Rod Dreher's Blog, page 520

Truth, Or Social Justice: Pick One

Philosopher Elaine Scarry, from her book On Beauty And Being Just:

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Platon’s dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation. Sometimes their institutional gravity and awkwardness can seem tonally out of register with beauty, which, like a small bird, has an aura of fragility, as when Simone Weil, in Waiting for God writes:

The love of the beauty of the world … involves … the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world, openings onto it.

But Weil’s list of precious things, openings into the world, begins not with a flight of a bird but with education: “Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences.” To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

It’s hard to read this without thinking of Jonathan Haidt’s recent essay stating that universities must choose one telos: Truth, or Social Justice. (Telos is the Greek word for “goal”.) They can have both, but they cannot have both equally.  Excerpts:

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

More:

Marx is the patron saint of what I’ll call “Social Justice U,” which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what I’ll call “Truth U,” which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In the process, all become smarter. Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.

More:

Sacredness

Humanity evolved for tribal conflict. Along the way we evolved a neat trick: Our ability to forge a team by circling around sacred objects & principles. In the academy we traditionally circled around truth (at least in the 20th century, and not perfectly).  But in the 21st century we increasingly circle around a few victim groups. We want to protect them and help them and wipe out prejudice against them. We want to change the world with our scholarship. This is an admirable goal, but this new secular form of “worship” of victims has intersected with other sociological trends to give rise to a “culture of victimhood” on many campuses, particularly those that are the most egalitarian and politically uniform. Victimhood culture breeds “moral dependency” in the very students it is trying to help – students learn to appeal to 3rd parties (administrators) to resolve their conflicts rather than learning to handle conflicts on their own.

Anti-Fragility

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche was right, and Nasim Taleb’s book “Antifragile” explains why. Kids need thousands of hours of unsupervised play and thousands of conflicts and challenges that they resolve without adult help, in order to become independently functioning adults. But because of changes in American childrearing that began in the 1980s, and especially because of the helicopter parenting that took off in the 1990s for middle class and wealthy kids, they no longer get those experiences.

Instead they are enmeshed in a “safety culture” that begins when they are young and that is now carried all the way through college. Books and words and visiting speakers are seen as “dangerous” and even as forms of “violence.” Trigger warnings and safe spaces are necessary to protect fragile young people from danger and violence. But such a culture is incompatible with political diversity, since many conservative ideas and speakers are labeled as threatening and banned from campus and the curriculum. Students who question the dominant political ethos are worn down by hostile reactions in the classroom. This is one of the core reasons why universities must choose one telos. Any institution that embraces safety culture cannot have the kind of viewpoint diversity that Mill advocated as essential in the search for truth.

Read the whole thing. It’s short, and to the point — and extremely clarifying.

It is clear that SJWs — not only militant students, but also, and especially, their fellow travelers on faculties and in administrations — are destroying the university as we know it. They may not mean to be, but that’s exactly what they are doing — and professors who try to split the difference between Truth and Social Justice are aiding and abetting the tearing down.

Re-read Elaine Scarry’s remarks. Beauty, like truth and goodness, is never something we can possess in its entirety, but we can prepare ourselves to see it clearly when it presents itself. Or we can prepare ourselves to be blind to its presence. Social Justice (such as it is) can be by-product of the search for Truth, but it can never be a substitute. If it is pursued as such, it will become an idol, and make it much harder to see truth, goodness, and beauty. This is largely what the Commedia is about.

Haidt’s is not a religious vs. secular argument. I would a thousand times rather my Christian children attend a secular college that claims Truth as its telos than attend a Christian college that makes Social Justice its telos, or that fails to make Truth its exclusive telos.

But Haidt’s insight is also true for churches today. If we diligently seek Truth, and seek to conform our lives as much as possible around what we believe to be True, then we will inevitably achieve a form of Social Justice. But there can be no Justice, social or otherwise, without Truth. And Truth can never be what serves a pre-determined goal — the Revolution, the party, equality, the nation, the family, the temporal interests of the Church, nothing.

Those contemporary churches that put anything above the fearless pursuit of Truth, and living in Truth, will die, because they have no way of protecting their vision of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful — which is to say, God. They subordinate it to worldly, temporal concerns, and destroy their only mechanism (so to speak) for perceiving God clearly. To be clear, it is impossible for any church to see the entire Truth, and in any case, for Christians, Truth is not merely a set of propositions, but is a Person, Jesus Christ. This has profound implications that we can’t really get into in this post. My point is, churches, like universities, that place politics, culture, or any other goal over Truth are signing their own death warrants.

