cut the taxes of the rich even as they praised blue-collar citizens for their patriotism and their “family values”. Working-class “Reagan Democrats” left their party to back a man who performed enormous favours for the wealthy and who did more than anyone to usher the world into its modern course of accelerating inequality.

What drives me nuts about Frank’s analysis (and this is what he always says) is how materialist it is. He doesn’t seem to understand that these moral and social issues that Democrats like Frank simply don’t take seriously actually are taken seriously by many Republican voters. Look, if you were an economically liberal gay voter, and for whatever reason the GOP was much better than your own party on gay rights, wouldn’t you vote Republican, or at least be seriously tempted to? You would do so because there are some issues that are more important than economics. Frank’s take on things is that if Reagan Democrat types had only realized that social issues were truly meaningless, nothing but an attempt to distract them from what really matters, the distribution of resources, they would have voted Democrat all along. This is as blind as conservative stalwarts who cannot or will not see that the economy really does play a role in tearing apart families and communities. (Side note, lest we all get nostalgic for the pre-Reagan years: the economy in the 1970s was terrible, and everybody knew we couldn’t carry on like this forever.)

Anyway, Frank again:

But what has also made Trumpism possible is the simultaneous evolution of the Democrats, the traditional workers’ party, over the period I have been describing. They went from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard and they did so at roughly the same time that the Republicans were sharpening their deadly image of the “liberal elite”.

And so the reversal is complete and the worst choice ever is upon us. We are invited to select between a populist demagogue and a liberal royalist, a woman whose every step on the campaign trail has been planned and debated and smoothed and arranged by powerful manipulators. The Wall Street money is with the Democrats this time, and so is Silicon Valley, and so is the media, and so is Washington, and so, it sometimes seems, is righteousness itself. Hillary Clinton appears before us all in white, the beneficiary of a saintly kind of subterfuge.

Read the whole thing. Even if I don’t agree with all of it, there are useful insights in it.

The kind of social policies and moral causes pushed by the Democrats in specific and liberals in general worked to unravel families and communities as much if not more than Republican economic policies. Good luck getting partisans on either side to see their own complicity in this effect.

No matter who wins tomorrow, the unraveling is going to continue. I expect to consider the next president, no matter which one it is, as a distant figurehead who is a threat to my family and community, and to be endured, not supported. I did not feel this way about Obama, even though I did not vote for him either time. If Obama were about to be elected to a third term, though, I would absolutely feel that way about him, given the direction of his administration on religious liberty. The next president, I believe, is going to put this country at serious risk of more foreign wars, which I expect will be my duty to oppose. In my case, I have liked and disliked particular administrations, and liked and disliked the same administration, but on different issues. But never have I felt so alienated from the government. Hell, I’m so done with them that I’m not even angry about it. What’s the point of being angry? We have too much work to do at the local level.

A reader sent in this good essay from First Things today, by philosophy professor John Cuddeback. In it, he talks about Aristotle and the election. Excerpts:

Aristotle envisions a common commitment to the virtuous life—or in any case a common conception of what the virtuous life is—as at the heart of political society.

But even if one grants Aristotle’s point in the abstract, does it have any relevance today?

I will not argue here that classical liberalism is wrong on this matter—though I think it is. I want rather to emphasize that if we are going to work for the renewal of our polity and local communities, we need to grapple with the fact that real human community requires more unanimity of thought and practice than we have realized.

More:

Aristotle’s position combines a clear conception of the ideal with a practical perception of what to do when the ideal is not realized. When the broader political community is not what it should be, then a man reasonably focuses his attention closer to home. Taken for granted here is that family and friends share a conviction that living virtuously is the only truly good human life, and that we need friendship and social solidarity in pursuing that great good.

This approach might appear at first a formula for simply receding from a political environment that one does not find “friendly.” Closer consideration, however, reveals a more subtle approach. At work here is a simple principle: Focus your energy where it can be most fruitful—on the common good.

Regardless of the broader climate, we can seek with family and friends to forge a fully human life —though in an unfriendly political environment it will be especially arduous. At least in these smaller communities we can try to put first things first, and thus all things in their proper place. In such communities we experience the kind of solidarity requisite for achieving human excellence in virtue.

Such attention to friendship, family, and local community does not entail an abandonment of the broader political process. On the contrary, building such cells of excellence is a fundamental requirement for the renewal of the broader polity.

Read the whole thing. Cuddeback never uses the term, but he makes a better case than I do (or at least a more succinct one) for the Benedict Option as a rational response to the dead ends of our national politics. Remember this John Adams quote?:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Well, could it be that we must study St. Benedict and build the local churches and forms of community so that our sons and daughters, the children of strong families, will be able to study politics, so that their children may have the opportunity to study and practice all the arts of civilized life in the time of rebuilding to come?

