Rod Dreher's Blog, page 575

View From Your Table

Lyon, France

Writes the reader:

Quenelles et Camembert rôti.

That is, fish dumplings and baked Camembert. Ahhh, Lyon.

I have a treat for your readers. The guy who sent this in is an old and dear friend from New Orleans. In fact, he’s the friend who went with me last summer to Siena for the Palio. A fellow Francophile (was a French major at Tulane) and foodie, we stopped off in Lyon on the way back home, met James C. there, and ate and drank well. My friend loved it so much that he has taken his lovely bride there for the next couple of weeks, to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. That’s why they can’t come to Walker Percy Weekend this year. But, you and I will have a series of terrific VFYTs in the days to come.

Here’s something neat. I knew they were headed to France sometime this week, but wasn’t sure when. Yesterday, I was going up the escalator, away from the train platform, to Concourse D in the Atlanta airport. Lo, on the opposite side, there my friends were, headed down to catch the train to the international concourse, and their flight to France. As we passed, we high-fived each other. “Vive la France!” I said. So I will be living vicariously through them for the next two weeks.

The Memory Of America

Denny Burk is having a melancholy Memorial Day. After reading the Gettysburg Address, he reflected:

I read this speech with heaviness of heart this year. It seems like the nation that Lincoln describes is slipping away. It seems less a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” than it is a people of the government, by the government, for the government. As the people decrease, the state increases. And the people have decreased in virtue, historical awareness, and commitment to ordered liberty “under God.”

The 2016 race for the presidency is a direct reflection of our current malaise. As a nation, we seem to have embarked on a Commodus-like decline. Out of all the people who campaigned for president this year, the two major parties have selected candidates that are not qualified for the office they seek. Both of them have disqualified themselves on moral grounds. As such, neither of them represents the best of our traditions, but they do seem to reflect what the nation has become. And this is much more distressing than the candidates themselves.

It is the conceit of great nations to think that things will always be as they have been–that national greatness is automatic and assured. But this is alas only a conceit.

Burk, a friend and a Southern Baptist pastor and theologian, adds:

Perhaps we are in the twilight of a great Republic, but perhaps not yet. But if it is, I won’t let it go without a fight. I hope and pray you won’t either.

Read the whole thing.

Man, that gets to me, this short piece of his. It’s sobering, and captures my own sadness. What does it mean to be a patriot when the country is going mad? I wrote a while back about the words of UVA political scientist John Owen IV, from 2004. Denny’s piece sent me back to them. Owen wrote back then that 9/11 served to bring a fracturing America back together to some extent. But he added:

September 11 has clarified matters. Though American society may deploy many corrupting influences against the Church and its members, the American state, by the grace of God, mostly continues to allow the Church to do its thing. The state, being the supreme coercive power in any country, is capable in theory of forcing the Church (and other communities) to change their practices or suffer punishment. America’s religious toleration is a reason why America not only deserves our loyalty, but also merits our continuing involvement. [Emphasis mine — RD] In a democracy the state is in principle responsible to the society it governs. Were Christians to cease being Americans in any meaningful sense, to withdraw completely from society, the state would be less responsible to us, and maybe less hospitable. God may use state persecution to purify His Church, but it is a perverse and unbiblical ethics that teaches that the Church should try to force God’s hand by enabling the state to become more oppressive.

When I cited Owen’s 2004 essay, I also cited the highly controversial 1996 First Things symposium, “The End of Democracy,” which speculated on whether or not judicial oligarchy had fatally compromised US democracy. I wrote:

Nearly twenty years on, concern about the judicial usurpation of politics remain, but the situation has become more radical. What happens when democratic politics itself produces results that orthodox Christians find not simply morally disagreeable (as happens all the time), but morally unacceptable? If memory serves, Father Neuhaus concluded in the End of Democracy symposium by saying that as long as we retain the capacity to work effectively for change within the regime, we must give it our moral assent, however grudgingly.