It is important that people see this now, and make plans accordingly. It is a time of winnowing. Universities and churches are precious things that can be destroyed, and are being destroyed at this very minute. Ideas have consequences, and so do choices.

The Low Pleasures Of A Trump Victory

So, I’m not casting a vote in this year’s presidential election. I expect Hillary Clinton to win, and that will make me miserable and fearful about the future. If Donald Trump were to win, that would make me miserable and even more fearful about the future. But I gotta say, I liked the strongly anti-Trumpist Damon Linker’s column today about the pleasures he would find in a Trump victory. Excerpts:

2. Progressives would learn that “history” is not on their “side.” Progressives believe in … progress. It’s their ideological faith, held as deeply as any religious creed. “Which side of history are you on?” — that’s the rhetorical question progressives are always tempted to pose when some event or trend seems to belie their providential convictions, and that’s very much been the case with the rise of Donald Trump. With Barack Obama, they believe, or want to believe, that the arc of history bends toward justice (with justice defined in such a way that it perfectly conforms to progressive assumptions about morality and government). Since I don’t believe that history has “sides” — and think that those who do are often led by their faith to make foolish mistakes — I would enjoy seeing the presumption flouted by a Trump victory, much as I enjoyed watching the surprise outcome of the Brexit vote send progressives on both sides of the Atlantic into hysterics.

And:

4. Hubristic Democratic elites would be humiliated. The establishment of the Democratic Party rallied around and nominated a deeply flawed candidate this year — one who is highly likely to preside over an administration continually dogged, and ultimately consumed, by scandal. Imagine the post-1972 Nixon White House for four years (assuming, of course, that Clinton manages to avoid impeachment and/or indictment for that long). It’s a sign of how much I detest Trump that I’ve consistently favored her over him every single day since he won the nomination. But on this one day, in this one column, I will admit that a small part of me would love to see the Democrats go down to a painful, humiliating defeat next Tuesday as comeuppance for their dumbass decision to coronate a Clinton this year instead of fielding a candidate who could have wiped the floor with Trump.

Read the whole thing.

If Trump wins, on Wednesday morning I will wake up looking for something good, anything. The idea that the election results will have ruined the day of these horrible people, as well as this sad-sack sycophant, is … well, it’s better than nothing.

The Word From Norcia: ‘Fiat. Fiat.’

Father Benedict Nivakoff writes from Norcia:

Dear friends,

Our life as monks has entered an entirely new phase, one we never expected but in which we see, unmistakably, God’s hand. He asks us to build up our community here on the mountain strongly and decisively based on prayer and conversion so that we might become saints for our time. He also asks us to rebuild the ruins of our monastery at St. Benedict’s home and to make it a source of light, hope and truth for monks and nuns throughout the world, as well as for all those who long for God.

In the days of aftershocks since last Sunday’s powerful quake that destroyed our ancient basilica and monastery, God has brought calm to our monks’ hearts in this new mission. In fact, one of our observers went ahead and received the tonsure and choir cape of postulancy at Vespers the same evening of the massive quake. We offered him the chance to go home, of course, but he would hear nothing of it. That is the way with this earthquake: it binds the monks to the very ground that shakes.

Visitors now regularly include state officials and international celebrities. The President of Italy came two days ago and gave personal greetings to the 3 monks who had served the faithful on the morning of the earthquake. The new Abbot Primate joined us also for prayer and a meal in fraternal support. We are cheered by these and in awe at the worldwide outpouring of support. We have become friends with the firefighters who now guard the entire city. A forced evacuation has meant the whole town is now empty.

We pray and watch from the mountainside, thinking of the long three years St. Benedict spent in the cave before God decided to call him out to become a light to the world. Fiat. Fiat.

In Christ,


Fr. Benedict

Subprior

“Fiat” means “let it be done to me” — the words the Virgin Mary spoke to the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation.

Look at the photo that leads this item. That’s Father Benedict on the far left, and Father Basil and Father Martin on the right. Do those look like men who just lost their home and everything they own less than a week ago? They have the peace which passes all understanding. I cannot wait to see what God does through them.

