Rod Dreher's Blog, page 531

A Turning Back — To Where?

Niall Gooch wrote this sad, lovely Larkinesque poem after a visit to an abandoned Welsh church:

An Ending

This is not the place of my imagining.

What had I hoped for?

50p leaflets and creased postcards

flyers for a summer concert two weeks past

and services every other Sunday;

well-mannered neglect.

A tasteful war memorial

(listing the martyrs of the true religion,

that tattered flag).

And relics of a long-dead Rector,

whose smart new altar rail

birthed a local schism.

Instead a half-ruin, locked and boarded,

overtaken by the pagan wild.

No quiet pew-sitting, nursing illusions

of imminent restoration

and in the meantime respectful disbelief.

The stooping, stumbling tombstones

gloomed in by weary trees

are near collapse, the path

untrodden and unkempt.

The bell alone seems new, but who

would answer to its call?

These graves have long forgot

the sound of weeping,

and the scent of flowers.

Better this way, perhaps –

to face the truth of dying faith.

Patterns not retraced in hushed politeness

for uncomprehending tourists

by godless guides, but obliterated

and undone: gone.

They will not come this way again.

Even if there is a turning back

it will not be a turning back to here.

It will be a forgetful remembering.

(Niall, if you’re still a reader of this blog, I would love to hear your further thoughts on “forgetful remembering.” Are you saying that once a living tradition dies, even its recovery will be compromised?)

Here is recent news from the Church in Wales (Anglican):

Average Sunday attendance in the Church in Wales has fallen to below one per cent of the population, the Membership and Finance Report said. And the Governing Body was in no mood simply to “receive” the report, as the motion on the order paper asked it to do.

In other words, the leaders of the church did not want to hear it. More:

The motion on the order paper asked members of the Governing Body to “take note of the report”, but the Revd Richard Wood (Bangor) described it as devastating, appalling, an embarrassment, and deeply depressing. He said: “I would hate us just to take note of it.”

He recognised that the Church in Wales was attempting new things, such as pioneer ministry and licensed evangelists, and said that these would take time to produce fruit. But he was concerned about the “huge amount of time, effort, energy, and money [spent] on propping up stuff which has failed”.

He moved an amendment to the motion, to say that the Governing Body received the report “with a heavy heart”, and added a new clause calling for more research into what made a growing Church.

“I want to know what those places of growth have in common with each other; and, in contrast, I want to know what is different about those who are not growing,” he said. “What common features prevail in both camps?”

He continued: “Across our Church, in many places, faith is weak, or has even died, and we are just going through the motions. The Church in Wales is now — according to these statistics — a small and insignificant church in Wales . . . but we act as though we are large and important.”

The Church in Wales is the second-largest denomination in the country, at 30 percent of the population. One can’t imagine that the other Christian churches there are doing much better.

A reader sent me this photograph of a page from one of Peter Seewald’s interviews with Joseph Ratzinger — a cardinal at the time of this interview, but later to become Pope Benedict XVI:

“Small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith.” The ability to “detach herself from the inter-connections with society that have existed until now.”

Cardinal Ratzinger prophesied the Benedict Option. I wonder what it would look like if Welsh church leaders gave up trying to act like a “large and important” church, and instead went Ben Op radical? You know, of course, that I’m not simply asking this about the Church in Wales, but to some degree of all of us.

‘One Magnificent Chance’

Ladies and gentleman, our Republican nominee for the United States presidency, speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday:

Donald Trump’s campaign announced Saturday evening that the candidate would soon deliver a nine-sentence critique of comments Hillary Clinton made months ago about many of the millennials supporting her primary rival, Bernie Sanders. It was an attempt to latch onto a new headline in hopes of finally escaping the controversies that had consumed his week.

It didn’t work.

It took Trump nearly 25 minutes to read the brief statement because he kept going off on one angry tangent after another — ignoring his teleprompters and accusing Clinton of not being “loyal” to her husband, imitating her buckling at a memorial service last month, suggesting that she is “crazy” and saying she should be in prison. He urged his mostly white crowd of supporters to go to polling places in “certain areas” on Election Day to “watch” the voters there. He also repeatedly complained about having a “bum mic” at the first presidential debate and wondered if he should have done another season of “The Apprentice.”

More:

Halfway through the statement, Trump took a nearly 20-minute-long break to cover a range of topics, including these:

— He reflected on how his movement has “the smartest people… the sharpest people… the most amazing people.” He said the pundits — “most of them aren’t worth the ground they’re standing on, some of that ground could be fairly wealthy ground” — have never seen a phenomenon like this.

— He asked that the crowd if they are proud of President Obama, and they answered with a booming: “No!”

— He told the crowd to get a group of friends together on Election Day, vote and then go to “certain areas” and “watch” the voters there. “I hear too many bad stories, and we can’t lose an election because of you know what I’m talking about,” Trump said. “So, go and vote and then go check out areas because a lot of bad things happen, and we don’t want to lose for that reason.”

— He declared that he won Monday night’s debate even though he had a “bum mic.” He asked the crowd if they think that “maybe that was done on purpose.” They cheered.

— He recounted how the “dopes at CNN” and “phony pundits” refused to acknowledge how well he was doing during the primaries. “Then we started getting 52 percent, 58 percent, 66 percent, 78 percent, 82 percent,” Trump said, not making clear what those numbers mean. “And they just didn’t understand what was going on.”

— He said Clinton could not fight bad trade deals or Russian President Vladimir Putin because “she can’t make it 15 feet to her car,” alluding to video that showed Clinton buckling as she unexpectedly left a 9/11 memorial service early. Her doctor later said she had pneumonia. Trump then imitated Clinton by flailing his arms and jostling side to side. He walked unsteadily away from the podium as if he were about to fall over. “Folks, we need stamina,” Trump said. “We need energy.”

— He claimed that he has a “winning temperament” while Clinton has “bad temperament.” Trump continued: “She could be crazy. She could actually be crazy.”

This is my favorite part:

“You’re unsuspecting,” Trump said. “Right now, you say to your wife: ‘Let’s go to a movie after Trump.’ But you won’t do that because you’ll be so high and so excited that no movie is going to satisfy you. Okay? No movie. You know why? Honestly? Because they don’t make movies like they used to — is that right?”

But don’t forget the carnival-barker messianism:

“You have 38 days to make every dream you ever dreamed for your country come true,” Trump said. “Do not let this opportunity slip away or be wasted. You will never ever have this chance again. Not going to happen again… You have one magnificent chance.”

Whether you’re for or against Trump, please, I beg you, read the whole thing. It’s hard to believe this is happening. He could not stay focused enough to read a nine-sentence critique.

If Hillary Clinton wins this thing, and that upsets you (as it will me), remember that one of the most unpopular politicians in America won the presidency in part because Donald Trump spent the last few weeks of the campaign, tweeting about beauty-queen sex tapes, griping about how they don’t make movies like they used to, and generally babbling like a drunken fool.

The Madness Of King Donald

I think both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unfit for the office of the presidency, though for different reasons. The idea of voting for either of them repulses me. It was easier for me, as a conservative, to vote for the crooked Edwin W. Edwards against David Duke in the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race than it would be for me to vote for Hillary Clinton this year. (And perhaps it takes a Louisiana conservative of a certain age to understand how hard it was to vote for EWE.)

