Rod Dreher's Blog, page 608

View From Your Table

Rome, Italy

That’s Giuseppe Scalas, one of this blog’s favorite commenters, across the table from me. We had dinner tonight at Nonna Betta, a kosher restaurant in the old Jewish quarter. Though both of us are Christian, Giuseppe said the Jewish community has been a constant presence in Rome for over 2,000 years, and offers the most authentic Roman cuisine available today. The food was quite good. I’m eating pasta with artichokes, and Giuseppe is having rigatoni stuffed with sheep stomach. It’s actually not bad at all, though unusual. We had great food and even greater conversation. Walked around the Roman Forum and talked about the Church, the world, the Benedict Option, and our families. I have been unbelievably blessed by the people I’ve gotten to know through this blog.

On to Norcia tomorrow!

P.S. We also drank a toast to the memory of Antonin Scalia. “Uncle Nino,” Giuseppe called him. The great one was remembered tonight near the banks of the Tiber by two Christian men who revere him and who love to eat and drink.

What Jindal Did To Louisiana

The State of Louisiana is in an unprecedented fiscal crisis. Unprecedented, as in, it’s never been this bad before. Clancy DuBos, a New Orleans journalist, brings even worse news:

A common refrain among some lawmakers in Baton Rouge these days is that we should “look forward” and stop blaming former Gov. Bobby Jindal for Louisiana’s unprecedented fiscal crisis. If those lawmakers were to read the latest annual report by the Legislative Auditor, they’d change their tune.

According to the auditor, the Jindal Administration failed to timely file the vast majority of statutorily required reports on more than $1 billion a year in tax incentive giveaways for fiscal years 2013 and 2014.

“We found that three of the six agencies that administer tax incentives submitted reports as of March 23, 2015. As a result, the Legislature only received information on five of the 79 tax incentives administered by these agencies,” the auditor’s report states on page 17.

“In addition, of the 79 tax incentive reports agencies were required to submit to the Legislature by March 1, 2014, 70 (89%) either were not submitted or did not comply with all of the reporting requirements. According to the Department of Revenue’s Tax Exemption Budgets, the revenue loss from tax incentives claimed in fiscal years 2013 and 2014 for which agencies provided no information or did not comply with reporting requirements totaled approximately $1.1 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively.”

You read that correctly: $1.1 billion for fiscal year 2013 and $1.3 billion for fiscal year 2014.

There’s our budget deficit right there, folks.

More:

Jindal didn’t create this mess alone, however. Democrat as well as Republican legislators aided and abetted his malfeasance.

To be clear, those “tax incentives” are actually expenditures. If lawmakers opt to eliminate any of them, it won’t be a tax increase, it will be a reduction in spending. In that respect, we can all agree that Louisiana indeed has “a spending problem.” We’re spending way too much on corporate giveaways.

The auditor’s report summarizes 36 audits conducted in 2015 and identifies some $1.8 billion in questionable expenditures — the vast majority of them corporate tax incentives. That should outrage every Louisiana taxpayer.

Read the whole thing. The Louisiana-is-good-for-business story of the past eight years appears to have been largely built on the state paying corporations to do business here.

That “look forward, don’t blame” strategy is exactly what the national GOP wants us all to do regarding the Bush years, because it’s what they’ve been doing.

(Readers, please remember that I’m traveling today, and will not be able to approve comments in a timely way. I wrote this post on Sunday and scheduled it to run today.)

View From Your Table

Antwerp, Belgium

James C., on the road again:

Antwerp, Belgium. I’m in Flanders this weekend for a very long overdue visit to a good friend. For the occasion I’ve made a brief suspension of my no-meat Lenten discipline, in order to eat one of my favourite things: friet met stoofvlees, fries covered in Flemish beef stew (cooked in beer—of course!). Next to it is a frikandel (oddly called a curryworst in Antwerp) with a spicy sauce whose name I’ve forgotten.

That tall tower in the distance is the Gothic spire of Antwerp’s cathedral. The Art Deco tower to the right is Europe’s first skyscraper. The docked ship is the Belgian Navy frigate Leopold I, recently returned from battle against the Islamic State in the eastern Mediterranean. I saw soldiers holding big guns in the shopping district—perhaps the Leopold is more needed at home…

Jeb Bush’s Good Character

Last night, I was online watching news clips reporting the South Carolina results, and I stopped on a report reflecting on Jeb Bush’s failed campaign. The report featured clips of Donald Trump bullying Jeb on the trail, and especially in the last debate. Jeb didn’t know how to fight back. Actually, he probably did know, but it’s not in his character to stoop to that level.