Marco Sermarini, the godfather of the Tipi Loschi, e-mailed the following today, though he started the email a few days ago. I had written to him lamenting the destruction of the tiny mountain village of Castelluccio, which he had shown me from the distance when I was with him in February:

Almost the whole of Castelluccio is ruined. There are still twenty wonderful, crazy people resisting up there. They don’t want to go away, the same as many other people living in Norcia, Accumoli, Amatrice (the hometown of the renowned spaghetti all’amatriciana), Pievetorina, Preci and other small villages. They want to remain there, in their own small beloved towns. They want to see the day when things will be rebuilt.

We are very sad for this: these places are part of our own civilization, we love those places and it’s hard to see them flattened to the ground. They are so familiar.

Today is 1st November, and it’s the 23rd anniversary of the foundation of our fellowship. We are now spending good time together, eating and drinking all together, and we are watching old pictures of our brief history. It was a sad moment when we saw a beautiful picture at the end of one of the walking pilgrimages to Norcia through the mountains: there was Father Cassian outside the Basilica waiting for the pilgrims arriving tired but happy. Now the Basilica is ruined — but not our faith.

Today Father Cassian succeeded to enter the ruined monastery with the help of the Fire Brigade men to take his notebooks and some other things. It’s a moment of trial for them, it’s aching for us, and we pray for them all the time.

We Tipi Loschi are fine, always with a sense of suspension: the earthquake was so strong that now things are different. We didn’t have damages, even if damages were in some towns not so far from here. You can touch those damages. From time to time earth makes us conscious that she keeps on moving (late at night while you are sleeping with your wife and your children, or talking during the day…). You can perceive that you are not the owner of your life, that you often trust in untrustworthy things and that you have to put all your life in the hands of Our Lord. No other way.

The Tipi Loschi helped the monks to build the wooden houses where they are living now. It was a spontaneous movement. All the hobbits wanted to go and help them, for a sense of gratefulness and Christian friendship; also the Northern Tipi Loschi (our friends from Brescia, Northern Italy) gave a wonderful hand to the Monks because they came with a gigantic truck with wooden houses and tools, and they spent a lot of time working for our beloved monks.

We ask every day the meaning of all this, but we believe that this is a moment of great consciousness. The Monks have always the right word to say to us, and things make always sense. When I say “ask the meaning,” I mean the sense of every small piece of your life changed by this earthquake. The Monks moved outside the town, for example, and this is something clear. The Basilica came down, and this is something to reflect on. It seems the image of the present moment of the world and of the Church.

I am very hopeful for the future: I am sure that from this ruin Jesus Christ will start again good things. Small people will understand that things can start again only helping each other just like we did during the old ages. That basilica didn’t grow by the help of any government, but for the love of the people for Jesus Christ and Saint Benedict. This is once again the story of Pimlico, that G. K. Chesterton tells in Orthodoxy.

Hope!

A postscript: Here is video from the Italian president’s visit to Norcia. Watch the first minute. See the weeping woman who greets him? It’s Mamma, from the peeg farm!

Everybody Row, Or We’re Going Over The Falls

A conservative reader writes with a very helpful insight into the Benedict Option:

I was thinking about the regular failure to communicate you are having with pundits & their pals. I had a thought, an analogy which might help.

It’s about the pro-life cause. People realized eventually that we have lost that fight for the time being, just as you’re saying about the culture war overall. People realized that there was no point in trying to pass laws that would make abortion illegal. So they poured themselves into local action, at pregnancy care centers.

That wasn’t done in opposition to national-level work by experts. They didn’t say that people working at pro-life organizations in DC should quit, or that they were wasting their time. We still need to keep a presence, to keep up the drumbeat and win small victories. But nobody thinks that what people are doing in the offices of the National Right to Life Committee is the most important thing happening for the pro-life cause. Reduced expectations caused ordinary people to fall back upon ourselves and ask, “Well, what can we do?”

I think the miscommunication has to do with the fact that you are speaking primarily to the 90 percent — the Christians in small and large towns who are never on TV, who never publish op-eds, etc. You are telling them that they can’t expect the professionals to do the culture war for them vicariously any more. They need to look around, like pro-lifers did, and figure out what they can do locally.

But while you’re talking to the 90 percent, the people responding to you are necessarily the 10 percent, the ones who are appearing on TV and publishing op-eds. To them, it naturally sounds like you’re telling them to give up. Your point is rather that they can’t do it alone, and you’re telling the 90 percent to gear up.