I wonder what Neuhaus would say today, though, if he were here. Is it possible for orthodox Christians to work meaningfully for change when the demos has become so post-Christian? After all, it won’t do to blame five unelected judges for imposing same-sex marriage on America. It’s true, but it’s also true that had the Court ruled the other way, we would have had same-sex marriage from coast to coast within 20 years, via democratic vote. The situation is far more radical than Neuhaus and his First Things cohort faced in 1996.

I don’t know what the definitive answers are. But I know it is time for serious orthodox Christians to start asking ourselves these questions. Both the Iraq War debacle and Obergefell — in their particulars, and in what they symbolize — are game-changers for Christian conservatives.

At the conference I was at this past weekend, law professor Bruce Frohnen touched the third rail of the Benedict Option: if the Ben Op critique is correct, does that require us Americans to abandon belief in liberal democracy? I think this, in the end, is why the idea of the Ben Op unsettles so many conservatives. And it really is unsettling. I don’t like where the logic of all this is taking me, and I confess that I’m resisting it. But the structures of our secular liberal democracy are such that given the tectonic cultural change now under way, and the abandonment of traditional Christianity by the masses (not just the liberal elites, as conservative mythology holds), means that the constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, may soon be used to oppress Christians in substantial ways.

If it were just that — just something affecting my own tribe — that would be horrible, but tolerable, if there were some hope of reform. I think of the loyalty black Americans had to this country when its laws in many places still oppressed them terribly. They had faith that America would live up to the promises of its founding and its Constitution — and because America was still a Christian nation in the sense of Christian teaching having authority, however attenuated, in the public square, the Civil Rights movement used the rhetoric of the Bible to press their case.

Now, America is post-Christian. Even Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, concedes this in an NPR interview:

“Conservative Christians in America are undergoing a huge shift in the way we see ourselves in the world,” Mohler says. “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.”

It’s not a case of “now that we’re not in charge, we’re going to take our football and go home.” It’s far deeper and more serious than that. It has to do with John Adams’s statement that our Constitution can only work for a religious and moral people. By this he meant that people must have inner order to live in the liberty our Constitution grants them. There’s no question that Christians will have less and less influence on the social order from here on out. The greater question — a question that involves every American — is whether John Adams was right: can liberal democracy be sustained without religion?

In any case: May God bless our beloved war dead. May their memory be eternal.

At Holy Cross In Baltimore

Frederica Mathewes-Green and Your Working Boy

I spent Saturday night with my old friends Frederica Mathewes-Green and Father Gregory M-G, her husband and the pastor of Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church. Went to the Divine Liturgy this morning at Holy Cross, which is always a bit (more than a bit) like coming home to me — a strange experience, because I’ve only been to liturgy there a handful of times in my life, but as a reader of Frederica’s books, and as a close friend and almost daily correspondent of hers for over 20 years, Holy Cross feels like my own.

As I stood behind her in the line for Communion, I realized that if it had not been for her, I would almost certainly not be Orthodox today. She never preached to me about Orthodoxy (I was a fairly new Catholic when we first met, and she respected that). All she did was be my friend. And in that friendship, over the years, I learned about Orthodoxy. When, in 2005, I found myself shipwrecked and shattered by the collapse of my Catholic faith, I found shelter and solid ground in Orthodoxy, not because Frederica suggested it, but because she had borne such effective witness to Orthodox Christianity in her life, particularly in our friendship. She and our pal Terry Mattingly came down to Dallas, ten years ago next month, for our chrismation.

So, after communion, I prayed and thanked God for our friendship, which I depend on even more after all these years. Funny to think about, but if she had ever tried to evangelize me directly, I would have been really put off by it. She didn’t tell; she showed by her love and steady fidelity. And that made all the difference.

