Rod Dreher's Blog, page 596

SJW Fashion Police Brutality

Bonita Tindle, a black Social Justice Warrior, fighting the power:

Campus police at San Francisco State University have launched an investigation into a viral video that shows a female student confronting a male student on campus about his dreadlocks.

Campus officials confirmed to KRON 4 News that the video took place on campus Monday afternoon and that both individuals are students, but neither are employed by the school.

The 46-second video shows an African-American student confronting a white student on campus about his dreadlocks.

She tells him in the video that he is appropriating her culture and when he tries to walk away she obstructs his path.

“Yo, stop touching me right now,” the man says he tries to walk up the stairs. She then grabs his arm to keep him from leaving.

Where would the world be without Bonita Tindle bravely taking a stand against … hair? I ask you. Had that underfed-looking white dude chalked “Trump 2016″ in that stairwell, the campus would have had to go into lockdown.

UPDATE: SFSU has a Program In Race And Resistance Studies. Bonita Tindle was probably just doing her homework.

UPDATE.2: I agree that it looks a bit staged — Bonita Tindle doesn’t look angry — but apparently it wasn’t. The dreadlocked guy, Cory Goldstein, has been writing about it on his Facebook page. He says that he filed a complaint with the university, but doesn’t intend to file a complaint with the police.

The Sacramental Laurus

I was reading to the kids the other night from Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, by Suzanne Massie. It’s a wonderfully written book. Here’s a passage that caught my eye. Christianity first came to Russia in 988, with the conversion of the Kievan Prince Vladimir to Orthodoxy. In this passage, Massie explains how the Slavs brought their own traditions into the forms handed to them from Byzantium:

For the Slavs, the destines of man, animals and plants were all blended into one; they blossomed and died together. For them, beauty lay primarily in an all-embracing, all-encompassing nature. To their church, the Russians brought this close feeling for nature. The Earth was the ideal of Eternal Womanhood, and so in Russia, there never was the extreme Latin veneration and cult of the Virgin as the Virgin of Purity but more importantly as the Virgin of Motherhood, fertility, and compassion; the Virgin was rarely portrayed without a child. Permeated by this sense of unity with nature and the earth, the Russians interpreted Christians rebirth quite literally as the beautifying and transfiguration of human life. The church building itself had a twofold meaning. It embodied the significance of the Resurrection and was also part of the natural world, blending harmoniously into the landscape.

More:

The Orthodox believe that it is possible to recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit in a man and to convey it to others by artistic means. Therefore, the function of an icon painter had much in common with that of a priest, and although it was important for an icon painter to be a good artist, it was essential for him to be a good Christian. Those who painted icons had to prepare themselves spiritually: fast, pray, read religious texts, for it was a true test, not only a pictorial work in the usual sense.

… For an Orthodox worshiper, icons were far more than paintings; they were the palpable evidence of things hidden and a testimony to the possibility of man’s participation in the transfigured world which he sought to contemplate. The role of icons was not static but alive, a dynamic means by which man could actively enter into the spiritual world, a song of faith to man’s spiritual power to redeem himself by beauty and art.

It’s important to point out here that no Orthodox Christian would say that man could “redeem himself”; the theologically correct thing to say would be “a song of faith to the ability of man to enter into a redeeming communion with God through beauty and art.” God does the redeeming, but the important point here is that for Orthodox Christians, with their sacramental mentality, the entire world testifies to God’s presence in Creation. This was especially true in medieval Latin Christianity too. One of the most common Orthodox prayers even today hails God as “everywhere present and filling all things.” Laurus conveys the imagination of the medieval Russian, who does not recognize a clear division between nature and supernature. Indeed, later in the book, as he matures spiritually, the healer Arseny recognizes that the healing herbs and gestures he has been using were nothing but vehicles through which the Holy Spirit worked.

Anyway, I bring this up because these passages from the Massie book helped me put my finger on what I didn’t like in my Torchy’s Taco-buying friend Alan Jacobs’s somewhat negative review of Laurus, a novel I’ve come to love. Alan is a very sophisticated reader, but I’m wondering if his Evangelicalism caused him to miss certain aspects of this very Russian novel. (Similarly, I wonder if the fact that I have been worshiping in the Russian Orthodox tradition for almost a decade revealed certain things to me about the novel that I would not have understood without that experience.)

Alan writes:

Indeed, Jesus Christ does not play a large role in Arseny’s consciousness. He is in constant conversation not with his God but with those dear to him who have died, and this seems to be related more to his temporal dislocation than to any faithful hope for the resurrection of the dead. His constant proximity to what certain Celtic spiritual traditions call the “thin places,” where the boundaries between this world and another are porous, doesn’t seem to be related to any particularly Christian ideas. When another such porous one, traveling with ­Arseny through Eastern Europe, comes upon the future site of Auschwitz and senses the evil yet to come troubling the ­medieval air, we shudder along with him; but such disruptions of ­conventional realistic narrative—and there are many of them in Laurus—seem, in this reader’s mind anyway, to owe little to any iden­tifiably Christian understanding of the supernatural.

Well, see my first point about the Orthodox imagination reading all of Nature as a revelation of the Triune God of Holy Scripture. This is, as I said, very much the same outlook as the medieval Western Christian. It did not occur to me, as a reader, to see anything particularly unusual about Arseny never, or rarely, mentioning Christ. I took it as given; his life would not make sense without Christ. I’m interested to hear from Catholic and Protestant readers of Laurus, to see if what we brought to the reading of Laurus affected our ability to grasp its message.

About the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. The wonder-working elder, or starets, is an old and venerable figure in Russian Orthodoxy. In Orthodox Christianity, there is a long tradition of certain elders receiving the gift of clairvoyance. In recent times, St. Paisios, an Athonite monk, had this gift, and demonstrated it (this amazing book, by one of his spiritual children, discusses this at length). But he also made some wild prophecies that have not come true, and seem quite unlikely to be realized. As ever, we have to be careful and discerning about these things. The point here, though, is that in the Orthodox Christian tradition, clairvoyance is rare, but still considered a spiritual gift that God grants to a few particularly holy elders.

Second, and, I think, more important, Vodolazkin plays with the concept of Time to reveal the essential unity and timelessness of all things in God. It is a mystical insight that has a long history in Christianity. St. Benedict of Nursia, for example, was granted a vision in which he saw all of creation unified “in a single ray of light,” according to his biographer, Pope St. Gregory the Great. In Dante’s Paradiso, at the end of the pilgrim’s journey, Dante had his final vision:

O grace abounding, by which I have dared

To fix my eyes through the eternal Light

So deeply that my sight was spent in it!

Within its depths I saw gathered together,

Bound by love into a single volume,

Leaves that lie scattered through the universe.

Substance and accidents and their relations

I saw as though they fused in such a way

That what I say is but a gleam of light.