I think a general problem with the 10 percent is that they believe their work is the only important work, and ordinary people don’t contribute to the cause. And I don’t know that the 90 percent resent that. It’s easier to be a spectator. If the only effective thing a culture warrior can do is face-to-face debate with a secular leader, you’re glad that the experts are out there and you can just watch it on YouTube.

That’s what you’re fighting against — you’re telling the 90 percent that they can’t do it vicariously any more, and that their personal lives matter. Holiness matters. You’re not telling the 10 percent to quit.

I had not thought about it like that, but the reader is absolutely right.

I had a conversation with someone recently, an older white working-class woman, who told me that she had been to six baby showers recently, all for young women who were having babies without husbands. One of the women was pregnant with her third baby by the same man. None were married. The older woman was deeply distressed by this, not only for moral reasons, but because she understands how hard those children are going to have it, regarding poverty and emotional instability.  But she feels powerless to resist this trend.

There’s very little Washington can do about this, and it’s ridiculous to look to DC for solutions. There’s a lot that we can do in our own backyards, within our own little platoons, to reverse this destructive trend. But we are going to have to work much, much harder than most of us ever have. I had lunch with a friend in Baton Rouge today, a young Christian father who told me that he worries about the world his children will grow up in, regarding how the culture catechizes them about the family. We live in one of the more culturally conservative parts of the US, but that means very little.

There is no place to hide. Another friend, a Christian conservative, told me the other day that he is disinclined to be as pessimistic as I am about the culture, “but I keep looking around and thinking about alternatives to the Benedict Option, and I just don’t see any.”

The work of the 10 percent — or whatever their percentage is — laboring in politics, social services, the ministry, education, the media, and so forth, is very important. Don’t stop! But the days of going with the flow for the rest of us are over. If we don’t push back hard, we are going to be swept over the falls. It’s already happening.

UPDATE: From David Gibson’s new column about St. Augustine and this election:

Christian history is filled with examples of the competing impulses to either engage with the world or retreat from it — and even before this campaign various Christian writers and thinkers had been debating whether it was time to withdraw from society to some extent.

The most notable and articulated expression of that idea is found in Orthodox convert and writer Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” a proposal (soon to be a book) that faithful believers start to model themselves on small, intentional communities like those established in the sixth century by St. Benedict, considered the founder of Western monasticism.

Caught between the self-defeating moral rot of the established order and the brutality and chaos of an uncivilized horde, the thinking goes, a Christian has little choice but to retreat to the sanctuary and pray.

But experts say that Augustine is no Benedict.

“Augustine’s ‘City of God’ is not about hunkering down. It’s about being a public presence in every city,” said Chad Pecknold, a Catholic University of America theologian and commentator on religion and politics who is writing a book called “Augustine’s City.”

:::::heavy sigh:::::

Look, my family and I just moved from the country into the nearby city. Why? Because our mission church could not afford to pay its priest any longer, and my wife and I knew we could not bear to live 45 minutes away from the nearest Orthodox church, much less raise kids so far away from a parish. Plus, our kids are now taking classes at a classical Christian academy, where my wife teaches. We realized that we could not really be part of building up that school community while living so far away. So we moved into the city for Benedict Option reasons.

Let me repeat that: We. Moved. Into. The. City. For. Benedict. Option. Reasons.

If we small-o orthodox Christians are going to have strong presences in our post-Christian cities, we are going to have to embrace the Benedict Option where we are. That means starting new, explicitly countercultural schools, or changing the ones we have. That means strengthening the local churches we have, and/or starting prayer groups and other fellowships that help us deepen our faith and communal bonds. My Catholic friend Leah Libresco Sargeant, as a single Catholic convert living in DC, depended heavily on the fellowship and spiritual support in the community around the Dominican House of Studies around Catholic U. Plus, she undertook some initiatives to build community among her young Catholic single friends. If you don’t understand that this is the kind of thing I mean by the Benedict Option, you don’t understand the Benedict Option.

I keep hoping that when the Ben Op book comes out on March 14, that this will be more clear. I interviewed Ben Oppish Christians living in cities, in suburbs, and rurally. This is not so much a matter of geography than of what you do in the geography you inhabit. For some of us, wanting a more Benedict Option life will mean moving to the country. For others, it will mean moving to the city. And for still others, it will mean staying in place, but organizing things differently.

