Rod Dreher's Blog, page 532

Boundaries and the Benedict Option

Prof. Gerald Schlabach, a Catholic convert and Benedictine oblate, has published a critique of the Benedict Option in Commonweal. I’m grateful for his attention to my ideas, and I will respond to his article between quoting sections of it. He writes:

There is no doubt, however, that many who currently advocate for the Benedict Option do envision precisely this kind of retreat. What’s troubling about such advocacy is that too often it overlooks what is most Benedictine about the Benedict Option, and not, in fact, optional at all: the imperative of all Catholics to stay together, both in global communion and in face-to-face relationships, even when those relationships are hard.

This is his basic line: that Catholics should stick together no matter what, because that’s the Benedictine thing to do. Nowhere, though, does Schlabach address an obvious question: what does one do when one’s parish (or school, or other Catholic community) teaches or practices something seriously contrary to the Catholic faith, as authoritatively proclaimed by the Church’s Magisterium? (Christians from the Orthodox and Protestant traditions face their own versions of the same question.)

Buried in Schlabach’s position is the assumption that being a member of the religious community is the ultimate goal of the Christian life. If that were true, it wouldn’t matter what one believed, as long as one stayed in community. But if one believes that the purpose of the Christian life is to grow in holiness, and to do so in community, then one has to know when the community no longer promotes holiness, but something else. And one has to know when the gap between holiness and what is taught and practiced in one’s local parish (or other community) is so great that one has to break communion.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a white Christian attending a church in the Deep South during the Civil Rights years. The pastor routinely delivers sermons defending white supremacy and denouncing “outside agitators” spreading a heretical “social gospel,” (that is, Christians from outside the South working for civil rights). Most of the congregation agrees with the pastor. But you do not. You deeply do not. You have told your children not to take what their pastor says seriously, that he is wrong about racial matters. Nevertheless, it is clear to you that the pastor is not going to stop, and that he really does speak for the sense of the congregation.

What do you do? If you are a Catholic, and this was a Catholic parish, you might be able to find another parish where this kind of preaching didn’t go on. You would be obliged by the church’s teaching, though, to go to mass. In the end, if you could not find another parish, you might have to suffer through the pastor’s immoral teaching, if only to satisfy your Sunday obligation. You would take what comfort you could in knowing that Christ is really present in the Eucharist. That might be a solution, but it would exact a tremendous cost on you and your family. You would be a member of that community only formally.

If you were a Protestant under this scenario, you would probably leave that congregation. If all the Protestant congregations in town were preaching white supremacy, you would be justified, I would think, in not worshiping with them on Sunday, but instead doing some form of worship at home with your family. That’s what I would do if I were a Protestant under those circumstances. Teaching racial supremacy as a Gospel value, especially in a place like the Jim Crow South, is such a profound and wicked violation of authentic Christian teaching that I could not in good conscience dignify it with my presence, nor could I have it taught as truth to my children by religious authorities. I think it is that important. Don’t you?

Now, there are other issues that are so fundamental that to treat them as if belief in them were optional for Christians is impossible. I would hope that all Christians reading this can agree that the case in the United Church in Canada right now, in which an atheist pastor is trying to keep her pulpit, in the name of inclusion and diversity, is absurd. Denying the existence of God and/or the divinity of Jesus Christ ought to be a deal-breaker for Christians when it comes to their pastors. If not, then you are in no way worshiping Jesus, but rather you have made an idol of the community.

Take the principle of the atheist pastor and work back from that. If you concede that a parish or congregation has a right and even an obligation to dismiss a pastor who denies something so fundamental to the faith as the existence of God, then you have drawn a line laying out the bounds of the community. All communities built around ideas have boundaries. They have to, to know who they are. If you do not believe in Jesus Christ, you are not a Christian. That’s an easy one. There really are differences in belief that ought to be tolerated for the sake of charity, but to believe that there is nothing that should cause one to break with a congregation, or to support expelling others from the congregation, is untenable.

Here’s something happening right now in a Catholic parish in Providence, RI, that illustrates this dilemma. Michael Templeton, the music director in the church, is a gay man who formally married his partner in a civil ceremony. The pastor of the parish dismissed him from his job as music director. Excerpt from the (ridiculously biased) story in the Providence Journal:

Glen Beattie, who came to St. Mary’s in 2008, waved goodbye to the altar Sunday as he headed out the door. “Bye church,” he said, sadly. If Templeton isn’t welcome, Beattie, also a gay man, doesn’t feel safe, either.

Templeton, 38, echoed this idea in an interview last week. He grew up Catholic, and has been in music ministry since he was a teenager. He’s dedicated his life to translating Scripture into song, he said.

“This is about a real statement on who is welcome and who is not,” Templeton said. “About who should feel safe and who shouldn’t.”

Templeton’s firing comes after Pope Francis released Amoris Laetitia, or “The Joy of Love,” which outlined a different path for the Church. Instead of casting out people that haven’t strictly aligned themselves with the Church’s belief system, Catholics should invite them in.

Bishop Tobin has taken a different approach. On Friday, he issued a statement saying he had “no choice” but to dismiss Templeton.

“Any person who holds a ministerial position in the Church, as an employee or a volunteer, is expected to live in a way that is fully consistent with the teachings and faith of the Church,” Bishop Tobin wrote. “If an individual deliberately and knowingly enters into a relationship or engages in activity that contradicts the core teachings of the Church, that individual leaves the Church no choice but to respond.”

Many St. Mary’s parishioners don’t agree. One woman, who has been attending church there for 40 years but did not want to give her name, said she’s thinking of leaving the religion altogether.

“This isn’t right,” she said with tears in her eyes. “This isn’t what being a Christian is.”

There is a very important issue at stake in this controversy — something important to both orthodox and progressive Catholics in the congregation. Bishop Tobin does not say that Michael Templeton is unwelcome in the church. He is saying that Templeton cannot serve as a lay minister within the church if he chooses to publicly defy Catholic teaching in such a significant way. The weeping woman quoted at the end has a very different idea of what being a faithful Catholic means — so much so that she may leave not only the parish, but Catholicism altogether over it.

Is Prof. Schlabach willing to tell Templeton and his supporters to suck it up and stay in that parish? Maybe he would. But for them, this would be a huge sacrifice, it seems to me. Yet  orthodox Catholics in the parish would conceivably also be making a big sacrifice if the church’s leadership saw it as a matter of indifference to allow someone who publicly denied the Church’s teaching on such a core issue to remain in a position of authority in the parish. And the orthodox Catholics have Catholic teaching on their side, regarding the moral and theological gravity of Templeton’s choice.

The point is simply this: one way or another, people within that congregation would have to make a big sacrifice to remain part of it. Both believe that the situation with Templeton embodies a core Christian truth, one that is not optional. The Roman Catholic Church also has a means of determining what truth is regarding this matter. The application of it to a particular situation is a matter of discretion, certainly, but the truth of the thing is not up for debate. Not for Catholics, anyway. Those who do believe that the Church’s teaching on this matter is wrong, or at least optional, are, in the eyes of orthodox Catholics, substituting a lie for the truth, and leading people away from holiness. And those progressive Catholics who believe otherwise, like the weeping lady, no doubt believe the same. One side or the other is going to have to accept what they see as a grave injustice to stay in that congregation.

Should they do so? Perhaps. But it’s a big deal, and it’s the kind of thing Schlabach does not address. The Benedict Option, broadly speaking, is for Christians (Catholic and otherwise) who see Christian orthodoxy besieged on a number of fronts, and who want to live out a communal life with other Christians who agree on fundamental beliefs, and who want to live them out together.

More Schlabach:

Interestingly, MacIntyrian localism has not aligned neatly with standard left/right polarities. Yes, some Catholics and former Catholics such as Dreher (who was raised as a Methodist and converted to Catholicism before finally joining the Orthodox Church) promote the Benedict Option out of dismay over issues such as same-sex marriage or alleged federal encroachments through Obamacare. Yet among the first and most prominent voices citing MacIntyre’s call were Catholic students of the Methodist ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who were animated by a left-leaning critique of war, militarism, and American empire. From that circle emerged one of the most notable examples of groups prompted by MacIntyre and inspired by St. Benedict in fresh ways, the New Monasticism movement among young Evangelicals. When Dreher asked one of its leaders, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, what others can learn from the patron of historic monasticism in the West, Wilson-Hartgrove bluntly replied that “Benedict saved me from the Religious Right.”

Well, yeah, and bless them. I admire and respect the radicalism of what the New Monastics are trying to do regarding community life, and thought about whether or not I should include them under the Benedict Option umbrella, for purposes of writing my book. I have benefitted in particular for Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s book on stability. I decided in the end not to write about them in the book not out of disrespect, but because it seemed to me that they do not have a commitment to Christian orthodoxy as I understand it, and as the people I’m trying to reach with the Ben Op book understand it. I recommend that you take a look at the dialogue JWH and I had about this issue. 