I believe with utter certainty that a Clinton presidency would accelerate the dramatic loss of religious liberty, most importantly by the Supreme Court justices she names, and the extension of the power of the state into the private lives of Americans and their institutions, all for the sake of the grand Social Justice Warrior cause. I believe that she will continue Washington’s misguided foreign policy, including an eagerness to intervene militarily in foreign conflicts (in this she will be worse than Obama). And I believe she will raise taxes and increase entitlements. I think she is dishonest and manipulative. Most every bad thing that conservatives say will happen under a Clinton administration, I am convinced will happen.

So, I have thought from time to time, “Could I really vote for Trump?” I actually agree with the general Buchananite thrust of his campaign’s themes, and strongly believe the globalist ideology embodied by Hillary Clinton is a menace. He is not remotely a religious conservative, but, I thought, at least he wouldn’t make a point of going after us. Do I trust him to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices? No — but I trust her to appoint activist liberals, so I’d rather take my chances with him.

If it weren’t for Trump’s character, this would be an easy choice. But that’s like saying, “If only there were a bridge, I could drive across the Gulf of Mexico.” The wretchedness of Trump’s character is not only disqualifying, I am convinced that it is a danger to the nation and the world. That is, giving a man like that the power of the US presidency is radically destabilizing.

To be sure, I am still unlikely to vote, for the reasons Jonah Goldberg explains here. This  Solzhenitsyn quote Jonah cites resonates with me: “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” Trump will carry my state, Louisiana, comfortably, and a Hillary vote from me almost certainly won’t matter. That said, whatever I decide to do with my vote, I know for whom I will not cast it, and will never cast it. 

What outrages everybody about Trump also bothers me. What tipped me is contemplating the fact that this man, Trump, six weeks before the presidential election, found himself awake in the middle of the night and decided to tweet this:

Given all the outrages from Donald Trump, this is a tiny thing, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Here is a man six weeks away from the election that could make him President of the United States. He is surrounded by advisers who are trying to convince him to rein in his self-destructive impulses. And yet, he wakes up in the middle of the night, because Hillary Clinton has gotten inside his head, and sends out picayune tweets, including one encouraging the American people, the people whose leader he seeks to be, to look into a supposed sex tape from a beauty pageant contestant.

Think about that. Think about what it says about the man’s worthlessness of character, his total lack of self-discipline,  his boundless vanity — so much that he would put his presidential campaign at risk to engage in an extremely petty spat over a beauty queen. Imagine him in the White House, having to make spot decisions about matters of national security. Imagine some foreign leader having taunted him publicly, and him waking up in the middle of the night, grabbing a phone, and tweeting a response that risks starting a war. Don’t think it will happen? How does one tell the President of the United States what he can and cannot do? Don’t you think that all his campaign advisers have told him to lay off of Twitter, because he can’t handle it? Don’t you think common sense would tell any of us that?

Yet he persists. He is controlled by his passions. Electing him would be like handing the keys to a Lamborghini to a drunken teenage boy. This behavior in a potential US president cannot be legitimated by being tolerated.

And then, there is this interview with Trump in today’s New York Times:

Donald J. Trump unleashed a slashing new attack on Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions on Friday as he sought to put the Clintons’ relationship at the center of his political argument against her before their next debate.

So we’re going to make the 2016 campaign about Bill Clinton’s adultery in the 1990s? Really? Aside from the world-historical stupidity of doing that (instead of focusing on trade, immigration, and the economy, which is why GOP primary voters went for him in the first place), consider: how well did making a martyr of Bill Clinton work out for Republicans back then? More:

Mr. Trump, aiming to unnerve Mrs. Clinton, even indicated that he was rethinking his statement at their last debate that he would “absolutely” support her if she won in November, saying: “We’re going to have to see. We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to have to see.”

Is he indicating here that he may not accept her election as legitimate? If so, that is utterly, damnably reckless, because he puts our entire constitutional system at risk. It’s hard to believe that he merely means by this that he would oppose her politically. Of course he would oppose her politically. Any conservative would. That doesn’t need saying. The question asked of him the other night after the debate had to do with whether or not he would consider her legitimate if she won the election. This issue is why Al Gore, though he lost what he believed was a loaded, unjust Supreme Court ruling making George W. Bush president, did the patriotic, admirable, morally sound thing by refusing to call Bush illegitimate, no matter what he (Gore) really thought. That Trump would even consider signaling that he might not do the same is stunning, and again, destabilizing.

More:

In an interview with The New York Times, he also contended that infidelity was “never a problem” during his three marriages, though his first ended in an ugly divorce after Mr. Trump began a relationship with the woman who became his second wife.

Trump is lying. He’s baldly, boldly lying. He has bragged about his infidelities before. He’s counting on the fact that his supporters will not care that he’s lying, and lying about a matter on which he intends to fault Hillary Clinton — who, despite being cheated on by her dirtbag husband, remained faithful to her vows.Trump is a compulsive liar. We would not be able to trust a single word the US president said.

And by the way, on Trump’s treatment of women with whom he was involved:

So the future president of the United States tried to pimp out his girlfriend/mistress/wife. Congratulations, GOP. https://t.co/fTsmFrLOK7

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 1, 2016

More from the NYT interview:

He said he was bringing up Mr. Clinton’s infidelities because he thought they would repulse female voters and turn them away from the Clintons, and because he was eager to unsettle Mrs. Clinton in their next two debates and on the campaign trail.

“She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” Mr. Trump said.

Well, there you have it. He’s bragging about his cruelty and viciousness — “viciousness” in the ordinary sense, and in the sense of being the opposite of virtuous. Is this the kind of man you want in the White House? Let me put this directly to my fellow orthodox Christians: do you really want to associate yourself with a presidential candidate who says these things?

None of this is to say that Hillary Clinton is worthy of the presidency. I do not believe she is. As a Christian deeply anguished over the steady loss of religious liberty, a Clinton presidency would be a disaster for us on this front. But Clinton’s faults, deep as they are, are the faults of a normal politician. Trump’s are in another category. Having a bad, crazy man like Trump in the White House would be a disaster for the entire nation, and even the world. The further we go into this campaign, the harder it is to believe that the US faces equal danger from these two.

If Trump is elected, I believe his presidency will be punctuated by mass civil disobedience. And depending on the issue, I might be one of the civilly disobedient. It is easy to conceive of US military commanders refusing an order from Trump as commander-in-chief because they judge it to be illegal. Can we really afford to create conditions under which our military brass might have to make that call?

Because Congress has been so deferential over the past decades to the president in matters of war, we could easily face a situation in which President Trump decides unilaterally to send American troops into combat because he has decided that his dignity has been offended by some foreigner, or for some other petty reason. If it came to that, I would hope that the military brass would refuse the orders. But if that happened — if we got into a situation in which the US military refused a lawful order from the Commander in Chief — we would face a constitutional crisis, and a simultaneous crisis of world stability, as America’s enemies would know that the Commander in Chief did not have the confidence of and control over his military forces.

And, a President Trump would use all the powers of his office to persecute his enemies, such that we will be looking back on the Nixon administration as a paragon of magnanimity. Again, this is a man who no master of his passions, but rather is mastered by them. When you get to the age of 70 and you cannot keep yourself from behaving like a tabloid clown, even when the US presidency is within your grasp, you are damn close to being a madman.

Note this too, from earlier this month:

The Trump campaign built a large policy shop in Washington that has now largely melted away because of neglect, mismanagement and promises of pay that were never honored. Many of the team’s former members say the campaign leadership never took the Washington office seriously and let it wither away after squeezing it dry.