People who say that I’m talking about everybody running to their bunkers hidden in the mountains need to stop it. It’s not true.

The Winnowing Of Christianity

Last night I rode with a traditionalist Catholic friend down to New Orleans to attend a Requiem mass featuring the music of Gabriel Fauré. It was deeply moving, and ravishingly beautiful. I’ve loved Fauré’s Requiem for years, but I have never heard it performed as part of worship. On the drive back, we talked about the travails in the Catholic Church now, and what ordinary faithful Catholics should do when there is so much confusion coming from the church’s leadership.

We talked for a bit about why it is that Evangelicals, who lack the ecclesial structure of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, have an easier time than the rest of us do holding to the orthodox biblical position on contentious moral issues of our time. Nevertheless, Evangelicalism is undergoing a similar winnowing over the issue of how to respond to homosexuality. Denny Burk, a Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor, writes about it on his blog. Excerpts:

I was just rereading an essay I wrote about six years ago on what the bible teaches about homosexuality. That essay begins with a discussion of Brian McLaren’s then recent affirmation of committed homosexual relationships.

It is strange to read that essay now and to consider in retrospect how quickly McLaren faded from evangelical view. At the time, the emerging church still had some purchase within the evangelical movement. Now that entire project is defunct and so are its major proponents. They pushed the very edges of the leftwing of the evangelical movement until they pushed themselves right out of the movement. Many of them did so by adopting unorthodox positions on sexuality.

The ascendancy of Emergent seems like ancient history, but it really wasn’t that long ago. How quickly its heterodoxy doomed it to irrelevancy and demise. Evangelicals no longer look to the McLarens, the Tony Joneses, or the Rob Bells for sound guidance on the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Burk highlights a really good piece by Ed Stetzer, who observes that all kinds of Evangelical organizations — even those that are fairly progressive on race and gender — are reaffirming the traditional stand on gay marriage. From Stetzer’s essay, this important and often overlooked point:

Ironically, some of the loudest post-Evangelicals (who protest Evangelical organizations making clear where they are on marriage) advocate for marriage to be an “agree to disagree” issue. In doing so, they often cite gender roles and baptismal views as similar categories where evangelicals agree to disagree. However, to be fair, this is a bit disingenuous. If you believe, as many do, that same-sex marriage is a justice issue, you don’t want to “agree to disagree” with someone that discrimination is acceptable. You want to persuade him or her. That’s not agreeing to disagree—that’s just the step before we all are to change our views.

In other words, this is a core issue for people advocating for same-sex marriage and the appropriateness of same-sex relationships, not just for those who take the traditional view.

He’s right, as about half a second of reflection reveals. The “agree to disagree” people have no intention of stopping there. That’s the camel’s nose under the tent. They take LGBT issues so seriously that they believe there can be no compromise on it. And frankly, I don’t blame them: if I believed what they do about homosexuality, I imagine that I would insist on changing the teaching too. The lesson here, though, is for Christian moderates and conservatives not to be taken in by the invitation to “dialogue” on whether or not the Biblical teaching is true, and to “agree to disagree” about the issue. It is always and everywhere a trap. Denny Burk nails it. Excerpt:

I have noticed a pretty consistent progression among those who eventually embrace gay marriage. It goes like this:

(1) Oppose gay-marriage: Everyone starts here, or at the very least they appear to start here.

(2) Oppose taking a stand on the question: Persons in this stage are becoming aware of how offensive the traditional view is to those outside the church. Their initial remedy is to avoid that conflict by not talking about the Bible’s teaching on this subject. In Brian McLaren‘s case, he urged evangelicals to observe a 5-year moratorium on talking about gay marriage. For Jen Hatmaker, she advocated going “into the basement,” where we don’t talk about these things but just love people. Choosing to avoid the question is never a final answer for anyone in this stage.

(3) Affirm gay marriage: At some point during the “we’re not talking about this anymore” stage, those who used to oppose gay marriage find grounds to affirm it. Some do it by questioning the Bible’s truthfulness. Others do through revisionist interpretations of the Biblical text. In either case, proponents end up affirming what the Bible forbids.

(4) Vilify traditional marriage proponents: Persons in this stage not only affirm gay marriage. They also view traditional marriage supporters as supporting invidious discrimination against gay people. They will adopt the rhetoric of Christianity’s fiercest critics to describe believers who hold to the Bible’s teaching on marriage and sexuality.