Beck Sings of Seikilos

Ever heard of the “Song of Seikilos”? I had not, until a couple of weeks ago, when I was listening to Robert Greenberg’s excellent Great Courses lectures on music. This is the oldest complete song, with music and lyrics, that we have. It was written on a stele circa 100 AD. It’s an epitaph written by a Greek named Seikilos — possibly for his own grave, or that of someone he knew. The lyrics are:

While you live, shine

have no grief at all

life exists only for a short while

and time demands an end.

And they come with music! Check out the performance above. It’s really and truly haunting.

I kept listening to it, and couldn’t figure out what it reminded me of. Then it hit me: this song from one of my favorite albums:

Here are Beck’s lyrics. The musical reference is clear to me. What about the lyrical one? Less so, but perhaps. “The puzzles and pagans lay” could refer to the stele and the pagan Greek buried under it. I dunno, what do you think?

I been drifting along

In the same stale shoes

Loose ends tying a noose

In the back of my mind

If you thought that you were making your way

To where the puzzles and pagans lay

I’ll put it together:

It’s a strange invitation

When I wake up

Someone will sweep up my lazy bones

And we will rise in the cool of the evening

I remember the way that you smiled

When the gravity shackles were wild

And something is vacant

When I think it’s all beginning

I been drifting along

In the same stale shoes

Loose ends tying the noose

In the back of my mind

If you thought that you were making your way

To where the puzzles and pagans lay

I’ll put it together:

It’s a strange invitation

Dies Irae = Election Day

Michael Brendan Dougherty says this election is God’s judgment on America, and he’s not kidding. Excerpts:

In 2016, self-described conservatives, the supposed defenders of the eternal verities, our national traditions, and family values, are rallying to the side of a cretinous, amoral lecher and thief. And liberals, the friends of the little guy and advocates of friendship among all races of men, are siding with a desiccated grifter and war hawk.

Lots of explanations for that, MBD says, but the one he finds most true? The wrath of God:

Conservatives tell themselves to present themselves as “optimistic.” Religious people in America tell themselves to be “winsome.” I’m a religious conservative and I’ve tried all that. I’ve made the idea of God’s chastisement of our nation into a fun joke in another column at the beginning of this ugly spectacle. But the hour is at hand. And it’s my duty to be honest with you.

I’m not joking. This isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. I’ll give you all the technical and historical knowledge I have. We can discuss history and analyze policy options all day. But if you want my answer for what is actually going on in this election, I suspect we are experiencing God’s wrath.

And:

I look at the headlines, our candidates, our political parties, our civic life, and mostly what occurs to me is that God has given us over to ourselves in this election, and he lets us make fools of ourselves with it. And not just this election. All the signs of God’s judgment of a nation, or a civilization, seem to be on us. In the Biblical accounts of Chronicles, you see the pattern. Faithful kings “seek” after God and ensure that a faithful liturgy is celebrated in Solomon’s Temple. Unfaithful kings make alliances with wicked nations, and cement these alliances with idolatrous worship in “the high places” or even the Temple itself. This lack of faithfulness is generalized, and the priests become wicked and oppressive. The life of God’s people becomes marked by violence, dislocation, and oppression. They lose the blessings of the Lord: good harvests, healthy children. They stop winning wars. They are conquered.

The Catholic Church, which I belong to, is rotten with wicked priests and mediocre leadership, ruined by pathetic attempts to make an alliance with the spirit of the age it lives in. It debauched its own liturgy to effect this alliance. Our sister churches of the Middle East are being put on the wrack of martyrdom by Sunni extremists, and the Western Church — fat with German money — is obsessed about how it might come to bless adultery. Last week, I read that the pope is seeking to come to some kind of understanding with a murderous regime in China. How pitiful. And then I look closer to home. Many civilizations have disgraced themselves with the murder of their enemies. But my own is one of few so debauched that we kill our own children and call it good.

There’s a lot more. Read the whole thing. 

Last night I was doing the very last work on the forthcoming Benedict Option book (boy, is that one well-timed!), end-noting the penultimate chapter, which is about technology. Here’s a passage from the manuscript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The argument goes like this: babies are good things, so anything technology does to help people have babies is therefore good. Love, as they say, wins. The technocrat decides what he or she wants and, once it is available via technology, rationalizes accepting it. Concealing what technology takes away from us is a feature of the technocratic worldview. We come to think of technological advances as inevitable because they are irresistible. Just as “truth” for the technocrat is what is useful and effective, what is “good” for him is what is possible and desirable.

God’s judgment falls on the just and the unjust — and let’s us orthodox Christians not fool ourselves: there are far more of us in the “unjust” camp than we think.

We have it coming. We really do. America started the war in the Middle East that has destroyed so many lives. America is leading the world towards the destruction of the family, and calling it virtue. And on and on. As Livy said of the late Roman Republic, “We can endure neither our vices nor their cure.”

