Rod Dreher's Blog, page 586

Liberty & Airbnb

NPR had a report yesterday on racial bias in Airbnb rentals, and it turned out to be more interesting than I expected. Here’s the intro; I will excerpt the transcript below:

The sharing economy has made many things that used to be strictly business far more personal. Platforms for hailing a taxi or renting a vacation home often display the names and photos of the strangers involved in the transaction. The idea is to personalize the exchange, but it can have unintended consequences.

Airbnb is the popular service through which private home owners make their properties, or rooms in their houses, available to renters. Turns out that if you’re black, you have a significantly lower chance of being able to rent a property. A Harvard Business School professor who ran a study testing racial bias in Airbnb rentals told NPR:

We could see that there was a very different response rate and acceptance rate for African-American guests relative to white guests. Having an African-American name leads to roughly a 15 percent lower chance of being accepted as a guest on Airbnb relative to having a distinctively white name, holding all else constant.

David King, the recently hired Airbnb diversity director (and a black man), acknowledges that racial bias is a problem, but doesn’t think that taking photos off of Airbnb profiles is a solution. He said:

The photos are on the platform for a reason. Number one, it really does does help to aid in the trust between the guest and the host. And then secondary to that is safety. You want to make sure that that guest that shows up at your door is the person that you’ve been communicating with.

Makes sense, right? Would you want to give up that protection if you were a homeowner?

It gets more complex when reporters talk to Synta Keeling, a black woman who rents rooms in her Anacostia townhouse to travelers via Airbnb:

KEELING: The strange thing about Airbnb – makes it tough, is, I really don’t want a racist guest in my house (laughter) because I don’t – I live here in this space, so I don’t need to feel uncomfortable.

Well … yeah. Can you blame her? I wouldn’t want anyone in my home whose views made me seriously uncomfortable. And I would not want to stay in the home of a stranger who was made uncomfortable by my views, or anything else about me. Are you a Social Justice Warrior with a room to rent? You should have the right to refuse to accommodate in your own home a notorious anti-SJW troll like me. I’m serious about that. And if my religion or politics, which are publicly known, make you uncomfortable having me as a guest, then you should have the right to say no. Believe me, I would not want to walk into a situation in which I was not wanted, however offended your prejudice would leave me.

The NPR reporters say that Airbnb is in an unusual place, legally. A hotel would be penalized for discrimination — but probably not an Airbnb property owner who rented their place via the service. But it’s not certain.

So, what’s the difference between refusing to rent a room in your own B&B to a traveler because of his race, sexuality, etc. — which is illegal — and refusing to do so via Airbnb’s platform? I can’t see any moral difference, but I hope for the sake of Airbnb owners that it never gets challenged in court, or if it does, the courts take the side of giving owners discretion. Yes, that means that there will necessarily be some objectionable discrimination, and that’s regrettable. But on balance, I think it’s worth it. If I could not have some measure of confidence in the person to whom I was renting my own property — especially if, like Synta Keeling, I actually shared the property with my guests — then I would not participate on Airbnb.

Is this not a problem that could be solved, or at least ameliorated, with comments on the host’s Airbnb profile? If a host mistreated or discriminated against someone in renting, that should be part of the profile (though Airbnb should have a way to vet those complaints and only post those that seem legitimate). Then again, that doesn’t speak to the legal issue. No one would put up with the local Marriott refusing to rent a room to black customers. But I would tolerate, say, a gay Airbnb host refusing to allow non-gay renters. I would also tolerate a gay B&B host doing the same. It may not be logical, but I would rather let small business owners — including Airbnb hosts — have that degree of freedom — even if it made it harder for me, personally, to rent a place. Again, I would not want to rent from a host who didn’t want people like me in their home or rental property.

But I wouldn’t support that as a general principle for the owner of a hotel or apartment complex. Is there any legitimate way for anti-discrimination law to give more leeway to Airbnb hosts? If I wanted to rent my guest apartment only to travelers over the age of 60, or only to Orthodox Christians, or only to professional writers and artists … why not? Why is the principle of non-discrimination more important than the freedom of the property owner? Why should Synta Keeling not have the right to refuse to rent a room in her house to a white supremacist who is trying to make a point?

That said, I can’t come up with a logically sound reason why an Airbnb host or the owner of a B&B should have that right, and the owner of the Marriott should not. What do you think?

The Spark Of Life

rendix_alextian/Shutterstock

Everybody’s talking today about the new film clip from British scientists, showing that a burst of light comes forth when sperm fertilizes an egg. From the Telegraph’s story:

The bright flash occurs because when sperm enters and egg it triggers calcium to increase which releases zinc from the egg. As the zinc shoots out, it binds to small molecules which emit a fluorescence which can be picked up my camera microscopes.

It’s not woo-woo, it’s science. I get that. Still, it reminds me of this, about the Shroud of Turin:

Scientists from Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development spent years trying to replicate the shroud’s markings.

They have concluded only something akin to ultraviolet lasers – far beyond the capability of medieval forgers – could have created them.

This has led to fresh suggestions that the imprint was indeed created by a huge burst of energy accompanying the Resurrection of Christ.

‘The results show a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can colour a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin,’ the scientists said.

More:

The image of the bearded man on the shroud must therefore have been created by ‘some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength)’, their report concludes. But it stops short of offering a non-scientific explanation.

Professor Paolo Di Lazzaro, who led the study, said: ‘When one talks about a flash of light being able to colour a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things such as miracles.

‘But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes. We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate.’

More from Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

The best description is that it is an extremely delicate singe marking. Italian physicist Paolo Di Lazzaro concedes in an article for National Geographic that every scientific attempt to replicate it in a lab has failed. “Its precise hue is highly unusual, and the color’s penetration into the fabric is extremely thin, less than 0.7 micrometers (0.000028 inches), one-thirtieth the diameter of an individual fiber in a single 200-fiber linen thread.”