Donald Trump often brags about having experts and senior former officials advising him. Wednesday night in a forum on national security, he said, “We have admirals, we have generals, we have colonels. We have a lot of people that I respect.” It’s true that Trump is getting high-level policy advice on a regular basis from senior experts such as Rudy Giuliani and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. But Trump has never acknowledged the policy shop based in Washington that has been doing huge amounts of grunt work for months without recognition or compensation.

Since April, advisers never named in campaign press releases have been working in an Alexandria-based office, writing policy memos, organizing briefings, managing surrogates and placing op-eds. They put in long hours before and during the Republican National Convention to help the campaign look like a professional operation.

But in August, shortly after the convention, most of the policy shop’s most active staffers quit. Although they signed non-disclosure agreements, several of them told me on background that the Trump policy effort has been a mess from start to finish.

“It’s a complete disaster,” one disgruntled former adviser told me. “They use and abuse people. The policy office fell apart in August when the promised checks weren’t delivered.”

Aside from the immorality of not paying people for work done — something Trump is accustomed to doing — consider what letting your policy shop go to hell says about the attention you will pay to governing. So much for the idea that Trump surrounds himself with smart people and listens to them. I think Trump figures he will be able to rule by decree. He won’t be able to, obviously, but he’ll smash up a lot of things in the attempt. As much as I think the GOP richly deserves the pain Trump has inflicted on them — Tucker Carlson’s jeremiad from the beginning of the year remains unsurpassed — by the time we get to the end of the Trump administration, the conservative party will likely be so discredited it may never recover.

Hillary will be very bad for people like me (social conservatives, I mean). It is impossible to believe that Trump would be anything but very, very bad for the country, and the world — a country and a world in which social conservatives also live.

Look, you know how pessimistic I am in general. I expect things to be pretty rotten for America over the next four years, no matter who is elected. The difference is that they will either go bad in predictable ways, ways that we can prepare for, or they will go bad in ways that nobody can foresee, because Trump is so chaotic. A predictable misery, a misery that can be contained, is the lesser of two evils. Besides, I used to think people who called Trump an “existential threat” to the Republic were being hyperbolic. I don’t think so anymore.

I want to say one more think to Christian conservatives who think Trump is all that stands between us and the Devil in a Red Pantsuit. What the church in America suffers from, and indeed the general moral and spiritual crisis in this nation, is not political. Our politics are a manifestation of it, not the cause of it. Donald Trump is not a solution to the problem, he’s a symptom of it. Politics will not fix what is broken within us. True, a Clinton presidency will make the conditions under which we can live and minister towards healing what is broken in America more difficult. Much more difficult. But here’s the thing: so will a Trump presidency, only in different ways, and in ways much harder to anticipate. Vote Trump if you must, but don’t fool yourself about what he is going to do for us. I encourage you to read Michael Brendan Dougherty on the case against the “esoteric case for Trump.” Excerpt:

Envisioning Trump as the restorer of heroic Western life — whether imperial, kingly, or mythical — is quite an act of creation. There is nothing about Trump that suggests he can hasten the end of Enlightenment principles through political rule. (Although an itchy nuclear trigger finger could.) These dreams are funnier still when considered next to Trump’s style, which is lamely democratic; his culture, which derives entirely from cable television; and his personal taste, which resides about one remove from Uday Hussein‘s debauches. The man is clearly a product of a decadent society, not the scourge or redeemer of one.

Truth. And a truth that matters.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat:

Set aside for a moment Trump’s low character, his penchant for inflaming racial tensions, his personal corruptions. Assume for the sake of argument that all that can be folded into a “lesser of two evils” case.

What remains is this question: Can Donald Trump actually execute the basic duties of the presidency? Is there any way that his administration won’t be a flaming train wreck from the start? Is there any possibility that he’ll be levelheaded in a crisis — be it another 9/11 or financial meltdown, or any of the lesser-but-still-severe challenges that presidents reliably face?

I think we have seen enough from his campaign — up to and including his wretchedly stupid conduct since the first debate — to answer confidently, “No.” Trump’s zest for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inability to delegate or take advice, are not mere flaws; they are defining characteristics. The burdens of the presidency will leave him permanently maddened, perpetually undone.

Even if that undoing doesn’t lead to economic or geopolitical calamity (yes, Virginia, there are worse things than the Iraq War), which cause or idea associated with Trumpism is likely to emerge stronger after a four-year train wreck? Not populism or immigration restrictionism. Not evangelical Christianity. Not economic conservatism. They’ll all be lashed to the mast of a burning ship whose captain is angrily tweeting from the poop deck.

There Are No Idealists Here

Advice from the Republican Party’s candidate for president:

Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016

Think about that: the Republican Party candidate for president is encouraging the public to check out a sex tape.

What a repulsive figure Donald Trump is — but he’s very much of our time. So too is Hillary Clinton, though. Slate Star Codex endorses Hillary Clinton today, but reluctantly:

Okay, but what about the real reason Trump is so popular?

When I talk to Trump supporters, it’s not usually about doubting climate change, or thinking Trump will take the conservative movement in the right direction, or even immigration. It’s about the feeling that a group of arrogant, intolerant, sanctimonious elites have seized control of a lot of national culture and are using it mostly to spread falsehood and belittle anybody different than them. And Trump is both uniquely separate from these elites and uniquely repugnant to them – which makes him look pretty good to everyone else.

This is definitely true. Please vote Hillary anyway.

His point is that Hillary really does represent arrogant, intolerant, sanctimonious elites who demonize anyone who disagrees with them — but that she is less bad than Trump.

Yesterday, I learned that a friend of mine, a conservative Christian academic, is planning to vote for Trump. That surprised me, so I wrote and asked him why. He told me that he’s not excited about it, but sees it as a matter of self-preservation. The feds have recently used Title IX to rout his small college, he says, using the law as part of a broad assault on free speech, free thought, and assembly. It terrifies him to think about four more years of Social Justice Warriors from the Justice Department and Department of Education deploying the might of the federal government to brutalize colleges like his. That’s what a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean, he’s convinced (and he’s right, if you ask me). He says he would rather take his chances with Trump.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, read Peter Leithart’s short discussion of what it means for SJWs to “burrow in” to the institutions of the federal government. Understand, I’m not saying that you should vote for Trump. I’m saying that it’s not irrational.

Over on his characteristically thoughtful blog, John Michael Greer says that we are living through the end of American liberalism. Note this part:

The current US presidential election shows, perhaps better than anything else, just how far that decadence [of American liberalism] has gone. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is floundering in the face of Trump’s challenge because so few Americans still believe that the liberal shibboleths in her campaign rhetoric mean anything at all. Even among her supporters, enthusiasm is hard to find, and her campaign rallies have had embarrassingly sparse attendance. Increasingly frantic claims that only racists, fascists, and other deplorables support Trump convince no one but true believers, and make the concealment of interests behind shopworn values increasingly transparent.  Clinton may still win the election by one means or another, but the broader currents in American political life have clearly changed course.

It’s possible to be more precise. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in stark contrast to Clinton, have evoked extraordinarily passionate reactions from the voters, precisely because they’ve offered an alternative to a status quo pervaded by the rhetoric of a moribund liberalism. In the same way, in Britain—where the liberal movement followed a somewhat different trajectory but has ended up in the same place—the success of the Brexit campaign and the wild enthusiasm with which Labour Party voters have backed the supposedly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn show that the same process is well under way there. Having turned into the captive ideology of an affluent elite, liberalism has lost the loyalty of the downtrodden that once, with admittedly mixed motives, it set out to help. That’s a loss it’s unlikely to survive.

