Rod Dreher's Blog, page 582

View From Your Table

Oxford, England

James C., on the banks of the River Isis, with croissant, strudel, and coffee.

Leninist Liberalism On The Bench

“To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class.” — Lenin.

You really have to read this post by Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet, in which he advises his fellow legal liberals to take the gloves off and hit conservatives with bare-knuckle force. Excerpts:

Several generations of law students and their teachers grew up with federal courts dominated by conservatives. Not surprisingly, they found themselves wandering in the wilderness, looking for any sign of hope. The result: Defensive-crouch constitutionalism, with every liberal position asserted nervously, its proponents looking over their shoulders for retaliation by conservatives (in its elevated forms, fear of a backlash against aggressively liberal positions).

It’s time to stop. Right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents, and – though I wasn’t able to locate up-to-date numbers – the same appears to be true of the district courts. And, those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions. (They might be reversed, but now there’s no guarantee.) And, we shouldn’t focus on the Court’s docket this year, which was shaped by conservative justices thinking that they could count to five on a bunch of cases. The docket will look quite different if they can’t see that path to five votes when they decide which cases to review.

What would abandoning defensive-crouch liberalism mean? (I’ve blogged about some of these points before.)

Among his explanations:

1.     A jurisprudence of “wrong the day it was decided.” Liberals should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided. My own list is Bakke (for rejecting all the rationales for affirmative action that really matter), Buckley v. Valeo (for ruling out the possibility that legislatures could develop reasonable campaign finance rules promoting small-r republicanism), Casey (for the “undue burden” test), and Shelby County. (I thought about including Washington v. Davis, but my third agenda item should be enough to deal with it.) Others will have their own candidates. What matters is that overruling key cases also means that a rather large body of doctrine will have to be built from the ground up. Thinking about what that doctrine should look like is important – more important than trying to maneuver to liberal goals through the narrow paths the bad precedents seem to leave open.

2.     The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.) And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central – seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.

 

 

Read the whole thing. It’s important. Note especially that Tushnet, a Harvard Law professor, says in his last item, “F**k Anthony Kennedy.”

Note too that he is comparing cultural conservatives to the defeated Nazis and Imperial Japanese, and advocating no mercy, just grinding us into the ground. Such is the magnanimity of some of our liberal elites.

And finally, observe that Tushnet believes that the only reason conservative judges and justices voted the way they did was for the sake of power relations, not because they happened to believe that the Constitution led to those conclusions. He apparently believes that the law is all about power relations, nothing more.

You need to be aware of what’s coming. This is what’s coming. And if a Tushnet dream court does what he wants it to do, it’s going to tear this country apart. This is the kind of thing many liberals applaud, even as they accuse conservatives of perpetuating the culture war. If you’re going to use the culture war metaphor, the Benedict Option assumes that we cultural conservatives have lost, and have to prepare for active resistance under occupation.

The only good reason I can think of to vote Trump this fall is that we can be certain that President Hillary Clinton, who will probably get to name three, maybe four, Supreme Court justices, will do her best to appoint justices that believe as Mark Tushnet does. If I were the Trump campaign, I would take Tushnet’s post and distribute it widely. It’s like a right-wing activist’s fever dream of what liberals in power would do — except it was written by a liberal who teaches at the most influential law schools in the nation, one that has produced four of the eight sitting Supreme Court justices (five if you count the late Antonin Scalia).

 

Memories Of The Carter Years

Screen shot by Rod Dreher, who really can’t believe what he’s seeing here

So, this happened, back in 1977:

You really have to watch the whole thing. I insist. Enjoy Paul Lynde!

 

All Politics (Henceforth) Is Local

Reformed pastor Steven Wedgeworth, a conservative, says the Trumpening offers a good opportunity for Evangelicals to formally leave the GOP. He calls on fellow conservative Evangelicals who are 40 and under to “admit it. We voted Republican because of the issue of abortion and a desire to protect our religious values against government coercion.”

Well, now that you put it that way, Pastor, I’m 49, and that’s the only reason I have voted Republican at all for the past 10 years. Wedgeworth continues:

The creation of more-lasting institutions will have to be taken care of on a different level than presidential politics. Churches, school, and other community and civic groups need to continue these projects with a new intensity. They need to also see this current crisis as an opportunity to chart a third way between the two dead-ends that our political landscape has presented us for the last quarter-century. Pastors and teachers should prepare their people to withstand the social temptation to fall in line with one of the two undesirable options forced upon them and instead to be satisfied with searching for a truth not yet fully embodied. Instead of a rear-guard action which incrementally slows the inevitable, we have to consider a dramatic change of course which opens up new possibilities in the distant future.

This means that thoughtful Christians should begin seriously thinking about and constructingan alternative to the Republican Party, and this alternative should be really different. It may even break with what most people consider pure “conservatism” in many ways—and that purity strategy has already been rejected this cycle, by the way. Instead, we need to introduce people to historical Christian principles of ethics and jurisprudence, more recent historical political movements like Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Abraham Kuyper’s Christian Democracy, as well as contemporary suggestions like Ross Douthat’s “Reform Conservatism.”