“Stop playing that,” my wife said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

I stopped, and we talked about it. We agreed that Trump was gratuitously cruel to Jeb Bush, in a way that is hard to take. Refusing to bow to Trump’s level of discourse was seen by many as Jeb’s validating Trump’s accusation that he’s “weak.”

This morning in his homily, my priest talked about the virtue of humility. It was such a contrast to everything about Donald Trump. Was Jeb Bush acting out of conscious humility when he refused to engage Trump at the gutter level? Maybe, maybe not. I suspect it’s more the case that people of his class and breeding (if we can say that still) have internalized a code of honor that considers that kind of vulgar display to be contemptible, and beneath one’s dignity to engage. How could one tell the difference between the strength of character through which a man refuses to dishonor himself, and weakness?

Jeb Bush was not my candidate. I’ve always felt that he’s an essentially good man, though I did not want him to be president this year. I am a conservative who believes the GOP needs a big shake-up, and whatever his admirable personal characteristics, Jeb represents Republican stasis. We can’t afford that, not now.

But I truly believe our public life is greatly diminished by the spectacle Donald Trump has made of himself, going out of his way to personally humiliate Jeb Bush. Hey, it worked, I guess, but it’s still an extremely dishonorable way to win. Jeb looked bad when he couldn’t answer Trump’s baiting about the Iraq War, and fell back on a feeble “you shouldn’t trash my family” defense. Then again, I remember thinking at the start of Jeb’s campaign that I did not envy what was coming for him, re: having to answer hard questions about his brother’s presidency. I don’t honestly know what Jeb Bush thinks about the Iraq War, or any other aspect of George W. Bush’s presidency. I know that Jeb likely has a sense of loyalty to his family that would cause him to be instinctively defensive of his brother — and that means not criticizing him in public.

Years ago, when Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” came out, Diane Sawyer did a TV interview with Gibson, in which she asked him about his crazypants father’s anti-Semitic conspiracy views. Gibson’s voice rose, and he warned Sawyer not to go there. I happen to believe his father, who does hold those views, is a bad man for believing those malignant lies. But I deeply sympathized with Gibson in that moment, because this was his father we were talking about. In Jeb Bush’s case, he was, after all, seeking the presidency, and there’s no way he could have legitimately avoided talking about the Iraq War and other aspects of his brother’s administrations. That’s just the truth, and it would not have been fair to have given him a pass.

Still, it was painful to watch him manhandled by Trump, even though at times (such as on the Iraq War) I think Trump had reason to push hard. But there’s a big difference between pushing hard and humiliating people. Trump has no sense of personal honor. None. When Jeb Bush left the scene last night with an incredibly graceful, dignified farewell speech, it was probably the thing he said throughout this campaign that revealed the true strength of his character. I am not sorry that Jeb Bush is out of the running now, but I regret very much that what wins in American politics this year are the tactics employed by the man who conspicuously lacks what Jeb Bush plainly has: character.

Crunchy Cons At 10

Ten years ago today, Crunchy Cons was published. I would love to hear from readers who were influenced by it, one way or another. What did it do for you? Hey, it’s still available on Kindle!

UPDATE: Reader Jon Parks wrote a song partly inspired by Crunchy Cons: go here and click on “All The Beauty’s Gone”. And another reader, Chris B., just found this on the bookshelf at his northern Wisconsin cabin. So the Sasquatches didn’t steal it, I guess:

The Trumpening Marches On

The photo above is of a reader of this blog, “celebrating” Trump’s South Carolina victory (though I’m pretty sure he did so tongue-in-cheek, because he cannot get over how insane this campaign is). I can’t stop thinking about the semiotics of that image. That’s expensive French Champagne the dude is drinking. The reference on the t-shirt is to this Key & Peele skit. America! [UPDATE: Confirmed. It was in an, ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine’ mode. — RD]

So, what do you think? I think if I were a Republican Party official, I would have to be kept away from sharp objects, and have my belt and shoelaces confiscated for my own safety.

Trump, last night, on the campaign ahead: “It’s tough, it’s mean, it’s nasty, it’s vicious, it’s beautiful.”