Over the decades ahead, in other words, we can expect the emergence of a postliberal politics in the United States, England, and quite possibly some other countries as well. The shape of the political landscape in the short term is fairly easy to guess.  Watch the way the professional politicians in the Republican Party have flocked to Hillary Clinton’s banner, and you can see the genesis of a party of the affluent demanding the prolongation of free trade, American intervention in the Middle East, and the rest of the waning bipartisan consensus that supports its interests. Listen to the roars of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—or better still, talk to the not inconsiderable number of Sanders supporters who will be voting for Trump this November—and you can sense the emergence of a populist party seeking the abandonment of that consensus in defense of its very different interests.

What names those parties will have is by no means certain yet, and a vast number of other details still have to be worked out. One way or another, though, it’s going to be a wild ride.

Read the whole thing. 

I think he’s right, and no matter who is elected in November, that president will represent the end of something big.

In his column today, David Brooks observes that if nothing else, this presidential contest embodies the death of idealism.Trump’s lack of idealism hardly needs elaboration. In Hillary’s case:

When asked why she wants to be president or for any positive vision, she devolves into a list of programs. And it is never enough just to list three programs in an answer; she has to pile in an arid hodgepodge of eight or nine. This is pure interest-group liberalism — buying votes with federal money — not an inspiring image of the common good.

More:

The twin revolutions of the 1960s and the 1980s liberated the individual — first socially and then economically — and weakened the community. More surprising, this boomer-versus-boomer campaign has decimated idealism.

There is no uplift in this race. There is an entire absence, in both campaigns, of any effort to appeal to the higher angels of our nature. There is an assumption, in both campaigns, that we are self-seeking creatures, rather than also loving, serving, hoping, dreaming, cooperating creatures. There is a presumption in both candidates that the lowest motivations are the most real.

Ironically, one of the tasks for those who succeed the baby boomers is to restore idealism. The great challenge of our moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust and autonomy.

I see what he’s getting at, but here’s the thing: where is the inspiration for the rebinding and restoration going to come from, especially given that liberalism — the Democrats and the Republicans both — is determined to suppress and even eradicate religion that doesn’t conform to the ideology of liberalism? How are we going to reverse isolation and fragmentation when expanding individual liberty is the professed goal of both political parties? Atomism — sexual and economic — is not a vice to our two liberal parties, but a virtue.

We Americans are moving inexorably towards the secular liberal future that Europe has already accepted. How’s that working out for them? They’re exhausted. Except for the Muslim Europeans, that is. Could it be that we’re living with now is not the abandonment of liberalism, but its end point?

I am idealistic on a localist level, but nationally? No.

Black Lives Matter Campus Fascists

At the University of Michigan, now home of the ve-xe-ze gender pronoun revolution, a student debate club scheduled a formal debate on the question of whether or not Black Lives Matter is harmful to race relations. The question was affirmatively answered, but not through reasoned debate. It was answered by BLM protesters themselves. Excerpt:

A routine debate on Tuesday hosted by a University of Michigan debate club was effectively shut down after a throng of protesters stormed the event and repeatedly shouted over participants, claiming the topic on whether Black Lives Matter is harmful to racial relations is too racist and bigoted to be discussed.

Holding signs with statements such as “my life is not a debate” and “black lives are not up for debate,” as well as chanting “Black Lives Matter,” hundreds of protesters filed into the room where the Michigan Political Union, a non-partisan parliamentary forum that facilitates discussions about contemporary issues, was just beginning its debate Tuesday night.

Michigan Political Union’s President student Joshua Strup had attempted to hold the door into the venue closed as those at the debate heard the crowd of protestors approaching, as the room was already filled to capacity, but to no avail. The protesters burst through and stood along the room’s four walls as well as the walkways between chairs.

Comments and yelling ensued between the protesters and Strup, as well as student moderator Carlos Owens, both of whom attempted to quiet the crowd. But the protesters would not be silenced. They shouted out a series of chants after they entered the room, including “racists hurt race relations,” “black lives are not up for debate, and neither is mine,” and “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

After their shouting spree, they laid on the ground to conduct a die-in demonstration. Thereafter, whenever a debate participant tried to speak, they would shout over them. Much of their comments were laced with profanity.

In a video embedded in that news account, we hear a robust young Black Lives Matter scholar hold forth on why the debate club has no moral right to question the effectiveness of BLM. She yells:

…How racist all of the fu–ing systems in America is. How racist all of the housing systems is, how redlining is, how every other fu–ing system is. Even in this school, the fact that I had to fu–ing buy my instrument and basically bullsh-t my way into a top-ass school. All of that shit! Muthaf–ka! …. There are no fu–ing questions to be asked. You know the fu–ing answers. White people know the fu–ing answers. What y’all want to do is traumatize us… What we’re not going to do is to continue to traumatize black people on this white, racist, fu–ing-ass campus.

Read the whole story. The black protesters, which included students from a local high school, shut down the event. Lakyrra Magee, a black student who opposed having the debate, wrote a column in the campus paper, talking about how her pain is the most important thing ever, and how it’s “blatantly racist” to question BLM. Get this: pro-censorship Magee is an intern with the ACLU. 

This outrageous event happened on Monday. If any readers know what actions, if any, the university took to punish members of this mob that bullied a debate club into silence, let me know. If nothing was done to them, that tells you a lot about the climate of intellectual intolerance on the University of Michigan campus. Every single student protester who can be identified in video ought to be disciplined, even suspended. You cannot have a university if anyone in the university asserts a right to silence by force other students. You cannot have a university where racist bigots like that BLM ranter are allowed to run roughshod over the right to free expression and inquiry.

If a student cannot come to campus and engage respectfully and rationally in debate, but instead reacts to speech she doesn’t like by screaming and cursing and intimidating the speakers, then she does not belong on a university campus. Period. End of story. She is not ready to be part of an intellectual community.

Going forward, the University of Michigan ought to send campus police to protect events like this. It ought to arrest protesters who try to shut these events down. If it does not, if it allows students who are there to get an education (and going to political debates is part of that education) to suffer at the hands of a racialized mob using fascist tactics to silence them, then the University of Michigan deserves the fate of the University of Missouri when it showed similar cowardice: a collapse in enrollment, as students choose to attend colleges where they can learn, not be bullied by hysterics.

UPDATE: A conservative friend at the University of Michigan writes:

As appalling as the behavior was, it’s worth noting that tensions–and tempers–were already flaring on campus before then. The day before the Political Union debate, a number of “racially charged” (the student paper’s term; I’d go so far as to say blatantly racist) fliers were found around campus, apparently organized (the fliers say so themselves) by the “Alt Right.” (Something called Radix Journal?) I don’t know whether BLM activists had already planned to protest the PU debate (they were, of course, wrong to do so), but the existence of their pissed-ness had cause: the university had just been covered in racist propaganda calling black men low-IQ rapists bent on murdering pretty (blonde) white women. You and I both know just how old that trope is. It’s the American race relations version of the blood libel against Jews.

I say this not to excuse the protestors. They were wrong, they were belligerent, they’re Orwellian in their pursuit of shutting down speech in the name of speech (and rights in the name of rights). But even at a campus as far left as Michigan, where people are proud terror groups like the Weather Underground originated, there is still a radical, fringe right-wing presence. And it’s not blameless, either: this time, at least, the far-right fascists fired the first shot.