After the liturgy, I went to the M-G manse around the corner for a meeting with the Dante reading group. Our dear pal Emily Lowe, who became friends with Julie and me something like 18 years ago, when she was a new college student in NYC, up from Holy Cross, made an impromptu dessert for the meeting: a representation of the scene from Inferno XIX, in which the pilgrim Dante encounters the damned Pope Nicholas III, head down in a hole in the ground, with only his legs sticking out. Here’s how Gustave Doré imagined the scene:

And here’s how Emily envisioned it. I love my Holy Cross friends!

Happy Birthday Walker Percy

Today is the centenary of Walker Percy’s birth. I can’t decide if it’s a shame or a mercy that he did not live to see the political year 2016. Here’s a comment from 2009’s The Limits Of Liberal Democracy: Politics And Religion At The End Of Modernity, by my friend Scott H. Moore, a Baylor University professor of philosophy:

Walker Percy’s 1971 novel Love in the Ruins is set “in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A…” Narrator Dr. Tom More begins with his delightfully disturbing description of life in the Paradise Estates suburb, just before the “end of the world.” More tells us that:

…the scientists, who are mostly liberal and unbelievers, and the businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side in Paradise Estates. Though the two make much of their differences — one speaking of “outworn dogmas and creeds,” the other of “atheism and immorality,” etcetera, etcerera — to tell the truth, I do not notice a great deal of difference between the two.

Here, according to More, “everyone gets along well.” It is a “paradise indeed, an oasis of concord in a troubled land. For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other; race against race, right against left, believer against heathen.”

In More’s account, the Republicans, who had changed their name to the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party and even printed campaign buttons in support of their new CCCP [Note: the Cyrillic letters for USSR — RD] became the “Knothead Party” for the “most knotheaded political bungle of the century — which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading ‘Knotheads for America.'”

The Democrats became the new Left Party and also accepted a nickname, “LEFTPAPASANE,” an acronym which stood for what the Left believed in: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.”

Novelist Percy has his fictional character Dr. More observe: “The center did not hold. However, the Gross National Product continues to rise.”

My dears, it will be a perverse pleasure to eat crawfish, drink beer, and talk Trump with you who are coming to Walker Percy Weekend on Friday. Last I heard, there were still some rooms available at the haunted plantation house at the north edge of town. If you’re interested in coming to town, drop me a note at rod – at – amcon — dot — mag and I’ll find out for sure who still has rooms open.

Matthew Sitman of Commonweal, and formerly of Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish blog, is coming down from NYC to give a talk about Love In The Ruins, one of his favorite novels. That means we’re going to be hearing about Percy, politics, and the Year Of Our Lord 2016. I think everybody’s going to be good and ready for the Front Porch Bourbon Tour after that. In fact, here is the whole schedule of talks (not included: the addition of a screening of The Seer, the new Wendell Berry documentary, 4pm on Friday June 3 at the West Feliciana Parish Library; you can come without having to buy a ticket to the entire festival; five dollars admission at the door). Go to the lecture schedule and see the great people coming in to give some interesting lectures. There will be the opportunity to talk to them to, over cocktails, Louisiana craft beer, and crawdads. The mighty, mighty Hot Tails is once again boiling the crawfish this year. If you came to the festival in 2014 or 2015, you know how damn good those mudbugs are.

Here is the whole schedule of drankin’ and crawfish-eatin’ social events. You can buy separate tickets just to the social stuff if you are so inclined.

If you’re having second thoughts about not coming — and I bet you are — there is still time. Get your tickets here. 

And if you can’t come but want a t-shirt, poster, etc., order here. 

Whether you can come or not to this weekend’s festival, please raise a glass tonight in honor of Walker Percy, and if you’re the praying sort, say a prayer for him.

British Christianity Death Watch

This is grim:

A landmark in national life has just been passed. For the first time in recorded history, those declaring themselves to have no religion have exceeded the number of Christians in Britain. Some 44 per cent of us regard ourselves as Christian, 8 per cent follow another religion and 48 per cent follow none. The decline of Christianity is perhaps the biggest single change in Britain over the past century. For some time, it has been a stretch to describe Britain as a Christian country. We can more accurately be described now as a secular nation with fading Christian institutions.

