Rod Dreher's Blog, page 589

Are Comments Sections Worth It?

A reader points out that The New York Times‘s Room For Debate feature this week has five people arguing over whether or not comments sections are worthwhile. 

For the pro side, here’s a bit from Samita Mukhopadhyay, an editorial director at Mic:

Even though these new platforms hold tremendous potential, and have high rates of engagement, it has not stopped online abuse. While the Internet has democratized publishing and provided an opportunity for a plethora of diverse voices to emerge, its openness has not come without consequences. Abuse seems to proliferate, in comments and on social media.

Still, vulgarity does not cheapen the voices of those who take engagement seriously, who are thoughtful and curious about online dialogue. Creating space for readers to grapple with topics that matter to them is still tremendously important — regardless of whether it happens on social media or in a comments section.

For the con side, here’s Jamilah Lemieux, senior editor at Ebony magazine. She says they are too overrun with jerks to be worthwhile. Excerpt:

Those sites with resources devoted to comment moderation may not seem as overrun with vulgarity, but the act of sorting through obscenity can take a heavy toll on moderators, especially when image sharing is enabled.

Comments sections have devolved into places where anonymous strangers can punch up at those they despise, admire, envy — or perhaps all of the above. Once upon a time, I’d lose hours debating with them. Now, I try to pretend they don’t exist: a challenge, because many just migrate to my Twitter feed to hound me there.

I think I have something to add to this. I am often complimented by readers on both the left and the right for the quality of the comments section on this blog. This is first and foremost a tribute to you commenters. But it is also the result of years of very patient, usually unpleasant labor on my part. When I began blogging at Beliefnet in 2006, I was shocked by the viciousness of so many of the comments, but I didn’t have the ability to delete the bad ones. Before too long, Beliefnet let me have administrator’s privileges over my own blog, and I began to weed them out, deleting bad comments and, when possible, blocking access to the blog. It took a long, long time, but I finally got it under control.

My blog went away when I was at Templeton from early 2010 through the summer of 2011, but came back when I joined TAC. I haven’t had nearly the problem with hateful comments here as I had at Beliefnet, and I’m not sure why, because my monthly traffic here is much higher. But I’ve still had, and do have, a challenge. You don’t notice it when I ban someone, but they notice it; all you see is that the comments thread is more pleasant, or continues to be relatively pleasant.

As you know, I try to be as tolerant as I can of views with which I disagree, even those I find somewhat repulsive. Some things are beyond the pale, though. I almost always send to the trash comments that attack me or another reader personally, and if the commenter develops a habit of that, I ban them from the site. I think of this site as a big garden party at my house. I’m happy to welcome all kinds of people to the party, but if you don’t know how to play well with others, I’ll show you the door.

True, there are times when I’ll let something slip through that I ought to have trashed, but that usually happens when I’m approving things in a hurry, often on my iPhone. There have been times when some of you point out to me that I ought not to have approved a certain comment. Sometimes I’ll remove it, sometimes I won’t. Again, at times it’s a fine line between judging a comment provocative but permissible, and judging that it has gone too far. I try to err on the side of more speech. But I do err, and I appreciate your tolerance.

I spend a lot of the work day on the comments section, trying to get it right. I interact when I can, but there are many occasions when I just don’t have the time to do an NFR (= Note From Rod), and I don’t want to hold up your comment until I do. So I just post it without comment. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s what I can manage now, with just me doing it. If this blog were more active in the comments section, I might not be able to do it all by myself. That’s a good problem to have, especially when the comments are so overwhelmingly good, from all of you.

So what do you think? Is this comments section worth it? I don’t read any comments section but the one on my own blog, because they are very much not worth it.

Secret Shame Of The Middle Class

This is a pretty sobering piece by Neal Gabler, a well-known and respected writer of serious books, who confesses that he and his wife are pretty much broke. And they aren’t alone. Excerpts:

The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

You wouldn’t know any of that to look at me. I like to think I appear reasonably prosperous. Nor would you know it to look at my résumé. I have had a passably good career as a writer—five books, hundreds of articles published, a number of awards and fellowships, and a small (very small) but respectable reputation. You wouldn’t even know it to look at my tax return. I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle- or even, at times, upper-middle-class income, which is about all a writer can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do. And you certainly wouldn’t know it to talk to me, because the last thing I would ever do—until now—is admit to financial insecurity or, as I think of it, “financial impotence,” because it has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly. In truth, it may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence. “You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who teaches at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and ministers to individuals with financial issues. “Much more likely.” America is a country, as Donald Trump has reminded us, of winners and losers, alphas and weaklings. To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation—even a form of social suicide. Silence is the only protection.