More:

This will allow us to question certain common talking points of American politics, particularly its simple binaries and reductionism, and we might even pick up some moderate and left-wing sympathizers along the way (though this must be done by way of shared principles). We need to reclaim political recognition of and protection for the institution of the family, and we need to recognize that we can really only achieve these sorts of things on the local level. We should begin withdrawing from large federal programs and networks (including schools), all the while calling on government, even federal-government, protection of local programs and networks (including schools). This isn’t exactly the Benedict Option, since it can’t exist without some sympathetic government agreeing to not harass it (and perhaps even incentivize it through mechanisms like friendlier tax policies, zoning laws, and liability protections), but it is a call for the rejection of the managerial state in favor of a more open political landscape that allows a variety of civil-society institutions to cultivate the people.

Read the whole thing.  I can’t find much to object to here, except that a third party is a fantasy, and I have less confidence than the author does about the government leaving us alone.

(Side note: it always puzzles me when people think they’re making an argument against the Benedict Option when they say, “But the government will never let you get away with that.” Really? The less free we believe the government will let us be, the more we need the Benedict Option. Do you really think when the government says to traditional Christians “thou shalt not,” that we are going to be at liberty in our hearts to say, “Oh, OK, whatever you say”? No. We are going to have to find ways to resist no matter what the government says. The harder you anticipate government will make it on us, the more you ought to be all in for the Benedict Option.)

Anyway, I agree with him that we should be as involved as we can be in local politics — especially insofar as that means we back candidates, including Republicans, who can be counted on to defend our religious liberty interests. What this means, though, is that we are going to have to surrender any hope of changing the world through politics, at least for the foreseeable future. This is going to be hard for many, many politically engaged conservative Christians to accept.

In my own case, it means that henceforth, absent some black swan event, I am effectively a single-issue voter: religious liberty. In practice, that means I am a default libertarian. If a politician wants to liberalize laws on drug use, LGBT, et cetera, but he is the strongest and most reliable candidate on protecting religious liberty, including things like the sphere within which religious schools and homeschooling can operate, then I am going to have to tamp down my objections and vote for him. Think about it: society is going the way of radical individualism anyway — faster with Democrats than with Republicans, but they’re both on the greasy slope down the side of a steeply graded mountain. At least with principled libertarians, we stand to get some protection. With these Big Business Republicans, at least at the national level, I think we don’t have much reason to hope. I’m willing to entertain contrary arguments, though.

By far the more important part of Wedgeworth’s proposed strategy is his counsel to “get serious about the meaningful non-political institutions which you participate in” — this, because that is the only real way to catechize our kids properly.

If it’s not clear to religious traditionalists now, it will be very soon: we are going to have to raise children who, if they are faithful to their God, are going to have to learn how to thrive in a society that thinks of them as repugnant, and possibly even the enemy.

Some people will regard this as alarmist scare talk. I hope they are right. I don’t believe they are, and in either case do not believe we can afford to place our hope on the possibility that things will return to “normal” soon enough. For Christians, the Indiana RFRA debacle was the Rubicon.  As the elite legal scholar “Prof. Kingsfield” said at the time, “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Nothing that has happened in the past 13 months since Indiana has done anything to invalidate his alarm. The Trumpening shows that a man can clinch the GOP nomination despite the fact that most prominent religious conservative leaders oppose him, and most churchgoing conservative Evangelicals do too. Religious and social conservatives are the biggest losers.

I am not going to blame Christian conservatives who vote for Trump in November, out of a desperate hope that a President Trump will not appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Nor am I going to blame Christian conservatives who withhold their vote, as I will almost certainly do (a luxury I have because I live in a deep red state, one that’s going to go Trump no matter what). You do what you need to do regarding the presidential contest. From now on, for us, all politics is local — and nearly all politics is going to be anti-political.

If any Christian conservative readers of this blog want to make a case for staying in the GOP (which I left years ago), please do. Seriously, I want to hear it.

Localism, Globalism, And Gender

Stephen Turley says that corporate CEOs support genderbending because destroying any form of identity that is not wholly self-chosen is good for globalized business. Excerpt:

This social order of consumer-based options tends to forge a new conception of the human person as a sovereign individual who exercises control over his or her own life circumstances. Again, traditional social structures and arrangements are generally fixed in terms of key identity markers such as gender, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation. But globalized societies, because of the wide array of options, see this fixedness as restrictive. And so traditional morals and customs tend to give way to what we called lifestyle values. Lifestyle values operate according to a plurality of what sociologist Peter Berger defines as “life-worlds,” wherein each individual practices whatever belief system deemed most plausible by him or her. These belief systems include everything from religious identity to gender identity.

Thus, lifestyle values and identities are defined and determined by consumerist tendencies and norms. Commercial advertising is not merely central to economic growth, it is also of central influence to inventing the self through offering variant lifestyle features and choices. In the words of social theorist Anthony Giddens: “Market-governed freedom of individual choice becomes an enveloping framework of individual self-expression.”

I would therefore argue that the corporations promising to boycott states like North Carolina for their traditionalist politics are not so much for LGBT rights as they are against arbitrarily restricting lifestyle options, since such limitations are deemed inconsistent with a society comprised of consumer-based self-expression.