Di Lazzaro and his colleagues at Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) experimented for five years, using modern excimer lasers to train short bursts of ultraviolet light on raw linen, in an effort to simulate the image’s coloration.

They came tantalizingly close to replicating the image’s distinctive color on a few square centimeters of fabric. However, they were unable to match all the physical and chemical characteristics of the shroud image, and reproducing a whole human figure was far beyond them. De Lazzaro explained that the ultraviolet light necessary to reproduce the image of the crucified man “exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today.” The time for such a burst would be shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and the intensity of the ultra violet light would have to be around several billion watts.”

The scientists shrug and say the only explanation lies beyond the realm of twenty-first century technoscience. In other words, the extraordinary burst of ultra violet light is not only beyond the ability and technology of a medieval forger: It is beyond the ability and technology of the best twenty-first century scientists.

Here’s a link to that 2015 National Geographic article he references. Excerpt:

If the most advanced technologies available in the 21st century could not produce a facsimile of the shroud image, he reasons, how could it have been executed by a medieval forger?

For believers, the radiation thesis suggests that a “divine light” in the tomb might have seared the crucified form of Jesus Christ onto the shroud. “One could look at hypotheses outside the realm of science, a sort of miracle,” says Di Lazzaro. “But a miracle cannot be investigated by the scientific method.”

The Benedict Option, Reactionary?

You may have seen Ross Douthat’s column from the weekend, in which he talked about the reactionary element of American conservatism. He says that classical reactionary thought usually contains racist and anti-Semitic elements. Even so…:

But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains real insights. (As, for the record, does Zizek — I think.) Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the poverty of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.

Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.

That’s a great insight. More:

Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in our intellectual life, though, without making room for racialist obsessions and fantasies of enlightened despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not exactly encouraging.

Yet its strange viral appeal is also evidence that ideas can’t be permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.

Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary style that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq, there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

Read the whole thing. 

What is Reaction? I find this loooooong post by Scott Alexander helpful. He doesn’t seem to be a reactionary, but he tries to explain it as sympathetically as he can. He, like me, finds the racialist aspect of contemporary reactionary politics “creepy,” and unlike me, he doesn’t understand the religious and metaphysical attractions of (some) contemporary reactionaries. Check out his post. I’m strongly opposed to the racism of the alt-right, and don’t mind being designated by them a “cuckservative”: their term for right-wingers who aren’t sufficiently racist and anti-Semitic.

Anyway, Ross’s last bit — reaction as an artistic and religious stance, but not a political one — seems to be more or less where the Benedict Option is. You have to be fairly alienated from liberal democratic culture to find the Ben Op appealing. In fact, I think that’s why so many conservative Christians resist it. They know that things are bad, and getting worse for us, and they know that the center is not holding, and cannot hold. But if it’s true, then they would have to do things that are really difficult. It seems easier to live with the cognitive dissonance. Many of us are like the conservative Episcopalians who say, “One more thing and I’m out the door!” — but then the one more thing comes, and we redraw the red line.

Discussing Ross’s column with a conservative friend, I told him that I don’t have much faith in liberal democracy, but I have even less faith in any alternative. I will vote for the party and the politician that gives me and my tribe the most room in which to be ourselves. But that’s not the same thing as having political hope. In fact, giving up political hope — that is, the possibility of a political solution — may be the first step toward sanity, and building a resilient future. When MacIntyre says a “crucial turning point” in the antique past came “when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium” — for us, I believe that means ceasing to believe that the United States is a Christian nation in any but a nominal sense, and coming to understand, in fact, that what is now mainstream in America is essentially anti-Christian. That does not call for a freak-out, but it does call for a radical re-evaluation of the way we small-o orthodox Christians think and the way we live here.

One of the most fundamental things we have to come to terms with is how living in modernity itself causes us to forget what Christianity is, and what a Christian is. As part of my Ben Op research, I’m reading now a dense book by social anthropologist Paul Connerton, whose 1989 book How Societies Remember I blogged about here. Note this short passage from that blog entry:

Connerton begins by saying that “our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past,” and that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” Those memories, he contends, “are conveyed and sustained by (more or less) ritual performances.” Finally, he argues that these performances have to be embodied to be effective. Let’s unpack this.

When a new regime or social order takes over, the first thing it does is to find ways to sever the society’s connection to its past. ISIS is now doing that in the areas it controls, by erasing any physical embodiment of the memory of the area’s pre-Islamic past. “The more total the aspirations of the new regime, the more imperiously will it seek to introduce an era of forced forgetting,” says Connerton.

The one I’m reading now, from 2009, is called How Modernity Forgets. Connerton draws on Marxist analysis to talk about how capitalism causes us to forget vital connections having to do with the origin of material goods. In this excerpt, he talks about how the city of Chicago’s role as a rail hub in the 19th century changed the experience of man to the material world:

One could buy merchandise after consulting a Montgomery Ward catalogue without troubling to reflect on a web of economic and ecological linkages that stretched out in all directions. The natural roots from which it had sprung or been extracted and the human history of the labour process that had created it faded from view as it passed along the long chain of wholesale-retail relationship. The relationship in which the flow of merchandise was enmeshed was obscured from view.

Or, in other words, they were forgotten. As natural ecosystems became more intimately linked to the urban marketplace of Chicago, they came to appear ever more remote from the busy place that was Chicago. Chicago both fostered an ever closer connection between city and country, and concealed its debt to the natural system that made it possible. Chicago concealed the very linkages it was creating. The field was separated from the grain, the forest from the lumber, the rangeland from the meat. The more concentrated the city’s markets became and the more its hinterland expanded, the easier it became to forget the ultimate origins of the things bought and sold there. The easier it became to obscure the connections between Chicago’s trade and its earthly roots, the more casually one could forget that the city dew its life from the natural world around it.