There is nothing new in the decline of the church, but until recently it had been a slow decline. For many decades it was possible to argue that while Christians were eschewing organised religion, they at least still regarded themselves as having some sort of spirit-ual life which related to the teachings of Jesus. Children were asked for their Christian name; conversations ended with ‘God bless’. Such phrases are now slipping out of our vocabulary — to wear a cross as jewellery is seen as making a semi-political statement. Christians are finding out what it’s like to live as a minority.

Just 15 years ago, almost three quarters of Britons still regarded themselves as Christians. If this silent majority of private, non-churchgoing believers really did exist, it has undergone a precipitous decline. Five years ago, the number of people professing no religion was only 25 per cent.

Read the whole thing.

In March, the American Journal of Sociology published research and analysis by David Voas and Mark Chaves, showing that the United States, because of its high levels of religiosity compared to other Western nations, can no longer be considered an exception to the secularization thesis. From the study:

We have established three central empirical claims. First, religiosity has been declining in the United States for decades, albeit slowly and from high levels. Second, religious commitment is weakening from one generation to the next in the countries with which the United States has most in common, and generational differences are the main driver of the aggregate decline. Third, the same pattern of cohort replacement is behind American religious decline. This decline seems to have begun with cohorts born early in the 20th century. At least since then, strong religious affiliation, church attendance, and firm belief in God have all fallen from one birth cohort to the next. None of these declines is happening fast, and levels of religious involvement in the United States remain high by world standards. But the signs of both aggregate decline and generational differences are now unmistakable.

In other words, Britain is way ahead of us, but we are on the same downward course.

As you may know, I’ve been at a conference this weekend in which the Benedict Option was the theme. I learned a lot, and got some good, constructive criticism from some of the panelists. Some others, though, seemed to me to be determined to reject the thesis without ever really grappling with it or (more to the point) without recognizing the problems it tries, however badly, to address. Stuff along the lines of:

Me: “I’m not saying that we have to all head for the hills. I’m not saying that we have to all head for the hills. Head for the hills? I’m not saying that. Some might feel called to do that, and God bless them, but I think that is neither feasible nor desirable for all of us. To repeat: I’m not saying that we all have to head for the hills.”

Critic: “You’re saying we have to head for the hills, and that’s just crazy.”

Leaving aside the legitimate criticism of the Benedict Option concept, made in good faith — and there is plenty of it, and I’m grateful for it because it helps me learn and refine the model — my guess is that a lot of people who fiercely, even angrily, reject the very idea of the Ben Op find it unthinkable that things in America are not always going to be more or less okay for us Christians. And/or, they cannot accept the possibility that whatever goes wrong cannot be fixed within the system we have now. If my analysis is correct, then a lot of things that they believe are true about the way we Americans live no longer are true, and the response required is a radical one along the lines of what I propose in the Benedict Option. Because that is emotionally and conceptually repulsive to them, the Benedict Option must be nonsense. That damn fool building the ark over there ought to wise up and realize the rain is bound to stop, and besides, it has never flooded in these parts.

Well. First, even if religious liberty jurisprudence were to freeze in place today, and we orthodox Christians were able to hold on to the liberty that we have, we would still need the Benedict Option, because the government is far from our biggest problem. We live in a culture that has shattered, and is shattering to religious truth. In other words, we live today in what Zygmunt Bauman has described as “liquid modernity”:

Liquid Modernity is sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the “solid” modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives.

Bauman’s vision of the current world is one in which individuals must to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” could be meaningfully applied. These fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. Liquid times are defined by uncertainty. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. The time it takes to fully consider options and make fully formed decisions has fragmented.

This is a very different Dark Age than the one that followed the fall of the Western empire, but a Dark Age it is, insofar as you can describe a Dark Age as an Age of Chaos and Mass Forgetting. And it will require a new, and quite different, St. Benedict for Christians to resist it, and ride out the flood.