The universal pattern of this knot

I believe I saw…

Granted, this is fiction, but the point is the same: all things that exist exist in God, Who is eternal. Time is an illusion to God. This is a metaphysical point. In the late Middle Ages, many Western theologians came under the sway of Duns Scotus’s concept of “univocity,” which meant that God is not Being, but rather a being, within the broader category of Being. This began the intellectual process, aided by nominalism, that separated God metaphysically from Creation. Orthodoxy never lost that understanding, and it is still present within the Thomistic metaphysical structure of Roman Catholicism. As far as I know, it does not exist within Protestantism, and certainly it is not stressed in contemporary Catholicism. Maybe that is why such an intelligent and perceptive reader as Alan didn’t recognize this material in Laurus as Christian.

Furthermore, reviewing Laurus, Justin Lonas said:

The way time moves (or doesn’t) in Laurus is reminiscent of Slaughterhouse-Five, with Arseny “unstuck” in time. Whereas Vonnegut’s clock-play evokes an underlying banality to life, what Vodolazkin achieves is more akin to prophecy—unfolding reality with a rising spiral of metaphysics.

Events and themes seem to reverberate through the book and beyond. What occurs is never in isolation from everything else in the story, but reaches across time and space to give significance to what comes before and after. Like biblical prophecies, which so often have immediate, intermediate, and ultimate fulfillments as they ripple out from their proclamation, the phases of Arseny’s story rhyme, often with repeated phrases and mirrored scenes. For example, early in the book, Arseny sees his older self staring back at him through a fire; the same few paragraphs are retold from the perspective of the old man some 200 pages later, as they behold one another and weep together.

The one constant in time within the story is writing. Characters are constantly quoting Scripture, things of importance are always written down, and Arseny reads and re-reads a few key texts and the manuscripts his grandfather had scribbled into pieces of birch bark.

“For Christofer, the written word seemed to regulate the world. Stop its fluctuations. Prevent notions from eroding. This is why Cristofer’s sphere of interest was so broad. According to the writer’s thinking, that sphere should correspond to the world’s breadth…Cristofer understood that the written word would always remain that way. No matter what happened later, once it had been written, the word had already occurred.”

I hope you will read Alan’s review. I don’t want to overquote it, but he has some interesting things to say about the parallels between a Hindu ascetic’s life and Arseny’s. Here’s one more passage of the review I want to comment on. Alan writes of a moment in the book where Arseny asks Christ for direction in life. I’ve slightly edited this to avoid plot spoilers:

“And so, O Savior, give me at least some sign that I may know my path has not veered into madness, so I may, with that knowledge, walk the most difficult road, walk as long as need be and no longer feel weariness.” He speaks this aloud, and is overheard:

What sign do you want and what knowledge? asked an elder … . Do you not know that any journey harbors danger within itself? Any journey—and if you do not acknowledge this, then why move? So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort; knowledge is obvious. Faith assumes effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.Arseny replies, somewhat comically, that he just wants to know the “general direction” of his journey; to which the elder replies, “But is not Christ a general direction?” That ­Arseny does not grasp the full import of this question may be seen in the question that he in turn asks a few lines later: “Then what should I be enamored of?”

I think this scene is clearly meant to be the fulcrum of the novel—and the “repose” the elder speaks of is echoed in the title of the next section, “The Book of Repose”—but it is not clear to me that Arseny ever really understands, much less practices, what the elder says to him. Such repose as he achieves strikes me as all too consistent with what he wants from his pilgrimage’s very beginning, an atonement to be earned by lengthy penitence. To be sure, there is grace for him, but it strikes me as a novelist’s kind of grace, not God’s.

Boy, do I disagree with this conclusion — and again, I suspect the difference between Alan’s reading of it and my own may simply be theological. I can’t talk about it in too much detail without spoiling the story, so bear with me. In the novel, the Elder who gives Arseny direction is telling him that he needs to quit walking around the world looking for redemption, but to go within, to be contemplative, not active, and to meet Christ there. In the stunning conclusion of the novel, Arseny — now called Laurus — sacrifices everything he had gained in life, in radical humility, to save the life of someone who wronged him. Because of Christ, and through Christ, he lived as Christ when he was put to the test. That is not “earning” atonement, but the ultimate repentance of the sin of Pride, which is what caused Arseny’s terrible fall as a young man — a fall that resulted in two deaths. If it weren’t for Arseny’s radical death to self as a Christian monk and ascetic, he would not have been open to the grace that allowed him to offer himself in the place of another.

By the way, Vodolazkin addressed these themes himself in the interview I did with him:

RD: I think one of the most important moments in Laurus occurs when an elder tells Arseny, who is on pilgrimage, to consider the meaning of his travels. The elder advises: “I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. Do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great], who had a journey but no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.” What does this say to the modern reader?

That it is time to think about the destination, and not about the journey. If the way leads nowhere, it is meaningless. During the perestroika period, we had a great film, Repentance, by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze . It’s a movie about the destruction wrought by the Soviet past. The last scene of the film shows a woman baking a cake at the window. An old woman passing on the street stops and asks if this way leads to the church. The woman in the house says no, this road does not lead to the church. And the old woman replies, “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?”

So a road as such is nothing. It is really the endless way of Alexander the Great, whose great conquests were aimless. I thought about mankind as a little curious beetle that I once saw on the big road from Berlin to Munich. This beetle was marching along the highway, and it seemed to him that he knows everything about this way. But if he would ask the main questions, “Where does this road begin, and where does it go?”, he can’t answer. He knew neither what is Berlin, nor Munich. This is how we are today.

Technical and scientific revelation brought us the belief that all questions are possible to solve, but that is a great illusion. Technology has not solved the problem of death, and it will never solve this problem . The revelation that mankind saw conjured the illusion that everything is clear and known to us. Medieval people, 100 percent of them believed in God – were they really so stupid in comparison to us? Was the difference between their knowledge and our knowledge as different as we think? It was not so! I’m sure that in a certain sense, our knowledge will be a kind of mythology for future generations. I reflected this mythology with humor in Laurus, but this humor was not against medieval people. Maybe it was self-irony.

RD: Timelessness is one of the main ideas of Laurus, which leaps suddenly and unexpectedly from the medieval present, to our own time. What does this mean?

EV: Time doesn’t exist. Of course time exists if we’re speaking in everyday terms, but if we think from the perspective of eternity, time doesn’t exist, because it has its end point. For medieval people, God was the most important thing about life, and the second most important thing was Time. On the one hand, medieval people lived rather short lives, but on the other hand, life was very, very long, because they lived with their minds in eternity. Every day is an eternity in the church, and all that surrounded these people. Eternity made time very long, and very interesting.