This is interesting to contemplate in light of the argument theologian William Cavanaugh makes in his 2008 book Being Consumed: Economics And Christian Desire.  Cavanaugh says that the free market is based on the definition of freedom as an absence of external constraints. The wider your choice, the freer the market. This is problematic from a Christian point of view, as well as from a virtue ethics point of view, because it is agnostic about the existence of good and evil. The free market, thus conceived, catechizes us into believing that there is no truth, only individual desire. But desires are unavoidably social, so the will to power in society belongs to those who maximize individual choice by tearing down any structure or belief system that denies the primacy of individual choice.

In theory, anyway. In fact, you will notice that behind the rhetoric of “diversity” and “inclusivity,” those with power are attempting to disempower and indeed oppress those who don’t go along with them. For example, at Harvard, single-sex student clubs — off campus and not formally affiliated with Harvard — are now going to be effectively suppressed by the university, in the name of inclusion. Note that single-sex private clubs are so abhorrent that Harvard is making them all but illegal, but Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, defended the right of a Harvard student club to hold a satanic “black mass” a couple of years ago, because freedom. Funny exchange on that here:

Wow. https://t.co/uqTVjFHxBf

— Reihan Salam (@reihan) May 6, 2016

@reihan Well, right, one is, the other isn’t. — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 6, 2016

And:

Not that Harvard is abolishing *all* single-sex spaces … https://t.co/Y7sQDV1M1n

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 6, 2016

And so forth. We know where this is going. We know about the hypocrisy of the secular left and corporate elites. No conservative who has ever had to suffer through so-called “diversity training” in a corporation can fail to grasp the deep dishonesty within the ruling class and its ideology. This is not about “freedom” at all. This is about destroying any nodes of resistance to a globalist ideology of consumer desire.

What is especially interesting is how elites within institutions that ought to be resistant are using the ideology to destroy authority within. For example, certain US Catholic universities:

The College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit, Catholic institution in Worcester, Mass., will implement a new housing policy in the 2016-2017 academic year that embraces gender ideology, which Pope Francis has called a threat to the family.

The updated housing policy “will allow students of different sexes to room together based on gender identity,” according to an April 29, 2016, report in the campus newspaper The Crusader.

At the University of San Francisco (USF), the gender-inclusive housing description was recently updated to indicate that students at the Jesuit-run institution should develop their own understanding about gender identity, including recognition that “human beings are not necessarily male or female as ascribed by their assigned gender at birth.”

Pope Francis, a Jesuit, reportedly called gender ideology “demonic” in an exchange with Austrian Bishop Andreas Laun. And the Holy Father has stated that the promotion of this ideology — which rejects the creation of human beings as male and female in the image and likeness of God — contributes to the destruction of the family.

These Catholic Jesuit universities are in practice radically denying what the Roman Catholic Church teaches is true and real. But they’re claiming to be doing it for reasons of compassion and inclusivity. It is, of course, Orwellian. But these are the times.

One more for you: a reader sends in this newly published statement from the Oregon Department of Education, telling the state’s public schools how they should accommodate transgender students. The reader says he lives in Portland

where I daily encounter incidents that make me think the American experiment in ordered liberty (to use George Weigel language) may be beyond saving.

Attached is a depressing example. To “fisk” this document in all of its false presumptions, unsubtle coerciveness, and delusions requires at least ten pages. It is something to behold.

It’s true. Take a look at it. The thing could have been written by the activists at GLSEN — and probably was. It makes so many statements that are contestable, but treats them as if they were established facts. And it instructs schools to collude with transgender students to deceive the students’ parents, if requested to do so by the student. This revolutionary document is saturated with therapeutic language, e.g., “health and safety,” “safe and supportive,” and so forth.

To go back to the original point of this post: we know that gender ideology is the new crusade by elites in law, academia, and government, for transparently ideological reasons. What is harder to understand is why business cares one way or another. But once you realize that it helps business do what business wants to do when it obliterates all awareness that there are some fixed realities pertaining to the human person that are not chosen. What is the purpose of most advertising if not to convince people that they can become the person they want to be, or can reach a state of satisfaction they do not currently possess, if they would only pay for a product, service, or experience on sale. Gender ideology serves the goal of making the human person more manipulable by power elites, including global corporations.

If you are a social or religious conservative, you had better get radical, or you’re going to get steamrollered.

America At The Movies 2016

I just got a phone call from an old friend in north Texas. She does a lot of work with law enforcement, especially in the area of domestic violence counseling and response. I hope she will not mind me saying, but she’s a tough Texas chick. She called to tell me what she and her teenage son dealt with last night at the movies in Frisco, a prosperous suburb of Dallas.

“I thought I knew what was going on in this country,” she said. “I was wrong.”

She had taken her teenage son to see the Captain America: Civil War movie for his birthday. In line behind them waiting to buy tickets stood several men in their early 30s who were obviously transgendered, and a young woman who presented as a man, though was plainly a female. My friend, “N.”, said the group started talking about sex, including their favorite positions, their favorite sex toys, you name it. One of the group was 20; an older transgender said to him, “You’re just a kid now, but when you turn 21, we’re going to take you out and get you broken in.” They proposed an orgy.