Gabler goes on, in great detail, to describe how he and his wife got to this place. It’s well worth reading, because a lot of it will sound very familiar to many people. To summarize the main points specific to Gabler:

1) He chose to live in New York, which is one of the most expensive places to live in the country;

2) He chose to be a writer, not the most lucrative and stable career;

3) He and his wife chose to put their kids in private school, something they felt was necessary in their Brooklyn neighborhood, but an expense they could have avoided or dramatically lessened had they lived in another part of the country (they eventually moved to the Hamptons to get out of paying that tuition);

4) He and his wife believed their two children had “earned” the right to go to very expensive universities, and they spent everything they had, and the inheritance his parents planned to leave for him, on educating the girls;

5) They got caught in the housing crash and had to sell a Manhattan apartment they owned at fire sale prices;

6) Given the way his income as a writer is structured, taxes were a bitch (as a writer, trust me, this is true).

Gabler’s is not a case of good-paying jobs (e.g., industrial manufacturing) disappearing. His, as he readily acknowledges, is a problem that he caused for himself. And that gets to the more important part of the piece:

Choice, often in the face of ignorance, is certainly part of the story. Take me. I plead guilty. I am a financial illiterate, or worse—an ignoramus. I don’t offer that as an excuse, just as a fact. I made choices without thinking through the financial implications—in part because I didn’t know about those implications, and in part because I assumed I would always overcome any adversity, should it arrive. [Here he lists some of this choices] But, without getting too metaphysical about it, these are the choices that define who we are. We don’t make them with our financial well-being in mind, though maybe we should. We make them with our lives in mind. The alternative is to be another person.

This is interesting. He felt that to choose otherwise would have made him inauthentic, untrue to himself. He felt that he deserved the life he had, and could not choose otherwise without betraying himself. I think this must be an extraordinary thing, in terms of history: people who spend recklessly to give themselves the lives they think they deserve. If you think about it, though, our culture, which valorizes Authenticity, encourages this.

So that was stupid of him, but it’s an error many of us would be subject to. If for some reason the market for my writing dried up, and I had to take a job doing something else to support my family, I would do it. But I would probably resist it for as long as I could, because it’s very hard for me to separate my sense of identity from my writing. Still, bills have to be paid, and I would hope that I didn’t hold out for long. But as we know, human nature is such that we don’t see what we don’t want to see until we have no choice.

This part of Gabler’s piece struck me as deeply true:

So who is at fault? Some economists say that although banks may have been pushing credit, people nonetheless chose to run up debt; to save too little; to leave no cushion for emergencies, much less retirement. “If you want to have financial security,” says Brad Klontz, “it is 100 percent on you.” One thing economists adduce to lessen this responsibility is that credit represents a sea change from the old economic system, when financial decisions were much more constrained, limiting the sort of trouble that people could get themselves into—a sea change for which most people were ill-prepared.

He goes on to talk about how contemporary America is built on consumer credit, and the mentality that goes along with it:

Part of the reason credit began to surge in the ’80s and ’90s is that it was available in a way it had never been available to previous generations. William R. Emmons, an assistant vice president and economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, traces the surge to a 1978 Supreme Court decision, Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. The Court ruled that state usury laws, which put limits on credit-card interest, did not apply to nationally chartered banks doing business in those states. That effectively let big national banks issue credit cards everywhere at whatever interest rates they wanted to charge, and it gave the banks a huge incentive to target vulnerable consumers just the way, Emmons believes, vulnerable homeowners were targeted by subprime-mortgage lenders years later. By the mid-’80s, credit debt in America was already soaring. What followed was the so-called Great Moderation, a generation-long period during which recessions were rare and mild, and the risks of carrying all that debt seemed low.

The difference between the way my father’s generation and my generation regard credit is a conceptual chasm. My father regarded credit cards as at best a necessary evil. Me, I couldn’t live without them. But they are terrible things, because by deferring the cost of things, they lull you into thinking that you are better off than you are. I use my debit card whenever I can, but even that can be misleading. There is something psychological about handing cash to the merchant; it feels more real. Do you find that? If I go to the ATM and get $200 out, I find that I am a lot more thoughtful about spending it than if I just slide the debit card.