NBC News asked the right question in its analysis piece: “If Donald Trump Can’t Stop Donald Trump, Who Can?” Excerpt:

Entering South Carolina with a dominant lead, Trump could afford to play things relatively safe like he did in the lead-up to New Hampshire (well, sort of). Instead, he needlessly tweaked GOP dogma and feuded with everyone from the last Republican president to Pope Francis while running after every shiny object in the news that caught his eye. He accused George W. Bush of lying his way into Iraq and blamed him for not preventing 9/11. He dumped on House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday. He seemingly endorsed Obamacare’s insurance mandate on Thursday and then walked it back on Friday.

Yet somehow it worked.

Republican voters, who have a nuanced view of President George W. Bush already, proved willing to set aside their old affection when choosing their nominee. He distracted from potentially unsettling news with wild tangents, like calling for an Apple boycott or threatening Cruz with a lawsuit or insinuating President Obama was a Muslim (yet again). He shrugged off old interviews showing that he supported invading Iraq in 2002 and called the invasion a success in 2003, both of which undercut his already entirely unsubstantiated claim that he opposed the war.

His closing message on Friday was an unfocused mess of a speech that included a depraved celebration of war crimes in which he repeated an urban legend about Gen. John Pershing massacring dozens of Muslim prisoners with bullets dipped in pig blood. So far he has never gone wrong selling fear and bloodlust, and Saturday was no exception.

Republicans are now on the precipice of nominating a candidate with virtually no institutional support from the party running on blatant appeals to bigotry, joyful celebrations of torture, and a complete contempt for the pieties of movement conservatism.

Well, one out of three ain’t bad. But those first two in the list, they’re pretty bad.

Question to the room: At this point, what could stop Trump? Last night was a good one for Rubio, but the (by now) vanity campaigns of John Kasich and Ben Carson are a drag he doesn’t need. If Ted Cruz can’t beat Trump in South Carolina, a state full of conservative Evangelicals, where (besides Texas) can he beat him? Couple of thoughts from Twitter:

Here's a depressing thought: For @realdonaldtrump to lose the GOP nomination, it will require an epic collapse, unlike any I can recall.

— Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) February 21, 2016

The general denial I'm still getting from GOP elites about the strong position Trump is in to be their nominee is pretty amazing

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) February 21, 2016

Hey readers, after church this morning, I’m going to the airport and flying off to Italy. I will be in Norcia this week, at the Benedictine monastery, praying, writing, and interviewing monks for my Benedict Option book. I will be blogging as I can, but please be patient with my approving comments. There is no wi-fi in the monastery, and I will have to go to a cafe in the town to manage the blog.

 

Of Popes and Populism

Ross Douthat finds that Pope Francis and Donald Trump have a lot in common:

Neoliberalism needs critics, as the Republican Party needs reinvention and the Catholic Church needs reform. At the same time, as Schmitz notes, what both Trump and Francis promise — deliverance “from inconvenient and unresponsive institutions, with all their strictures and corruptions” — downplays the value of rules, customs, and traditions in protecting people from the rule of novelty and whim.

This is always populism’s peril: That it relies too much on the power of charisma, and tears down too much in the quest to make America or Catholic Christianity great again.

He goes on to say that “everything that makes them interesting makes them dangerous as well.” Good point.

Chris Jackson wonders what would happen if Donald Trump converted to Catholicism and announced his candidacy for Pope. Excerpts from the the really amazing pre-papal address:

I don’t have to do this, when you think about it. I really don’t. I’m rich. I’m really, really, rich. I built a great company; a tremendous company. I employ thousands and thousands of people. So my friends, they ask me, they say Donald, you have everything you can dream of. You’re rich, you have an amazing wife, an amazing family, you’re very successful, why run for Pope? And I say, you know what? I have to run. My Church needs me. The Catholics need me. I have to make the Catholic Church great again. I have to.

(Cheers, applause)

You know, it’s a sad thing to say, but the Church is in such bad shape; terrible shape under Francis. The Catholic Church doesn’t win anymore. We just don’t. When is the last time Catholics won anything? Lepanto? When was that, the 1500’s? We don’t win anymore. But, let me just say, Under a Trump papacy, we are going to win again. We are going to win so much. We are going to win so much you are all going to be sick of winning, ok? But right now, it’s terrible. Just the other day, I see the Pope is praising Martin Luther. Martin Luther! Can you believe it?