The story above about faith in Britain, taken from the Spectator, reminds me of an English friend here in America who, with her husband, left her native land to settle here, in part because she wanted to give her children a better shot at remaining Christian than they would have if they stayed in Britain. She chose to go into exile from the country of her birth, the country she loves, because she recognized that some things are more important. From the long view, she has bought her family line some time — a generation, probably two — before the same flood that has drowned Christianity in Britain reaches catastrophic levels here. We had all better make good use of the time we have been given to prepare. Voas and Chaves, who are among the world’s leading scholars on this kind of thing, say that this process, which is carried along by very deep cultural currents, starts, it is very difficult to reverse.

I would add that yes, the United States has gone through periods in its past (e.g., the Colonial period) in which religious observance was not particularly robust, and those periods were reversed through revival (Great Awakenings). Britain has had the same experience. But the condition of liquid modernity, I argue, makes it highly, highly unlikely that we are going to see a repeat. God may send us this great grace, but we must prepare for much worse. As the poet Terence addresses his jolly critic in the well-known A.E. Housman poem (cited by Hope College’s Jeff Polet in his remarks at this weekend’s conference):

Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,

And while the sun and moon endure

Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,

I’d face it as a wise man would,

And train for ill and not for good.

I am eager to hear in this thread from UK readers of this blog who are observant Christians. How do you regard the present and the future, in terms of your faith? How are you preparing your children for it?

View From Your Table

Linthicum, Maryland

Reader, I ate both of those crab cakes, the size of cat heads. With some Old Bay. Happy.

Latino SJWs For Trump

If you’re Donald Trump, you can’t buy publicity like this from his enemies in San Diego yesterday:

As hundreds of protesters outside his rally here Friday afternoon chanted obscenities, waved Mexican flags and clashed with police, Donald Trump reveled on stage in the drama his candidacy has created.

More:

One poster referenced Trump’s wife, who immigrated to the United States from Slovenia: “The Art of the Deal. Deport Melania. Legalize 11 million.” Another: “Trump, Shame of America.” Another: “Jesus would not vote for Trump.” And: “Racist, go home.”

As the rally progressed inside, a few protesters — including two women not wearing shirts — were escorted out of the convention center by police officers and cheered by the protesters. As a yellow helicopter circled above, a speaker blared a expletive-filled song about Trump. The crowd’s most popular chant was: “F— Donald Trump! F—Donald Trump!”

Dozens of local police officers and sheriff’s deputies carrying riot gear stood guard outside the convention center. As the crowd became more and more agitated, one officer said to his colleagues: “Hats on, guys, hats on.” With helmets on, the police formed long lines across from the barricaded protesters. At one point, a handful of protesters tried to rush out of their protest area and were beaten back by half a dozen police officers with batons. At least one protester then spit at a police officer and others threw water and small objects.

The crowd then started chanting: “F— the police!” One woman tried to change the vibe by chanting: “Keep the peace!”

These foul-mouthed, Mexican flag-waving, anti-police protesters are doing Trump’s work for him, more than making up for his deficits as a candidate. What did Trump talk about in his actual San Diego rally? Look:

The Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee gave a fiery speech in San Diego and sought to leverage the power of his pulpit to shame one of this city’s federal judges, Gonzalo Curiel, who is hearing a class-action lawsuit against Trump University.

Trump delivered a lengthy monologue about the years-old case involving students who claim they were defrauded by Trump’s real estate “university.” He delved so deeply into details of the case — at one point, he talked about the origin of the name of the law firm representing him — that he seemed to lose the attention of his crowd.

Trump is utterly self-involved, and lacks discipline. We know this. But what will people who weren’t at that rally know about what happened there? Threats of violence, riot police, Mexican flags waving, cursing mobs.

If I were a Democrat, I would be very, very worried about this kind of thing. I completely understand why Latinos and others would be enraged by Trump. But your emotion does not justify this kind of reaction, not if you want to defeat Trump. This is something that the SJW left never understands: how they look from outside their passionate, self-involved circles. They are as solipsistic in their own way as Trump is — but in their case, they are helping elect the man they hate.