Similarly with Western culture and the Christian religion. We have become a consumer society, seeing all things as commodities that can either be bought and sold, or if not bought and sold, at least as things that can be used or discarded according to our desires. This process has been happening for some time with Christianity, and it is quickly accelerating. The political theorist Glenn Tinder wrote an Atlantic essay in 1989 on “the political meaning of Christianity.” Look at this bit:

The idealism of the man-god does not, of course, bring as an immediate and obvious consequence a collapse into unrestrained nihilism. We all know many people who do not believe in God and yet are decent and admirable. Western societies, as highly secularized as they are, retain many humane features. Not even tacitly has our sole governing maxim become the one Dostoevsky thought was bound to follow the denial of the God-man: “Everything is permitted.”

This may be, however, because customs and habits formed during Christian ages keep people from professing and acting on such a maxim even though it would be logical for them to do so. If that is the case, our position is precarious, for good customs and habits need spiritual grounds, and if those are lacking, they will gradually, or perhaps suddenly in some crisis, crumble.

To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted? Again and again we are told by advertisers, counselors, and other purveyors of popular wisdom that we have a right to buy the things we want and to live as we please. We should be prudent and farsighted, perhaps (although even those modest virtues are not greatly emphasized), but we are subject ultimately to no standard but self-interest. If nihilism is most obvious in the lives of wanton destroyers like Hitler, it is nevertheless present also in the lives of people who live purely as pleasure and convenience dictate.

And aside from intentions, there is a question concerning consequences. Even idealists whose good intentions for the human race are pure and strong are still vulnerable to fate because of the pride that causes them to act ambitiously and recklessly in history. Initiating chains of unforeseen and destructive consequences, they are often overwhelmed by results drastically at variance with their humane intentions. Modern revolutionaries have willed liberty and equality for everyone, not the terror and despotism they have actually created. Social reformers in the United States were never aiming at the great federal bureaucracy or at the pervasive dedication to entertainment and pleasure that characterizes the welfare state they brought into existence. There must always be a gap between intentions and results, but for those who forget that they are finite and morally flawed the gap may become a chasm. Not only Christians but almost everyone today feels the fear that we live under the sway of forces that we have set in motion—perhaps in the very process of industrialization, perhaps only at certain stages of that process, as in the creation of nuclear power—and that threaten our lives and are beyond our control.

There is much room for argument about these matters. But there is no greater error in the modern mind than the assumption that the God-man can be repudiated with impunity. The man-god may take his place and become the author of deeds wholly unintended and the victim of terrors starkly in contrast with the benign intentions lying at their source.

It is my contention that liberal democracy has effectively repudiated the religious roots that made for ordered liberty, and will not be sustained because it cannot be sustained. John Adams had it right when he said that our Constitution is made for a moral and religious people, and could not work for any other. The forces of liberal democratic capitalist society do for religion what Connerton says they do for the means of production: cause mass forgetting of where the good things we enjoy come from. Consequently, if you are a Christian who assumes that you live in a more or less Christian country, and that all is well, your faith will be washed away — either in your own life, or in the lives of your descendants — because modern society (liberal, democratic, consumerist, relativist) will by its very nature cause you to forget its roots.

The forces in motion are not going to be stopped, not in the lifetime of anyone alive today. For traditional Christians, and religious traditionalists of any sort in the West, it can only be ridden out. This does not require one to affirm monarchy, fascism, or any other illiberal political form (as I do not). The problem is not political, but religious. If the Benedict Option is in any sense reactionary, it’s because it prescribes turning aside from shoring up the imperium (= liberal democracy) and instead redirects the Christian’s energies and focus to building up local forms of community within which the Christian vision can survive and thrive.

This does not mean total withdrawal, though it might for some people. I imagine most Ben Op people will do as I do, and continue to make their livings working in the world, and being a help in their own communities. But their primary loyalty will be not to the imperium, but to God, above all, and then to the family, church, school, and other local structures in which the faith is made manifest.

To take an extreme example: a Christian living and working in communist Czechoslovakia would still have had to participate in the system to earn his daily bread. But that didn’t mean that he supported communism.

Vaclav Havel once wrote that the materialist totalitarianism that people under Soviet domination endured was not different in essence from the arrogance of its liberal European version. A lengthy excerpt here, but an important one:

I presume that after all these stringent criticisms, I am expected to say just what I consider to be a meaningful alternative for Western humanity today in the face of political dilemmas of the contemporary world.

As all I have said suggests, it seems to me that all of us, East and West, face one fundamental task from which all else should follow. That task is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication, at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power — the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans. We must resist its complex and wholly alienating pressure, whether it takes the form of consumption, advertising, repression, technology, or cliché –all of which are the blood brothers of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought. We must draw our standards from our natural world, heedless of ridicule, and reaffirm its denied validity. We must honor with the humility of the wise the limits of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. We must relate to the absolute horizon of our existence which, if we but will, we shall constantly rediscover and experience. We must make values and imperatives the starting point of all our acts, of all our personally attested, openly contemplated, and ideologically uncensored lived experience. We must trust the voice of our conscience more than that of all abstract speculations and not invent responsibilities other than the one to which the voice calls us. We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy, and tolerance, but just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their “private” exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community. We must be guided by our own reason and serve the truth under all circumstances as our own essential experience.

I know all that sounds very general, very indefínite, and very unrealistic, but I assure you that these apparently naive words stem from a very particular and not always easy experience with the world and that, if I may say so, I know what I am talking about.