If you would think about the first patriarchs, Adam, Methuselah, and others, they had an incredible long life. Adam lived 930 years, Methuselah lived, as far as I remember, 962 years. Because they had eternity in their memories, eternity could not disappear at once. This eternity disappeared slowly, dissipated in the long life of the patriarchs. Medieval people, by comparison to us, are these patriarchs. Their life was very long because they had as part of daily life this vertical connection, the connection to the divine realm, a connection that most of us in modernity have lost.

The book is Laurus. Evgeny is flying all around now, getting ready for the release of his follow-up novel, The Aviator, which comes out on April 8 (not sure when it will be released in English). Not sure what the plot of this one is, but he tells me it is very different from Laurus. You can imagine how anxious I am to read it.

Not The Benedict Option

It has been clear for a while that it’s not going to be possible to have a really productive debate about the Benedict Option until the book comes out next spring, and we have something concrete on the table to discuss, instead of a collection of blog posts. I don’t often respond to critiques of the Ben Op nowadays for that reason, but a friend sent me a couple of things he read online recently from distinguished critics, and I want to mention them here, briefly.

The Jesuit politics professor Fr. James Schall dismisses the Ben Op like this:

The problem with this “Benedict Option”, as the theologian Jean Daniélou once noted, is that Christianity is not intended for the few. The whole point of Christianity, as contrasted with Greek elitism, was that it was intended also for the Gentiles, for the poor and the normal, not just the Chosen People. The “Benedict Option”, so it is said, leaves the culture at the hands of the ideologues. It is a counsel of despair that admonishes us to flee.

I have written here a thousand times that the Ben Op does not advocate an Amish total withdrawal from public life, but rather what I call a “strategic retreat”: for Christians to take a few steps back for the sake of deepening our own knowledge of and practice of the faith, precisely so we can live in this post-Christian society more resiliently. The Ben Op is about getting far, far more serious about formation, as well as deepening one’s involvement with local community. On that point, here’s Alasdair MacIntyre from the introduction to the third edition of After Virtue:

My own critique of liberalism derives from a judgment that the best type of human life, that in which the tradition of the virtues is most adequately embodied, is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved. Liberal political societies are characteristically committed to denying any place for a determinate conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception. On the dominant liberal view government is to be neutral as between rival conceptions of the human good, yet in fact what liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life.

This critique of liberalism should not be interpreted as a sign of any sympathy on my part for contemporary conservatism. That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism. …

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community. …

More:

The flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place with the lives of each individual, or each household, and in the life of the community at large. Because, implicitly or explicitly, it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered, the life of every individual, household or community by its orderings gives expression, wittingly or unwittingly, to some conception of the human good. And it is when goods are ordered in terms of an adequate conception of human good that the virtues genuinely flourish. “Politics” is the Aristotelian name for the set of activities through which goods are ordered in the life of the community.

Where such communities exist — and they cannot help but exist—it may be possible for some to live lives they understand.

Elsewhere, the Canadian Catholic writer David Warren criticizes the here. It’s a good column, but I take exception to this excerpt:

The “Benedict option,” so far as I have seen it expounded, strikes me as one of the mistakes. It is a proposal for what we, as men, can do to make things better. The word “option” already gives the game away. We have created a society that is spiritually uninhabitable, with all our other options. This one will fail, too; fail even to get started.

I don’t really understand this criticism. I’m not proposing Utopia. I’m saying that if we Christians are going to live in this time and place as we are supposed to live, we are going to have to do some things radically different. What else is there? What most of us are doing right now is failing. I can’t remember precisely when and where the term “Benedict Option” was coined, or even if I did it, but it’s what has stuck — and it’s a good term, provided that you understand where it comes from: this passage from MacIntyre’s After Virtue:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred 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. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

To turn aside = making a choice to opt out for the sake of doing something countercultural.

LA Welfare-Dependent Film Industry

The state of Georgia has built a significant film industry by giving Hollywood studios generous subsidies in the form of tax credits — a program that costs Georgia taxpayers $1 billion a year.  But Georgia governor Nathan Deal earlier this year said he would not seek to repeal the tax credits, claiming that they were an overall economic winner for the state, because they made a lot more money for Georgia than they cost the taxpayer. Does anybody know if that is true?

In any case, threats by Disney and Marvel to pull film production out of Georgia if Deal signed the religious liberty law no doubt influenced the governor to veto the bill.

Here in Louisiana, we had the same thing Georgia has. Film and television production boomed after the state subsidized the industry with tax credits. But the program cost the state far more money than it brought in, according to state budget analysts, but everybody liked the Hollywood glamour, so the program went untouched — until Louisiana got its back against the wall. In the face of the state’s mounting fiscal crisis, legislators scaled back the program. What happened when Hollywood could no longer get corporate welfare from taxpayers?

It collapsed.

Now, maybe Georgia has a different experience with its program. Maybe it’s structured differently, and really does earn more money than it costs taxpayers. But given Louisiana’s bad experience, has any disinterested party in Georgia looked at the books to see? Or did the governor of Georgia just let a corporate welfare client tell his state how to run its social policy?

How The Republicans Blew It

Just getting around to Nick Confessore’s piece in yesterday’s NYT, explaining how the GOP elites lost touch with their base. Some excerpts:

Some conservative intellectuals warned that the party was headed for trouble. Republicans had become too identified with big business and the wealthy — their donor class. They urged Republican lawmakers to embrace policies that could have a more direct impact on pay and economic prospects for these voters: wage subsidies, relocation aid to the long-term unemployed, even targeted infrastructure spending. But much of the party’s agenda remained frozen.

“They figured, ‘These are conservative voters, anti-Obama voters. We’ll give them the same policies we’ve always given them,’” said James Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “High-earner tax cuts, which people are skeptical of; business tax cuts, even though these businesses seem to be doing great. It didn’t resonate with the problems in their lives.”

More:

While jobs in places like Buffalo were vanishing, Washington was coming to resemble a gilded city of lobbyists, contractors and lawmakers. In 2014, the median wealth of members of Congress reached $1 million, about 18 times that of the typical American household, according to disclosures tabulated by the Center for Responsive Politics. During the same year, real hourly wages remained flat or fell for nearly all American workers.

Ed McMullen, a public relations executive who worked for the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1980s, watched the gulf widen between the Washington establishment and the working people in his home state, South Carolina.

“Thirty years later, the same people are sitting in Washington that I worked with, making a million a year, going to fancy dinner parties, and they’ve done nothing to move the ball,” said Mr. McMullen, who has joined the Trump campaign. “Therein lies the great chasm between the think tanks, the ideologues and the real world.”

And:

Few issues were now as dangerous to them as trade, Mr. Luntz told the lawmakers, especially a trade pact sought by a president their voters hated. Many Americans did not believe that the economic benefits of trade deals trickled down to their neighborhoods. They did not care if free trade provided them with cheaper socks and cellphones. Most believed free trade benefited other countries, not their own.