Prof. Schlabach has argued for same-sex marriage.  That puts him outside of Catholic orthodoxy, and Christian orthodoxy. And this is not an issue on which we can agree to disagree as a matter of ecclesial discipline. Certainly we can agree to disagree and still remain friends. I’d say that at least half of my friends support same-sex marriage, and I love them no less for that. I hope they feel the same way about me. But as a matter of what is taught within the community of the Church, this is a bright, clear line, though not the only one (abortion is another, and so too, in my view, is racism).

More Schlabach:

In any case, the question of whether the Benedict Option necessarily entails a retreat from public matters depends not so much on what we are leaving or resisting in doing so as on what we do once we go deeper into our locales.

Right. As will be perfectly clear when The Benedict Option is published next year, I do not argue that orthodox Christians should withdraw entirely from public life. I do argue, however, that we should, as MacIntyre counsels, “[turn] aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and [cease] to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.” What we should do instead is focus on “the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.”

This requires not just some form of withdrawal from the mainstream — as the New Monastics are doing in their own way. It also requires going towards something good. And it requires sharing the goods we find in our own community with the rest of the world, insofar as we can do that without compromising the integrity of our faith. I have no problem at all with Ben Op Christians running for public office or otherwise being engaged with the wider community. My contention is that it is more important to focus on building up the local Christian community — but that is merely a matter of priorities. The Benedictine monk doesn’t turn his back entirely on the outside community. He couldn’t do so without violating the Rule of St. Benedict‘s command to show hospitality to visitors and pilgrims. But he can only show true hospitality to the visitor if he has made a priority of prayer and communal life according to the Rule. In other words, Benedictine hospitality is not the point of the Rule, but flows naturally from the virtues inculcated by the practices of Benedictine community life — practices that can only be carried out in relative isolation from the world.

Schlabach builds his essay around the Benedictine vow of “stability” — that is, the mandate that when a monk makes his final profession and becomes a Benedictine, he is bound to remain a part of that same monastery’s community until the day he dies, barring exceptional circumstances. Schlabach says:

What makes Benedictines unique among religious orders is precisely this vow of stability and the practices it entails for monks as they commit to living the rest of their lives in one place, within one community. Whatever other spiritual practices they may have developed (liturgy of hours, lectio divina) or borrowed (Ignatian self-examination), monks in this tradition embrace community life itself as the most basic of their spiritual disciplines. Continuing to live together with people whom one cannot simply “unfriend” exposes self-deceptions and wears off uncharitable rough edges like nothing else.

This is true, and I have been told the same things by the monks I interviewed. However — and this is a crucial point — I suspect it would be unthinkable (at least for the Norcia monks) to keep in community a monk who openly and persistently denied Catholic teaching, and/or the Church’s teaching authority. Chapter 23 of the Rule prescribes excommunication (being prohibited from receiving communion) for lesser faults:

If a brother is found to be obstinate,

or disobedient, or proud, or murmuring,

or habitually transgressing the Holy Rule in any point

and contemptuous of the orders of his seniors,

the latter shall admonish him secretly a first and a second time,

as Our Lord commands (Matt. 18:15).

If he fails to amend,

let him be given a public rebuke in front of the whole community.

But if even then he does not reform,

let him be placed under excommunication,

provided that he understands the seriousness of that penalty;

if he is perverse, however,

let him undergo corporal punishment.

For heavier faults (Chapter 25):

Let the brother who is guilty of a weightier fault

be excluded both from the table and from the oratory.

Let none of the brethren join him

either for company or for conversation.

Let him be alone at the work assigned him,

abiding in penitential sorrow

and pondering that terrible sentence of the Apostle

where he says that a man of that kind is handed over

for the destruction of the flesh,

that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord (1 Cor. 5:5).

Let him take his meals alone

in the measure and at the hour

which the Abbot shall consider suitable for him.

He shall not be blessed by those who pass by,

nor shall the food that is given him be blessed.

If, after all these attempts at correction, a monk persists in the error, the Rule is unsparing:

But if he is not healed even in this way,

then let the Abbot use the knife of amputation,

according to the Apostle’s words,

“Expel the evil one from your midst” (1 Cor. 5:13),

and again,

“If the faithless one departs, let him depart” (1 Cor. 7:15)

lest one diseased sheep contaminate the whole flock.

“Stability,” then, is not an absolute value in the Benedictine life. The Rule advises progressively stronger measures to deal with someone obstinate, and also advises the abbot to be quick to receive back a penitent. But if someone persists in error, he must be disfellowshipped, because to do otherwise would sow disorder and disease within the entire community. Does the professor know better than St. Benedict himself?

Schlabach:

Unlike participating in other forms of Christianity, being Catholic necessitates a refusal to leave in protest when the going gets tough, or to start a new church, or to shop around for another identity, or to bandy about threats of schism. In this sense, to leave Catholicism in favor of another high-church communion such as the Eastern Orthodox is fundamentally a Protestant act.

Well. I am going to assume in charity that Prof. Schlabach is being unintentionally snotty here because he does not know the circumstances surrounding my departure from Catholicism. If he cares to inform himself, he could start here.  I left Catholicism not because I was protesting anything, or seeking another identity, but because after a long period of spiritual agony over the abuse scandal, I found that I had lost my ability to believe in Catholic Christianity. As I have said in this space many times, that was the most painful experience of my life, even more painful than losing my sister and my father. I would not have chosen it for anything. That said, let me suggest that my decision to leave Catholicism when I could no longer affirm that everything the Roman Catholic Church taught was true shows a greater respect for the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church than that of someone who rejects that authority when it conflicts with what he prefers to believe, yet continues to teach theology and Christian ethics at a Catholic university. 

More Schlabach:

Lacking this imperative [staying together no matter what], the option of resolving church conflicts by departing from communion becomes all too tempting. Yet that is precisely what appears to be happening when Dreher cites concrete examples of families and communities embracing the Benedict Option not only because they are disillusioned with American culture, but because they are disappointed with the Catholic Church in America.

Wait, what? If faithful orthodox Catholics feel the need to establish Benedict Option communities in whatever form to help them live more faithfully Catholic lives in communion with the Catholic Church, what’s wrong with that?

Schlabach suggests that if liberal and conservative Catholics were more tolerant of each other, they could learn to work together, and maybe quit thinking of themselves as liberals or conservatives. That’s a nice thought, but it applies political reasoning to theology and morality. Politics is the art of managing the common life of a community. Politics in any community depends on shared agreement on basic principles. Liberal democratic politics are by nature flexible, because they accept the individual as the basic political unit, and focus primarily on establishing procedures for allowing the community to govern itself while maintaining respect for individual liberty. You become an American by virtue of your birth, or if you are a naturalized citizen. There is nothing you can do to lose your American citizenship, aside from renouncing it. It is an essentially different thing than membership in the church.

Christianity is a revealed religion. It proclaims non-negotiable truths, first principles that must be affirmed for membership in the community. Where the line gets drawn depends on your denomination, but no Christian church can say that everything is up for grabs, or that truth is determined solely by the majority vote of the congregation. There may be a Protestant church that operates that way, but to the best of my knowledge, even the more liberal churches affirm that there are some truths that are non-negotiable, at least in principle. In the Order of St. Benedict, as we have seen, there is a mandate to expel persisently heretical or persistently disobedient monks from the monastery. Some churches have procedures that exclude people from the church entirely, but normally, excommunication only means that Church authorities have declared that a particular sinner is barred from receiving communion until and unless he repents.

My point simply is that it is untenable to think that churches can be run as secular political organizations. You can’t say that pro-choice Christians can say that abortion is morally permissible because the fetus is not a human being while pro-life Christians hold that abortion is a grave offense involving the taking of a human life — and the two sides can resolve their differences by concluding either a) that they should meet halfway, and agree that abortion is wrong only some of the time, or b) that abortion is a matter on which Christians can agree to disagree, because it’s not ultimately that important. In secular liberal democratic politics, people within a polity tend to find a way to split the difference to accommodate everyone. Churches can’t operate that way, because their telos is fundamentally different. The only way that principle could be said to apply to a church is if the telos of the church was not to proclaim the truth and disciple the congregation in living that truth out, but rather to keep the congregation together for its own sake.

For Catholic Christians, at least, there is a way to resolve these differences: by seeing what the Roman Catholic Church has authoritatively taught based on its magisterial interpretation of Scripture. This is essential to what it means to be a Catholic. To say that moral truth is determined by the individual Christian is, well, Protestant, or if not Protestant (because many Protestants deny this), at least not Catholic. It shouldn’t have to be necessary to explain this to a trained Catholic theologian, but we live in interesting times.