The vanguard of impersonal power, which drags the world along its irrational path, lined with devastated nature and launching pads, is composed of the totalitarian regimes of our time. It is not possible to ignore them, to make excuses for them, to yield to them or to accept their way of playing the game, thereby becoming like them. I am convinced that we can face them best by studying them without prejudice, learning from them, and resisting them by being radically different, with a difference born of a continuous struggle against the evil which they may embody most clearly, but which dwells everywhere and so even within each of us. What is most dangerous to that evil are not the rockets aimed at this or that state but the fundamental negation of this evil in the very structure of contemporary humanity: a return of humans to themselves and to their responsibility for the world; a new understanding of human rights and their persistent reaffirmation, resistance against every manifestation of impersonal power that claims to be beyond good and evil, anywhere and everywhere, no matter how it disguises its tricks and machinations, even if it does so in the name of defense against totalitarian systems.

The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances, our own land, to drive it out of contemporary humankind. The best help to all who suffer under totalitarian regimes is to confront the evil which a totalitarian system constitutes, from which it draws its strength and on which its “vanguard” is nourished. If there is no such vanguard, no extremist sprout from which it can grow, the system will have nothing to stand on. A reaffirmed human responsibility is the most natural barrier to all irresponsibility. If, for instance, the spiritual and technological potential of the advanced world is spread truly responsibly, not solely under the pressure of a selfish interest in profits, we can prevent its irresponsible transformation into weapons of destruction. It surely makes much more sense to operate in the sphere of causes than simply to respond to their effects. By then, as a rule, the only possible response is by equally immoral means. To follow that path means to continue spreading the evil of irresponsibility in the world, and so to produce precisely the poison on which totalitarianism feeds.

I favor “antipolitical politics,” that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.

That is the best secular statement I know of the inchoate politics of the Benedict Option. Havel rejected the main political alternatives on offer from the West as “two different ways of playing the same game.” That’s what I think about the Democratic and Republican parties. Take a look at this piece in National Review, written by George Nash, the well-known historian of conservative thought. In it, Nash surveys the mess that is American conservatism at the present moment:

Suffice it to say that in all my years as a historian of conservatism, I have never observed as much dissension on the Right as there is at present. Now, some may see in this cacophony a sign of vitality, and perhaps it will turn out to be so. But conservatives, more than ever, need minds as well as voices.

In this season of discontent, it might be useful for conservatives to step back for a moment and ask a simple question: What do conservatives want? What should they want? Perhaps by getting back to basics, conservative intellectuals can restore some clarity and direction to the debate. What do today’s conservatives want? To put it in elementary terms, I would say that they want what nearly all conservatives since 1945 have wanted: They want to be free, they want to live virtuous and meaningful lives, and they want to be secure from threats both beyond and within our borders. They want to live in a society whose government respects and encourages these aspirations while otherwise leaving people alone. Freedom, virtue, and safety: goals reflected in the libertarian, traditionalist, and national-security dimensions of the conservative movement as it has developed over the past 70 years. In other words, there is at least a little fusionism in nearly all of us. It might be something to build on.

Well, yes, but that description is so general as to be all but meaningless. It says nothing about the elite vs. masses divide that Nash earlier in the piece identifies as the big factor in American politics now. And for that matter, are there many liberals who would deny that they too want freedom, virtue, and safety? But what is freedom? What is virtue? What is safety? We can’t even agree on what these terms mean as conservatives. It is a pretty safe bet, though, that “freedom” and “virtue” are going to be redefined within conservatism to make orthodox Christians enemies of freedom and virtue, as the left already considers us.

Get in there and fight for our place at the table if you want to, but it’s a losing battle. Big business has taken sides, and so have the courts. So have the young, who are abandoning the faith, or, if they hold to it at all, profess a hollowed-out, vapid version that is far removed from historical Christianity.

Sooner or later, religious conservatives will have to take the Benedict Option, or be assimilated. I know of no feasible alternative. The longer you put off the decision to start thinking and moving in the Ben Op direction, the harder it’s going to be.

Lifting The Autism Veil

I listened the other day to a fascinating Fresh Air interview with John Elder Robison, the author of Look Me In The Eye, a compelling 2008 memoir of his life with Asperger Syndrome. In that book, Robison talked about how so much of his life made sense after he received his Asperger diagnosis. (Asperger, if you don’t know, is an autism spectrum disorder.)

More recently, he underwent experimental treatment in which doctors used low-level doses of electricity to target minute sections of his brain. The treatment changed him, lifting a veil that his neurological condition had imposed on reality. In his new book Switched On, Robison talks about what it was like to suddenly be able to experience the world in a more neurotypical way, after forty years as an Aspie — in particular, being able to read other people’s emotions. From the interview:

I was always possessed of strong emotions, what I wasn’t possessed of was reaction to situations with other people, and indeed after another stimulation, when I could look in your eyes and feel like I was just reading your thoughts, which was really weird and powerful for me, because that had never ever happened in my life. …

Just looking at somebody and having her tell me about putting a water pump on her car, but I would look at her and I would see that she was worried and frightened and anxious and I thought, “Excuse me, I have to go outside and gather myself for a second,” because I was almost reduced to tears by an ordinary conversation of commerce and I think that looking back on that time I now see that having this unregulated ability to read emotion was actually, for me, perhaps more disabling than being oblivious to the emotion, because when I was oblivious I could just listen to her tell me about the water pump leak, and I didn’t even notice if she was scared or anxious.

And:

I can’t go to movies anymore. I can’t watch TV. Ten years ago I could’ve sat through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre eating popcorn and stuff and wouldn’t have cared. Now it’s really upsetting and really stressful to me just to watch the evening news. I can’t do it. …

But at the same time, I know that my ability to serve on these autism committees, I think that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m really proud [that] I can do that, and I think this made it possible. So there’s pain that I felt from having these emotions come on, but I’m just so proud that I can do this thing that’s important to young people and other people with autism and differences. …

After all this seeing of emotion, though, one thing that I’ve come away with is the knowledge that I wanted all my life to be able to read these emotions, but of course reading emotions just makes me like everyone else. I think a debt that I could never repay Alvaro and those scientists is that they showed me that my geeky ability to see into machines and see into things, that’s my true gift in life too, that nobody else can do that.