“I told them to stop calling it free trade, and start calling it American trade,” Mr. Luntz said in an interview. “American businesses, American services — American, American, American!”

With God as my witness, if Donald J. Trump does nothing else but damage the career of Frank Luntz and his damned stupid let’s-figure-out-a-new-way-to-lie-to-the-rubes, he will have served his country well.

Read the whole thing. John Podhoretz makes a good case that Confessore is mistaken, explaining why nobody saw Trump coming, and that Trump himself made trade a key political issue. Ross Douthat, often a critic of the GOP elites, defends them, sort of, in a series of 15 tweets, the key one of which is this:

11/ The best defense of the GOP elite is simply that the party’s voters want the self-contradictory + impossible. Which some of them do.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 28, 2016

Look, Confessore’s narrative plays to my own biases, and I love Burl Finkelstein, the small business manager who is in the piece’s lede. But did anyone anticipate that an elderly socialist from Vermont would be making Hillary work for the Democratic nomination? This has been a very strange year.

Could it be that the GOP coalition has been unstable for a while, and Trump is the first candidate who gave downscale voters a choice? That the edifice had rotted from within, and along came Trump to push it over? The “open letter” from the woman who once headed communications for Trump’s PAC, saying that Trump didn’t think he was going to get this far and never wanted to be president — that letter, if it’s true, indicates that not even Trump knew how weak the GOP was.

Nobody has diagnosed the crisis better than Tucker Carlson did back in January. Excerpt:

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump. In the case of Trump, though, the GOP shares the blame, and not just because his fellow Republicans misdirected their ad buys or waited so long to criticize him. Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t.

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.

If you missed it the first time, read the whole thing. And if you read the whole thing back then, read it again.

College: Militants Without The Military

Fantastic, long interview by Tyler Cowen with Jon Haidt, one of my intellectual heroes. Here’s an excerpt I really like. Let’s say you had an army in which everybody was told to do their own thing. How well would they achieve their purpose, which is to win wars? They would be terrible at it! Well, consider the contemporary university. Excerpt:

COWEN: Say we take the military, a very different environment. The military is not-for-profit, it intersects with corporate America, but it’s not itself a corporation. It can at times be highly inefficient, and we at least try to overcome this by building up an ethos which is in some ways fairly homogenous, and it tells people to behave a certain way, and there are strong group norms, and a lot of sanctions.

One may not like all of that, but typically once sees something like that is needed in the military. Now if we take colleges and universities, they’re big, they’re bureaucratic, they’re not-for-profit, the incentives are not traditional commercial incentives — could it be the case that for higher education to function well it needs these tight, strict norms? Tight, strict norms, will ex post always look in some ways silly, as they can in the military. Maybe this is a semi‑second, third best efficient way of running academia, yes or no?

HAIDT: No. Again, you’re looking at it like you look at these giant systems, and then let’s take that analogy to another giant system, but you have to think about what is each system designed to produce. Diversity is divisive. There’s a lot of social science research on this, the more you make something diverse, the less trust there will be, the harder it is for people to work together.

If you’re the US military, or any military, yes in the ’70s the Army in particular embraced ethnic diversity, and they did a great job of it. It’s actually quite striking that the military has done — that things have gotten better and better and better in terms of racial climate in the military, and worse and worse and worse in the academy, we can come back to that. If you’re the military, you need cohesion, and that’s what they say — above all, unit cohesion, we must have that.

You want to basically bury racial and other kinds of diversity in a sea of uniformity. You want to give people a sense of common mission, you have common uniforms, so you want to make people feel they’re all part of the same — that’s what you do if you need a group to function effectively together.

In the academy that is not our goal. We’re not trying to turn out classes of “our graduating class will go forth, and they will all work together as a unit to accomplish greatness.” No, that’s not what it’s all about. We want clashing ideas.

We don’t want uniformity and homogeneity, we want the benefits of diversity, but the irony is we have so focused on racial and other kinds of demographic diversity, because of the political slant of the university, because of the sacred values of the campus left, we have so focused on that kind of diversity.

There’s this wonderful line from George Will, in some essay he wrote, “There’s a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything except thought.” That’s where we are. We now have almost a kind of uniformity the military has, where everybody’s on the left, which gives us cohesion, but that kills the very function of the university, which is to have diversity of thought, so we can change our minds. We challenge each other in the marketplace of ideas.

Here’s another good excerpt:

COWEN: Let’s say you were put in charge of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and you could more or less do what you thought was best without constraint, what would you change?

HAIDT: Oh gosh, I’d change a lot of things. One thing that I would do is I would start admitting for signs that you can contribute to an intellectually diverse environment. That means that I would look for people who — so Yale in particular, but all of the top schools have a huge problem, that they have basically social justice warriors who are so empowered, so angry, that they dominate discourse and you basically have the small illiberal left has completely terrorized the larger liberal left.

Yale right now is quite dysfunctional. Students there say they can’t speak up, they can’t speak up in class, they feel pressure on Facebook, if somebody sends around a petition for some left-wing cause they have to endorse it, even if they don’t want to. Yale’s a mess right now, as a lot of schools are. That should be the top diversity issue, is intellectual diversity. I would stop admitting for social justice cred, in other words, if you say, “Oh, I started this protest group, and we got this overturned.”

Basically I think a lot of students know is the way to get into a top school is show your social justice activism. Well, top schools are now full of social justice activists, and they’re no longer places where people can say anything that contradicts the social justice activists. What’s that old joke? “Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Well, stop doing this.” They should stop admitting social justice warriors and start admitting people they’ve got the guts to disagree.

One more:

COWEN: What’s the best replacement for religion in modern, secular society?

HAIDT: Oh boy, the best replacement.

COWEN: Good question. Durkheimian question.

HAIDT: Yeah. A few years ago I would have tried to give you an answer and say we should have some other sacred value to replace it, but given what’s happened in the last year on campuses, I’m really afraid of it, because you might think, “Humanitarianism should replace it. We should all have a religion of helping the poor, helping each other.” Now, of course, it’s really important to help the poor. It’s really important to help people who are oppressed.

But once you make it a religion, that means you are impervious to evidence. You are committed to certain religious rituals even if those rituals make things worse. For example, I’ve been studying the research on affirmative action and diversity training. As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that they make things better and there is some evidence that it makes things worse.

Now, it’s messy. I can’t say for sure that they do, but the point is, we seem to be doing things on campus that are making things worse. The activists are largely asking for things that will make things worse. Much more affirmative action, much bigger racial preferences, which will cause much bigger gaps between Asians at the top and African-Americans at the bottom. Which is going to inflame prejudice, not reduce it.

Once you make something a religion, you’re not open to evidence. You do really crazy, stupid things. What I would say is, let’s not have a replacement for religion. Let’s set things up so that there isn’t a big religion that unites us all to take on our enemies. Let’s try to return to a climate in which people find meaning and purpose in their private lives and in their smaller associations, but we don’t have a big sense of national purpose.