There’s more — read his whole post. 

This is how it always works. It’s the general dynamic behind the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”), and the specific dynamic behind Neuhaus’s Law: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”

If your church or religious organization is at the No. 2 stage, it’s probably time to start looking for the exits. Can anybody recall a church that has formally refused to take a stand on the issue (in other words, that has agreed to disagree), and that has successfully resisted being pulled to the left by activists within the church?

 

The Most Conservative Case Against Trump

Ross Douthat makes it, in this very fine piece. He begins by talking about critics of the pro-life movement who say that pro-lifers must not really believe that abortion is murder, else they would support violent action to stop this mass murder. In fact, says Douthat, Catholic Just War Theory does not allow one to stop evil by any means necessary. For one, all legal means to stop the evil must have been exhausted. For another, you have to be reasonably certain that your actions won’t call up a greater evil than the one you intend to defeat.

What does this have to do with Trump? Douthat:

A vote for Trump is not a vote for insurrection or terrorism or secession. But it is a vote for a man who stands well outside the norms of American presidential politics, who has displayed a naked contempt for republican institutions and constitutional constraints, who deliberately injects noxious conspiracy theories into political conversation, who has tiptoed closer to the incitement of political violence than any major politician in my lifetime, whose admiration for authoritarian rulers is longstanding, who has endorsed war crimes and indulged racists and so on down a list that would exhaust this column’s word count if I continued to compile it.

It is a vote, in other words, for a far more chaotic and unstable form of political leadership (on the global stage as well as on the domestic) than we have heretofore experienced, and a leap unlike any that conservative voters have considered taking in all the long years since Roe v. Wade.

Douthat says he agrees that “grave evils will follow from electing Hillary Clinton.

But the Trump alternative is like a feckless war of choice in the service of some just-seeming end, with a commanding general who likes war crimes. It’s a ticket on a widening gyre, promising political catastrophe and moral corruption both, no matter what ideals seem to justify it.

And:

[B]ecause the deepest conservative insight is that justice depends on order as much as order depends on justice. So when Loki or the Joker or some still-darker Person promises the righting of some grave wrong, the defeat of your hated enemies, if you will only take a chance on chaos and misrule, the wise and courageous response is to tell them to go to hell.

Exactly right, and bravo. I have not seen the most profound anti-Trump conservative case made so well by anybody.

This is the tragedy of the 2016 presidential vote for conservatives: a choice between the most progressive and corrupt Democratic nominee in our lifetime, versus a Republican of convenience whose answer to the very real problems we face is to blow it all up and create chaos.

To me, it’s not Trump’s stated policies that’s the problem. It’s his character. Douthat elaborated on this point in his Sunday column, which I commend to your attention. In brief, Trump has no core convictions, and possesses — or, to be precise, is possessed by — a temperament that he cannot control, and which would get this country into a world of trouble were he to take the White House. Prudence is said to be a cardinal conservative virtue. Trump has not one scintilla of it. As governing a superpower is not a reality television show, I think the chance of war and civil unrest under a Trump presidency is much greater than under a Clinton one. These are the evils, or potential evils, greater than any of the certain evils that a Clinton administration would bring. We can’t take that chance.

The desperate day may come when a Trump is justified for conservatives. But we are not there yet, and we should hope that we don’t get there. What we face with Trump is not a restoration of conservative order, but the dismantling of the American order. This unwinding is already happening fast enough on its own; it does not need assistance from a President Trump, and conservatives voting for him Because Hillary.

Now, I confess that this is an easier position for me to take — being #NeverHillary and #NeverTrump — because I live in a state that’s going to go solidly for Trump. If I lived in a swing state, I don’t know what I would do. I still would not vote Trump, but I would have to face the decision I faced in the autumn of 1991: do I vote for an objectively crooked Edwin Edwards to save the state from David Duke? I did then. Would I now? Is Trump as bad as Duke? These are questions I get to duck this year, but a lot of you readers no doubt have to face them. I’m eager to hear in the comments section how you are wrestling with them.

Note to commenters: I’m going to police this thread pretty closely to keep out trolls and bomb-throwers. I want to hear from conservative readers who are struggling with their vote, to hear how they are reasoning. I don’t care if you’ve decided to vote Hillary, Trump, or third party; I want to know how you arrived at that decision — and, if you haven’t made the decision yet, what’s weighing on your mind?