Listen to the whole interview here. One thing that’s not clear for me from this interview is whether or not gaining the ability to read the emotions of others resulted in a corresponding lost of his “geeky ability to see into machines and see into things.” It doesn’t seem so, but it’s just not clear.

The unveiling of Robison’s mind came with significant costs, costs that he could not have anticipated ahead of time. In the past, he thought certain people he called his friends were laughing with him. In truth, they were laughing at him, and once he understood that, it broke his heart, but he ended the friendships. More seriously, it ended his marriage. His wife suffered from chronic depression, and once he was able to feel real empathy with her, he couldn’t bear her sadness. It overwhelmed him.

If you were in Robison’s shoes, would you have chosen this treatment? Let me put the question more pointedly: Knowing what Robison now knows about the treatment — that it could upend your life in unpredictable ways — would you still undergo it if it could life the autism veil?

I think that’s really an impossible question to answer from a neurotypical point of view, because we neurotypicals don’t know what the world is like seen through the autism veil. Think of it this way: if you were offered a treatment that would help you experience reality much more richly, and see things that you had not been able to see before, would you take it, knowing that you could never go back to seeing the world as you do today?

Thinking back to the LSD thread we recently had here, we discussed the beneficial experience that some people who try psychedelic drugs have of feeling at one with the universe. I heard privately from a couple of people, one of them a fairly well known writer, who said that their psychedelic experience unexpectedly brought them out of depression and opened the door for them to believe in God. They both said that they believe the drug gave them a temporary view into the world as it truly is — filled with the presence of God — and that shook them out of their misery.

Now, let me put this to you: if a doctor said to you that you could take a dose of laboratory-produced LSD, and would be monitored by physicians the whole time, to prevent you from doing anything stupid, would you do it? That is, if you could be reasonably sure that nothing bad would happen to you physically from this experience, but there was no predicting what kind of emotional and psychological experience you would have, and what its lingering effects (good or ill) might be … would you do it? Why or why not?

The question is not so much “would you do drugs?” as “would you open yourself to the experience that is like having a veil lifted, and giving you an encounter of reality that is substantially different from what you’ve known all your life?” Except in Robison’s case, it wasn’t just for 12 hours, or however long a psychedelic experience lasts. It was permanent.

Put that way, it’s pretty scary to consider, isn’t it? That your entire understanding of yourself and everyone and everything around you could change — and not necessarily for the better.

I think this is one reason why people resist true religion: they fear what the world will look like if they have an experience that convinces them that the religion is true. This was certainly the case with me as a young man. I wanted the comforts of religion, and I even wanted the mystical experience of religion, but I wanted to have them from the safety of a life that I controlled. But that’s not possible. It’s like wanting to experience the ocean in a backyard swimming pool. The ocean can only be the ocean if it can encompass you. The same is true with God.

I knew someone once who was so depressed and unhappy, but who refused to get help of any kind. She was afraid of what might happen if she changed. She preferred the misery she knew to the possibility of being healed and relieved of her pain, but at the cost of changing. This is how we all are at some level, is it not? But I digress…

UPDATE: Look, John Elder Robison responded in the comments:

Thanks for your thoughtful commentary on my Fresh Air interview, and my Switched On book.

You present my story and an example of why people resist trying mind-bending drugs, and why they might fear an insight that could come from religious experience.

Maybe that’s so. But remember, I had no expectation that such would happen to me. To the best of my knowledge, people who experience religious visions get them unexpectedly too. Taking psychedelic drugs is different – you go into that expecting a wild ride.

Did you know that I come from a long line of clergy? My dad was a preacher before becoming a philosophy professor. My 8th grandfather was the first rector at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg, VA nad he held the pulpit at Jamestown.

So maybe it’s all in my DNA . . .

Dante & Change

Joshua Gibbs is teaching Dante to his students. He says (correctly!) that the Commedia is all about learning to desire the right things. This is really difficult, because it requires change, it requires metanoia. It requires repentance. And it all starts with wanting to be good, which is a more difficult thing to pull off than you might think. Excerpt:

I have found it liberating, exhilarating, and encouraging to admit to my students that I do not want to change. Change begins with the admission that you do not want to change— otherwise the change would have already taken place. When a man admits he does not want to become righteous, he understands the nature of the problem: he knows what righteousness is, but has not lived in such a way as to find righteousness attractive. A man who is not becoming righteous may have convinced himself of any number of lies which excuse stagnation: the problem is ignorance, the problem is environment, the problem is a hectic life. I do not have time to be good. When the problem is recognized— and the problem is a lack of desire for goodness— then that man can begin praying and confessing properly. Forgive me for not wanting good things. I have regularly confessed to my students, “I have a hard time praying for God to give me enough faith to pass the martyr’s test. Instead, I just pray I won’t be put to the martyr’s test.”

That whole post of his hit home with me, you won’t be surprised to learn. In How Dante Can Save Your Life, I tell the story of wanting to be at peace with my Dad, but not wanting to give up my claim on justice against him. My priest told me that this was a dead end, that I would never know real peace until I chose Love over Justice. And, of course, he was right. I find that it’s hard enough to choose good over an evil we happen to cherish, but it’s much harder to choose the supreme good over a rival good.

The Culture War In One Graph

Via OurWorldInData.org

There’s a fascinating graph for you. It tells you the radical shift from “materialist” values to “postmaterialist” values in the West, over a 30-year period. From OurWorldInData.org:

Materialists are mostly concerned with material needs and physical and economic security. In contrast to this, post-materialists ‘strive for self-actualization, stress the aesthetic and the intellectual, and cherish belonging and esteem’ …

When liberals complain that middle and working-class conservatives who vote Republican are voting against their own economic class interests, they may have a point, but are more likely than not deceiving themselves. What do I mean? You could just as easily say that wealthy people who vote Democratic are just as foolish (if you believe it’s foolish to vote against your own economic interests in favor of an ideal). But would it really be accurate to blame wealthy liberal Democrats for having false consciousness?