The SJW militants are not going to be able to help themselves this summer in Cleveland. It’s going to all redound to Trump’s benefit, you watch. I’m not saying I want this to happen. I’m saying that it will happen.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I was at the rally (not a Trump fan to put it mildly, but 2 grandkids wanted to go). From what I could observe at the rally itself, on the way out afterwards, and on local TV when I got home at about the time that confrontation was escalating, the ones determined to make trouble were Anglos, not Mexican Americans. The latter, like the Trump supporters, seemed quite civil. On both sides there was some jeering back and forth, and some of the signs were offensive, but that’s about it.

Same Potties, Different Worlds

A Quartz dispatch from the front lines of the bathroom wars:

For the tens of thousands of refugee women trapped in Greece, daily life is made that much more treacherous by a very basic problem: unsafe bathrooms.

Refugee camps tend to have too few bathrooms, which are often mixed and unprotected, making them hotspots for sexual attacks on women and girls. While there are no hard statistics, reported cases include German guards at a reception center peeping at women in the bathrooms and attempted rapes at bathrooms along the refugee trail.

At Idomeni, Greece’s largest informal refugee camp, which the authorities started clearing this week, there were just 193 bathrooms and 84 showers for over 12,000 people, according to Emmanuel Massart of Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Women there told me they wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone, and not at all at night.

The lack of of safe, private washrooms feeds into a host of daily indignities, women told me.

Sounds truly horrible. How would one fix this, Quartz?

But not far from Moria there is an example of how to do it right. In Kara Tepe, an open facility for nearly 1,000 vulnerable people who have been moved from Moria, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has built a washing area with signs that clearly designate well-lit, gender-separated washing areas.

 

Wait — you’re saying that gender-segregated bathrooms make women safer and more secure? Gosh, that’s news to me, especially because I was just reading in Quartz the other day about what a great thing it is to have non-gendered, unisex bathrooms in high schools, so trans students feel safe.

So it seems that we should have gender-segregated bathrooms for the safety and comfort of women at risk of being sexually harassed or assaulted by men … except when transgendered people say their safety depends on … oh, to hell with it.

(H/T: Reader M.B.)

‘The Best Swears Are The Sacres’

Jiri Flogel/Shutterstock)

A fellow Francophile sends in this weird, funny, cussy (you have been warned) story about how they swear in Québec. Excerpt (which I have sanitized for your protection™:

The sacres is the group of Catholic swears unique to Québec. There are many of them; the most popular are probably tabarnak (tabernacle), osti or hostie or estie (host, the bread used during communion), câlisse (chalice), ciboire (the container that holds the host), and sacrament (sacrament). These usually have some milder forms as well, slightly modified versions that lessen their blow. “For example, tabarnouche and tabarouette are non-vulgar versions of tabarnak, similar to ‘shoot’ and ‘darn’ in English,” says Polesello.

The sacres typically are interchangeable, rarely having any particular meaning by themselves. Most often you’ll hear them used as all-purpose exclamations. If a Québecois stubs his or her toe, the resulting swears might be “tabarnak, tabarnak!” instead of “f–k f–k f–k.” They can be inserted into regular sentences the way English swears can to vulgarly emphasize your statement. “For example, un cave means ‘an idiot,’ but un estie de cave means ‘a f–king idiot,'” says Polesello.

Because the words are largely just meaningless statements of rage, there is an interesting ability in Québec French to create fantastic new strings of profanity that are, basically, untranslatable. Essentially you can just list sacres, connecting them with de, forever. Crisse de câlisse de sacrament de tabarnak d’osti de ciboire!, you might say after the Canadiens fail to make the NHL playoffs. The closest English translation would be something like “F–king f–k sh-t m——–ker c–kface a–hole!” Or thereabouts. But strings of profanity like that in American English, though not unheard of, are certainly not common. In Québec, letting loose with a string of angrily shouted Catholic terminology is something you’re fairly likely to hear at some point.