Consider the sign of Norcia. The town is desolate now, depopulated because its people have fled in fear of further earthquakes. Its churches, including the basilica of St. Benedict, are ruins. Spiritually speaking, this is us. And yet, because the monks took the early warning signs seriously (e.g., the August quake) and relocated to the hills just outside the town, their lives were spared from the later quake that brought their basilica crumbling to the ground. In fact, not a single one of the Norcini lost his or her life, because they had all moved to safer ground, even though it meant embracing a harder way of living.

Now the monks have survived, and are present to rebuild amid the ruins. And us? Let he who has eyes to see, see. People are going to laugh at Michael Brendan Dougherty for his column. I’m not laughing. He’s brave to say what a lot of us are thinking. And he’s right.

 

Overheard At The Pizza Parlor

I’m sitting here at a mom and pop pizza shop working on the end notes for my book. I’m listening to the owner, a frazzled-looking middle-aged man, complain to what looks like a regular customer, and elderly woman eating a salad.

“I can’t count on any of these kids,” he said to her. “They don’t think they have any obligation to come in to do their shift if they don’t want to. One of them called in this morning and said that she didn’t feel up to coming in to work. She didn’t sound too sick to me. She just didn’t want to be here. They drink too much the night before, they don’t come in — and they don’t see nothing wrong with it.”

The old woman nodded.

“That’s how they all are,” he continued. “So I gotta come in and do their shift. I try to tell them that it doesn’t matter how sick I am, or what I have planned for my day off; if they don’t do their shifts, I’m outta luck. I don’t understand this generation. When I was there age, I worked through sickness a lot of the time. Everybody did. Wasn’t it that way with y’all?”

The old lady nodded again.

“I don’t know what happened. People not like that anymore. You can’t count on nobody. It’s hard to find good help these days. Sometimes I don’t know how we stay open.”

FWIW.

Trash-Mouth Philosopher Trashes Trump

Troubled Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley writes in The New York Times today:

As the Republican candidate for president in 2016, Donald J. Trump has accomplished many things. He engaged in rhetorical tactics unprecedented in recent American electoral history. He was straightforwardly misogynistic. He repeatedly endorsed obviously false claims. There were frequent open discussions of the intentions behind his many odd comments, retractions, semi-retractions and outright false statements.

Well, if anybody knows about vile, hateful rhetoric, it is troubled Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley. ‘Memba this, in response to a very mild speech given by an eminent Christian philosopher, in which the philosopher mentioned that homosexuality is considered to be disordered by Christian standards (something that was not a controversial claim for nearly two millennia, until about a generation ago)?:

I am really mortified about this. My comment “F*ck those assholes”, posted on a friend’s private FB page about homophobes, was *photographed*. Even *worse*, it made it into *the right-wing hateosphere*, where it is being linked and relinked. I really wish now I hadn’t said that!! I PROFOUNDLY regret not using much harsher language and saying what I really think of anyone who uses their religion to promote homophobia, you know that sickness that has led people for thousands of years to kill my fellow human beings for their sexual preferences. Like you know, pink triangles and the Holocaust. I am really, truly, embarrassed by the fact that my mild comment “F*ck those assholes” is being spread. This wildly understates my actual sentiments towards homophobic religious proponents of evil like Richard Swinburne, who use their status as professional philosophers to oppress others with less power. I am SO SORRY for using such mild language. I am posting this on “public” so that there will be no need for anyone to violate any religious code of ethics and take pictures of private FB pages to share my views about such matters.

That’s New York Times contributor and Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley, everybody. Presuming to lecture the rest of us about Donald J. Trump’s reckless use of language. Mind you, a presidential candidate who gives himself over to hateful public language that reveals his lack of character is not the same thing as an Ivy League philosopher doing it. The point to be made here is that people in Jason Stanley’s class give themselves permission to speak viciously about out groups, and pay no professional price at all. How do you think traditional Christians, Muslims, or Orthodox Jews in Stanley’s classes must feel, knowing that their professor harbors such spite in his heart for people like them? How eager will they be to speak up in class to offer opinions or even to ask questions that stand to offend him? He does not teach at Podunk Community College; he teaches at the training ground of America’s elites.

More and more, it’s not about equal justice for all but rather “who, whom?”.

One of the few good things I can imagine coming out of a Trump victory will be that it will ruin the next four years for the sitting Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy.

 

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Grilled oysters at the tailgate before the Alabama game. The hand belongs to the legendary Ken Bickford, who was pouring frozen French 75s. A couple of guys from this motley bunch were there.

A couple more came in today:

Herndon, Virginia

Kodiak, Alaska

The Alaska reader writes:

I don’t know if this counts because I don’t have a breakfast nook table set up yet, though that’s eventually the plan. Home made Bison chorizo sausage scrambled with vegetables and eggs. View out the harbor in Kodiak, Alaska. Bison is from Kodiak too.