And so we return to MacIntyre’s basic observation: that in modernity, we have fewer and fewer shared sources of authority to which we can appeal to resolve our differences. I don’t know enough about the various Protestant traditions to say, but one great advantage of Roman Catholicism over Protestantism, at least in theory, is that Rome settles doctrinal conflicts authoritatively. Based on my reading of his Commonweal article, Prof. Schlabach does not recognize Rome’s authority except in an advisory capacity to the individual, which is no real authority at all.

That may well be an unfair judgment on my part, in which case I invite correction. It really is a difficult and complex question, trying to figure out how far one can go in disagreeing with Church teaching and practice without violating the boundaries of what one must believe to be a Catholic (or, more broadly, a Christian). There is a tension there that can be creative and constructive.

But a tension there is, and the boundaries can only be stretched so far. Take the example of St. Dismas parish and school in this anonymous piece from First Things. I happen to know who the author is, and the name of the actual parish and school that he’s talking about. Read it, and tell me how on earth that parish and its pastor, and that school, have anything but the faintest thing to do with Roman Catholicism. The Benedict Option is for people like the author of that essay, who believe in what the Roman Catholic church teaches, and who want to live authentically Catholic lives, and want and need other Catholics, and Catholic families, to share that pilgrimage of faith with them. They’re not going to find it at St. Dismas. And there are small-o orthodox Christian in every faith tradition who find themselves in similar situations.

I appreciate the opportunity to have these conversations in public. These issues are important, though I look forward to being able to discuss them when the book is published, so the fullest expression of my thinking about the Ben Op is available for public scrutiny. It is irresponsible to say, “Peace, peace” where there is no peace. There should not be any reason for people to feel the need to take the Benedict Option within their own religious tradition. But that is not the world we live in, and we ignore the facts at our own spiritual peril — and our children’s.

 

‘F–k You, A–holes,’ Argued the Yale Philosopher

They don’t make Yale philosophy professors like they used to, I reckon. Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He also deigned to offer his professional Ivy League philosopher’s opinion on reports of remarks that the distinguished Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne made last week at a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting — comments that offered a critical view of homosexuality, reportedly (I say “reportedly” because to my knowledge, no one has seen a transcript of his talk). The considered judgment of the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale, regarding Swinburne and those who defended his right to his opinion, is this: “F*ck you assholes. Seriously.”

Except without the asterisk.

I knew this because I saw it on this post on a group blog by right-of-center philosophy professors. You should take a look at it, noting especially its tone. Most of the post is dedicated to rounding up reaction, for and against, to Swinburne’s speech, with particular attention paid to the hysterical nature of left-wing philosophers. The author of the blog entry took screenshots of a Facebook page, which is how Stanley’s judgment ended up on that site. (I saw it the other day, but did not know who Stanley was until a reader pointed it out to me that he’s very far from a nobody.) Stanley now writes, on his Facebook page:

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

The Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, everybody.

I urge you to go to the linked post from the conservative philosophers’ blog and judge for yourself if it can remotely be described as part of any such “hateosphere”. If anything, the reckless judgment, vulgar language, and unhinged nature of Prof. Stanley’s remarks are far closer to hatred than anything on the conservative philosophers’ page. But as is par for the course for the academic left, extremism in the attack on homophobia is never, ever a vice.

Philosopher Ryszard Legutko, in his book The Demon In Democracy, understands what’s going on here. For the progressive, as for the communist, achieving the egalitarian utopia requires demonizing and extirpating the enemies of Equality and Freedom:

So at a certain moment the spirit of mistrust turns to human minds and human thoughts, which are believed to be the fountainhead from which acceptance of the inequalities springs. It is thus a matter of time before the sting of egalitarian ideology is directed against education, where the minds are shaped, against family life and community life, through which human thoughts acquire social durability, against art, language, and science, where they find more refined expression.

Legutko continues: “The spirit of suspicion will not disappear because there are always newer areas to conquer and deeper sources of inequality to discover.”

More:

Both sides — communist and liberal-democratic — share their dislike, sometimes bordering on hatred, toward the same enemies: the Church and religion, the nation, classical metaphysics, moral conservatism, and the family. Both are unable to mitigate their arrogance toward everything that their ideology despises, and which, in their revolutionary ardor, the seek to remove from the public space and from private lives.

Both are fixated on one or two things that they refer to ad nauseam because those things delineated the unbreachable boundaries of their limited horizon. In every sentence from the Leninist and Stalinist catechisms one can replace “proletariat” with “women” or with “homosexuals,” make a few other minor adjustments, and no one will recognize the original source. Both sides desire a better world so badly that in order to have it, they do not hesitate to control the totality of human life — including these aspects that are most personal or intimate. Both, unfortunately, have been successful politically and have taken over the ideological power of institutions, laws, and even something as elusive, but nonetheless important, as political atmosphere.

Let’s try that Leninist and Stalinist catechism trick:

We are on the eve of decisive events. Progressives in academia must not pin their faith on the general language of “freedom of expression” and “freedom of inquiry,” but must contrapose that language in their own progressive-democratic terms in their full scope. Free speech must never mean the right to make hurtful, bigoted remarks that make the university an unsafe place for marginalized communities. History shows that kind of thing leads to things like pink triangles and the Holocaust. Only a force guided by this understanding of can really ensure the complete eradication of homophobia, racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and all bigotries from the university.

I bet Prof. Stanley could sign on to that. I bet a lot of university professors could, and would. It is inspired by this passage from a 1906 speech of Lenin’s, in which he told revolutionaries not to reject the ordinary meaning of democratic terms, and start using their own language instead. Otherwise, the bourgeoisie might gain a foothold in the coming post-Czarist political order:

We are on the eve of decisive events. The proletariat must not pin its faith in general democratic slogans but must contrapose to them its own proletarian-democratic slogans in their full scope. Only a force guided by these slogans can really ensure the complete victory of the revolution.

Or take this one. First, the Stanleyfied version:

This means replacing what in fact are structures of oppression (structures hypocritically cloaked as “freedom of expression”) with a more just way of governing academia, one that empowers the marginalized. This means replacing democracy for the oppressors by democracy for the oppressed. This means replacing freedom of speech and inquiry for the white, male, heterosexists, for the exploiters, by freedom of speech and inquiry for those who have long been excluded from power. This means a gigantic, world historic extension of freedom, its transformation from falsehood into truth, the liberation of humanity from the shackles of heterosexist, white-supremacist patriarchy, which distorts and truncates any, even the most “open” university.

The original, from Lenin’s 1918 speech on “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship”:

This means replacing what in fact is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (a dictatorship hypocritically cloaked in the forms of the democratic bourgeois republic) by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means replacing democracy for the rich by democracy for the poor. This means replacing freedom of assembly and the press for the minority, for the exploiters, by freedom of assembly and the press for the majority of the population, for the working people. This means a gigantic, world historic extension of democracy, its transformation from falsehood into truth, the liberation of humanity from the shackles of capital, which distorts and truncates any, even the most “democratic” and republican, bourgeois democracy. This means replacing the bourgeois state with the proletarian state, a replacement that is the sole way the state can eventually wither away altogether.

And so on. The fact that a Yale philosophy professor not only holds such vicious opinions towards another professor who apparently only stated a historically standard Christian philosophical view of homosexuality, but who also did not hesitate to publicly denounce that professor in the most vulgar possible terms, is a striking sign of the revolutionary times. To give you a sense of the ideas that are considered so vile as to be unutterable, even in a Christian philosophers’ conference, I searched in Swinburne’s 2007 book Revelation to see what his view on homosexuality is. To my knowledge, there has been no transcript provided of his SCP talk, but numerous online comments by philosophers who were there said that there was nothing in it that Swinburne had not already said in Revelation (which was published by Oxford University Press, not known for being a purveyor of National Socialist tracts) It’s possible to search on Amazon and find the relevant pages in the Swinburne book. It starts on p. 304. As best I can tell, here is his argument:

Children need two parents. The inability to beget children is a “disability.”

Homosexuality, by this definition, is a disability.

Disabilities need to be prevented and cured.

What causes homosexuality? We don’t know, but it’s likely some combination of genetics and environment.

We can change the environmental conditions by discouraging people from homosexual acts, and embracing a homosexual identity.

There is always a possibility that the disability called homosexuality might be cured, so therapy should be considered. But as of now, we have no reason to think that it will be successful, except in a slight number of cases.

In any case, homosexuals should be encouraged to be chaste, just as heterosexuals should be encouraged to be chaste in the face of their own disordered sexual impulses.

We must show love and compassion to homosexuals (and others with disordered impulses), but real love and compassion implies wanting not what they want, but what is best for them.