On and on like this. And more transgenders joined them, not waiting in line, but moving towards the front to stand with their friends. N. told me that the trans group was very aware of itself, and did not care who heard their filthy talk.

N. said, “I’ve been molested. I’ve been raped. If this had been a group of men talking that way about their sexual adventures, I wouldn’t have had any problem going up to them and asking them to tone it down. But I was scared of this group. They were so angry. You could feel it coming off of them.”

“Why didn’t you go to the theater management and ask them to say something to the transgenders?” I said.

“Because the group would have known it was me,” she said. “I would have had to have left the line. Plus, in this environment, I doubted that they would have done anything. Nobody wants to risk being called a bigot.”

She said that after they went into the theater, but before the movie started, the trans group continued their foul, verbally abusive behavior. N. asked her son if he wanted to go to the bathroom before the movie started. He told her he did not feel safe doing that.

“Rod, I have gay and lesbian friends. I have a bi friend,” she said. “None of them behave like that. I’ve never seen anything like it. They were egging each other on. And the sense of rage coming off those people — it was evil. And here’s the thing: this was not in Austin, this was not in Deep Ellum [hipster Dallas neighborhood], this was in the far north suburbs.

“This was not at the fringes. It’s in a town that’s home to three of the biggest churches in Texas!”

It was just one night at the movies, granted. And any sort of person could be a jackass at the movies. What got to N. was that this trans group — she described them as over 20 people — was so confident in itself that its members thought they had no responsibility to anybody else around them to respect civility. That, and the fact that nobody dared to confront them over their obnoxious behavior, either not wanting the hassle, or thinking that nothing would be done by the authorities running the theater, because trans folk are this week’s Chosen People. That’s all a theater chain needs: national headlines saying that it is HATEFUL to trans people.

“I was thinking, ‘Well, sign me up for the Benedict Option,” she said.

After our conversation, N. texted:

I found it very ironic that we went to see the movie Civil War last night. What I watched go on outside that theater while we were in line and inside that theater made me realize a civil war is coming. It is undeniable at this point. I kept thinking, someday. You know how you think that? ‘Someday it’ll get bad. Someday we’ll have to take a hard stand. Someday people will be persecuted for their beliefs.’

Rod, it’s not someday anymore. It is in our face. And I can easily see where this erupts into extreme violence. I can easily see where a civil war is coming. …

I don’t know which would be worse, Hillary and her liberalism, or Trump with his hatred and his wolf in sheep’s clothing politics. But it’s about to get really, really bad.

What makes this a Thing, in my view, is that my friend, and every other person in that line and in the theater who was subjected to this filth, felt afraid to say a word to these disgusting loudmouths — or, it appears, to ask management to do something about it. This, for fear that the scene might get ugly — and that authorities would not do anything about it, for fear of being called bigots. And this, in Texas.

The movie theater incident is a Broken Window Moment. We will have plenty more of them.

‘Shut Up, Bigot,’ He Reasoned

A concerned lawyer sends in this Eugene Volokh item about a proposed American Bar Association rule change to the ABA’s conduct rules — which have been adopted by a number of states to govern their lawyers. The rule change, if approved, stands to make anything a lawyer says (in the conduct of her job) that offends an officially protected victim group a violation of professional standards — and therefore subject to sanction. Volokh:

So say that some lawyers put on a Continuing Legal Education event that includes a debate on same-sex marriage, or on whether there should be limits on immigration from Muslim countries, or on whether people should be allowed to use the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity rather than their biological sex. In the process, unsurprisingly, the debater on one side says something that is critical of gays, Muslims or transgender people. If the rule is adopted, the debater could well be disciplined by the state bar:

1. He has engaged in “verbal … conduct” that “manifests bias or prejudice” towards gays, Muslims, or transgender people.

2. Some people view such statements as “harmful”; those people may well include bar authorities.

3. This was done in an activity “in connection with the practice of law” — Continuing Legal Education events are certainly connected with the practice of law. (The event could be labeled a bar activity, if it’s organized through a local bar association, or a business activity.)

4. The statement isn’t about one person in particular (though it could be — say the debater says something critical about a specific political activist or religious figure based on that person’s sexual orientation, religion or gender identity). But “anti-harassment … case law” has read “harassment” as potentially covering statements about a group generally, even when they aren’t said to or about a particular offended person, and the rule is broad enough to cover statements about “others” as groups and not just as individuals.

Or say that you’re at a lawyer social activity, such as a local bar dinner, and say that you get into a discussion with people around the table about such matters — Islam, evangelical Christianity, black-on-black crime, illegal immigration, differences between the sexes, same-sex marriage, restrictions on the use of bathrooms, the alleged misdeeds of the 1 percent, the cultural causes of poverty in many households, and so on. One of the people is offended and files a bar complaint. Again, you’ve engaged in “verbal … conduct” that the bar may see as “manifest[ing] bias or prejudice” and thus as “harmful.” This was at a “social activit[y] in connection with the practice of law.” The state bar, if it adopts this rule, might thus discipline you for your “harassment.” And, of course, the speech restrictions are overtly viewpoint-based: If you express pro-equality viewpoints, you’re fine; if you express the contrary viewpoints, you’re risking disciplinary action.

Read the whole thing.