Anyway, Gabler’s overall point is that we Americans are doing less well than we think we are, and that we continue to shield ourselves from this reality because we have this ineradicable hope that it’s just about to be morning in America (“Gatsby believed in the green light…”). Please, read the whole thing. 

I have a couple of thoughts. One, when Gabler says that he and his wife are “financial illiterates,” he could just as well have been talking about me and my wife. Fortunately, my wife realized this about a decade ago, and contacted a financial advisor, one who specializes in working with artists and writers. I don’t know where we would be without Chris Currin’s help over these last years. Unquestionably a lot less secure than we are today, because he has helped us invest wisely, to stash a lot away for retirement, and to save bigtime on taxes. I’ve had some very nice income years since we moved back to Louisiana and I started writing books, but if we had not had Chris there to impose discipline on us, I would have foolishly spent a lot of the money that’s now sitting in a 401(K). I don’t think this is because I’m a bad person, necessarily, but rather that I am someone who has a totally unrealistic sense of money. (Me: “Hey, it would be nice to have a nice bottle of wine with dinner tonight. I’ve got $2,000 in the checking account. Why not?” That is an incredibly stupid way to think about money, because you end up nickel-and-diming yourself to death.)

So, my advice to you is this: if you can afford it, get a reputable financial advisor. Really, it’s the smartest thing we have ever done. Julie and I recognized our weakness in this area, and sought help. It has made a tremendous difference.

The other thing I want to point out is how incredibly difficult it is to overcome the force of culture. People do what their neighbors and peers do. When we got ready to buy our first house, back in 2005, a number of our friends were skeptical of the little house we bought in a transitional neighborhood, for $165,000. We could have afforded a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood, but we were really scared about taking on a lot of housing debt, and besides, we loved that little house. It was big enough for us.

We had to sell it in 2010 when we moved to Philadelphia. The housing crash was still a big thing in Dallas. We had to pay the mortgage on that house for six months before it sold, and in that time we watched our nest egg wear away. The anxiety was so intense that it no doubt contributed, along with my sister’s terminal cancer diagnosis, to my developing chronic mono in that period. When the house finally sold, it was for precisely what we paid for it. But we lost over $50,000 in the deal, because we had spent heavily on fixing the house up. Still, we were lucky. Had we done what most people in our income bracket had done, the losses might have wiped us out.

The point is that to live a more financially stable life in America today requires the ability to be strongly countercultural. It requires fighting the tendency within oneself to believe that one deserves to live in a certain manner, because to do otherwise would be inauthentic. You may think there’s safety in numbers, because everyone is doing it, but the thing our mamas used to tell us when we were little kids is still true: if everybody was jumping off the cliff, would you do it too?

The trick is being able to see that everybody is jumping off the cliff, not simply jumping for joy at being able to live in the manner in which we believe we’re entitled.

I was talking the other day to a man who owns a small landscaping business. He said his biggest problem is with labor. “People don’t want to work,” he said. “They watch TV and think that they should be able to live a certain way, but they don’t want to work for it. I’ve got more work than I can handle, but I can’t get people to stick with it. They want it handed to them. It’s crazy. It didn’t used to be like this.”

No, it didn’t. He’s talking about a degraded working class ethic, but we middle class people have our own version of this. We are willing to work; that’s the easy part. We aren’t willing to live within our means. Doing so is very, very hard. I’m as implicated in this as anybody else.

 

Dept. Of ‘No Comment’

Now this is funny:

Transparent, the Amazon-streamed show about transgender acceptance, is having a disagreement on its set related to its new unisex bathrooms. Some crew members are reportedly upset about having to use the restroom in the same space as coworkers of different genders, now that both bathrooms are open-access. TMZ reports the story, adding that many are allegedly afraid to complain about the issue over concern that they’ll be labeled transphobic.

It’s like being a servant in Kim Jong-un’s palace. You don’t dare complain about anything, or it’s curtains.

Remember, almost nobody has problems with gender-segregated public toilets. We are having to do this stupid thing to satisfy about one-third of one percent of the population, and policy-making progressive elites.

I guess this wasn’t a no-comment post after all.