To their great credit, I haven’t yet seen any public apology or groveling from the UM Political Union. I suspect all this accomplished was to create a dozen more Jonathan Chait fans. And it’s not worth taking the time to wonder if any students will be punished for shutting down the debate. Of course they won’t. Don’t be silly — this isn’t the University of Chicago! (The administrators, after all, need to keep the protestors from coming after their heads. Why the hell else do you think Jim Harbaugh is endorsing protesting the national anthem if that’s what his players want to do? If someone calls him a racist, only a national championship might save him.)

More and more, it feels like we’re just living through the nation-wide performance of Love in the Ruins. Divisions in the Catholic Church? Check. GOP as Knotheads? Check. Transformation of the Democrats into the party of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia? Check. Race relations abruptly deterioriating to the point of violence, though no one quite knows why? Check. The only one sane enough to dissent from this state of affairs considered a madman? Probably.

(The University as the only place imaginable where middle-aged Bernie Sanders voters are considered, from the perspective of academic politics, like right-wingers? Check.)

As for me — I’ve taken to pouring out a few fingers of bourbon in the evenings and reading the novel again. It’s all almost enough to want to see Trump elected, just to watch the faces of everyone else in this town. But only almost.

Radix Journal is a white nationalist publication edited by Richard Spencer. This racist provocation got exactly the reaction he wanted from the BLM mob. Dammit. Don’t BLM and its sympathizers understand that by reacting so emotionally and destructively, they’re only strengthening the racist right?

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

I read your post this morning regarding the BLM protest at the U of M debate club and, let me just say, I am not surprised in the least. I received my MBA from the U of M Ross School of Business relatively recently, and during my time in Ann Arbor I developed a deep attachment to the school and the city. My first daughter was born in Ann Arbor, my time at the school was amazing, and my U of M degree has opened doors to me career-wise that never would have been opened to me otherwise. That being said, I was under no illusions then about what kind of school the undergrad U of M was and what kind of city Ann Arbor is, for all the positives that exist around both.

The campus was constantly full of SJW nonsense, from far-left race based events, to bi-weekly (I’m not exaggerating) LGBTQ-RSTUVWXYZ campus & university sponsored events. The business school was somewhat insulated from it, but not entirely (the “LGBT Allies” held an annual drag show – I did not attend), and from what I hear through the grapevine it is creeping in farther and farther every year.

Since I graduated I’ve always hoped that my kids would be able to attend U of M. It’s a great school in a quintessential college town, with a lot of great academic programs. However, at the rate stories like these pop up about my alma mater, I don’t think that I could in good conscience send my kids there. I refuse to subject them to an environment and culture that is not only at-odds with, but openly hostile to, the upbringing that my wife and I are trying to instill in them.

The more I look around, however, I fail to see any place that is any better, including the Catholic schools! For an example, take a look at the most recent Creighton University alumni magazine, that includes an article by two Creighton professors of Theology, arguing that the Catholic Church should and WILL shift its stance on gay marriage, transgender acceptance, and the whole host sexual revolution issues that come with it (https://www.creighton.edu/creightonmagazine/2016smrfeaturemarriagefamily/). These are professors of Theology at a Catholic university, openly pushing this in a University sanctioned publication!

It’s bad enough when the state schools do this stuff, but it’s become expected there. When a nominally Catholic school in the heartland of the US does this, however, that is crossing a line that I certainly didn’t foresee even 5-10 years ago. To say that it is disheartening is an understatement, but it’s becoming clearer everyday that there is no safe haven left for the conservative, orthodox believer, and that no quarter will be given for our beliefs. I hope that this entire movement burns itself out, and maybe it will, but no without leaving a lot of destruction in its wake.

Resisting The SJW-Dominated Universities

Thomas Kaempfen, a liberal reader, linked critically in a comment last night to this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, published last year during the protests that roiled Yale. The authors, Kate Manne and Jason Stanley, are professors of philosophy — Manne at Cornell, and Stanley at Yale. You have encountered Stanley’s witty mots on this blog here and here. Stanley’s comment on the distinguished Oxford professor Richard Swinburne’s controversial remarks criticizing homosexuality from a natural-law position at a Christian philosophers’ conference: “F–k you, assholes. Seriously.”

In their Chronicle essay, Manne and Stanley defend the hysterically intolerant progressive Yale mob that set upon faculty members Nick and Erika Christakis over Erika Christakis’s note to students in the residential house they oversaw, in which she gently criticized the Yale administration’s policing student Halloween costumes as a form helicopter parenting. From the text of her letter:

I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.

As a former preschool teacher… it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably “appropriative” about a blonde ­haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it.

I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren’t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don’t know the answer to these questions; they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.

Which is my point.

I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours.

This mild epistle set off days of Social Justice Warrior rage on campus, on behalf of the Oppressed. It eventually resulted in Erika Christakis’s resignation from Yale, and her husband’s decision to leave his role as master of the residential college. The SJWs at Yale took their scalps. So much for free speech at Yale. Read Conor Friedersdorf’s account of the controversy if you have forgotten.

In their Chronicle piece, Manne and Stanley contest the idea that “free speech” was restricted at all. In fact, they say, defenders of the Christakises and of free speech were really oppressors:

The notion of freedom of speech is being co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence those who are oppressed and marginalized. All too often, when people depict others as threats to freedom of speech, what they really mean is, “Quiet!”

Observing that Erika Christakis’s initial e-mail and the tone of her campus defenders was non-hysterical, unlike Christakis’s critics, the pair writes:

But didn’t Erika Christakis, and most though not all of her defenders, express their views in a much more reasonable tone of voice than the students protesting? Yes. But sounding reasonable can be a luxury. Such speech trusts, even presumes, that one’s words will be received by a similarly reasonable, receptive, even sympathetic, audience. Oppressed people are often met with the political analogue of stonewalling. In order to be heard, they need to shout; and when they shout, they are told to lower their voices. They may be able to speak, but have little hope of being listened to.

The Michigan State University philosopher Kristie Dotson describes this predicament as “testimonial quieting,” as the philosopher Rachel McKinnon has helped us to see. When oppressed people speak out — and up, toward those in power — their right to speak may be granted, yet their capacity to know of what they speak doubted as the result of ingrained prejudice. And the way in which they express themselves is often then made the focus of the discussion. So it is not just that these people have to raise their voices in order to be audible; it’s also that, when their tone becomes the issue, their speech is essentially being heard as mere noise, disruption, commotion. Their freedom of speech is radically undercut by what is aptly known as “tone policing.”

You see what’s happening here. Manne and Stanley defend the right of people to curse, shout down, and otherwise intimidate into silence those they disagree with, provided that the shouters are members of a minority group privileged by progressives. Here is a clip of Jerelyn Luther, a black Yale undergraduate yelling at and f-bombing Prof. N. Christakis as he tries to engage her and others in dialogue.  Jason Stanley, a Yale professor, defends this fascistic behavior, because Luther is black. Is there any wonder that he thinks “F–k you, assholes” is a sufficient response to Richard Swinburne and his supporters?

The academy is in the process of committing suicide. But there are some who are not going quietly. If you haven’t seen the academic group blog Heterodox Academy, you need to bookmark it. On the site, Prof. Jon Haidt says the “Yale problem” — the intolerance over the Christakis situation — starts in high school. Haidt talks about he gave a talk at “Centerville High,” an elite private school in the Northwest, where he talked about the difference between coddling students and strengthening them. He says that the Q&A turned into the most hostile he had ever experienced in his career. All the questioners but one were female; the males sat mute.