Read the whole thing, or listen to the interview here. It’s very long, and very good.

Campus Voices Against Coercion

Call me a Marxist if you will, but it is perfectly clear that the Social Justice Warrior movement for “safe spaces” and suchlike is a naked grab for power and domination, using modes of discourse that work within those communities, and to which wibbly-wobbly campus administrators, teachers, and diversocrats are especially susceptible. Liberalism in this case is nothing but a pseudo-benign mask over will to power.

Rachel Huebner, a Harvard undergraduate, writes about the situation on her campus:

The rise of safe spaces has also deeply encroached upon open dialogue and free expression. It is ironic that while the origins of the term safe space can be found in the 20th century women’s movement, where it “implies a certain license to speak and act freely,” today the term has come to be associated with precisely the opposite: the inability to speak freely. Journalists have been silenced in the name of safe spaces and debates have been barred. Books have been banned and conversation topics prohibited.

In a class I attended earlier this semester, a large portion of the first meeting was devoted to compiling a list of rules for class discussion. A student contended that as a woman, she would be unable to sit across from a student who declared that he was strongly against abortion, and the other students in the seminar vigorously defended this declaration. The professor remained silent. In a recent conversation with peers, I posed a question about a verse from the Bible. A Harvard employee in the room immediately interjected, informing me that we were in a safe space and I was thus not permitted to discuss the controversial biblical passage. And these are just stories from the past three months.

The assaults on free expression have dire consequences. The rise of the microagression movement has been reported to be detrimental to mental health on campus. Students’ emotional distress is increasing as educators presume that fragile undergraduates need to be protected from any form of dissent. Administrators must recognize that the current restrictions are incompatible with the very premise and goal of an education.

It is time to stop focusing on feelings as the criteria for speech and actions on the college campus.

Here’s an e-mail I received over the weekend from Amelia Sims, head of the College Republicans at Emory University, and a Catholic. I share it with her permission:

First, I just wanted to say I love reading your blog, and I can’t wait for your Benedict Option book. Recent events on campus have really made manifest to me how needed it is right now. Campus environments have become suffocating crucibles for Christian kids, and most of them come into college without the resources or basic arguments to defend their beliefs. I’m a senior at Emory, and it’s been quite a circus these past few days with all the media coverage on the chalkings and such. I wrote an op ed in the Washington Post about it, but I also wanted to share a little more info with you.

At this point, it’s all pretty embarrassing for the school, and most people just want all of it to blow over as fast as possible. Emory is a pretty liberal school, but most people here, even the more radical liberal students and professors, agree the protesters response was radical and overblown. The protesters really are a small, loud minority. On campus, everyone kind of knew the chalkings were a joke, and most people didn’t take them seriously. The protesters demands were silly and I loathe the histrionic excess of this kind of mob mentality, however, it’s also been kind of sad to see the media exploit them.

The people quoted in the article told reporters they wished to remain anonymous and yet the reporters disclosed their identity. They’ve now received numerous death threats and floods of person attacks on social media and in their emails, as have the president and Vice President of SGA. I’ve seen them, and they are truly horrifying. These more radical groups have received more fodder from this overblown media reaction than from anything else in years. 

This is also true for Trump followers. Though Trump supporters may as well be alien invaders on this campus, there are a few of them. I’ve met five people, just over the past few days, who have decided to support Trump in reaction to the radical nature of the protests. Most people on campus, however, have never met a Trump supporter and can’t conceive that anyone would vote for Trump, but for some feelings of bigotry, xenophobia, or white supremacism. They speak of his followers as if they are a breed of people that need to be exterminated. It’s sick. They know so little of real immigration policy that they see any demand for increased border security as a personal attack, and they fail to acknowledge that both Sanders and Cruz are pretty staunch defenders of border security too. (not to mention the secure fence act Clinton and Obama signed in 2006)

A lot of “talking” has resulted from all this upheaval, but it’s also worth noting how little back and forth there has really been. There are a lot of emotions on both sides and no trust or dialogue or argument. Instead of discussion or argument, groups have issued blanket statements which students identifying/sympathizing with them have monolithically posted on Facebook. This kind of parroting, on both sides, makes any kind of discussion about free speech, Trump, or border security/immigration impossible. Feelings are used to end discussions, not further them, and people have insulated themselves so well they have a really hard time conceiving of suffering outside of their own interest group. There has definitely been a mounting tension on campus since the Ferguson riots last year, but now more than ever, I feel like I’m witnessing a lot of what you have been discussing in your blog for the past year. I really shouldn’t be surprised at all, but It’s like it’s all unfolding as a Euripidean tragedy and it’s just really depressing to watch. Kyrie eleison

Read Amelia’s op-ed.

One of two things is going to happen:

1. Students sick and tired of being mau-mau’d and having their speech stifled and educations ruined are going to organize and start pushing back, hard, and campuses will be turned into a battleground, or

2. Students will go gently into that good progressive night, and surrender without protest because they just want to conform and get a good job.

I think No. 2 is far worse than No. 1, but No. 1 means trouble ahead. Conservatives — especially religious conservatives — should understand that the SJW mentality is not going to be limited only to campus, but is taking hold in the business world too. You can fight it now, or you can fight it later, but you are definitely going to have to fight it … unless you choose to conform.

‘Religious Liberty': Now, Dirty Words

Another deeply red state falls before the LGBT/Big Business steamroller:

In a striking defeat to religious conservatives, Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia said Monday that he would veto a bill intended to protect critics of same-sex marriage.

“In light of our history, I find it somewhat ironic that some in the religious community today feel that it is necessary for government to confer upon them certain rights and protections,” Mr. Deal said at the State Capitol, where he had faced intense pressure from the bill’s supporters and critics. “If indeed our religious liberty is conferred upon us by God, and not by man-made government, perhaps we should simply heed the hands-off admonition of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Mr. Deal, a Republican in his second term, announced his decision less than two weeks after the General Assembly easily approved House Bill 757, which its supporters named the Free Exercise Protection Act. The vote tallies from March 16, when both the House of Representatives and the Senate considered the bill over a stretch of a few hours, indicate that Mr. Deal’s veto is likely to stand.

By rejecting the measure, Mr. Deal has most likely sidestepped the type of economic backlash that Indiana faced last year after its governor signed a so-called religious liberty measure. (After a national outcry, Indiana officials rewrote the law.) Hundreds of businesses and sports organizations, including Coca-Cola and the National Football League, had warned Mr. Deal, explicitly or implicitly, that a decision to support the bill could jeopardize economic opportunities in Georgia.