Mammon Yes, God No

The New Yorker‘s James Surowiecki writes this week about how Big Business has been a massively effective force for gay rights. He writes that progressives are used to seeing Big Business as the bad guy, but the pro-LGBT activist role corporations have taken on complicates matters. More:

The implications for modern conservatism are even more consequential. Social conservatives were an essential part of the Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan assembled—composed of pro-business conservatives, national-security hawks, and the Christian right. The coalition always entailed fudging policy differences: not all social conservatives were true believers in big tax cuts and deregulation; business élites often didn’t feel strongly about abortion and prayer in schools. But, as Daniel Williams, a historian at the University of West Georgia and the author of a history of the Christian right, told me, “Even though the relationship between the two sides was always complicated, they were willing to make a bargain, because each side needed the other.”

The L.G.B.T. fight shows how far that bargain has eroded. To many conservative business leaders, today’s social-conservative agenda looks anachronistic and is harmful to the bottom line; it makes it hard to hire and keep talented employees who won’t tolerate discrimination. Social conservatives, meanwhile, think that Republican leaders are sacrificing Christian principles in order to keep big business happy. “There’s more than a fair amount of anger and a great deal of disappointment,” Williams said. Evangelicals have called companies like Apple and Disney “corporate bullies,” to whom Mammon matters more than morals.

Needless to say, the forces of Mammon are winning. In a comprehensive 2014 study of two decades of public-opinion data, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page showed that the views of business leaders and the economic élite matter far more to politicians than what ordinary voters want. Social conservatives have been the most loyal Republican voters for thirty years. But now they are waking up to the fact that their voice counts for less than Disney’s.

Yes, this is true. What do we do about it? I’m really not interested on this thread in liberals tut-tutting us social conservatives. I know what you’re going to say because you’ve said it all before. Please hold your fire on this one.

I’m interested here in hearing from conservatives — social and otherwise — who are re-thinking their relationship to the GOP and to the conservative movement in light of these huge social changes. As most of you know, I’m working on my Benedict Option book, which will be my take on what we should do now. I won’t belabor that again. Please, let the rest of us hear from you, even if you don’t really know what to think or what to do.

View From Your Table

Punta Chiappa, Italy

James C. continues his birthday excursion in Italy. I’m guessing this above is the sandwich he described in this comment on his earlier VFYT from this trip:

Today I was just walking along the mountainous coast of Liguria, taking trails from village to village above almost impossibly blue water (they are reachable only by trail or boat). I stopped at a house in one village that had a little sign out front. The place was closed, but as I peeked in the window, a women opened the door. Would I want something to eat? she rattled out in Italian. Next thing I knew, she took me into her kitchen to pick out what I wanted. There was an old lady there (the woman’s mamma) and while we chatted together they made me a magnificent sandwich of hot and fresh focaccia, pesto, buffalo mozzarella, succulent tomatoes, and salami. The mamma wrapped it up in tin foil and sent me back on the trail, for a relative pittance.

This evening I just came back to the apartment I rented in Chiavari to pick up my baggage, and the friendly owner suddenly showed up with his mamma, who wanted to meet me. After another friendly chat, I barely made my train. But if I had missed it, nessun problema: it’s really hard to leave this place.

 

Italia, y’all! In the distance above, the town of Camogli. Here’s what it looks like up close:

About the image below, James writes:

Stella Maris…found this at the tip of a dramatic outcropping to implore Our Lady Star of the Sea to watch over the seafarers. God I love being in a catholic country

A Rape Or An Opportunity?

Marina Lonina, an 18-year-old in Ohio, is charged in connection with the rape of her friend; she didn’t try to help her friend, but rather livestreamed the assault online. Excerpts:

Mr. O’Brien, the prosecutor, said Ms. Lonina had apparently hoped that live-streaming the attack would help to stop it, but that she became enthralled by positive feedback online.

“She got caught up in the likes,” he said.

She got caught up in the likes. So, if the mob cheers a rape, then it’s okay by Marina Lonina? Lonina’s lawyer claims that she video’d the rape on the Periscope app to preserve evidence of the crime. More:

In an interview on Monday, Mr. O’Brien acknowledged that for roughly 10 seconds during the 10-minute video Ms. Lonina pulled the leg of the victim, who he said cried out during the attack saying “no,” “stop” and “help me.” It was not clear though that she intended to help the victim, he said.

“For the most part she is just streaming it on the Periscope app and giggling and laughing,” Mr. O’Brien said.

Ms. Lonina did not call 911, he added.