UPDATE: I have to include this funny pic, which a reader just sent. Something tells me that this image was shot in Wisconsin, and that Uncle Chuckie slipped out under the cover of darkness and put up the sign:

Aboard The Trump Truck

A reader just photographed this on Perkins Road in Baton Rouge. Notice the quote from 2 Thessalonians in the back window.

UPDATE: The full verse is:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first

The Trump of God. If anyone from coastal America came within 20 feet of the Trump Truck and its potent awesomeness, they would sizzle and fry like moths on a bug zapper.

Hillary: The Archbishop In Her Cathedral

Did you see Scott McConnell’s great TAC piece on the rise of the alt-right? In it, he talks about how whatever its excesses, the alt-right, in both its harder and softer versions, have a more realistic sense of what is going on in the West now than do many in the mainstream. I think this is correct, and the failure of the establishment parties and institutions to absorb the critique and to adjust for it makes for a dangerous and destabilizing situation.

I do not consider myself part of the alt-right (and they sure wouldn’t welcome a God-botherer like me), but they do have some important insights. One of the most useful concepts that has emerged from the alt-right is the idea of the Cathedral, a term coined by Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug and other alt-rightists consider progressivism/universalism to be a form of godless religion (and by progressivism, they include the GOP; remember, Alasdair MacIntyre said that in our modern liberal democracies, there are only liberals: conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals). Those who worship in the Cathedral aren’t aware of themselves as being adherents to a pseudo-religion. They think that they are simply part of the way the world works. The Cathedral itself is the infrastructure of their world: the established media organs, education industry, politics, entertainment, law — basically, all the opinion-forming and gatekeeping institutions of American society. Moldbug has called it a “mystery cult of power.”

Keep that in mind when you read this powerful Guardian essay by the liberal writer Thomas Frank, commenting on what the Wikileaks theft and revelation of John Podesta’s emails tells us about the Cathedral. Excerpts:

They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

More:

The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.

Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery).

The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg. He makes plans to visit Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to “learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action”).

More:

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appearsto have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

Read the whole thing. Thomas Frank is one angry leftist — and he’s right to be. This is why I say that the Democratic Party is bound to get its Donald Trump one of these days — sooner rather than later. The Democratic leaders of the Cathedral can no more imagine losing power than the Renaissance popes did in the years prior to the Reformation, or the canons in the GOP wing of the Cathedral a year ago could imagine a grubby outsider like Donald Trump would be heading the party’s ticket going into the election, having torn the party to shreds.

This is not a brief for Donald Trump. As much as I take pleasure in the Cathedral’s pain, I agree with Ross Douthat that Trump is probably more dangerous than what he seeks to replace. In that sense, I am more Erasmus than Luther. Trump wishes to tear down a system that he sees as thoroughly corrupt (and he’s not entirely wrong in that, not by a long shot), but he does not know what to replace it with. From Douthat’s Sunday column:

There is no algorithm that can precisely calibrate how to weigh global instability against the reasons that remain for conservatives to vote for Trump. No mathematical proof can demonstrate that the chance of a solidly-conservative Supreme Court justice isn’t worth a scaled-up risk of great power conflict.

But I think that reluctant Trump supporters are overestimating the systemic durability of the American-led order, and underestimating the extent to which a basic level of presidential competence and self-control is itself a matter of life and death — for Americans, and for human beings the world over.

I may be wrong. But none of my fears (and I have many) of what a Hillary Clinton presidency will bring are strong enough to make me want to run the risk of being proven right.

I still believe Hillary Clinton will win this election, but if she does, it will settle almost nothing. The forces called up by the Cathedral’s failures — forces that have already sacked its Republican wing — will not go away anytime soon. And the Cathedral is unlikely to reform itself, because the stories it tells itself to justify its ways are theological, and immune to criticism or serious revision. What is likely to happen after this election is a further atomization of the American body politic, as more and more Americans come to recognize the correctness of the Cathedral as a symbol for the ruling elites, and embrace heterodoxy in one form of another.

The Cathedral’s archbishop, her canons, and its entire staff may wake up one day to find themselves in the approximate position of the Catholic bishops of Ireland did in the past decade: discovering that the congregation has disappeared, having lost faith in the Cathedral because of outside forces drawing them away, but also — and especially — because the Cathedral’s indifference and even hostility to them drove them away.