Read the whole thing to learn why the Québecois cuss like this. It’s twisted, diabolical, and fascinating, especially the part about how the Québecois exorcised Catholicism so thoroughly from their culture that young generations there don’t understand why these peculiar words are dirty.

Note well: If you are averse to reading filthy language, even when presented neutrally, as a linguistic curiosity, you will want to skip this.

Men Are Dogs

OK, let’s look at the this week’s identity freakshow: people who think they are animals. The Guardian brings us news of the “pups” subculture. Excerpts:

It’s easy to laugh at a grown man in a rubber dog suit chewing on a squeaky toy. Maybe too easy, in fact, because to laugh is to dismiss it, denigrate it – ignore the fact that many of us have found comfort and joy in pretending to be animals at some point in our lives.

No, it is not too easy to laugh at this insanity. By all means dismiss it and denigrate it. No grown man should behave this way. Naturally, they began as BDSM pervs:

Secret Life of the Human Pups is a sympathetic look at the world of pup play, a movement that grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach out to likeminded people. While the pup community is a broad church, human pups tend to be male, gay, have an interest in dressing in leather, wear dog-like hoods, enjoy tactile interactions like stomach rubbing or ear tickling, play with toys, eat out of bowls and are often in a relationship with their human “handlers”.

In the documentary, we see Tom, AKA Spot, take part in the Mr Puppy Europe competition in Antwerp, a mix of beauty pageant, talent show and Crufts; David, AKA Bootbrush, talk to camera in a leather dog mask; two pups walk through London pretending to wee on lampposts to raise awareness of their identity; and lots of men jumping up for “treats”, barking and wagging their mechanical tails.

But wait, there’s more:

Tom’s discovery of puppy play came about gradually. He knew he liked sleeping in a collar, had a fetish for skin-tight clothing – Lycra, rubber, even off-the-peg cycling shorts – then came a dalmatian zentai suit he found on eBay, a £1 orange lead from Pets at Home until, eventually, a man in a club walked up to him and said: “Oh right, so you’re a pup.” The realisation was not without its repercussions: it led to a breakup with his former fiancee Rachel and a move into a gay relationship with his new handler. Colin.

“I wouldn’t say it was the catalyst, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Tom. “Then I had this moment of panic because a puppy without a collar is a stray; they don’t have anyone to look after them. I started chatting to Colin online and he offered to look after me. It’s a sad thing to say, but there’s not love from the heart in me for Colin – but what I have got is someone who is there for me and I’m happy with that.”

And, you knew this was coming. Emphasis mine:

Whether we see it as a kink, an identity, a reaction to an early experience, a form of escapism or a fetish, the main thing, says Tom, is that we see it at all; that we know it’s there and accept it. “It feels like you can be gay, straight, bisexual, trans and be accepted,” he says. “All I want is for the pup community to be accepted in the same way. We’re not trying to cause grief to the public, or cause grief to relationships. We’re just the same as any other person on the high street.”

Read the whole thing.

As it happens, VICE did a piece on pup culture earlier this year (probably NSFW). It’s a gay male thing, it appears. Excerpts:

Already the howls leak onto 12th Street. And as you pass through the heavy black doors of San Francisco’s go-to gay biker hangout, The Eagle, the scene that greets you isn’t the expected handful of dudes quietly gathered at the bar to catch the Warriors game. It’s more like a rave at the SPCA.

Bare-assed except for tail-shaped butt plugs and Nasty Pig jock straps, sporting custom leather puppy masks and MMA mitts, several go-go boys hop and fidget to Berlin techno above the packed crowd. Huge cutouts of snarling pooches and giant bones loom over the dance floor. On the back patio, a hunky daddy dressed to the leather nines sits in a large chair, reading a newspaper, puffing a fat stogie, and resting his feet on a coiled human pup, who excitedly chews on a squeaky SpongeBob. A bootblack and a barber, both dressed only in latex aprons, ply their grooming trades with fanatical skill. Over in the corner a big cage rattles, as the human pups inside bark and throw themselves against the bars.