Therefore, to love gays (and everybody else) is to desire that all who live outside the bounds of normative heterosexual marriage live in chastity.

This is a very common Christian argument from Scripture and the natural law. For a more detailed version of this argument, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teachings on the meaning of sex and sexuality. The Catholic Church teaches that all sexual acts and all sexual desire outside of heterosexual marriage (including masturbation,  and use of pornography) are disordered, because they disrupt the purpose of sex (= the unity of the couple, open to the possibility of the conception of new life). This is why the Church condemns contraception as a deformation of the right use of sex. The Catechism calls homosexuality “intrinsically disordered” because it is a state of sexual desire that can in no way be rightly ordered.

One can easily see why contemporary philosophers would object to this, and they should object to it, philosophically, if it violates their principles. But the idea that what Swinburne said is some sort of crazy right-wing blast from the bowels of Hitleriana, not fit to be stated in philosophical company, is insane.

But I don’t think Stanley and his academic confreres are insane, not in the least. I think they are radical progressive ideologues. I think they deliberately want to demonize any philosophers who hold to the traditional Christian teaching on the meaning of sexuality, particularly homosexuality. One of the most prominent contemporary philosophers is Princeton’s Peter Singer, who has advocated bestiality (under certain conditions) and the extermination of handicapped newborns. Singer is welcome within contemporary philosophical circles … but Richard Swinburne is now to be anathematized?

Anybody with eyes can see what’s going on here. There is a cleansing underway. The fact that the Society of Christian Philosophers is allowing itself to be bullied by these people is deeply depressing. Christian philosophers ought to be defending Swinburne’s right to state his opinion, even if they disagree with that opinion.

(I should add here that one of the handful of reasons I would even consider voting for Trump is the certain knowledge that a Hillary Clinton administration would only further the cultural hegemony of cutthroat revolutionaries like Stanley and his fellow travelers.)

Trump, Vows, & Treason

Alexi Sargeant has a very strong First Things piece on why Trump’s character — specifically, his disregard for vows — ought to be a deal-breaker for Christians. He begins by quoting the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen on the sacredness of vows. Said Sheen, in part, “It is too terrible to contemplate what would happen to the world if our pledged words were no longer bonds.” Excerpt from Sargeant’s commentary:

Trump’s policies, such as they are, usually come down to America breaking its promises. In the debate, he doubled-down on his previous pledge to back out of defending our NATO allies (who came to our defense after 9/11). Later in the debate he casually said we can’t defend Japan, another nation with whom we have a mutual defense treaty. This promised perfidy is of a piece with his rhetoric about tearing up deals and starting trade wars. He then brushed off the idea that stop-and-frisk policing was unconstitutional—not by taking the chance to give us any sense of how he understands the Constitution, but with flat denials. It seems that, like America’s treaties, the Constitution is just another document waiting to be renegotiated.

Donald Trump’s appeal is bound up in his transgressive persona. He does what is Just Not Done. But conservatives who spin this as simply “shaking up the corrupt norms of a stale political class” are being naïve or willfully obtuse. Trump does not care from where a norm comes. His consistent approach—as a businessman, as a showman, as a Democrat, and now as a Republican—is to violate whatever norm is in place, as a demonstration of his own power.

More:

What were most disturbing in his first debate performance were the times he chose to acknowledge his past dishonors brazenly, to frame them as matters of pride. This was how he reacted when confronted about his refusal to release his tax returns (“that makes me smart”), his bilking of contractors (“I was unsatisfied with his work”), and his tax-dodging (“it would have been squandered”).

Donald Trump seems to think that backing out of agreements is laudable, as long it helps him get ahead. But any churl can break a vow. What takes character, in politics, business, or marriage, is to make a vow and keep it, come what may.

Read the whole thing. He’s right, you know. One of the themes in Dante’s Commedia is the terrible political consequences that result when people break their vows. Dante the poet was exiled through the constant strife in Florence, and throughout Italy. In his fictional person, a pilgrim through the afterlife, Dante learns that so much of the violence and discord that has torn Italian society apart has to do with the inability of people to trust others to be true to their word. In the Inferno, the lowest level of Hell is reserved for Traitors, the worst of whom — those whose treason had wide social consequences — are immobilized in a lake of ice for eternity. In Dante, punishments fit the crime. For Traitors, who lived with no ultimate loyalties except to themselves, because that preserved the absolute freedom of their will, the just punishment was to be frozen in place forever.

Why are Traitors the worst of all sinners, in Dante’s scheme? For one thing, they make social and communal life impossible. If you cannot count on people to honor their vows, you never know what is real, and who is trustworthy. For another, as the pilgrim Dante learns in Paradiso, free will is God’s greatest gift to a man. To make a vow is to make a gift of God’s gift — that is, to pledge one’s sacred liberty, to a cause, person, or institution, out of love. If vows are tossed aside lightly, love is cheapened, and the order of the entire universe is weakened. By breaking vows, we weaken the power of love and goodness in the world. This is how our free will, the gift most precious to God, the gift that tells us the most about His nature, becomes a source of disharmony and debilitation within ourselves and the community.

As Sargeant says, the foulness of Trump’s character came out when he expressed pride in violating his obligations, praising his own intelligence and cunning in screwing over others. Do you really think that if it came down to it, Donald Trump could be trusted to protect and defend the honor and good faith of the United States of America? Do you think he could even be loyal to America’s best interests if they conflicted with the best interests of his businesses?

How could anybody, Republican or Democrat, or the leaders of any nation, believe a thing this man promises? He revels in being a traitor to his vows and promises. And let’s say that as president, he came to think of himself as the nation’s CEO, and approached diplomacy with these gutter ethics — and succeeded. What kind of lesson would that teach? It would corrupt the public’s morals even worse than they already are.

Look, many of us believe, with very good reason, that Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy. Trump is in another league entirely on this front. If the presidential contenders had Dungeons & Dragons alignments, Hillary would be lawful evil, and Trump would be at best neutral evil, at worst, chaotic evil. No good will come out of this election for faithful orthodox Christians. But there are meaningful gradations of evil, and Alexi Sargeant’s meditation on the sacredness of vows for the sake of maintaining social order illuminates an important difference between these two dreadful, dreadful candidates.

When Ideology Is More Important Than Truth

More from philosopher Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon In Democracy, in which the Polish Catholic academic, an anti-communist dissident, explores the similarities between communism and liberal democracy:

The liberal-democratic man, especially if he is an intellectual or an artist, is very reluctant to learn, but, at the same time, all too eager to teach. This trait of his character is in a way understandable once we remember that his nature was considerably impoverished by his turning back on standards of classical and Christian anthropology. He lost, or rather, as his apologists would have put it, was relieved of the intellectual instruments — deemed unnecessary — that would enable him to describe the inadequacy of his existence and to articulate a sense of want. He is, as Ortega once put it, a self-satisfied individual, not in the sense that he occasionally fails to feel his misery, or to be haunted by a fear of death, a disgust of meaninglessness, a fatigue of the mystification that, as he begins to realize more and more acutely, surrounds him, but because he assumes and never has the slightest doubt that he is in possession of the entirety of the human experience. Looking around, he finds hardly anything that would put this conviction into question and a lot that gives it — practically each day and with each development – a strong corroboration.

On life under communist ideology:

The ubiquitous ideology in the communist and liberal-democratic societies drag people farther and farther from reality. One of the most unpleasant aspects of living under communism was an awareness that we were always surrounded by nonreality, i.e., artifacts fabricated by the propaganda machine, whose aim was to prevent us from seeing reality as it was.

Oftentimes it was a fraud or simply a suppression of information about, for example, the state of the economy, or who murdered whom at Katyn, or what the fraternal Parties agreed on during the summit. But it was something more sinister than that. The entire atmosphere was sultry, because we could not free ourselves from a feeling that we were living among phantoms in the world of illusion, or rather of delusion.

After communism ended in Poland, Prof. Legutko found that:

Very quickly the world became hidden under a new ideological shell and the people became hostage to another version of the Newspeak but with similar ideological mystifications. Obligatory rituals of loyalty and condemnations were revived, this time with a different object of worship and a different enemy.

The new commissars of the language appeared and were given powerful prerogatives, and just as before, mediocrities assumed their self-proclaimed authority to track down ideological apostasy and condemn the unorthodox — all, of course, for the glory of the new system and the good of the new man. Media — more refined than under communism — performed a similar function: standing at the forefront of the great transformation leading to a better world and spreading the corruption of the language to the entire social organism and all its cells.