Ryan T. Anderson explains why this is such a big, uh, deal. The compromise bill that Gov. Deal vetoed was very weak — and still, he yielded:

This shows the lack of courage of many in the political class, and also highlights the extreme nature of the Left and the business community. To these groups, even mild religious liberty protections are unacceptable.

The economic threats made by big businesses to get the government to do their bidding at the expense of the common good are examples of a vicious form of cultural cronyism.

The Georgia religious freedom bill that Deal vetoed would have safeguarded clergy from having to officiate same-sex weddings, prevented faith-based organizations from being forced to hire someone who publicly undermines their mission, and prohibited the state government from discriminating against churches and their affiliated ministries because they believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

The bill that the Deal vetoed was the result of a series of compromises that significantly watered down the original version. It did not offer protections to bakers, florists and similar wedding professionals, and it adopted a very narrow definition of faith-based organizations, covering only churches, religious schools, and “integrated auxiliaries”—the same unacceptable definition used by the Obama administration to exclude the Little Sisters of the Poor.

More Ryan T. Anderson:

Most remarkably, Deal concluded that states simply shouldn’t pass any religious freedom laws, for religious freedom “is best left to the broad protections of the First Amendment.”

This is nonsensical.

There is a reason why President Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—and why it passed unanimously in the U.S. House of Representatives and with 97 votes in the U.S. Senate. There is a reason why over 20 states have adopted their own state religious freedom restoration acts, and why 11 more have constitutional religious liberty protections that provide a similar level of protection.

Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and other religious freedom protections are needed against our contemporary over-active progressive government.

Read the whole thing. 

You have to understand that there is no religious liberty that will be respected by LGBT activists and their Big Business allies — and the Republican Party is a fair-weather friend.

We have to fight as hard as we can to hold what little ground might be available to us, but orthodox Christians and other religious conservatives must face the fact that we are in trouble. The vise of the state is going to close tighter on religious schools and institutions, and it will be very hard to protect ourselves. When you can’t even get a feeble religious freedom bill passed into law in the state of Georgia, you know you are in trouble.

Read this “Prof. Kingsfield” entry from almost a year ago. It seems like forever and a day ago that I had the interview with an elite law professor who is deeply closeted as a Christian (his real name is not “Kingsfield”), and he offered sobering advice for orthodox Christians in the wake of the Indiana RFRA debacle. It is well worth reading. Here is a part I want to highlight today:

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.

“And if the bishops are like these Indiana bishops, where does that leave us?” he said. “We have a problem in the current generation, but what I really worry about is what it means to transmit the faith to the next generation.”

“A lot of us will be able to ‘pass’ if we keep our mouths shut, but it’s going to be hard to tell who believes what,” Kingsfield said. “In [my area], there’s a kind of secret handshake that traditional Christians use to identify ourselves to each other when we meet. Forming those subterranean, catacomb church networks is not easy, but it’s terribly vital right now.”

“Your blog is important for us who feel alone where we are, because it let’s us know that there are others who feel this way,” Kingsfield said. “My wife says you should stop blogging and write your Benedict Option book right now. There is such a need for it. My hope for this book is that it will help Christians like us meet and build more of the networks that are going to carry us through.”

Kingsfield said he and his wife send their children to a classical Christian school in their area. “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” he said. “Studying the past is so important. If you have an understanding of where we came from [as a culture], you can really see how insane we have gone.”

Through the classical Christian school community, he said, he and his wife have met believers from other traditions who are very sympathetic to the threat to all orthodox Christians, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.

“We have to get to know them better. We have to network with them. Our kids have to grow up with those kids, even if it means some driving, some traveling, arranging joint vacations,” Kingsfield said.

Read the whole thing. I know a lot of you have thought me alarmist, but as you see leading Republicans like the governor of Georgia — Georgia! — caving in to threats from major corporations, the future for orthodox Christians is taking shape before our eyes. If you think Rep. Paul Ryan, Sen. Mitch McConnell, or the next Republican president, if we have one, will be a profile in courage compared to Gov. Deal, you are dreaming. The only thing we can hope for is that they would appoint judges that will be more sympathetic to us than Democratic appointees. But as the late, great Antonin Scalia warned, the elite law schools have already gone over.

In fact, law firms have been declining to take cases on the opposite side of LGBT interests, either because they see those clients as bigots, or they are terrified of losing other clients (this has happened, according to lawyer friends). A law firm could defend accused pornographers, pimps, drug dealers, what have you, and face no stigma within the legal profession. But not orthodox Christians. Think about that. Michael McConnell, who teaches law at Stanford, told the NYT last year, “The level of sheer desire to crush dissent is pretty unprecedented.”

The level of sheer desire to crush dissent is pretty unprecedented. It’s true. The LGBT activists, the media, academia, and Big Business have made “religious liberty,” once a bedrock American value, into a code word for bigotry. And they will not stop at anything. Today’s alarmists are tomorrow’s realists. There will be no peace. The sooner you get that learned, and get started building up your family, your networks, and your institutions, the more resilient we will all be when we are really put to the test.

That day is coming, and a lot sooner than many of us think. Prepare.

UPDATE: Erick Erickson, who lives in Georgia, offers his remarks. Excerpt:

On top of that, the Governor really wants evangelicals to help him with his education reform effort. I sat in on a meeting last year where the Governor talked to faith leaders in the black community, many who also supported this legislation.

The veto of HB757 [the religious liberty bill] means the Governor is going to see his remaining agenda hijacked and HB757 will probably next year be HB1. The issue will not only not go away, but if the Governor remains recalcitrant on the issue, it is going to become the biggest issue in the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary.

What conservatives in Georgia are now seeing is that big businesses have the ear of Governor Deal in a way small businesses and churches do not. They are also seeing that no compromise can be had on the religious liberty issue. The evangelicals actually reduced the impact of HB757 by making it only apply to non-profit religious organizations and, at Governor Deal’s request, included specific language prohibiting invidious discrimination.

To have Governor Deal use rhetoric by opponents of religious liberty legislation — rhetoric that actually ignores key components of the legislation — was disappointing.

UPDATE.2: I think North Carolina’s bill, signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory, went too far in restricting LGBT rights. I also think that had it been as puny as Georgia’s, it would have drawn the same reaction from activists and Big Business.

Donald Trump, Social Justice Warrior?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt breaks down an important 2014 study indicating that the Social Justice Warrior phenomenon on campus is not a trend, but instead marks a deep cultural shift. The paper is not by Haidt, but it’s long, so he summarizes it for his readers. Excerpts (all boldface in Haidt’s original):

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind.

I want to make the ideas in the article widely available. It’s a fairly long article, so I provide below an outline of its main sections with extensive quotations from each section. My hope is that you can read the text below and get 80% of the value of the article in just 7 minutes.

In what follows, all text is copied and pasted directly from the published article, [except for comments from me, which are in brackets.] I have also bolded the lines that are most important for understanding the phenomena described in The Coddling of the American Mind.