More:

Figaro Pup identifies as a border collie. “I share a lot of traits with the breed. I get bored easily unless something is really holding my attention. I am always trying to keep groups together or herd people or pups. My husband is my handler, although I and the other pups in our pack call him Daddy. A typical day is surprisingly mundane. We do all of the normal things that couples do, work, chores etc. There are just a lot of little things that call out our other relationship dynamics. We switch from husbands to daddy/puppy fairly seamlessly. When we kiss hello, maybe I’ll get some scritches behind the ear, or I’ll play with a squeaky toy while we watch TV, unless it gets taken away.”

And:

Both Papa Woof and Brue take great pains to insist that puppy play is not about bestiality…

Right. Aaaaaand, I’m out of there.

Here’s something on the same wavelength, but not as sexed-up. From a Houston TV station’s report:

Throughout the U.S., a group of people who identify as therian has been growing over the years. Therians are people who believe they are animals, either spiritually or psychologically. Within the Houston area, there are an estimated 3,000 people in this community.

“A therian is basically someone who believes spiritually or mentally that they are an animal,” said Aramond VanRahamdalph, who leads a therian group in Houston. He identifies as both vampire and therian. As a therian, he tells FOX 26 News that his identity is of both a wolf and a raven.

“When we go through our awakening, it’s brought upon by a kind of a bond with a specific animal,” said VanRahamdalph. “It could be at a zoo or out in the wild. For most therians, when we shift, which we get the animalistic instincts, a sixth sense, heightened senses, hair on the back of your neck, sensation gets a little stronger.”

Sounds like possession to me, but what do I know.

You know, on second thought, it is too easy to laugh at these deranged people (remember the Norwegian cat lady?). What they are doing is pushing the logic that demands that in custom and in law, society must recognize the right of the sovereign individual to claim his sexual identity based on will alone, having nothing to do with biology. Those men are no more dogs than Caitlyn Jenner is a woman, but we are not obliged to recognize them as canines under penalty of law and at risk of hysterical, bullying public censure by progressive members of Congress. Yet, anyway.

If human identity is not inextricably bound in our biology, then where do you draw the line? In the same way the trans bathroom argument is about something much deeper than what it’s about, laughing at these nuts too easily dismisses the very real philosophical principle at issue here: what is man? As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of the earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

And:

It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

Very few people are going to go Therian, or play at bestiality like the Pups. But the same principle of personhood and identity that requires us to ignore biology entirely when it comes to determining male and female identity must logically allow trans-species identity. In her vicious exchange this week with law professor Gail Heriot, the bullying Rep. Zoe Lofgren inadvertently conceded the point. Heriot had said that by transgender logic there’s no reason why people shouldn’t call her a Russian princess if she insists she’s one. That prompted Lofgren, a California Democrat, to denounce Heriot as an “ignorant bigot.” Heriot then asked her (I paraphrase), “Well, do you think I am a Russian princess?”

Said Lofgren, “I have no idea.”

Lofgren perfectly well knew that Heriot was not a Russian princess, but if she had said “no,” then she would have conceded that identity is not simply a matter of desire and will. Had Lofgren done that, she would have undermined her ideology. Better to just yell, “Bigot!”

To be sure, gender dysphoria is a real psychological condition, and I don’t think it’s wrong for society to reach some kind of accommodation for people who suffer from it. But we have gone way, way too far, and accepting this principle is going to be our undoing. In for a transgender, in for a Pup and a Therian. Impossible, you say? Eight years ago, when Barack Obama was running for president, denying that he favored same-sex marriage, did you ever imagine his administration would one day order public schools to let “girls” with penises use high school locker rooms, under threat of losing all federal funding? In our unwinding culture, what is impossible today will be mandated tomorrow.

Matter matters! Personally, I blame Ockham. But you knew I would say that.