Volokh goes on to say in a separate post that under the proposed rule change, a law firm could theoretically be sanctioned for hiring a new lawyer who went to an Ivy League law school, over competitors who went to less prestigious law schools. The reason? Discrimination on the basis of “socioeconomic status.”

More about this issue at the Wall Street Journal‘s law blog, and at the ABA Journal.

At this point, this is just a proposal by an ABA committee. But it is alarming that the national lawyers’ professional association is even thinking this way. This is not nothing. Sign of the times.

Swamp People For A Day

Our European visitors wanted to go on a swamp tour. We signed up for Cajun Country Swamp Tours, in the Atchafalaya Swamp near Breaux Bridge. It was a lot of fun. We saw plenty of gators.

And we saw many beautiful birds, like this great blue heron:

(Photo by Philippe Delansay)

It was a good way to spend a couple of hours. Afterward, we went to Johnson’s Boucanière for lunch (get the rib), and then motored out to Vermilionville, the folk life Cajun village on the banks of the Vermilion River. It was really something else. The village exists to show historical aspects of Cajun life, including domestic architecture (1785-1890), interior design, plants ground around household, and so forth. The parts I enjoyed the most was listening to my friend Philippe, a native Parisian, speaking French to a couple of Cajun volunteers.

One of them, a woman from Henderson who spun cotton thread, explained that she was speaking Creole. This was odd to us; we assumed that Creole was what black people living among the French spoke historically. This white woman told us that her husband is from Arnaudville, not too far away from her hometown, and he speaks Cajun French. This is just what she grew up with. Later, Philippe talked to a guide whose French was accentless.

We also saw this in the replica classroom, of the sort little Cajun kids would have been taught in many decades ago:

The culturally dominant English speakers tried to force Cajun school children to speak English by punishing them for speaking French in school. This seems terrible today, and a way of robbing a people of its language for the sake of erasing its memory and dominating them. On the other hand, this is how you unite a disparate nation. It is not pretty.

Driving back home, I told my wife that even though I am not Cajun, who the Cajuns are and what they’ve accomplished is what makes me proudest to come from south Louisiana.

Remembering Slavery At Whitney

We have old friends visiting this week from Europe. I encouraged them to go to Rosedown Plantation, in St. Francisville, which is one of the grandest and best preserved plantations in the South. It really is a wonder to behold. But Julie and I also suggested that they get the other side of the story by going to Whitney Plantation, down the river in St. John the Baptist Parish.

Whitney Plantation is America’s only museum of slavery. John Cummings, a (white) New Orleans lawyer, bought the antebellum home and property in 1998, and spent $8 million restoring it. It has been open for less than two years. From a newspaper story:

“Who in the hell built this house?” Cummings thundered… . “Who built this son of a bitch? We have to own our history.”

Slaves did. Cummings is passionate about telling the story of what slavery was. South Louisiana is full of plantations, some of which have started to be more honest and open about slavery. But none are dedicated only to telling the story of the enslaved Africans who worked those sugar cane and indigo fields.

My family has never been to Whitney. We joined our friends there this afternoon. It was unforgettable. I mean that. As I sit here after midnight on Wednesday, writing this, I can hear my son Lucas and his Franco-Dutch friend Léon lying on air mattresses in the darkened living room, talking about the lives of the slaves. It made a huge impression on them, this plantation.

The tour begins in the Antioch Baptist Church, a 19th-century African-American church building donated by the congregation, which was founded by freed slaves, and which gave their original church building to Whitney Plantation when they built a new chapel. Inside the restored church, sculptor Woodrow Nash created clay life-size images of actual Louisiana slave children whose stories about their childhoods in bondage were collected in 1940 by the Works Progress Administration. Here is a view:

Behind the church there is the “Wall Of Honor,” which is actually several granite walls, upon which are inscribed the names of every slave who ever lived, labored, and suffered on Whitney Plantation, as far as historians are able to document from the records. They only have one name, because they were not accorded the dignity of surnames. Scattered throughout the list of names are quotes from actual slave testimonies:

The glare of the afternoon sun prevented me from photographing the most harrowing passages, including a couple from freed slaves recalling savage beatings they endured as children — one from a woman who was beaten bloody for stealing a biscuit, because she was hungry.

This clip from a Smithsonian magazine story gives you more details about the Wall, the nearby Garden of Angels, and other buildings:

But interspersed throughout is something more telling of the slave experience than a last name: testimonials to the brutality doled out by plantation overseers. “They took and gave him 100 lashes with the cat of ninety-nine tails,” wrote Dora Franks of her uncle Alf, whose crime was a romantic rendezvous off the property one night. “His back was somethin awful, but they put him in the field to work while the blood was still runnin’.” Another story ends with a single terrifying phrase: “Dey buried him alive!” As the tour passes massive bronze sugar kettles, the slave quarters and the kitchens, the narrative of persecution is a relentless wave of nauseating statistics. Some 2,200 children died enslaved in the home parish of the plantation between 1820 and 1860; infant mortality was grotesquely common. Some 100 slaves were forced to work around the clock during the short autumn harvest season to keep the massive sugar kettles going. Slaves laboring in the dark routinely sustained third-degree burns and lost limbs, although this rarely ended their servitude. Amputations were frequent; punishment by the whip common. A trip to the Big House — at one time called “one of the most interesting in the entire South” by the Department of the Interior — reveals incredible architecture and design, including rare murals by Italian artist Domenico Canova. But the elegant front portico looks out toward the river, turning its back on the daily parade of torture and terror just steps away from the backdoor.