The truth is no doubt closer to this: as Western societies have become significantly wealthier and more secure, all except the poorest feel secure enough materially to argue about cultural ideals. In other words, it takes a rich society to argue about transgenders in the public toilets.

Which, of course, brings us, as all things do, to Camille Paglia, and this bit from her interview with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie:

Paglia: There [comes] a time when these fine gradations of gender identity—I’m a male trans doing this, etc.—this is a symbol of decadence, I’m sorry. Sexual Personae talks about this: That was in fact the inspiration for it, was that my overview of history and my noticing that in late phases, you all of a sudden get a proliferation of homosexuality, of sadomasochism, or gendered games, impersonations and masks, and so on. I think we’re in a really kind of late phase of culture.

reason: So that the proliferation of cultural identities, the proliferation of all sorts of possibilities is actually a sign that we’re…

Paglia: On the verge of collapse? Yes! Western culture is in decline. There’s absolutely no doubt about it, in my view, looking at the history of Egypt, of Babylon, of Byzantium, and so on. And so what’s happening is everyone’s so busy-busy-busy with themselves, with this narcissistic sense of who they are in terms of sexual orientation or gender, and this intense gender consciousness, woman consciousness at the same time, and meanwhile…

reason: Is that also racial or ethnic consciousness as well?

Paglia: Right now, to me, the real obsessions have to do with gender orientation. Although I think there’s been this flare-up [regarding race]. I voted for Obama, but I’ve been disappointed. I think we had hoped that he would inaugurate a period of racial harmony, and I think the situation has actually become even worse over recent years. It seems to be overt inflammatory actions by the administration to pit the races against each other, so I think there’s a lot of damage that needs to be healed.

But I think most of the problems as I perceive them in my students and so on, is that there’s this new obsession with where you are on this wide gender spectrum. That view of gender seems to me to be unrealistic because it’s so divorced from any biological referent. I do believe in biology, and I say in the first paragraph of Sexual Personae that sexuality is an intricate intersection of nature and culture. But what’s happened now is that the way the universities are teaching, it’s nothing but culture, and nothing’s from biology. It’s madness! It’s a form of madness, because women who want to marry and have children are going to have to encounter their own hormonal realities at a certain point.

reason: Do you see your personal liberation as having helped to grease the skids for decadence, for the collapse of Western civilization?

Paglia: I have, yes.

reason: Do you feel at all ambivalent about that?

Paglia: I’ve defined myself as a decadent. One of my first influences was Oscar Wilde. I stumbled on a little book called The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde in a secondhand bookstore in Syracuse, New York, when I was like 14, and I was fascinated by his statements. So I am a Wildean, and he identifies himself as a kind of decadent in that period of aestheticism.

reason: And certainly he was toward the end of the great hegemony of England as a world power, at least in a cultural sense.

Paglia: Yes, that’s true too, the decline of an empire. Absolutely.

Anybody know if there’s any truth to that, or is that just Camille spouting off? I mean, I’m primed to believe her, but that’s confirmation bias. Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman, in his classic (secular) book Family And Civilization, cited the proliferation of what we would call “sexual diversity” as a factor in the decadent stage of civilizations. In Zimmerman’s view (discussed here), which is not based on religious conviction (Zimmerman was not religious) but sociological observation, it’s all about the family. A society that breaks apart into individualism and “atomization” is done for.

Trump-Clinton Neck-and-Neck

Well, well, well:

Hillary Clinton holds just a 3-point lead over Republican front-runner Donald Trump in a national head to head matchup, according to a George Washington University Battleground Poll.

Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has 46 percent compared to Trump’s 43 percent, a more narrow margin than other polls have found.

In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Clinton has a larger 8-point lead over Trump, 48.8 to 40.8 percent. Fellow Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has a 15.3-point lead over the Republican front-runner, 53.3 to 38 percent.

A poll this far out from November doesn’t tell us much, but if Trump is the GOP nominee, I think the vote will probably be closer than most people think. A lot of people really cannot stand Hillary Clinton. I talked to a man the other day who voted twice for Obama, but says he will not vote for Hillary under any circumstances. “She’s a crook,” he said. Doesn’t mean he’ll vote Republican, but I was struck by the strength of his anti-Hillary conviction.

Michael Brendan Dougherty reminds us that Trump is a lousy candidate who probably can’t win in November. I think that’s the safer bet, but then again, pundits have been consistently wrong about Trump. Remember how Ted Cruz was going to steal this thing away from Trump after Wisconsin?

My Twitter feed is as jammed as a salmon stream at spawning time with Republican types reminding each other with #NeverTrump tweets that the Donald is a monster. And yet, look at the polls: Trump is way ahead in Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and California. Unless Kasich drops out, which he’s not going to do, Trump might  run the table. Pennsylvania, Maryland, and three other states in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic region — all Trump-friendly — vote tomorrow. Indiana’s the week after that. California’s not till the very end (June 7), but it’s got 172 delegates. (The remainder of the GOP primary schedule is here.) The NYT explains how Trump could win the GOP nomination outright.

If I were laying money on the November winner today, I would put it on Hillary, simply because Trump is so volatile. But that is far from a sure bet.

What Is Human?

Googling around a bit more on political scientist Dale Kuehne, I came across this reaction of his to the Obergefell ruling last year. I think this is really important to understand. Excerpts:

By the time last Friday came, the same-sex marriage debate was no longer about sex and had very little to do with marriage. Rather it was anchored in a redefinition of human identity itself. In the new world order, it is the individual, not biology or God, who determines identity. We are now “selves” of an increasing number of varieties and we are decreasingly male or female in a biologically meaningful sense. One day soon people will cease to use “same-sex” as adjectives for marriage. Every marriage will be the same: Selves who take vows. Two selves. Perhaps even three selves or more.