Then:

We talked about what Centerville could do to improve its climate, and I said that the most important single step would be to make viewpoint diversity a priority. On the entire faculty, there was not a single teacher that was known to be conservative or Republican. So if these teenagers are coming into political consciousness inside of a “moral matrix” that is uniformly leftist, there will always be anger directed at those who disrupt that consensus.

That night, after I gave a different talk to an adult audience, there was a reception at which I spoke with some of the parents. Several came up to me to tell me that their sons had told them about the day’s events. The boys finally had a way to express and explain their feelings of discouragement. Their parents were angry to learn about how their sons were being treated and… there’s no other word for it, bullied into submission by the girls.*

And Centerville High is not alone. Last summer I had a conversation with some boys who attend one of the nation’s top prep schools, in New England. They reported the same thing: as white males, they are constantly on eggshells, afraid to speak up on any remotely controversial topic lest they be sent to the “equality police” (that was their term for the multicultural center). I probed to see if their fear extended  beyond the classroom. I asked them what they would do if there was a new student at their school, from, say Yemen. Would they feel free to ask the student questions about his or her country? No, they said, it’s too risky, a question could be perceived as offensive.

You might think that this is some sort of justice — white males have enjoyed positions of privilege for centuries, and now they are getting a taste of their own medicine. But these are children. And remember that most students who are in a victim group for one topic are in the “oppressor” group for another. So everyone is on eggshells sometimes; all students at Centerville High learn to engage with books, ideas, and people using the twin habits of defensive self-censorship and vindictive protectiveness.

And then… they go off to college and learn new ways to gain status by expressing collective anger at those who disagree. They curse professors and spit on visiting speakers at Yale. They shut down newspapers at Wesleyan. They torment a dean who was trying to help them at Claremont McKenna. They threaten and torment fellow students at Dartmouth. And in all cases, they demand that adults in power DO SOMETHING to punish those whose words and views offend them. Their high schools have thoroughly socialized them into what sociologists call victimhood culture, which weakens students by turning them into “moral dependents” who cannot deal with problems on their own. They must get adult authorities to validate their victim status.

It starts in high school, and it starts in the home. And so you end up with people like this pathetic snowflake at Villanova, who wet the bed over the fact that Milo Yiannopoulos polluted her campus with his presence:

Cierra Belin ‘18 said she went through “the seven stages of grief” upon hearing the news.

“It truly disgusted me that our university would welcome someone like that,” Belin said. “Villanova already has too much work to do in diversity inclusion, that having him validate those micro aggressions would set us back a good 50 years.”

Who knew Milo was so powerful? Seriously, though, what is it about the inner lives of these kids that leads them to want to be weak? It surely comes from the progressive culture represented by Manne and Stanley that valorizes weakness, as well as racializes, genderizes, and queers it.

One hopes that academia can pull back from the brink. I know that I would not send any of my kids to a place like Yale, even if they got a free ride, because I don’t trust the quality of the education they would get in a university where they and their professors risk being made into instant pariahs and punished for saying something that offends the SJW crybullies. I am surely not the only parent who cares more about the quality of education than the credential that allows a young adult to enter into a decadent and corrupt network of nomenklatura.

This is a real culture war: a war between culture and anti-culture, the latter represented by militant left-wing bigots who praise racism as virtue, and the liberal fellow travelers who lack the conviction and the backbone to fight back in defense of the university and of liberal ideals. In communist Czechoslovakia, dissident university professors who were dismissed from their posts for being politically unreliable set up underground classes to teach willing students real history, real poetry, real literature, and real humanities — not the politicized garbage the Marxist ideologues pumped into their heads at the universities. Should we lay plans for similar networks here?

I’m not talking about replacing hard-leftist ideology with hard-rightist ideology. Fascists are no more interested in truth than are Communists. We are going to need the support of old-fashioned liberals like Thomas Kaempfen, people who actually care about free expression, free inquiry, and rational discourse. I’m talking about a depoliticized approach to the humanities that emphasizes the quest for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. What would such an alternative system look like? How would we go about it? Let me know your thoughts.

Among The Professional Lovers Of Wisdom

Begging your pardon for the language below, but you really do have to see this to appreciate its greatness. Golden-tongued Yale philosopher Jason Stanley continues to draw plaudits from the academic philosophy community for his incisive dismissal of Oxford’s Richard Swinburne and those who may share his convictions. From Stanley’s public Facebook page:

A reader who is also a philosopher writes:

These are not nobodies either. Jonathan is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and is very active and well-known in the profession, and is often featured on popular philosophy blogs. Georgetown University’s Kukla, too, is fairly well known. In addition to being an editor for a prominent philosophical journal, she’s often interviewed and featured in magazines like HuffingtonPost, LA Times, 3AM magazine, etc. A quick Google search will yield those results.

Kukla not only teaches philosophy at Georgetown, a putatively Catholic university, but is also editor in chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and Public Affairs Quarterly. She is the senior researcher at Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, which, according to its website, believes that “a morally complex world needs practically engaged ethics.” The Kennedy Institute of Ethics wants you to know that is “the best of Georgetown in its commitment to conversation for the common good.” Which I guess is why its senior researcher wants Richard Swinburne’s defenders to suck her giant queer cock.

The Ivy League continues to cover itself in glory on Stanley’s Facebook page:

John Collins teaches philosophy at Columbia University. 

Other insightful commentary from colleagues and friends of Prof. Stanley available on his Facebook page, including one remark eagerly anticipating the death of “Swineburne.”

A couple of readers have sent me this paragraph from the introduction to Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works. Stanley discusses his “intellectual debt” to his sociologist father:

My father, like my mother Sara Stanley, was a survivor of the Holocaust. No doubt as a consequence, he devoted his academic career to a theoretical repudiation of authoritarianism in all of its various guises. He argues in his work that no system that usurps the autonomy of persons can be acceptable, even if it is in the name of greater social efficiency or the common good. The lessons of history show that humans are too prone to confuse the furtherance of their own interests with the common good, and their subjective explanatory framework with objective fact.

I suppose that in the view of Stanley fils, philosopher, the truth of things is to be determined by what furthers individual autonomy, and people who don’t understand that are living in false consciousness. Also, f–k you, assholes.

Why on earth do people say that the humanities are in crisis within the academy? I can’t imagine.

‘Diversity Or (Career) Death!’ Ze Said

A reader at the University of Michigan passed the document below on. It was sent out by the University of Michigan to employees of its Ann Arbor campus:

Dear Ann Arbor campus faculty and students,

The University of Michigan is committed to fostering an environment of inclusiveness. Consistent with this value, the University has created a process for students to designate pronouns with the University and have those pronouns reflected on class rosters this fall. A designated pronoun is a pronoun an individual chooses to identify with and expects others to use when referencing them (i.e., he, she, him, his, ze, etc.). Faculty members play a vital role in ensuring all of our community feels valued, respected and included.

Students can designate pronouns in Wolverine Access through the new Gender Identity tab within the Campus Personal Information section. This page will be used to enter/update and/or delete pronoun information with the University.

Designated Pronouns will automatically populate on all class rosters accessed through Wolverine Access. Rosters pulled from other systems will not have designated pronouns listed. If a student does not designate a pronoun, none will be listed for them. Given that this process is new, we ask that faculty review their rosters again in mid- to late October to give students time to designate their pronouns.