The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters “moral dependence” and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.

More:

But note that these campaigns for support do not necessarily emanate from the lowest reaches of society – that they are not primarily stocked or led by those who are completely lacking in property, respectability, education, or other forms of social status. Rather, such forms as microaggression complaints and protest demonstrations appear to flourish among the relatively educated and affluent populations of American colleges and universities. The socially down and out are so inferior to third parties that they are unlikely to campaign for their support, just as they are unlikely to receive it.

In other words, they aren’t going to protest poverty; they are going to protest chalk on the sidewalk.

And why are these things occurring in university settings? Because they are already highly egalitarian:

According to Black (2011), as noted above, changes in stratification, intimacy, and diversity cause conflict. Microaggression complaints are largely about changes in stratification. They document actions said to increase the level of inequality in a social relationship – actions Black refers to as “overstratification.” Overstratification offenses occur whenever anyone rises above or falls below others in status. [Therefore…] a morality that privileges equality and condemns oppression is most likely to arise precisely in settings that already have relatively high degrees of equality… In modern Western societies, egalitarian ethics have developed alongside actual political and economic equality. As women moved into the workforce in large numbers, became increasingly educated, made inroads into highly paid professions such as law and medicine, and became increasingly prominent in local, state, and national politics, sexism became increasingly deviant. The taboo has grown so strong that making racist statements, even in private, might jeopardize the careers of celebrities or the assets of businessmen (e.g., Fenno, Christensen, and Rainey 2014; Lynch 2013). [p.706-707] [In other words, as progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.]

It really is true: you cannot please the SJWs. They will keep moving to goalposts to keep their anger stoked. And the more elite your profession is, the greater is the likelihood that it will be made subject to SJW-style moral blackmail. What’s more, the paper finds, the more “diverse” an institution/community is, the more subject it is to these tactics, because members of one group find that they can increase their power by using these tactics against others. Diversity, in this sense, is very much the enemy of social cohesion.

Quoting a portion of the paper that says SJW-ism arises in a culture that privileges victim status, Haidt concludes that colleges that indulge SJW whining are doing them a great disservice. Haidt:

This is the great tragedy: the culture of victimization rewards people for taking on a personal identity as one who is damaged, weak, and aggrieved. This is a recipe for failure — and constant litigation — after students graduate from college and attempt to enter the workforce.

Haidt goes on to cite a portion of the paper that says the growth in the college administrative bureaucracy has fed this too, as universities have added “diversity” staffers. And the explosive growth of social media, which allow for the rapid publicization of grievance, also plays a role.

Here’s where it goes beyond campus, perhaps indicating a society-wide shift. The authors of the paper say that America used to have an honor culture, where people who felt their honor was slighted would seek personal means of restoring it, often violence. That gave way to a dignity culture. From the paper:

The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others (Berger 1970; see also Leung and Cohen 2011). Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor (Leung and Cohen 2011:509). People are to avoid insulting others, too, whether intentionally or not, and in general an ethic of self-restraint prevails.

More:

Microaggression complaints have characteristics that put them at odds with both honor and dignity cultures. Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response. But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all.

Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.[p.714-715]

A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization. … Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood because the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.

I urge you to read the whole thing.  The paper Haidt cites goes on to say that the SJW mentality is not exclusively something on the political and cultural left, and gives examples. If that is so, then it says that even conservatives are being corrupted by a system that rewards a sense of victimization. And why not? If trying to be dignified and responsible about conflict means you will lose to the whiny babies who can squeal the loudest about their so-called oppression, then you learn to do what it takes to win.

The Haidt blog entry makes me wonder about Donald Trump, and whether he is a candidate for our time in ways heretofore unappreciated. He is a man who trafficks in verbal aggressions, both micro and macro. To his supporters, his refusal to kowtow to the language of liberal grievance is admirable. In other words, SJWs have no power over him, and that can be refreshing when you see other authorities terrified of being called bigots, oppressors, racists, and what have you.

But Trump is also a man who constantly paints himself as a victim. This explains his childish obsession with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, for example. He constantly takes small slights, the sort of thing you would expect a presidential candidate, or even a man of Trump’s age, to shrug off — he takes them and makes a federal case out of them for why he is being treated unjustly. Here is a man of extreme wealth and privilege in his own right, who has managed to vanquish nearly every one of his opponents for the GOP nomination — including Jeb Bush, the Establishment prince — and in so doing smash the once-mighty Republican Party … and yet he cannot let the smallest thing go. Here he is reacting to the women on The View talking him down the other day:

Explain how the women on The View, which is a total disaster since the great Barbara Walters left, ever got their jobs. @abc is wasting time

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016

And when you point out that this kind of thing ought to be beneath a man of Trump’s stature and, um, dignity, many of his supporters immediately rush to claim the mantle of victimhood for their man.

So I wonder: Is Trump the first Social Justice Warrior presidential candidate, in the sense of weaponizing grievance in a way similar to that done by left-wing campus protesters? On campuses, leftist protesters rarely make actual reasoned arguments; they simply assert that they are in pain, and have been mistreated, and demand redress. Similarly with Trump, in his speeches, he tries to strike a resonant emotional chord with his listeners, and appeals to their sense of grievance (which often has valid grounds). He positions himself both as the petitioner and the authority who will bring justice to the situation. In other words, he’s both the Emory University students traumatized by chalk, and the college president who is going to feel their pain and undertake administrative actions to give them what they want.

Contrast this to Hillary Clinton, who is the college president of the Democrats, listening the pain expressed by various victim groups in the Democratic coalition, and promising to deal with their grievances fairly, in standard Democratic fashion. The emotional power of Trumpism is that he is himself constantly aggrieved. Like campus SJWs, he’s a narcissist who is never satisfied — and he may be the first major politician from the right to take the grievance culture of the privileged campus left and make its tropes and strategies work for him in a presidential campaign, by heightening the sense of victimhood in his supporters (whether they are actual victims or not), offering himself as a Victim who stands in for them all, and also as the potential Authority figure who will restore justice.

And think about this: Trump boosted himself against his GOP rivals earlier in the primary season in part by diminishing them personally. He insulted Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in particular, and he did it in ways that exploited their vulnerabilities (e.g., a disengaged Jeb! was “low-energy”; “Little Marco” was too unseasoned and ready for office). He was able to get away with it for a couple of reasons. First, Trump has no apparent sense of honor or dignity, and has a long-established a public persona that renders him immune to the sort of behavior that would embarrass most grown men. Second, his GOP opponents all still belong to a culture of dignity, and did not know how to respond effectively to his taunts. When they tried — Marco Rubio getting into the gutter with him — they looked terrible, because it was fake, and really did diminish them.