Moreover, “selves” won’t be limited to human relationships. Professor Sherry Turkle from MIT has written of the question of marriage to a robot. Marriage with animals is tomorrow as well, because it is already today in some places.

Accordingly, tomorrow’s political headlines will be of two variants. One variant are headlines that announce the expansion of the rights of transgender people as well as those whose identity goes beyond gender. Transgender is the next civil rights movement. The second set of headlines will concern the issue of religious freedom for churches and religious institutions whose views on traditionally-accepted morality are deemed discriminatory to “selves.”

“Transgender is the next civil rights movement.” He wrote that about 10 months ago. He was right. More:

Yesterday’s discussions were about sexual morality and marriage. Tomorrow’s discussions are about human identity and purpose. If anyone wishes to revisit yesterday’s discussions, the road goes through tomorrow’s discussions on identity.

So let’s begin. I believe the prevailing cultural notion of identity, as something each of us can only discover by looking within ourselves is logically flawed. I do not believe it is possible for any of us to understand who we are merely by looking within because none of us can know who we are without a reference point outside of ourselves. The question we face concerns not whether we require reference points outside of ourselves, but which ones. Teaching needs to include the examination of external reference points to help people avoid getting lost in the abyss of the self.

If I am right, then our regime is wrong. If the regime is wrong then the consequences for ourselves, our children and coming generations is enormous. If the regime is wrong then we are embarking on a course that is destined to fail by teaching something about identity we know not to be true: that the only way we can figure out who we are is to look exclusively within.

Read the whole thing. Again, this is not simply about who gets to use which bathroom. This is about something as fundamental as human identity. You may choose to ignore or to dismiss this. But it’s not going to ignore or dismiss you. As Kuehne put it last year, this is where the debate actually is. It is now down to the fundamentals of human identity.

America Unbound

Last night I listened to this hourlong talk, with Q&A, by Andrew Bacevich, about his new book America’s War For The Greater Middle East: A Military History. It’s worth your time. Here, in a Politico essay from earlier this month, Bacevich lays out his thesis. Excerpt:

To understand the persistence of such illusions requires appreciating several assumptions that promote in Washington a deeply pernicious collective naiveté. Seldom explicitly articulated, these assumptions pervade the U.S. national security establishment.

The first assumption is that those responsible for formulating U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East—not only elected and appointed officials but also the military officers assigned to senior posts—are able to discern the historical forces at work in the region. But they can’t. The worldview to which individuals rotating through the upper reaches of the national security apparatus subscribe derives from a shared historical narrative, recounting the story of the 20th century as Americans have chosen to remember it. It centers on an epic competition between rival versions of modernity—liberalism vs. fascism vs. communism—and ends in vindication for “our” side. Ultimately, the right side of history prevailed. Presidents and Cabinet secretaries, generals and admirals see no reason why that narrative should not apply to a different locale and extend into the distant future.

In other words, they are blind to the possibility that in the Greater Middle East substantially different historical forces just might be at work.

A second assumption takes it for granted that as the sole global superpower the United States possesses not only the wisdom but also the wherewithal to control or direct such forces. In the 20th century, “our” side won because American industry and ingenuity produced not only superior military might but also a superior way of life based on consumption and choice—so at least Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe. A third assumption asserts that U.S. military power offers the most expeditious means of ensuring that universal freedom prevails—that the armed might of the United States, made manifest in the presence of airplanes, warships and fighting troops, serves as an irreplaceable facilitator or catalyst in moving history toward its foreordained destination.

That the commitment of American armed might could actually backfire and make matters worse is a proposition that few authorities in Washington are willing to entertain.

A final assumption counts on the inevitability of America’s purposes ultimately winning acceptance, even in the Islamic world. The subjects of U.S. benefactions will then obligingly submit to Washington’s requirements and warmly embrace American norms. If not today, then surely tomorrow, the United States will receive the plaudits and be granted the honors that liberators rightly deserve. Near-term disappointments can be discounted given the certainty that better outcomes lie just ahead.

None of these assumptions has any empirical basis. Each drips with hubris. Taken together, they sustain the absence of self-awareness that has become an American signature. Worse, they constitute a nearly insurmountable barrier to serious critical analysis. Yet the prevalence of these assumptions goes far toward explaining this key failing in the U.S. military effort: the absence of a consistent understanding of what the United States is fighting for and whom it is fighting against.

Read the whole thing.

Not coincidentally, a Pakistani tribal elder talks about the effect that US drone attacks has on his community:

“Children stopped going to school, the women have become mental health patients, in my own house my four children, my daughter has mental problems, because of drones,” he said.

And the strikes are not fulfilling their aim, he argued.

“These drone attacks do not finish terrorists. When in one house two or three children and their mother or father are targeted by drone attacks, the whole household become terrorists against America,” he argued.

Ah yes, winning hearts and minds.

In listening to the Bacevich speech, and the follow-up Q&A, last night, something he said struck me with particular force. He said that American policy towards the Middle East is emblematic of a nation that does not believe it has limits.

In this view, America keeps making these catastrophic mistakes because we believe that wanting a certain outcome is enough to make it happen. We are rich enough, powerful enough, and, in our own minds, righteous enough that it should happen. It’s interesting to contemplate how this hubris plays out on the foreign policy and military fronts, while we also observe the same dynamic expressing itself socially and culturally.

For example, most of us, it appears, have come to the conclusion that biology does not matter, that it is nothing more than a conceptual barrier that prevents us from exercising our will, and can therefore be destroyed. Because freedom. We have come to believe that there are no moral strictures or structures (like, say, the natural family) that ought to bind us and guide our conduct.