Here’s a photo I took in the Garden of Angels:

That’s how the deaths of these children were recorded, verbatim. “corpse of a little slave.” “a negro girl”. Human beings. Children, their names known only to their mothers.

“My God, what a contrast to what we saw this morning,” said one of our visitors, referring to Rosedown. Yes, it is. Julie and I were so grateful that we had the opportunity to visit Whitney Plantation. Living here in the Deep South, even though some plantation houses open to the public are trying to do better by historical honesty, none, to my knowledge, remotely approach the thoroughness of Whitney Plantation. It is very hard to think of the beauty and glory of the Old South when confronted by the names of human beings, and the stories of what they endured at the hands of white society.

Here’s the thing that is so hard to hold in your mind: there was beauty in the son of a bitch. Look at this fresco image left inside the Big House by an Italian artist:

How can people capable of appreciating the beauty of that image, and allowing it to grace their domestic life, have also enslaved and tortured human beings? It is a naive question, I guess, but it is also the question we have to ask. The men and women who enslaved the Africans were not monsters, though they did monstrous things. They were people like us. As a small boy, I heard some older white people claim that the slaves loved their masters, and that the horrors of slavery were exaggerated.

The lie has to be countered, again and again. I told my children that the Confederate battle flag flew over soldiers — including our own ancestors — who fought to preserve the social order that enslaved Africans. That’s not all that social order meant, but it did mean that, and the stain cannot be erased. Nor should it.

If you are coming down to South Louisiana, please consider making the Whitney Plantation part of your trip. It is a profound experience that left some of our group near tears. To you readers who are coming to the Walker Percy Weekend — some tickets are still available — I hope you’ll add an extra day to see Rosedown in the morning, and Whitney in the afternoon. It will add such dimension to your understanding of Southern history, and American history, and the history of the human race.

One last thing. As some of you know, I worked with the African-American actor Wendell Pierce in the writing of his memoir, The Wind In The Reeds. Wendell’s ancestors on his mother’s side come from this area (specifically, from a neighboring parish). His great-grandfather was a slave child named Aristile, whose early memories include watching Union soldiers marching along the levee during the Civil War. In the book, Wendell tells the story of his family’s history up from slavery.

On the Whitney tour, our guide, Adina, explained how freed slaves were still held in a kind of bondage on plantations through the sharecropping system. They were only allowed to buy goods through the plantation store, which, of course, jacked up prices and kept the sharecroppers in debt bondage. I told the story, from Wendell’s book, about Father Harry Maloney, a white Catholic priest of the Josephite order who came to serve the black Catholics of Ascension Parish, where Wendell’s grandparents lived. As the story, which came from Wendell’s Uncle Lloyd, goes, Father Maloney used the power of his white skin and Roman collar in the heavily Catholic area to defy the racist power structure on behalf of his flock. Father Maloney broke the power of the plantation stores by running food drives, then distributing the goods to sharecroppers, so they didn’t have to depend on the exploiters.

“I grew up here, and I’ve heard of him!” Adina said. Later, we told more Father Maloney stories, including one about how he started a bus service to the Avondale Shipyards in New Orleans, so black men who had no cars could get down there to take good jobs, and thereby escape the miserable sharecropping life. Adina told me that bus is still running today, over 60 years later.

I tell you about the selfless deeds of that righteous white Catholic priest in part because of this I saw on the wall as we left the Visitor’s Center:

History is impossibly complicated, morally and otherwise. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at my local library about The Wind In The Reeds, and the things I learned about my own state and its racial history from working with Wendell. I said at the end that it made me think, and think hard, about how in our town every spring, we celebrate the 19th-century heritage of this historic and beautiful countryside, but we avert our collective gaze from the fact that in the period and the society we celebrate, the ancestors of about half the people in the parish today were held in bondage. It’s not right to tell only a partial truth, for it might as well not be the truth at all, I said.

Nowadays, the New Orleans city government is attempting to remove statues and memorials to Confederate figures, like Robert E. Lee atop Lee Circle. I think this is wrong, and in my library talk, I said that even though I think the Confederacy fought to preserve an evil institution, we should not pull down the statue of the Confederate soldier that stands on the courthouse lawn in our town. But we should add to the courthouse lawn a memorial to the slaves of our parish, or even better, a statue of the Rev. Joseph Carter, who stood down a foul-mouthed white mob on October 17, 1963, to become the first black man to register to vote here in 61 years.

It’s time we talked openly about this, and did right by history. Going to Whitney Plantation on Wednesday made me feel even more strongly that the way to confront history is not by tearing down statues or razing plantations that stand as monuments to those things, but rather to erect memorials and museums like Whitney Plantation, to broaden and deepen awareness of the moral and historical record, and the commemoration of the world the slaves made.