These changes give students the ability to tell the University what pronoun they identify with for use in our communications and interactions with them. Asking about and correctly using someone’s designated pronoun is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their identity and to cultivate an environment that respects all gender identities. If you make a mistake and use the wrong pronoun, you can acknowledge that you made a mistake, and use the correct pronoun next time. Please help us continue to make the University of Michigan an inclusive and welcoming place for all of our students.

To learn more about how to designate pronouns, visit Wolverine Access at https://csprod.dsc.umich.edu/htmldoc/.... If you have any questions about designated pronouns and to learn more about gender identity and gender expression, email the Spectrum Center at spectrumcenter@umich.edu or visit our website at spectrumcenter.umich.edu.

The reader added the following commentary, which I’ve edited very lightly out of an abundance of caution to protect the reader’s confidentiality, given the McCarthyism on campus these days:

It was only a matter of time before my institution imposed upon the faculty some sort of system that would compel us to use students’ pronouns of choice. Lo and/or behold. The email above was just now sent to the faculty by two high-ranking administrators (total 2015-16 salary $835,674.13). It informs us that students may now choose to designate a pronoun in their online personal file, which will be displayed on a faculty member’s online course roster.  It would seem that professors and graduate student instructors are now obliged to familiarize themselves with any non-binary pronouns required by a student prior to the start of the semester.

Luckily for the students, they can report any and all cases of harassment to the Spectrum Center. I am unable to locate most of its staff members in a publicly available salary database; its director however, pulls down $81K, more than many faculty members. Since faculty are now given all the necessary pronoun information up front in our class rosters, we no longer have any excuse for slipping up and harassing/micro-aggressing/invalidating a student with the flagrant and violent use of an incorrect pronoun.  But I’m fairly sure that such a thing will never happen because we’re all deathly afraid of losing our jobs over a discrimination lawsuit.  I for one just bought a house and since I have no actual talents or skills I really need this job.  “Ze”, huh?  Well that’s just super!

Now, let’s set aside for the moment the fact that the (very few?) faculty members like myself who have not drunk heady draughts of the Kool-Aid are being compelled to assent to a brand new and extremely radical ideology they disagree with.  Let’s also set aside the fact that when I am told to call a man a woman and vice versa, I am being forced to stare falsehood in the face and call it truth–and then celebrate that falsehood to the heavens (not that I don’t believe that there are men who desperately want to be women and vice versa; I know there are and they have my sympathy). Let’s further forget that something so trivial and childish as improper pronoun use (!!!) could cost me and my peers our jobs unless we were to make public apologies, recant our heathen ways, and embrace the One True Faith.

Again, let’s ignore all that vitally important stuff and think about dollars and cents.  Once again, one of the two units I work in is compelled to trim its annual budget.  By a tiny amount, I’ll freely admit: 1%.  But it’s still a cut.  And we have to cut that 1% every year.  This means that our department never be able to make permanent one of our underpaid temporary employees who keeps a research center running.  Without this individual’s tireless efforts our doors would be closed and our emails often unanswered.  Everyone is asked to trim, to cut, to streamline, etc.  But there is always more money to be found for a new Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator, usually someone who makes as much or more than an assistant professor.  In short, if you need something to help you do the job for which you were hired, they plead poverty.  But when the progressive left creates yet another radical identity category, some new and improved form of human personhood, they build and staff a center for it.  Counting only individuals with the word “Diversity” or “Inclusion” either in their job title or the title of the unit for which they work, we spent $3,151,280 on salaries alone in 2015-16.  The cost of whatever programs or initiatives these individuals and units were collectively responsible for is beyond my ability to calculate (I wouldn’t know where to look for such numbers).  Sadly, the two other universities in our “family” spent only $140,347 on similar staff; surely they are nightmare hellscapes for the “diverse”.

Granted, $3 million is chump change for a place like this but darned if I couldn’t do wonders with it. But when my department needs money for something important and central to our job, I’m told to hustle a donor. Kind of insulting.

In the Middle Ages, even when a kingdom was poor, they built lavish cathedrals, because that’s what was most important to them. It’s what they worshiped. On campus today, administrator’s worship the great god Diversity, to whom fulsome tribute must be paid.

The NYT reports on the latest in campus catechesis:

WORCESTER, Mass. — A freshman tentatively raises her hand and takes the microphone. “I’m really scared to ask this,” she begins. “When I, as a white female, listen to music that uses the N word, and I’m in the car, or, especially when I’m with all white friends, is it O.K. to sing along?”

The answer, from Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University, is an unequivocal “no.”

The exchange was included in Ms. Marlowe’s presentation to recently arriving first-year students focusing on subtle “microaggressions,” part of a new campus vocabulary that also includes “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

Good grief. When a student is not only afraid to sing along with a pop song, but is “really scared” even to ask if it’s okay, because even the question might seem blasphemous, we are in serious trouble. Who can possibly learn in a climate of such ideological fear? Say the wrong thing, and boom! you’re gone. More:

Among her other tips: Don’t ask an Asian student you don’t know for help on your math homework or randomly ask a black student if he plays basketball. Both questions make assumptions based on stereotypes. And don’t say “you guys.” It could be interpreted as leaving out women, said Ms. Marlowe, who realized it was offensive only when someone confronted her for saying it during a presentation.

Want to be extra-safe? Don’t talk to anyone not of your own race. The risk is too great. This is priceless:

Fresh on the minds of university officials are last year’s highly publicized episodes involving racist taunts at the University of Missouri — which appear to have contributed to a precipitous decline in enrollment there this fall.

“That closes your doors,” said Archie Ervin, the vice president for institute diversity at Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “If you have sustained enrollment drops and disproportionately full-paying students such as out-of-state, the state legislature can’t make up the gap.”

So this is what they’re telling themselves: that the massive drop in enrollments at Mizzou is because there were alleged racist taunts there, not because SJWs roiled the campus and demonstrated that the university will surrender to their crybullying. The thought that the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education are actually making things worse on campus never occurs to them, or, crucially, to the colleges that hire them. They’re all true believers.

UPDATE: This just went out from the University of Washington. The boldface part is emphasized by the faculty member who forwarded it to me:

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,

Names matter. And there are many reasons why some of our students may use names that differ from their legal names. Some students prefer to use a middle or nickname. Some students may choose a name that aligns with their gender identity. International students may adopt “Western” names. Other reasons may include a pending divorce or identity-related safety concerns. Whatever the reason, it’s important that the University of Washington respect students’ wishes. Our student leaders have asked us to update our systems to use preferred names, and our commitment to equity compels us to respond.

I’m pleased to announce that, starting autumn 2016, the University of Washington is offering students at all three campuses the opportunity to have their preferred names appear on class and photo rosters, in the UW Directory and on Grade Page, a system through which faculty enter grades. In winter quarter 2017, we will be able to add more options, with preferred names appearing on Canvas, MyPlan, MyGradProgram, EARS, DARS and Panopto. Legal names will continue to appear on official documents such as transcripts, diplomas, financial aid and immigration records.

This change sounds simple, but is the result of five years of substantial research and infrastructure engineering by UW-IT and the Office of the University Registrar to update relevant systems as part of the Preferred Names Project. This work supports the University’s commitment to value and honor diverse experiences and perspectives, and to create a welcoming and respectful learning environment, promote access, opportunity, and justice for all.  In making this change, we join a host of peer institutions, such as University of Michigan and UC Berkeley, in using the names student prefer.