 

In his recorded talk, Bacevich talks about the campus at Boston University, where he taught until his recent retirement, and how well Arab Muslim students from the Middle East did there. He said that we ought to have more of them here so that they can learn that “we are not their enemy.” I’m skeptical of that — not of having them here, but of them learning that we are not their enemy.

Aren’t we? On a cultural level, I mean. Certainly I would not defend Arab Islamic culture without reservation; for example, the way they treat women, in general. But come on, can we really say with a straight face that the hedonistic culture of the post-Christian West is no threat to their way of life? That they have nothing to fear from us, other than our drones and bombs?

We still think that the whole world should want to be just like us, and are mystified when others think we are degenerates. It’s all of a piece, this hubris.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this 2004 essay by a couple of Australian Evangelicals, commenting on the moral blindness of the United States, including her Christians, post-Abu Ghraib. The authors quoted President Bush and others saying that the horror of torture and human degradation that Americans foisted on those prisoners couldn’t be true, because Americans Aren’t That Kind Of People. Excerpt:

But the initial theological mistake, where America cannot really do wrong, makes them greatly to be feared. They will be unable to hold their fearsome armoury in check, and will fail to restore people they have broken, because like sinners everywhere they will not notice their past and future wickedness. Somewhere in here is the ‘arrogance’ and ‘folly’ that Jesus also said comes from the heart.

 

 

Goodbye, Public Schools?

I was around town this weekend, and ran into a guy I know. I asked him how his family was (his kids are all preschool age). He mentioned at one point that “public school is not an option” for them. That surprised me. He went to public school, and has always been a supporter of public education. What changed?

Turns out the latest round of transgender stuff was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I told him that it would be a while before that stuff got to our local public school. Yes, he agreed, but it’s coming — and in his view, there is not much chance that local administrators and teachers could stop it if they wanted to, not if it’s a federal mandate.

What could I say? I think he’s right about that. But I thought about it all weekend. Here’s a young guy who works, and his wife works. Ordinary, salt-of-the-earth people. Goes to church, but not a holier-than-thou type, not by a country mile. And he has lost faith in public education — not because of the quality of teaching or the character of the teachers, but because he has come to believe that the federal government will roll over community standards when it comes to mainstreaming sexual, um, diversity.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that all it will take is one lawsuit, or threat of a lawsuit, and gender-specific locker rooms and bathrooms will end. Local people — assuming they will oppose it, which is no sure thing — will be helpless to do a thing about it.

The problem is that in a place like where I live, private school is not much of an option, though homeschooling, as we do, is. But my friend and his wife both work, and both need to work, so it’s not an option for them. What do they do? I guess ride it out and hope for the best here, all the while hoping too for a reasonable alternative by the time the cultural revolution is imposed on our public school.

Louisiana will be one of the last places this happens, but by the end of President Hillary’s term(s) in office, it will either have happened, or we will be much, much closer to it.

Again, because we homeschool, this concern hasn’t really been on my radar. I did blog about it last year, but it hasn’t been at the front of my mind, until the guy in town said what he did. I would like to hear from conservative Christian, Muslim, and other socially conservative readers who have kids in public school, or will have them there. What will you do? Or, if you live in a state or a school district that has already gone over (e.g., this San Francisco elementary school, which has gender-neutral bathrooms), what are you doing?

I’d like to point to a 2007 piece that Sally Thomas wrote for First Things, challenging the idea that Christians have a moral duty to keep their kids in public schools where the culture is hostile to them. She writes:

The idea of sending a child daily into a hostile environment—if not actively hostile, as in bullying, then certainly philosophically hostile—expecting him not only to withstand assaults on everything his parents have told him is true but also to transform the entire system by his presence, seems sadly misguided to me. There may be many valid arguments for sending a child to school, but that one doesn’t wash.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in addition to the salt-and-light business, Jesus also tells the multitude, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” A child’s greatest treasure, to my mind, is his childhood itself. He has only one, and it’s over quickly enough. If we as parents invest that treasure in sex education that makes us cringe, history we know to be a lie, and busy work we recognize as meaningless, we should perhaps not be too surprised if at the end of the day these things, and not the things which are above, have claimed our children’s hearts.

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the responses of students in an evangelical college here, in a class taught by one of my husband’s friends, who decided to poll the students on their views of Christian sexual morality. He was taken aback, to put it mildly, to discover that the sole moral conviction held by an overwhelming majority was that it was wrong for Christians to judge other people’s behaviors. “Sex is just a bodily function anyway,” one student said. Bear in mind that these students were self-described Christians, from Christian homes, who had chosen their college for its Christian environment. Somehow, in all their years of formation, they seemed to have missed the fairly crucial lesson that Christianity establishes clear guidelines regarding sex. That Christians should regard those guidelines as neither repressive nor even negotiable was right off the radar.

If, as a correspondent of mine has suggested, Christians are impotent in engaging with secular culture, perhaps the problem is not that too many of us have withdrawn from it but that too many have surrendered our cultural distinctiveness. If we urge our children to integrate into the secular mainstream, and it turns out instead that the secular mainstream is integrated into them, then what we end up with is, well, what we largely have: a generation that believes that Christianity is only about not being judgmental.

Note well that she wrote this almost a decade ago, before the state became so interested in mainstreaming sexual diversity through educational policy. Even if we didn’t have the state and progressive-minded schools and school boards pushing the GLSEN agenda, we would still be in a mess. I suppose today I’m wondering: what is your tipping point, as a parent? How much are you willing to tolerate of the ethos at your kid’s school before you say, Enough?

And note well x 2, it is not enough to put them in a Christian school and assume that you’ve solved that problem. The Christian school might be pathetic at teaching and inculcating actual Christian virtues in their students. If parents aren’t consciously part of the countercultural educational mission, the culture will form the kids, not the church.