Every former slave state needs to have a Whitney Plantation. I guess they would first have to have a John Cummings, who has served the people of Louisiana, black and white alike, well with his labor and his ardor for justice. Here, finally, is a CBS report on Whitney Plantation. This will have to do until you can see it yourself. Bring your children.

Resisting The Anti-Culture

Carl Trueman asks:

Is the culture war over? Or, to use less martial language, is Christian cultural engagement at an end? At the risk of depriving a rapidly shrinking handful of old-school Republicans and countless trendy Christian blog pundits of their reason to exist, I believe the answer is yes. It is over. For to engage a culture there must first be a culture to engage. And, as the ever-incisive Anthony Esolen has pointed out on numerous occasions we no longer have a culture. What we really have is an anti-culture.

More:

Let’s face it: We now live in a world where refusing a man the right to expose himself in a woman’s toilet is enough to risk your city losing the right to host a football game. Even to suggest there might be a debate to be had about such a thing is enough to render one liable to accusations of irrational hatred and dismissal as a benighted bigot. Culture did not bring that about. Anti-culture did—the wholesale repudiation of the past and its institutions and interdicts, and a Devil-may-care attitude to the future. The anti-culture warriors of this present age have very long, very strong arms and—unfortunately for the coming generations—very short sight. Just think of the Talibanic fury recently released on university campuses against any vestige of the past which does not conform to the exacting morality of the present.

Christians need to wake up to this. We have no culture to engage, let alone transform. It is thus time to drop the hip rhetoric of cultural engagement and transformation that comforts us that we are part of some non-existent dialogue and that grants the world of our opponents a dignity which it simply does not deserve.

He says he’s not sure that the Benedict Option is the answer (because it’s still a work in progress), but says that one of its founding principles — that there is no longer any real relationship between Christian teaching and Western culture — precisely because there is no such thing as a culture of the West anymore.

How can Trueman say that? He’s working from sociologist Philip Rieff’s definition of culture. For Rieff, any culture is defined by its “thou shalt nots” — that is, the things it forbids. This tells the people within a certain culture what is sacred and what is taboo. Culture is “a pattern of moral demands, a range of standard self-expectations about what we may and may not do, in the face of infinite possibilities.” Different cultures have different standards of inhibition and release (all cultures must permit, however rarely, some form of release), but within particular cultures, those who are members of it know what is permitted and what is not without having to think about it all that much.

But now, says Rieff, we live in an “anti-culture” — that is, under a cultural system that cannot do what cultures are supposed to do: say what is forbidden. Modern Western culture is built on transgressing boundaries, on forbidding to forbid.

The center cannot hold because there is no center to be held.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice informed the state of North Carolina that HB2 violates federal civil rights law:

U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.

The department gave state officials until Monday to respond “by confirming that the State will not comply with or implement HB2.”

More:

Speaking to business leaders Wednesday night, McCrory called the letter “something we’ve never seen regarding Washington overreach in my lifetime.”

“This is no longer just a N.C. issue. This impacts every state, every university and almost every employee in the United States of America,” he said. “All those will have to comply with new definitions of requirements by the federal government regarding restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities in both the private and public sector.”

From the NYT:

The state measure, House Bill 2, known as HB2, was signed into law in March and says the bathroom a person uses is determined by his or her biological gender at birth. That requirement “is facially discriminatory against transgender employees” because it treats them differently from other employees, Ms. Gupta wrote.

Think about this: if your state does not allow biological men who assert that they are women to use the women’s room if they choose to, your state stands to lose all federal education monies, by order of this despicable national government. Gov. McCrory is right: this is no longer a North Carolina issue. And to think there are some people who still insist that this is only about bathrooms.

The violation, the unspeakable arrogance. Holding schoolchildren hostage to this perverse generation’s ideal of civil rights. Five years ago if you had said such an edict would come down from Washington, most people would not have believed it. Yet here we are.

Today the federal government says that states cannot forbid men from using the women’s room, and vice versa. Tomorrow it will mandate this in the public schools. And it will by no means stop there, not with this bunch, and certainly not with Hillary Clinton in the White House. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.

We no longer have a culture. We have chaos. And the people will accept it, because we have exchanged the culture we had for chaos, and we call it freedom.

I have never been the kind of conservative who thought of my government as a threat to me, my family, my faith, and my culture. That’s over.

It’s time to prepare for some very dark days. Those who still have a culture within them and their families and communities had better start digging in.

A reader writes:

In contemplating the political events of the last 24 hours and their implications, especially for evangelical Christians, I was drawn back to Philip Rieff’s work, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” I am not interested in Donald Trump the individual.  I am however, very interested in what makes Mr. Trump carry such symbolic weight for so many of my fellow citizens. I have no intention of antagonizing individual Trump supporters, nor of debating the relative merits of Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton; except to suggest that they are two sides to the same coin.

In assessing the nature of that “coin” Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has put it well, “… the therapeutic sensibility [has replaced] justice with personal liberation – defined as pursuit of impulse, thus distorting politics by making people either overly political, aiming only at exertion of self interest through power, or apolitical, leaving the polity devoid of a binding public philosophy. In the absence of transcendent principle, … like the push for civil rights for African Americans…, all of social life, from the private to the political, becomes a sphere for self interested manipulation.” Clinton and Trump are merely different manifestations of this therapeutic culture, in which we are all at least partially complicit.