In a similar way, on campus, I am fairly certain that most students don’t agree with the SJWs, at least not their tactics, but are afraid to speak out because they intuitively understand that to be a victim is to have power within the university community. If they are white, or male, or a member of some other community deemed oppressive by SJW ideology, they would expose themselves to attack if they stood up to the SJW bullies. Note how the president of Emory promised SJW protesters that he would use campus security cameras to track down the people who wrote “Trump 2016″ in chalk on campus sidewalks, and punish them if caught. Can you imagine? Bringing the security apparatus of the campus to bear on people who chalked support for a presidential candidate on the sidewalk. But that is the power of SJW victimhood.

Plus, one likes to think that most students have enough residual dignity to restrain themselves from behaving like bully-babies.

What if that changes? What if students — whites, males, and other out-groups — decide that they’re going to fight fire with fire, and adopt Trumpian methods on campus, challenging the sacred victim status of the SJWs, and claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves, and intimidating university authorities until they get what they want? Trump has shown what you can do to acquire power if you just don’t give a rat’s rear end what people think of you. That is, if your own belief in yourself and your righteousness is so absolute that you are not susceptible to believing that it is undignified or dishonorable to present yourself in the public square as a victim. Trump’s genius is to present himself as both victim and victor, and that kind of thing is not going to work on campus. But sooner or later, the tactics of the SJWs are going to be taken up by their opponents, because that’s the only way they will save themselves from being entirely disempowered on campus, and in time, in the workplace. Trump has shown that establishments are weaker than people think, and can be pushed over. So have the SJWs. All that campuses need now are counterprotesters to the SJWs, making similar uncompromising demands from administrators, driven by nothing but their feelings of grievance. Then we can have a proper war of all against all.

Thanks, SJWs.

If we really are undergoing a tectonic cultural shift from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood, the implications for democracy are profound, and profoundly troubling. But it is entirely what you would expect from a society riven with what the left-wing social critic Christopher Lasch, of blessed memory, called “pathological narcissism.” Here are quotes from a 1976(!) essay in The New York Review of Books:

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling—even if it is only a momentary illusion—of personal well-being, health, and psychic security. Therapy is the modern successor to religion; but this does not imply that the “triumph of the therapeutic” constitutes a new religion in its own right.

Therapy constitutes instead an antireligion, not always to be sure because it adheres to rational explanation or scientific methods of healing, as its practitioners would have us believe, but because modern society “has no future” and therefore gives no thought to anything beyond its immediate needs.

Even when they speak of the need for “meaning” and “love,” therapists define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements. It hardly occurs to them—nor is there any reason why it should, given the nature of the therapeutic enterprise—to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause or tradition outside himself. Love as self-sacrifice or self-abasement, “meaning” as submission to a higher loyalty—these sublimations strike the therapeutic sensibility as intolerably oppressive, offensive to common sense and injurious to personal health and well-being. To “liberate” humanity from such outmoded ideas of love and duty has become the mission of the post-Freudian therapies and particularly of their converts and popularizers, for whom mental health means the overthrow of “inhibitions” and the nonstop celebration of the self.

And:

The weakening of social ties, which originates in the prevailing state of social warfare, at the same time reflects a narcissistic defense against dependence. A warlike society tends to produce men and women who are at heart antisocial. It should therefore not surprise us to find that the narcissist, although he conforms to social norms for fear of external retribution, often thinks of himself as an outlaw and sees others in the same way, “as basically dishonest and unreliable, or only reliable because of external pressures.” “The value systems of narcissistic personalities are generally corruptible,” writes Kernberg, “in contrast to the rigid morality of the obsessive personality.”

The ethic of self-preservation and psychic survival is rooted, then, not merely in objective conditions of economic warfare, rising rates of crime, and social chaos, but in the subjective experience of emptiness and isolation. It reflects the conviction—as much a projection of inner anxieties as a perception of the way things are—that envy and exploitation dominate even the most intimate relations. The cult of personal relations, which becomes increasingly intense as the hope of political solutions recedes, conceals a thoroughgoing disenchantment with personal relations, just as the cult of sensuality implies a repudiation of sensuality in all but its most primitive forms. The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic about the power of positive thinking, radiates pessimism. It is the world view of the resigned.

Lasch was writing about the Me Decade, but his insights are helpful to explain the culture now coming into being. Trump is the quintessential narcissist. The SJWs are narcissists, exquisitely attuned to their own “pain.” We live in a debased post-Christian culture in which power is acquired among elites by appealing to one’s alleged weakness. It will not stay confined to elite culture. The Trump campaign suggests that it is already migrating into the public square in a big way.

The Widening Gyre

Yesterday I posted about a righteous and kind Muslim man in Glasgow who was murdered by another Muslim hours after he wished his Christian customers a happy Easter on Facebook. The latest news is that the killer may have traveled hundreds of miles to murder Asad Shah, and, as a Muslim reader of this this blog speculated yesterday, may have done it in whole or in part because Shah belonged to a sect of Islam considered heretical by Sunnis.

And now, this unspeakable horror in Lahore, Pakistan:

A suicide bomber killed at least 65 people, mostly women and children, at a park in Lahore on Sunday in an attack claimed by a Pakistani Taliban faction which said it had targeted Christians.

More than 300 other people were wounded, officials said.

The explosion occurred in the parking area of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park close to children’s swings. The park is a popular site for members of Lahore’s Christian community, many of whom had gone there to celebrate the Easter weekend holiday.

Witnesses said they saw body parts strewn across the parking lot once the dust had settled after the blast.

“When the blast occurred, the flames were so high they reached above the trees and I saw bodies flying in the air,” said Hasan Imran, 30, a resident who had gone to Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park for a walk.

Officials said 65 people were killed and about 300 wounded. Police Superintendant Mustansar Feroz said most of the casualities were women and children.

The Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the attack.

“The target was Christians,” a spokesman for the faction, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said. “We want to send this message to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that we have entered Lahore.”

“He can do what he wants but he won’t be able to stop us. Our suicide bombers will continue these attacks.”

Martyrs, all of them. Women and children, picnicking in a park to celebrate Easter.

Meanwhile, in Brussels today, police used a water cannon to disperse a group of actual fascists, skinheads who came to the market square to trample on the memorial to the bombing victims and to confront Muslims.

And in Rome, in an Easter address, Pope Francis chided Europeans for not bringing in more refugees from the Islamic world:

Easter “invites us not to forget those men and women seeking a better future, an ever more numerous throng of migrants and refugees — including many children — fleeing from war, hunger, poverty and social injustice,” he said.

Francis lamented that “all too often, these brothers and sisters of ours meet along the way with death or, in any event, rejection by those who could offer them welcome and assistance”.

Unbelievable. The gyre widens…

But here is a flame of hope, from the Easter Vigil at the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia. The darkness cannot comprehend the light, nor can it overcome it:

Photo by Marco Sermarini