Monster. Throw the book at her. How do you go from being somebody’s friend to being the kind of person who videotapes her rape for the sake of an online audience? I’m reminded of Alypius’s corruption at a gladiatorial match. From Augustine’s Confessions, this account of how his friend fell victim to bloodlust:

He had gone on to Rome before me to study law . . . and there he was carried away again with an incredible passion for the gladiatorial shows. For, although he had been utterly opposed to such spectacles and detested them, one day he met by chance a company of his acquaintances and fellow students returning from dinner; and, with a friendly violence, they drew him, resisting and objecting vehemently, into the amphitheater, on a day of those cruel and murderous shows.

He protested to them: “Though you drag my body to that place and set me down there, you cannot force me to give my mind or lend my eyes to these shows. Thus I will be absent while present, and so overcome both you and them.”

When they heard this, they dragged him on in, probably interested to see whether he could do as he said. When they got to the arena, and had taken what seats they could get, the whole place became a tumult of inhuman frenzy. But Alypius kept his eyes closed and forbade his mind to roam abroad after such wickedness.

Would that he had shut his ears also! For when one of the combatants fell in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirred him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity and still prepared (as he thought) to despise and rise superior to it no matter what it was, he opened his eyes and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body. Thus he fell more miserably than the one whose fall had raised that mighty clamor which had entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the wounding and beating down of his soul, which was more audacious than truly valiant–also it was weaker because it presumed on its own strength when it ought to have depended on Thee.

For, as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in with it a savage temper, and he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on the bloody pastime, unwittingly drinking in the madness–delighted with the wicked contest and drunk with blood lust. He was now no longer the same man who came in, but was one of the mob he came into, a true companion of those who had brought him thither.

Why need I say more? He looked, he shouted, he was excited, and he took away with him the madness that would stimulate him to come again: not only with those who first enticed him, but even without them; indeed, dragging in others besides.

There is something about online culture that facilitates this kind of thing. We’ve all felt it at one point or another — the sense that life is an ongoing spectacle, and we are all observers looking for a new thrill. I expect that nearly all of us here would have behaved differently than Marina Lonina did in that situation. But what if we had been raised in an online culture that conditioned us to respond as voyeurs, and as voyeurs whose self-worth depends on producing a greater spectacle for the mob?

In his book From Nature To Creation, Duke University theologian Norman Wirzba talks about how nobody’s gaze is innocent, because it can create idols:

Our looking at something — how we look at it, and the fact that we are looking at it rather than something else — presupposes an interest and an intention. As people who want to know what something is, we have expectations, desires, and fears that invariably shape how something appears to us. This means that our looking at something is also at the same time (though not always knowingly) a looking at ourselves, because whatever we see is mediated by the boredom, anxiety, or hope we happen to feel. Our gazing at something includes a mirror reflection of the gazer’s capacities, dispositions, and expectations.

When Marina Lonina looked at her friend being raped and found it to be an entertainment that she wanted to share with strangers, she was really looking at herself, you might say. That hideous spectacle was mediated not only by her smartphone, but by her boredom, anxiety, and perversion, because she is the sort of person who can watch a friend get raped and see it as something entertaining.

Wirzba writes:  “Idolatry is one of humanity’s great sins because it encourages us to see and represent reality as, and thus limit reality to, the sphere of human power and convenience.”

What is the idol to which Marina Lonina bowed here? She saw and represented the reality of a sexual assault as something that was interesting, and desirable to share with others. All she really saw was her own desire: a desire for kink, I guess, and a desire to make her friend who was being raped into an object for public consumption, which she, Lonina, exchanged for the sake of the mob’s approval.

What interests me is what Marina Lonina looked at that led her to that point. On what did her gaze rest on the days, weeks, and years leading up to that night? Why was her response, when seeing what the man was doing to her friend, to livestream the rape rather than to help free her friend, or call 911, or run out of the house to get help?

Why did she see a man raping her friend, and not see a man raping her friend, but saw something entertaining? Everything that we choose to see — and choose not to see — trains our eyes. Wirzba says we have to embrace asceticism, choosing to train ourselves to see the world as it is, not as we would have it be:

Asceticism is the discipline and art that, at its best, enables us to contemplate the beauty that radiates throughout creation. As such, asceticism is the prelude to true perception. … One’s manner of approaching the world determines the kind of world one sees. Asceticism is all about attending to customary ways of approaching others that lead to distortion because what we see is dominated by the anxiety or hubris or insecurity we so often feel.