Cultures endure when their institutions embody common understandings of the good, that are all the more powerful for being implicit. There are perpetuated by certain forms of life in community, that have the power to bind and shape us far beyond mere argument. In this sense it is not the words of a written constitution written on paper, but the sentiments of an unwritten constitution written on the heart that matter most. The ascendance of the Clinton/Trump Hydra is prima facie evidence of the deformation of that unwritten constitution, and the emergence of an anti-culture.

The signs of the nature of this anti-culture are manifest in many places, but with Trump in view it may be useful to consider reality television as one particularly clear example. As Rieff himself put it:

“In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have ‘spiritual concerns’ and engage in ‘spiritual’ pursuit … There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation, We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt [alienation as theatrical device], with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.”

The ascent of Trump, from cartoon robber-barren, to reality TV patient-analyst, to political icon triumphantly enacting his own discovered will, seems to somehow mark a parallel descent toward a cultural breaking point.  To quote Rieff again on cultures that have reached this late stage:

“Its jurisdiction contracts; it demands less, permits more. Bread and circuses become confused with right and duty. Spectacle becomes a functional substitute for sacrament. Massive regressions occur, with large sections of the population returning to levels of destructive aggression historically accessible to it. At times of impending transition to a new moral order, symbolic forms and their institutional objectifications change their relative weight in that order. Competing symbolisms gather support in competing elites; they jostle each other for priority of place as the organizers of the next phase in the psycho-historical process.”

In a culture where our most basic symbols no longer signify, questions like, will “Obama Care” be repealed, what will trade and immigration policy look like, or even who will sit on the Supreme Court, are all matters of secondary concern. Something much more deeply pressing is before us – the fundamental decadence of our cultural moment is now dramatically apparent. As men like Jacques Barzun and C.E.M. Joad have well expressed, cultural decadence is best understood as a loss of unitive purpose. In an atmosphere of cultural drift, the core function of culture, to act in tandem with the state as a temporal remedy against the human inclination to devour one another, is called into question.

As Augustine understood, neither culture nor the state are redemptive, and so the weakening or even collapse of one or both can work no ultimate harm. But still, life in a diabolic culture and disordered state entails real physical and spiritual suffering both for ourselves and for our neighbors. Our obligation to seek the good of the City where God has placed us, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, means that these effects can not be ignored.

The question of how best to go about loving our City and our neighbor is a vexing one. Of course we can only give what we have, and having lost touch with the deeper wisdom of our own traditions we evangelical Christians are unable to offer a distinctive voice within the Trump culture. Beset by moralistic therapeutic deism, our moral imaginations have atrophied.  A Jeremiah 6:16 ethic might serve as a remedy here: “Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” There is no more critical task that the re-catechizing of the faithful along these lines. But for this to occur, institutions with the means and authority to catechize must be protected from mounting legal and cultural threats that now beset them.

While Jeremiah 6:16 is inspiring, those who know their Bibles well will know that I cheated, quoting the verse only in part. As spoken by the Prophet it concludes, “But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” And of course this is the way with men always and everywhere. We are broken and disordered, not inclined to choose aright; or as a wise man once told me, “dead men always choose death.” We must pray to be made alive so that we may choose life.

Whether Trump wins or loses, the Trump culture is ascendant. Whether in the person of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we will get the President we deserve. The question is what next. Anyone who thinks that politics provides the primary answer to that question, is missing the larger reality. And so to close with Rieff once again,

“Remissive motifs other than sexual have dominated earlier phases of the psycho-historical process, expressing the ideological breakup of great communities, but always at the same time preparing the ground for fresh internalizations of control. But the modern cultural revolution has built into itself a unique prophylaxis: it is deliberately not in the name of any new order of communal purpose that is taking place. On the contrary, this revolution is being fought for a permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands, in a world which can guarantee a plenitude produced without reference to the rigid maintenance of any particular interdictory (and counter-interdictory) system. This autonomy has been achieved by Western man from common and compelling mobilizations of motive. Stabilizing the present polytheism of values, there is the historic de- conversion experience of the therapeutic, proposing an infinity of means transformed into their own ends.

Interdictory systems are still deeply rooted within us, of course. A cultural revolution does not occur as a discernible event, or as a plurality of events, nor does it occur swiftly within a few years, as does a political revolution; only afterwards, when the revolution itself has been incorporated into the new system of controls, do such mythic condensations of cultural chance occur.”

Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president. And we deserve them. As I say: Prepare. 

UPDATE: A reader sends this essay by Sam Gerrans, a Russian Muslim, and says, “A Russian Muslim understands what’s going on in our culture better than we do.” Yes. Excerpt:

Those familiar with the Hegelian dialectic will recognize the familiar ingredients – thesis and antithesis – as the set-up for the inevitable synthesis. What that synthesis will be, I can’t say, other than it will have nothing to do with what normal men and women normally want.

What I am sure of is that both the progressives and Sharia-touting Islamists are unwitting pawns in bringing that end about – and that both will continue to be useful to that small clique which decides social policy and declares war on those who wish to have sane, generative, enduring families.