… Practically everyone felt coerced not only to take the right side, but to reassert his partisanship by surrendering to all the necessary language rituals without any critical thought or disarming doubt. The person accused of a reactionary attitude under communism could not effectively defend himself because once the accusation was made it disallowed any objection. Even the best counterargument to the effect that the charge was ill-stated, and that being a reactionary does not mean that one is necessarily wrong just as being a progressive does not mean that one is necessarily right, only sank the accused person deeper. Any such argument was a confirmation of his belonging to the reactionary camp, which was clearly reprehensible if not downright criminal. The only option that the defendant had was to admit his own guilt and submit a self-criticism as self-downgrading as possible, but even that did not have to be accepted. If the defendant had the right to answer the charges in public — and of course hd did not — the immediate result was an avalanche of well-orchestrated condemnations and mass protests where the indignant engineers, workers, and writers shredded the insolent reactionary into pieces.

Legutko says it’s the same way under contemporary liberal-democracy on the subject of homosexuality. If you’re smart, he says, and you have anything critical to say about homosexuality or the gay rights movement, you had better begin by condemning homophobia and praising the gay rights movement, and you had better serve up your criticism wrapped in “the rhetoric of tolerance, human rights,” etc.

The characteristic feature of both societies — communist and liberal democratic — was that a lot of things simply could not be discussed because they were unquestionably bad or unquestionably good. Discussing them was tantamount to casting doubts on something whose value had been unequivocally determined. … The language discipline is the first test for loyalty to the orthodoxy just as the neglect of this discipline is the beginning of all evil.

Trust me, if you are a conservative, you need to buy Prof. Legutko’s book. It’s powerful. These passages brought to mind philosopher Edward Feser’s discussion of the recent controversy in the Midwest Society of Christian Philosophers. As I wrote yesterday, Richard Swinburne, one of the most important Christian philosophers on the planet, delivered at their recent meeting a lecture in which he criticized homosexuality. Notre Dame philosopher Michael Rea, the president of the group, issued this public apology:

I want to express my regret regarding the hurt caused by the recent Midwest meeting of the Society for Christian Philosophers. The views expressed in Professor Swinburne’s keynote are not those of the SCP itself. Though our membership is broadly united by way of religious faith, the views of our members are otherwise diverse. As President of the SCP, I am committed to promoting the intellectual life of our philosophical community. Consequently (among other reasons), I am committed to the values of diversity and inclusion. As an organization, we have fallen short of those ideals before, and surely we will again. Nonetheless, I will strive for them going forward.

Edward Feser comes out swinging hard in defense of Swinburne’s right to say what was on his mind. Excerpts:

Fourth, Rea says that because he is “committed to promoting the intellectual life of our philosophical community,” he is “consequently… committed to the values of diversity and inclusion.”  Well, fine.  So what’s the problem, exactly?  “Diversity and inclusion” in the context of “the intellectual life of [a] philosophical community” surely entails that a “diversity” of opinions and arguments be “included” in the discussion.  Now, Swinburne’s view is unpopular these days.  It is often not “included” in philosophical discussions of sexual morality, discussions which tend not to be “diverse” but instead are dominated by liberal views.  Hence having Swinburne present the views he did is precisely a way of advancing the cause of “diversity and inclusion.”  Yet Rea treats it as if it were the opposite.  Why?

Fifth, Rea speaks about the SCP having “fallen short” of the ideals of diversity and inclusion and of his resolve to “strive for them going forward.”  Well, what does that entail exactly?  Evidently he thinks that letting Swinburne say what he did amounts to having “fallen short.”  So is Rea saying that, “going forward,” he will work to make sure that views like Swinburne’s are no longer expressed at SCP meetings, or at least in SCP keynote addresses?  How would preventing views from being expressed amount to the furthering of “diversity and inclusion”?  And how would that square with the free and open debate that philosophy is supposed to be all about?

 

What this is really about, says Feser, is “making public dissent from liberal conventional wisdom on sexuality practically difficult or impossible.” And:

What does all this have to do with Rea and Swinburne?  Just this.  Sophistries and ruthless political pressure tactics of the sort just described succeed only when people let them succeed – when they let themselves be intimidated, when they acquiesce in the shaming and shunning of those who express unpopular views, when they enable the delegitimization of such views by treating them as something embarrassing, something to apologize for, something “hurtful,” etc.

This, it seems to me, is what Rea has done in the case of Swinburne.  Given current cultural circumstances, Rea’s statement amounts to what philosophers call a Gricean implicature – it “sends a message,” as it were — to the effect that the SCP agrees that views like Swinburne’s really are disreputable and deserving of special censure, something to be quarantined and set apart from the ideas and arguments that respectable philosophers, including Christian philosophers, should normally be discussing.

That is unjust and damaging to philosophy itself, not merely to Swinburne.  It is especially unjust and damaging to younger academic philosophers – grad students, untenured professors, and so forth – who are bound to be deterred from the free and scholarly investigation of unpopular ideas and arguments.  If even the Society of Christian Philosophers is willing to participate in the public humiliation even of someone of the eminence, scholarly achievement, and gentlemanly temperament of Richard Swinburne, then why should any young and vulnerable scholar trust his fellow academic philosophers to “have his back” when questions of academic freedom arise?  Why should he believe they are sincere in their purported commitment to reason over sophistry?

Read Feser’s whole commentary.  This is the world that conservatives, especially conservative Christians, are now living in. It is not going to get better anytime soon. We had better prepare to fight and to be courageous, and we had better be prepared to lose without violating our consciences or capitulating to the intellectual bullies. If you think this is only going to stop in academia, you’re very, very wrong.

Keith Scott’s Gun

From the restraining order Keith Scott’s wife filed against him in 2015

The Charlotte Observer reports that police claim the gun they recovered from the scene of Keith Scott’s shooting (which they say had his fingerprints on it) was stolen — and that they have on record the thief saying he sold it to Scott. I had not heard this:

The Observer has reported that Scott was convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in 2005, after he shot and injured a man in San Antonio, Texas. He fired more than 10 rounds from a 9-millimeter pistol, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice told the Observer.

In October 2015, Scott’s wife, Rakeyia, filed for a restraining order against him, the Observer has reported. In her petition, she said that law enforcement officials should consider her husband a potential threat because he carried a 9-millimeter gun.

More on Scott’s violent criminal history:

NBC Charlotte has learned that Rakeyia Scott, the wife of Keith Scott, filed a restraining order against her husband in October 2015.

“He hit my 8-year-old in the head a total of three times with his fist,” and “he kicked me and threaten(ed) to kill us last night with his gun,” the restraining order reads. “He said he is a killer and we should know that.”

Rakeyia marked ‘yes’ when the order asked if there was any reason law enforcement should consider the defendant a potential threat. Written in was a statement saying her husband carries a “9mm black,” apparently referencing a gun.

The restraining order was dropped eleven days after being filed in October 2015.

Scott’s record has also been subject to scrutiny. He had prior convictions in Gaston County for assault with a deadly weapon and in Texas he served more than eight years for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and evading arrest. Scott’s attorney for his Texas case says he shot a man he believed was threatening his family.

Eight years in prison on a felony conviction — and that felony conviction made it illegal for him to own a firearm. But he had one anyway.

Now, the police didn’t know that Scott had a criminal history, including an eight-year prison stint for gun violence, when they told him to drop the gun, but if he was a violent man — as his criminal record shows he was — then it is plausible that he behaved foolishly and dangerously in front of the police that day. This is especially true if he had been smoking pot, as the police say (cops released photos of what they say was his gun, his ankle holster, and the blunt he had been smoking).

So far, no footage has come out showing exactly what Scott was doing with his hands when police say he was holding a gun in it. But the cops are on video screaming at him 10 or 12 times to “drop the gun.” In order for the police to be clearly in the wrong here, you have to demonstrate that they planted the gun at the scene of the shooting. If you accept that Scott did have a gun, then you have to believe that this provably violent man, a man with a record of serious gun violence, did nothing wrong when confronted by police. And you have to believe that the police had no good reason to think that the armed man standing in front of them, a man who refused to drop the gun after being ordered to many times by police ordering him to do so, threatened their lives.

 

 

 

A Social Justice Warrior Presidency

Steve Sailer this morning has a link to a Wall Street Journal story about how the US Labor Department has filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit against Palantir, a cybersecurity firm in Silicon Valley. From the Journal:

Palantir Technologies has discriminated systematically against Asian job applicants since at least January 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor said in a lawsuit filed Monday.

The Palo Alto, Calif., data-mining firm is one of the world’s most valuable private companies, best known for helping the U.S. track down Osama bin Laden. It has been been party to more than $340 million in federal contracts since January 2010, according to the complaint, and counts the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Army among its clients.

“Federal contractors have an obligation to ensure that their hiring practices and policies are free of all forms of discrimination,” Patricia Shiu, director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program, said in a statement.