Asceticism — the disciplining of the passions — is the last thing the world today wants — which is precisely why it’s the thing this world needs. I like this distinction he makes:

Monastic detachment, we can now see, is not detachment from the world, as if created things were somehow evil, but rather detachment from oneself and from the deep desires that get in the way of welcoming others for who or what they are.

… How we name and narrate the world is important because it is our naming and narrating that determine how we will relate to it. It is thus of the highest importance that the intellect be trained to watch for how the passions infiltrate and distort the conceptual images we make of things.

Again, it is possible that Marina Lonina was carried away by the moment against her best instincts, as Alypius was. But it is also possible that the things Marina Lonina had allowed herself to see, and take pleasure in seeing, in the years leading up to that awful moment trained her intellect to regard it not as a rape, but as a media opportunity.

 

When The Revolution Comes

A reader sent a link to a story from the New York Post, about wealthy cougars who get plastic surgery to prepare for the Coachella festival. The reader added this remark from historian Lewis Mumford’s book The City In History:

“These are symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come, hangman! Come, Vulture!”

What’s he talking about? From the NYPost story:

Sarah Mirmelli is ready to face the music.

Before heading to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., this weekend, the 33-year-old divorced mother of two blew $20,000 in preparation. Her clothing alone for the weekend — a “sick” outfit featuring a vintage Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, YSL army jacket, denim cutoffs, corset, thigh-high leather boots — was $8,000. She spent thousands more on Botox, lip injections, boxing classes and a personal trainer who helped her drop 10 pounds in advance of the three-day-long concert in the California desert. In the month leading up to it, she even gave up alcohol and went vegan to get in shape for the debauchery to come.

“Everything’s about Coachella,” says Mirmelli, who started going to the desert festival after needing to cut loose following her divorce six years ago. This year is her fifth time attending.

Getting in shape for the debauchery to come. Isn’t that so 21st century WEIRD? More:

New York doctors who specialize in Fountain-of-Youth procedures say they’ve noticed an uptick in ladies looking for nips, tucks and tightenings before heading to Coachella.

“About two months ago, when Guns N’ Roses mentioned they would [play], more women in their 40s started coming in,” says Dr. Norman Rowe, an Upper East Side plastic surgeon whose main focus is fat-reduction procedures. “They’re reliving their teen years.”

Read the whole thing. Hey ladies, guess what? You’re going to die one day. All the plastic surgery you can buy, and all the pretending that you’re forever young, is not going to save you.

In any case, future Gibbons should print this out for their files.

Living In Unreality

On the Dictatorship of the Dimwits post, a reader writes:

I teach religious education to third graders in my parish. These children are 8 and 9 years old, a mix of boys and girls who have self selected themselves at gender specific tables. Boys on one side, girls on the other. Nothing can make them sit together. Boys have cooties and so on. And yet…there is a boy in class who wants everyone to call him Princess Insert-Name-Here. When my co-teacher and I pointed out that we wanted to use our given names in class and that he would go by that, a lively discussion ensued wherein the children wanted to know why he couldn’t be called princess, he wants to be a princess, therefore he IS a princess and we should all just recognize that, and refer to him as he wishes. Apparently it’s ok for him to go by that title at school, and everyone complies with his wishes there. This could not have been more shocking to me. I tell this story only as a warning. These children have been socialized in this manner since birth. It is not going away in my lifetime.

Another reader writes on the same post:

I run an outdoors business in Central Asia. The younger our customers from the West are the more problematic they are. They literally have problems walking in anything but smooth surfaces. Seriously. It is easier to guide a sixty year old down a narrow and difficult mountain path than a twenty year old. ALL Western customers have a problem with raw food. That is not precooked perfectly natural food. But the younger they get the more problems. Same with allergies. The younger the worse. We can´t let them have any natural milk. As a rule older people can still stomach “normal” milk especially if they grew up in the country. The biggest problem though is mental. In most of the country there is no or only intermittent cell phone coverage. It is hell if these youngsters realize that they will be without their connection to the outside world.

What all of that says to me is that modern technology has resulted in a total disconnect from physical reality. First this generation has grown up almost without contact with nature. When they exercised their bodies they always did it in artificial surroundings. They mostly ate factory processed foods and never drank milk that hadn´t been rendered lifeless by various processes. And finally their social interaction is mostly by electronic means. Then it really doesn´t matter whether you are man or woman, 6 or seven feet tall, Chinese or European. The electronic world happens to be their reality and they are bringing the rules of this reality into the physical world.