Trinity Western Wins! No, Really

This is stunning and unexpected news from Canada:

A decisive legal victory in British Columbia has put an evangelical Christian university one step closer in its bid to secure recognition for its proposed law school.

The Appeal Court of B.C. released a decision in favour of Trinity Western University on Tuesday, describing efforts by B.C.’s law society to deny accreditation to the school’s future lawyers as “unreasonable.”

The legal dispute centres around the university’s community covenant that bans its students from having sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage.

In a unanimous decision, a panel of five judges said the negative impact on Trinity Western’s religious freedoms would be severe and far outweigh the minimal effect accreditation would have on gay and lesbian rights.

“A society that does not admit of and accommodate differences cannot be a free and democratic society — one in which its citizens are free to think, to disagree, to debate and to challenge the accepted view without fear of reprisal,” says the 66-page judgment.

“This case demonstrates that a well-intentioned majority acting in the name of tolerance and liberalism can, if unchecked, impose its views on the minority in a manner that is in itself intolerant and illiberal.”

More:

The decision upholds last year’s B.C. Supreme Court ruling against the Law Society of B.C. and its move to prevent the school’s future alumni from working in the province as lawyers.

Read the whole thing — and note well that the judges’ decision was unanimous. Here is the final paragraph of the ruling:

A society that does not admit of and accommodate differences cannot be a free and democratic society—one in which its citizens are free to think, to disagree, to debate and to challenge the accepted view without fear of reprisal. This case demonstrates that a well-intentioned majority acting in the name of tolerance and liberalism can, if unchecked, impose its views on the minority in a manner that is in itself intolerant and illiberal.

This should be hammered hard into to the door of the Cathedral (in the Moldbug sense of the 21st century established church: the Democratic Party, the media, the universities, et al.)

UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out that this is a battle won, but the war is still on. This is headed to Canada’s Supreme Court now.

Yes, Highlights Is Going Gay

You may recall the recent post here revealing that Highlights For Children, the venerable magazine, had come under fire from SJWs for its policy of not featuring families headed by gay couples in the magazine, out of a willingness to allow parents of the magazine’s young subscribers the opportunity to talk to their children about homosexuality as they considered appropriate.

Well, the SJWs got their scalp. A reader forwarded me the correspondence between herself and the magazine around the issue. She kept writing, trying to get a straightforward answer about whether or not the magazine was going to feature same-sex families. Finally, out of frustration, she cancelled her family’s subscription, and told the magazine, “I think Highlights should continue being what it is and leave conversations about this sort of thing up to families.”

At last, the reader got a response. Emphasis below is mine:

Dear [Name],

Thank you for your message, and I’m sorry that we were slow to respond.

Although I see that you have already canceled your subscription, I thought it still important to answer your questions about what Highlights means when we say we plan to be more fully reflective of all families, including families with same-sex parents.

As you know, Highlights publications focus on kids. We are general interest magazines, and we publish fiction and nonfiction of all types, as well as games, puzzles, jokes, and crafts. Our target audience is kids under the age of 12, most under the age of 8 or 9.

The themes we cover in our magazines are broad and universal—relatable to children trying to navigate childhood. Because children are our focus, we rarely show a full family in our illustrations, instead focusing on showing the child the reader relates to. When a parent is shown or integrated in a story, it is frequently just one parent because a good 800-word children’s story cannot support too many different characters.

When we do show families in the magazines, we make it a point to include diversity. We strive to be diverse in every way. The goal, however, is not to specifically call attention to diversity but instead to help kids understand that while differences exist, we are all actually more alike than different. For instance, from time to time we show families headed up by a grandparent or single parents. We show adoptive families, blended families, multi-generational families, and multi-racial families. In the future, we will depict same-sex families in our magazines in a manner consistent to the way all diverse families are depicted. This is in support of our mission to help children become their best selves and understand that all families, including theirs, are important.

We’re sorry to lose you as a subscriber, but I hope this email helps to clarify our position.

Sincerely,

Christine Cully

So, that settles that. Just wanted to update you. In five years, the magazine will no doubt face pressure to queer Gallant, or in some other way highlight children who claim to be gay or transgender — and it will yield, as institutions always do these days. I’m not being snarky. This will happen. These are small things, but they testify to the massive cultural change that has taken place. You might call it good, you might call it bad, but you have to call it a cultural revolution.