The Journal continues:

The accusation that Palantir discriminated against Asians is an oddity in Silicon Valley, where big companies including Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. have been criticized for hiring too many white and Asian engineers, and too few blacks and Hispanics.

Sailer points out that Palantir is critical to national cybersecurity, and helped unmask and defeat a sophisticated Chinese cyberespionage network. He says:

So, maybe, the reason Palantir gets 85% of its job applications for software engineer from Asians but only hires 44% Asian has something to do with, I don’t know, Chinese espionage?

Maybe. But the thing that jumps out to me in this story is what it says about the federal government’s priorities. Is it really the case that the government should spend its time and its resources taking one of the most important companies to US national security to court because it hired 44 percent Asians instead of 85 percent Asians? Is that really a federal crime?

Look, I’m not defending illegal discrimination against Asians. Maybe this company did wrong. What I’m saying is that it’s just crazy that of all the potential targets for a federal lawsuit, the government goes after one of the companies that is most important to national security, on these grounds.

But that is how the princess-and-the-pea mind of the Social Justice Warrior works. There is no more important cause in the world than eliminating all discrimination committed by kulaks hated demographic groups, while promoting discrimination by favored demographic groups. This New York Times essay by a Yale Law professor is the quintessence of SJW snowflakery. Excerpts:

I’m not sure how many days are left in my life.

I am not suffering from a terminal disease. I don’t work in a high-risk occupation. No, I don’t have suicidal thoughts. I don’t even live in an especially dangerous neighborhood.

I am racially black and I live in America, which raises the question: Will I live as long as I intend?

I repeat: this man, Chris Lebron, is a Yale professor. He teaches at an Ivy League school. He is, by any measure, one of the real winners in life. There is no more prestigious position in American academia than to be an Ivy League professor. In a time of employment peril for American academics, holding a teaching position at a well-endowed ($25.6 billion) Ivy League college is about as secure a position as you can hope for. Unlike most Americans of any color, Chris Lebron is set for life. And yet, this melodrama. More:

You might now be thinking that this is really something — for somebody like me to say all this, sitting in the ivory tower in the Ivy League. I seem to have disproved my own point, because as I write this, I have been allowed to pursue, and in large part achieve, my plan of life.

It is absolutely true that I have managed to carve a space for myself, but that space may not be what you think it is. My professional social circle, because of the lack of diversity in the academy, is composed in such a way that the chances of my being harassed outside my home are diminished, not because of who I am, but on account of who I am with. And, yes, money helps — I earn a salary adequate to buy me surface level credibility in the eyes of American society. But these achievements and small securities come with the cost of not knowing how far they will carry me or how long they will protect me. In planning my life, I’ve come to accept this.

So maybe this is how black Americans ought to plan for a life in America — holding out the hope to meet basic goals or striving to achieve larger ambitions knowing all the while that the present-day effects of America’s racial history can fatally disrupt enjoying, celebrating, commemorating the results of achievements small or large. Let me be honest with you — that is neither rational, nor is it fair. And there’s still the small matter of the luck that runs out.

I wish I knew America’s plan for me.

“America’s plan for me”?! Does America have a plan for any of us? Should it? Come on. What does this guy want, anyway? He’s enormously privileged by comparison to most Americans. Lebron is an assistant professor. Want to know the salary of an assistant professor at Yale? It starts at $135,505.  That puts him in the top 14 percent of Americans by income — and again, given the massive size of Yale’s endowment, that income is secure. That’s not “a salary adequate to buy me surface level credibility in the eyes of American society.” That’s a salary higher than 86 percent of Americans earn.

But Lebron wants to complain about how unfair life is, how racist. In a piece for the Times last year, Lebron called for “a new black radicalism.” Excerpt:

Today, as we face a seemingly endless number of black lives being unjustifiably threatened, damaged and lost, and the resulting emotional cycle among black Americans of rage-despair-hope, it seems urgent that we ask again whether now is the time to make black radicalism central to black politics and activism. And if so, what should it demand of American citizens?

If you read his essay in tandem with the more recent one, it seems clear that Lebron thinks that a thriving life is something that the government can and should provide, and the fact that it is not doing so is an example of white supremacy. Tell it to Appalachia, mister.

The reason I bring this up in light of the Labor Department’s lawsuit is to highlight the priorities of SJWs, and what we can expect from four more years of a Democratic administration. We can expect an administration so in thrall to progressive racial politics that it will go after firms like Palantir for relatively minor issues and see the racialized special pleading of a black Yale professor in the top 14 percent as a cri de coeur that deserves privileging by the state.

I found that Lebron essay because one of you readers wrote last night in this space that it may be an example of why Trump is doing so well. That could be. Me, I think Trump is racist to some degree, but I also believe it’s true about Hillary Clinton, in the sense that she, like many progressives, believes that racial bias when it’s exercised on behalf of nonwhites is virtuous. Put another way, I believe that Hillary is predisposed to think that the snowflakey complaints of a black Yale assistant professor (or a transgender high school student) deserve far more attention than the struggles of poor white people in Mississippi trailer parks. And, being a Democrat, she’s predisposed to believe that the absence of full equality can only mean that someone, somewhere, was treated unjustly, and that equality can and must be forced by government action, no matter how much injustice against individuals has to be committed by the government to achieve equality.

This morning, I received an e-mail from a young white father in Atlanta:

I can only deeply lament the grave social situation going on here in Atlanta and elsewhere. You see, the real problem is not at all black people, but the ‘thug culture’ that has infected the black community. There are places where I grew up that you simply cannot go anymore without exercising extreme caution: parks, shopping plazas, movie theaters, and many more places. Crime rates have skyrocketed in towns that only 20 years ago were relatively peaceful suburbs. People are attracted to Atlanta because of the jobs and affordable living, but typically cannot afford to live in the upper-class enclaves located inside and just outside of the I-285 perimeter, and so they have spread out into the many towns and neighborhoods of greater Atlanta. This is, of course, a wise and sensible move for many. The problem is, ‘thug culture’ has moved in with many of these people. Thug culture, of course, glorifies violence, illicit sex, drug use, and rank materialism (getting rich by any means possible). Other ethnic communities are not immune to or free of these vices, but they do seem to be far more prevalent in the young, urban African American community (I am sincerely open to being proven wrong on this score, but the stats say otherwise, sad as it is to say it).

That’s why the media’s unceasing coverage of blacks gunned down by police is an occasion, at least for me, for incredulity, anger, and grief. The statistics, like them or not, demonstrate overwhelmingly that young black males commit a staggeringly higher number of crimes, violent and otherwise, than do their counterparts. I see this where I live, all the time. Blame what you will for this (and there are many factors for sure), but that does not alter the fact that free moral agents choose to injure and kill other human beings. The crime rates in greater Atlanta are horrific, and innocent people are hurt every day here. Does that merit a response from the major networks, Don Lemon, or President Obama? These incidents occur daily in Atlanta, and no one cares.

The same is going elsewhere. And nothing is said. Try to mention ‘black on black’ crime and watch in real time as the R-word is stapled to your breast pocket and branded on your forehead. This is absurd. Donald Trump is a narcissistic villain, and I refuse to vote for him, but when you live in a place like metro Atlanta, where hundreds and hundreds of crimes are overlooked by the media except for the [eventual] day a police officer (a public servant, for pity’s sake!) messes up and hurts or kills a person of color, I think you begin to see why people are attracted to Trump and will probably turn out in droves to vote for him. This is not at all to excuse police officers from any crimes they commit; they should absolutely be held to a very high standard, for they have been vested with a great deal of power. But what good can be said for a society that treats its own police officers this way? I can’t help but think that so many of these critics don’t actually know any policemen or women.

I think among liberals of all races, that man’s opinion would be seen as racist on its face, and dismissed — and this is a white guy who refuses to vote for Trump! So, yes, the flagrant double standard the Democratic Party has on racial issues, and its preoccupation with identity politics, matters. Remember, Yale is the university at which protests over a housemaster’s public statement about Halloween costumes ended up with that professor effectively driven out of Yale, and her husband making an abject confession of thoughtcrime before his student persecutors. Over advice on Halloween costumes. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote at the time:

At Yale, I encountered students and faculty members who supported the Christakises but refused to say so on the record, and others who criticized them, but only anonymously. On both sides, people with perfectly mainstream opinions shared them with a journalist but declined to put their name behind them due to a campus climate where anyone could conceivably be the next object of ire and public shaming. Insufficient tolerance for disagreement is undermining campus discourse.

The racial conflicts we have in America are huge, complicated, and deep-seated. We all know that. A Democratic friend told me on the phone yesterday how distressed she was that, in her view, Trump’s candidacy has legitimized a lot of nasty white racist talk that had been marginalized. I can see her point, and concede it to some degree (the Alt-Right racists, I mean), but it is also true that Trump’s candidacy is in part a protest against the de-legitimization by the left of ordinary observations related to race and public life, e.g., what the Atlanta reader wrote about.