That is how I view the conflicts that are happening on campuses all over the Western world.

That this will end terribly is another story.

This weekend I’ve been reading a wonderful book by the Duke theologian Norman Wirzba: From Nature To Creation, which is featured on the current issue of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. These passages from the book are what came to mind when I read the reader comments above:

Media platforms and technological devices are not simply neutral tools that we use to move through life. Their power is much more extensive, because they shape and frame what we perceive and understand the wold to be. When people spend enough time in front of screens, it becomes all but inevitable that the whole world takes on the character of something to be watched. Given the technologies we now have for manipulating screens in whatever fashion we like to suit our own particular tastes, if we find the Mona Lisa boring, no problem. We can run the image through the Fatify app or add the graphics and colors we like to make it amusing or better than the original! Should we be surprised that people often find the world uninteresting and dull?

Wirzba says that in our time, “idolatry has become the dominant mode of perception.” More:

By idolatry I did not simply mean the fabrication of statues of monuments to our own self-glorification, though there is ample evidence of that. I meant, rather, a form of perception (and thus also a capacity for apprehension) in which what is seen reflects the ambition, anxiety, insecurity, hubris — the deep desire — of the one perceiving. To gaze at things idolatrously is to put in motion ways of naming and narration — and thus also practical and economic forms of engagement with the world — that establish us as the centers and bestowers of value and significance. … The effect of so much of our culture’s training is to convince us that we really are the center around which the world moves.

Narcissistic WEIRDoes getting even WEIRDer. The core of the Benedict Option will be the urgent necessity to remember how to see reality, and to live in it. The mass forgetting forced by modernity is going into hyperdrive now.

I’m starting to change my mind a little bit about the desirability of heading for the hills. Seriously. This culture is going insane, and calling it Progress.

These Are Things

Photo by Rod Dreher, who just about fell out at the sight of this

I have raised my older son right, and this proves it. He fetched out of the town recycling Dumpster a stack of The Cross And The Clown, the journal of the Fellowship of Christian Clowns. [Insert joke about synod/conclave/etc. here] The boy knew that his father would be all Prytania about this kind of thing. And he was right! I have about ten issues to go through. One of the most excruciating cinematic experiences I’ve ever endured was watching the movie version of the hippie-clown Jesus freak show Godspell. It’s the only time I’ve ever wondered if the Sanhedrin had a point.

Not a clown fan. Not a Christian clown fan either.

In other “no, really, this is a thing” news, I found myself in conversation late today with a group of delightful Southern women. Somehow the topic of Illusions, a double-wide strip club south of the small town of Woodville, Miss., came up (don’t ask me to explain it in public here, but if you see me, ask me, it’s funny). Illusions’ slogan: “We put the wood in Woodville.”

Said one of the women, “We have a camp near Woodville. You know what they call Illusions there?”

“No, what?”

“The Woodville Ballet.”

And that’s why I love the South. We have proper theology and geometry. Most of the time.

View From Your Table

Barga, Italy

James C. is on the road again:

My mother suggested going somewhere for my birthday this weekend. Where to go? Where else but Italy?

I wanted to go someplace new so, basing ourselves in the historic city of Lucca, we’ve been taking country buses up into the ‘Apuan Alps’ of the (relatively) undiscovered Garfagnana region of extreme northwest Tuscany.

Here I am in the town of Barga, which perches, spills, straggles and clings in all higgledy-piggledy ways at the summit of a perch in the mountains. It’s one of the loveliest hill towns I’ve seen in Italy, and that local brew is one of the finest beers I’ve had in a long time.

He sent a few more photos too, no doubt just for me alone, because I don’t publish views of your table. Still, I had to share the ones that came through with you, because they made my mouth water.

That’s a plate of gnocchi al pesto with farinata, served to James in a seaside town in Liguria called Chiavari. He writes:

Pesto is the local thing here, and boy does it taste good when homemade. The farinata is an addictive chick pea-based thing that comes out in a big cylinder that you cut from like a pizza pie.

That was lunch. Here’s dinner:

James writes:

I went light for dinner with some foreign food (foreign for Liguria: South Tyrol, the northeast Italian alpine region that borders Austria). The place, Birra Leo, brews its own beer on site and serves some South Tyrol classics. I passed on giant roasted pork leg and instead got this: spinach spätzle in this amazing sauce of speck and mountain cheese with brown bread. Wow.