The tools at Identity.UW.edu help students add a preferred name at any time during the quarter. Instructions prompt students to notify their professors and teaching assistants when a name change has been made to facilitate a smooth transition across applications.

See the Preferred Names website for more information, or contact the Office of the University Registrar at RegOff@uw.edu.

The faculty member who forwarded that to me adds:

As with the faculty member from UM, what kind of jumped out at me was the amount of resources being sunk into this (see bolded portion). Because apparently students can’t just hand in assignments with their preferred name on them in quotation marks, or underlined, or using a first initial and their preferred middle name, or any number of other solutions that have worked perfectly well in the past.

I’m sure pronouns are next for us at the UW. That will be fun. It’s hard enough to learn names in a 10 week quarter. Maybe I just won’t bother addressing anyone by name, and will avoid using third person pronouns in discussions.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Just this week, the oldest public school in America, Boston Latin School (which educated Sam Adams, Cotton Mather, and countless others), which is a minority-majority nationally-ranked public exam school that sends 15-20 kids to Harvard a year, was ordered by the Department of Justice to hire a diversity officer and produce annual reports on the racial climate.  And they need to “institute a system of restorative justice”, whatever that means.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2016/09/26/boston-latin-school-civil-rights/

And, presumably so that they aren’t disciplined by the Feds again, the whole school department is pro-actively updating their record systems with a non-binary gender option, probably similar to UMich [NFR: The tweet is from a Boston at-large city council member]:

https://mobile.twitter.com/AyannaPressley/status/780794512805208064

America’s Culture War Mercenaries

A reader passes along a government document putting out bids for a contract. Here’s the top of the document:

Apparently the (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, a small Balkan nation that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia, is insufficiently progressive on LGBT issues. So the American government is spending $300,000 to undermine the traditional Orthodox Christian culture of the country. Excerpts from the document (emphases mine):

Macedonia has ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Human Rights Convention. Through ratification of these human rights treaties, Macedonia has assumed obligations and duties under international law to respect, to protect, and to fulfil human rights. Despite the adoption of international human rights principles, which are incorporated in domestic legislation, Macedonia has made little progress towards meeting European Union criteria in strengthening the rule of law and respect for human rights according to international reports. In these terms, the country has still not met the necessary requirements for EU membership. The 2015 EU Progress Report notes that “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons continue to suffer discrimination and homophobic media content, both online and offline… Considerable efforts are still needed to raise awareness of and respect for diversity within society and to counter intolerance. This needs to be done through public campaigns and training of law enforcement bodies, prosecutors, judges and health workers.”

What does this mean? Are radio stations calling for pogroms against LGBTs? Or are newspapers simply calling on readers to hold fast to the traditional teaching on marriage? It’s impossible to say without further information. The diversocrats slap the Orwellian word “homophobia” — as if the pathology of fear were the cause of any belief that falls short of 100 percent affirmation. Similarly, we know from our own experience that when the Left says “respect for diversity,” it means “you will accept what we believe about LGBT, and cast aside your religious beliefs.” Macedonia is a country that is 2/3 Orthodox and 1/3 Muslim. I could be wrong, but I would not be surprised if many people there hold beliefs about LGBTs that would trouble even conservative Christians in the West. But we can be certain that as far as USAID is concerned, any belief about homosexuality and transgenderism short of what obtains in the offices of the Human Rights Campaign and the English faculty at Oberlin must be stamped out. More:

The LGBTI community is systematically discriminated against. The 2013 Macedonian Helsinki Committee Report on Hate Crime Incidents concludes that youth and members of the LGBTI community are the most affected members of society owing to the fact that sexual orientation and gender identity are not recognized grounds on which hate crimes can be perpetrated. Bias motivated crimes are not properly reported or investigated by the police. Relevant practitioners do not receive training regarding the identification and response to hate incidents. By not treating the hate crimes phenomena as a separate issue, the state does not offer special protection and support to victims.

Wait, so because the country’s legal system does not single out LGBTs for “special protection and support” when they are physically attacked, that means it’s homophobic? There are lots of people in this country (like Andrew Sullivan) who find the concept of “hate crimes” philosophically and morally problematic, and inherently ideological. If Macedonia has hate crime designations for violence against other groups but not LGBTs, then that’s a problem. But is it really a problem that’s the business of the United States to solve?

More:

The LGBTI community in Macedonia faces numerous challenges, as noted in international reports. In May 2015, the International LGBTI Association, which rates European countries according to how fully they respect the human rights of and grant full equality to the LGBTI community, ranked Macedonia as 43rd out of 49 countries, the worst score in the Balkans. The community suffers from discrimination, physical violence, lack of legal protections, and use of derogatory language in the media, government, and society. The situation is particularly dire for rural LGBTI persons and youth. Exacerbating these problems is the ruling party’s promotion of a socially conservative, exclusionary agenda that relies on traditional gender ideology.

Well, there you are: sounds like the government of this traditionally Orthodox country promotes what the Orthodox church teaches about sexuality and gender, and what human beings have believed for time immemorial. And that is something the United States government will not tolerate, and in fact hates so much that it is planning to spend $300,000 to send in agents to undermine faith and family in a small Balkan nation. Cultural hegemony, liberal-style. Does Washington hire culture-war mercenaries to go into countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatr to spread the gospel of sexual diversity? Or do they just do this to countries too small, poor, and powerless to resist?

Finally, this excerpt:

The objectives of the program are:

1) Increasing awareness of LGBTI rights and advocacy;

2) Ensuring a safe place for vulnerable members of the community;

3) Developing institutional capacity by facilitating networks and the engagement of the LGBTI community members with each other (nationally and regionally), the broader CSO community, and local and national institutions; and

4) Assist LGBTI CSOs to build alliances with human rights and media CSOs to combat hate speech and exclusionary narratives. 

“Exclusionary narratives”? I suppose we should call the nearest Gender Studies faculty to find out what that means, but it’s pretty clear that US taxpayer dollars are being used to hire culture-war mercenaries to go into a Christian country, in complete disrespect for its religious belief and traditions, and destabilize them.

And if Washington finds traditional Christianity so threatening abroad that it’s willing to spend taxpayer dollars to hire Social Justice Warriors to fight it, what do you think the future holds for traditional Christianity in our own country? You had better start preparing  yourself, your family, and your community for the resistance. The New York Times today has a story about Iowa’s conservative Evangelicals trying to come to terms with their losses. It focuses in part on the Odgaards, an older couple who had to sell their business because they would not rent out the chapel inside it to a gay couple for a wedding. “It all flipped, so fast,” one of them said.

It did. And it’s not flipping back, even if Donald Trump is elected president. It’s a new world now. The US Government is positioning itself as the enemy of traditional Christians, (and Jews, and Muslims) with our “hate speech” and “exclusionary narratives.” That’s a big reason why I wrote The Benedict Option.

 

View From Your Table

Topsham, Maine

The reader writes:

One of the advantages of homeschooling is the ability to make, and consume, large, leisurely breakfasts. These are some breakfast sandwiches on homemade bread, which our 14-year-old whipped up for himself (along with his favorite mug from the best coffee in Portland). His five younger siblings asked him to make more, but I’m not sure we have enough bread left over at the moment…

You can see some of our day’s work on the chalkboard, and his reading material. It’s his 2nd time through J.D. Vance’s book.

What a great shot! This is pretty much the Platonic ideal of the VFYT. Thanks!