The New York Times provided a space for one of the most privileged people in America — a well-paid Ivy League professor — to complain about how his life is in danger because of white supremacy. How likely do you think it is that The New York Times would give a platform for someone to say what the Atlanta man did? Do you think that tells us something about the bubble that media elites (and other liberal elites) live in?

 

The Trump-Clinton Debate

Trump won the first 25 minutes and then things went about the way I expected a ninety-minute debate to go for him.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 27, 2016

That’s it. Trump blew this thing, in my view. Hillary caught her stride about a half-hour in, and showed herself to be presidential. He came off as extremely unprepared. I cannot believe Trump helped himself tonight, though for all I know, the voters loved him. Hillary didn’t have a big win, but she did win, and I believe that she stopped the bleeding for her campaign.

I know that everybody has a different standard for Trump, but if Trump ends up judged the winner of this debate in the polls, I don’t know what to say anymore. There is no way Donald Trump is ready to be President of the United States. No way. And I don’t believe many undecided voters changed their mind to vote for Trump based on his performance tonight.

Your thoughts?

UPDATE: This:

If we hadn't just lived through the first nine months of 2016, I'd say that Trump's toast.

— David French (@DavidAFrench) September 27, 2016

UPDATE.2: The only positive reason Hillary Clinton gave tonight for voting for her is that she’s not Donald Trump. That’s not nothing! But when I think about what any of the other GOP presidential contenders could have done against her tonight, and what a Clinton presidency will mean for the country, and for the Supreme Court, I … despair.

UPDATE.3: Yes, Lord, yes, it is. With a stake through its heart and a garlic necklace. Ain’t nothin’ left for us religious conservatives but the Benedict Option.

Am I right that not one word was spoken about abortion, same-sex marriage, or any other culture war issue? The relig right really is dead.

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) September 27, 2016

The End Of Liberal Democracy?

Remember the “Flight 93 Election” essay by the pseudonymous writer Decius, who advocates voting for Trump as a last, ‘Hail Mary’ pass to restore a Republic deformed by liberalism? What if the truth is that there is no “saving” the Republic in the sense he means, because liberal democracy was always destined to turn out this way? That is, what if the problem is not that liberal democracy has gone off the rails, but that it has not.

In a 2014 essay in TAC, Patrick Deneen talked about this problem in a specific Catholic context. Excerpt:

The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which (Catholics hold) are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

Because of these positions, the “radical” position—while similarly committed to the pro-life, pro-marriage teachings of the Church—is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government. It is comfortable with neither party, and holds that the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of liberalism—the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (“conservatism”—better designated as market liberalism). Because America was founded as a liberal nation, “radical” Catholicism tends to view America as a deeply flawed project, and fears that the anthropological falsehood at the heart of the American founding is leading inexorably to civilizational catastrophe. It wavers between a defensive posture, encouraging the creation of small moral communities that exist apart from society—what Rod Dreher, following Alasdair MacIntyre, has dubbed “the Benedict Option”—and, occasionally, a more proactive posture that hopes for the conversion of the nation to a fundamentally different and truer philosophy and theology.

Over the weekend, I read The Demon In Democracy by the Polish Catholic philosopher Ryszard Legutko. I cannot recommend it to you strongly enough. This book is absolutely essential reading for any conservative, especially any Christian conservative, who wants to understand what’s happening now. It’s written plainly and punchily, accessible to any reader (though how much of this is due to the translator’s gifts, I don’t know). The last time I read a book of political theory and cultural criticism so short but so powerful was when I took up Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences in college, and it turned me rightward. Let that be an enticement to you, or a warning. For an American, even a conservative American, reading Legutko is like taking the red pill. It’s hard to go back to what you used to think about liberal democracy after this book. I am going to talk about it at length in a series of posts.

In the 1930s, fellow travelers of the Bolsheviks tried to take the sting out of communism by referring to it as “liberalism in a hurry.” Decades later, the conservative writer Joe Sobran quipped, “If communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is communism in slow motion.” The core argument of The Demon In Democracy is that Sobran was right. That sounds radical, even kind of crazy. Not long ago, some emigre friends from the Eastern bloc (they defected during the Cold War) told me that what they see happening in the West now reminds them of their communist youth. These are highly intelligent people, but I found it hard to understand this point of view. After reading Legutko, I get it. Boy, do I get it.

Legutko, now a European parliamentarian, was during the Solidarity years an editor of one of its underground journals. He was an anti-communist dissident, and has become a deep skeptic of liberal democracy. Legutko begins the book by wondering why it was that former members of Poland’s communist regime had so little difficulty making the transition to liberal democracy, and ended up helping to run things in post-communist Poland, whereas many dissidents could not transition. The reason, he says, is because both communism and liberal democracy come from the Enlightenment, and share much in common. “They are both fueled by the idea of modernization,” he says. And:

In both systems a cult of technology translates itself into acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society, changing human behavior, and solving existing social problems. This engineering may have a different scope and dynamics in each case, but the society and the world at large are regarded as undergoing a continuous process of construction and reconstruction. In one system this meant reversing the current of Siberia’s rivers, in the other, a formation of alternative family models; invariably, however it was the constant improvement of nature, which turns out to be barely a substrate to be molded into a desired form.

Both systems regard modernization as an ultimate good, and demonize anything that stands in the way of modernization. “[P]rogress is largely in the same direction, and backwardness is represented by the same forces,” he writes.

Having cast away the obligations and commitments that come from the past, the communist and the liberal democrat quickly lose their memory of it or, alternatively, their respect for it. Both want the past eradicated altogether or at least made powerless as an object of relativizing or derision. Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence and in practice, against memory. Those who were fighting the regime were also fighting for memory against forgetting, knowing very well that the loss of memory strengthened the communist system by making people defenseless and malleable. There are no better illustrations of how politically imposed amnesia helps in the molding of the new man than the twentieth-century anti-utopias 1984 and Brave New World. The lessons of Orwell and Huxley were, unfortunately, quickly forgotten. In my country at the very moment when communism fell and the liberal-democratic order was emerging, memory again became one of the main enemies. The apostles of the new order lost no time in denouncing it as a harmful burden hampering striving for modernity. In this anti-memory crusade, as in several other crusades, they have managed to be quite successful, more so than their communist predecessors.

“You can’t turn back the clock,” said the communists, and so say our liberal democrats (note well that “liberal democrats” in the sense Legutko means takes in democratic parties of the left and the right). Both systems are totalizing systems, meaning that they will not leave any sphere of society untouched by their principles, “including ethics and mores, family, churches, schools, universities, community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations.

The people, structures, thoughts that exists outside the liberal-democratic pattern are deemed outdates, backward-looking, useless, but at the same time extremely dangerous as preserving the remnants of old authoritarianisms. Some may still be tolerated for some time, but as anyone with a minimum of intelligence is believed to know, sooner or later they will end in the dustbin of history. Their continued existence will most likely threaten the liberal-democratic progress and therefore they should be treated with the harshness they deserve.

If you wonder why on earth the NCAA has involved itself in trying to compel universities and polities to open their bathrooms to transgenders, well, now you know. If you wonder how we get to the point where the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers publicly apologizes for a speech given by the world’s most eminent Christian philosopher, in which he (apparently) defended the orthodox Christian position on homosexuality — there you go.

The ultimate goal is what James Kalb calls “equal freedom.” He defined it in his 2008 book The Tyranny of Liberalism, and in this interview. Excerpt:

By liberalism I mean the view that equal freedom is the highest political, social, and moral principle. The big goal is to be able to do and get what we want, as much and as equally as possible.

That view comes from the view that transcendent standards don’t exist–or what amounts to the same thing, that they aren’t publicly knowable. That leaves desire as the standard for action, along with logic and knowledge of how to get what we want.

Desires are all equally desires, so they all equally deserve satisfaction. Nothing is exempt from the system, so everything becomes a resource to be used for our purposes. The end result is an overall project of reconstructing social life to make it a rational system for maximum equal preference satisfaction.

That’s what liberalism is now, and everything else has to give way to it. For example, traditional ties like family and inherited culture aren’t egalitarian or hedonistic or technologically rational. They have their own concerns. So they have to be done away with or turned into private hobbies that people can take or leave as they like. Anything else would violate freedom and equality.

Anything that gets in the way of equal freedom must be tolerated only until the point at which they can be crushed, at which point they must be crushed. More Legutko:

In a way, liberal democracy presents a somewhat more insidious ideological mystification than communism. Under communism it was clear that communism was to prevail in every cell of social life, and that the Communist Party was empowered with the instruments of brutal coercion and propaganda to get the job done. Under liberal democracy such official guardians of constitutional doctrine do not exist, which, paradoxically, makes the overarching nature of the system less tangible, but at the same time more profound and difficult to revers. It is the people themselves who have eventually come to accept, often on a preintellectual level, that eliminating the institutions incompatible with liberal-democratic principles constitutes a wise and necessary step.

The power of both communism and liberal democracy is that the people inside each system cannot conceive of any better way of organizing society. That is, they are acculturated according to the system’s totalizing values, such that any deviation from the progress promised by the system is seen as an impermissible deviation — impermissible because it makes things worse. Legutko:

The only change that one could imagine happening was one for the worse, which in the eyes of supporters meant not a slight deterioration, but a disaster. The communist would say: if communism is rejected or prevented, then society will continue to be subjected to class exploitation, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. The liberal democrats would say: if liberal democracy is not accepted, then society will fall prey to authoritarianism, fascism, and theocracy. In both cases, the search for an alternative solution is, at best, nonsensical and not worth a moment’s reflection, and at worst, a highly reckless and irresponsible game.

I’ll stop there for now. I will be posting several times this week on Legutko. I should make it very clear here that he does not claim that communism is equivalent in any way to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is a much better system, he says. But from the point of view of the ancients, and of their successors in the West, the Christians, liberal democracy is fundamentally irreconcilable with what it means to live a Good life. And we who have been formed under liberal democracy don’t understand this, which is one reason why conservatives, especially conservative Christians, can’t grasp the nature of the battle we find ourselves in.

If you haven’t yet read Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby’s 2015 First Things essay about the end of “the civic project of American Christianity,” you really should. Hanby:

Too often we are content to accept the absolutism of liberal order, which consists in its capacity to establish itself as the ultimate horizon, to remake everything within that horizon in its own image, and to establish itself as the highest good and the condition of possibility for the pursuit of all other goods—including religious freedom.

Just to remind you, The Benedict Option is my program for living out an authentic Christian resistance to the tyranny of liberal democracy, or rather, what liberal democracy has become, having raised its anchor from its grounding in Christianity, and set sail across the turbulent waters of liquid modernity.

Something Trumpish This Way Comes

Seen the polls today? Here’s the news from Bloomberg:

The Republican and Democratic nominees each get 46 percent of likely voters in a head-to-head contest in the latest Bloomberg Politics national poll, while Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent when third-party candidates are included.

Clinton faces higher expectations as tens of millions of people tune in for a television spectacle that could reach Super Bowl viewership levels. About half, 49 percent, say they anticipate the former secretary of state will perform better, while 39 percent say that for Trump, a real-estate developer and former TV personality.

Ann Selzer, the Iowa-based pollster who oversaw the survey, said there are signs that Clinton’s margins with women and young voters have eroded over the past three months, helping to explain Trump’s gains.

She blew August, spending much of her time raising money (this, even though her campaign coffers are bursting) instead of campaigning. This, from polling guru Nate Silver, is amazing:

The latest polling is consistent with a Clinton lead of only ~1% nationally. State firewall breaking up. Trend lines awful.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 26, 2016

Evidence that the race is a dead heat—or at least dead-ish heat-ish—is starting us in the face. Not some complex conclusion from our model.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 26, 2016

What’s amazing about Silver’s tweets is a) that here we are in late September, and Donald Trump is polling dead even with Hillary Clinton, and b) that Silver felt obliged to remind his readers that the truth is right in front of their noses.

Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait says it’s panic time:

If your football team is either a 1-point favorite or a 5.5-point favorite, then you should be deeply concerned about the chance of losing. If the outcome is not a football game but the chance that the Executive branch falls under the control of a bigoted, uninformed, dictator-admiring man-child, you should be more than concerned. You should be freaked out.

It’s clear that Trump has the campaign momentum now, and that Hillary has to bring her best game tonight to stop it. I agree with Ross Douthat: Hillary ought to be able to wipe the floor with him. But nothing is predictable this year. Douthat:

A series of debates between a man proudly unprepared for the office of the presidency and a woman of Clinton’s knowledge and experience should produce a predictable outcome: She should win, and he should lose.

This is not a hot take. It is a cold take, a boring take, a take that assumes that the political world, even now, is still relatively rule-bound and predictable.

But as someone who, like a lot of people, consistently underestimated Trump’s appeal, I wouldn’t dare to make a prediction. Michael Brendan Dougherty says if Trump wants to come out ahead, he should double down on the crazy. Excerpt:

Trump shouldn’t try to be presidential tonight. He should stick to being different. For good and ill — mostly ill — Trump is a once-a-century candidate. He needs to embrace that. He should put himself forward as the only man we’ll ever see in our lifetime of voting who can interrupt this endless succession of “competent” and “experienced” politicians. This is a time when seven out of ten people believe the country is going in the wrong direction, and when more people than that despise the performance of Congress. Trump should embrace the fact that he is an outlier. The emotional response he needs to seek from undecided viewers isn’t, “Gee, Donald Trump looks more like a regular politician tonight.” Instead it should be, “I know it’s crazy. But screw it. I’m voting Trump.”

I’ve noticed something that Hillary supporters, and many #NeverTrumpers, have been doing all year: acting as if saying or writing something that might be taken to give aid and comfort to Trump and his supporters is a sign that one is really trying to aid and comfort Trump. In February, during the GOP primaries, I thought about what the most plausible case for social conservatives voting for Trump might be, and posted it. Some people went nuts, thinking that I was signaling my own support for Trump. No matter how many times I say that I am voting for neither Trump nor Clinton, because I cannot stomach either one, that’s still not good enough for those terrified of a Trump presidency.

I’m starting to think that this has a lot to do with why Trump is doing so well. People can’t bring themselves even to think about such a thing, so they treat any commentary that assumes that Trump might be elected as only motivated by a desire to see that happen. Therefore, we must not talk about the Thing.

Look, I so distrust Hillary Clinton and what she stands for, and am so sick of the status quo, that if there were a similarly disruptive candidate who did not have Donald Trump’s disqualifying character flaws, I would happily vote for him or her. Hillary’s awfulness does not, in my mind, overcome Trump’s deficits. And I urge pro-Trump Christians to read Eric Erickson’s harsh commentary explaining why he believes Christians have no business voting for Trump (he’s not voting Hillary either).

But there are obviously a lot of voters who are not as troubled by Trump’s deep flaws as they are by Hillary’s. Trump goes into tonight’s debate immune to self-sabotage to a certain extent. Everybody knows he’s a vain blowhard by now, yet he’s still running even with Hillary Clinton. If people are still willing to vote for the guy despite all the crazy things he’s been saying all year, he would have to work really hard to say anything tonight to alienate them.

On the other hand, if you watched any of the Democratic debates, you know that Hillary is really good at this stuff. It’s not hard to imagine that putting the two side-by-side on the same stage will shake some Trump-leaners to her side, given what I expect to be a very sharp contrast.

On the third hand, ‘memba Al Gore’s sigh in his debate with George W. Bush? It reinforced the impression many people had of him as an arrogant know-it-all. It would be very, very easy for Hillary Clinton to fall into this kind of trap with Trump. This is one reason why her “basket of deplorables” line was so harmful to her: it struck a resonant chord with voters who already think of her as a cross between Lisa Simpson and Tracey Flick.

I am probably wrong. I have been about everything else this political year.

 

Leo The Trans-ish Ten-Year-Old

World of Vector/Shutterstock)

The BBC brings us the wonderful, magical, liberating tale of “Leo,” a 10-year-old girl who has decided that she isn’t always a girl. Leo calls herself a himself, and “gender non-binary.” Says Leo:

I really want to use the boys’ loos because it’s more right than using the girls. I’m not allowed to and I think I should be able to.

I can understand because there are lots of older boys using the loos who might be a bit worried about someone (being there) who doesn’t have what they have.

I still feel that “he” doesn’t feel particularly right. I feel more right as “ze” or “they”, but they draw attention to me and my gender when we’re trying to have a conversation about trousers.

When I’m older, I’m going to make that decision again, instead of just sticking with “he”.

There isn’t a body of the two genders. I just wish there was some way in the middle.

Ten years old. The poor child. And the new society says we must not attempt to help this confused child, lest we be guilty of bigotry. Indeed, all the kids in Leo’s school must be forced to play along with this psychodrama, and be catechized in a politically useful falsehood.

What if Leo’s parents had chosen not to play along with this, and had instead sought psychiatric treatment for their child. Would they have been allowed to do so? Would a psychiatrist take them under his care? Ten years from now, will it even be professionally possible for a psychiatrist to do so?

Our society has gone mad. But you knew I would say that.