(Boos)

Our Pope is over there praising Martin Luther; meanwhile millions of Hispanics are converting to Protestantism in Latin America. It’s true. We are losing millions and millions of people to the Protestants and our Pope does nothing. He does nothing. And I have nothing against the Protestants. Many of them are good people. I employ thousands of Protestants. I used to be a Protestant. But their leaders are just too smart for our leaders. We have people in power in the Church today who have no idea what they are doing. They are incompetent. All our leaders do is “dialogue.” We don’t convert anymore, we “dialogue.” What the hell is dialogue? Excuse me, but shouldn’t we be converting these people? If we have the Truth, why aren’t we converting them? But we don’t convert, we “dialogue”, and we lose millions and millions of these people to Protestantism. They are saying if the head of the Catholic Church thinks it’s ok to be Protestant, why convert? Why do we need to convert? Let him convert. Let the Pope convert. That’s what they’re saying. They’re laughing at us. There is no respect there. No respect. When I’m Pope, they are going to respect us again, let me tell you.

(Cheers, applause)

Another thing I hear a lot about is 2 Vatican. Have you heard of 2 Vatican?

(Crowd yells “Vatican II!”)

Vatican II? Is it Vatican II? Vatican II, 2 Vatican, who the hell cares. It stinks right? No matter what you call it, it stinks.

Read the whole thing. It’s pretty funny. Trad humor!

Trump Vs. The Kochs

I had not realized until this morning how much the Koch brothers hate Donald Trump. Here’s a piece from The Hill, from earlier this month, just before Iowa’s caucuses, about a meeting of their donor network. Excerpts:

Donald Trump is so fiercely opposed by the Koch brothers network that some donors believe the powerful group will intervene to stop the billionaire if it looks like he could win the Republican presidential nomination.

“They are always very hesitant to get involved in a primary, but I think if they were going to do it, this would be the time because they just hate the guy,” said a donor who attended the Koch network’s winter retreat, held over the weekend at a luxury resort on the edge of Coachella Valley.

Both officials and donors within Charles and David Koch’s powerful group hope the real estate tycoon’s White House bid dies a natural death so the group can avoid spending a penny of its $889 million 2016 cycle budget against him. But the Koch network’s conversations over the weekend concerning what to do about Trump were more detailed than previously revealed.

More:

This is not the first time the Kochs and Trump have been at odds.

The Kochs declined to invite Trump as one of the presidential candidates to attend a donor gathering last summer. The attendees were Rubio, Bush, Cruz, and Fiorina.

In response, Trump unloaded on Twitter. “I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?” the billionaire wrote.

This is how weird American politics are right now: the billionaire Donald Trump is the populist Republican candidate opposed to the billionaire Koch brothers, who fund much of the conservative movement.If your head is spinning like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist, you’re not the only one.

Trump: Nemesis Of The GOP

Damon Linker’s latest column on the travails of the Republican Party at the hands of Donald Trump hits on a tremendously important truth. Linker says that if Trump wins tonight in South Carolina, it

will not only strongly indicate that he’s likely either to win the nomination orprevent the nomination of anyone else prior to the GOP convention this summer. It will also portend a tumultuous future for the Republican Party, regardless of who ends up as the nominee in 2016. A party with such a large bloc of voters who diverge so sharply from the party’s organizing ideology is either a party that will need to significantly change its ideological direction — or one on the verge of breaking apart.

He says that Trump’s outburst in last weekend’s debate, in which the candidate said that the Iraq War was a disaster, and that George W. Bush “lied” to drag America into the war, was a bright red line. The conventional narrative told by antiwar critics is that the Bush administration told itself (and the American public) a story it wanted to believe, to justify war on Iraq, engaging in a massive — and massively consequential — episode of confirmation bias. That is bad, but it is not the same thing as deliberately lying for the sake of starting a war. That particular slander has been common on the far left — until the leading Republican candidate for president in 2016 uttered it onstage in a presidential primary debate.

Unthinkable! But Trump went there. Linker’s Week colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty (side note: what a great pair of columnists those two are) recounts what happened next:

So yes, Trump’s anti-Bush comments crossed a line, but they were in the right direction: away from Bushism.

And oddly enough, instead of letting Jeb carry the anchor of his brother’s administration in that debate, Rubio stupidly volunteered to do it for him. “I just want to say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time that it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore,” said Rubio. This got a wildly enthusiastic response from the partisan Republicans in the hall. What did everyone else in the country think?

Jeb also tried to avoid any substantive confrontation on his brother’s record, by claiming that it was unsporting of Trump to attack his family members. Does the public like the kind of cronyism that forbids us to judge the last Bush presidency merely because that family has threatened us with another one? Is this what the Republican Party wants to sell during its primary as it prepares to face a Clinton? I doubt it.

Amen, brother! As shocking and as offensive as Trump’s “Bush lied” remark was, it was not as shocking and as offensive (to me, anyway) as the continued refusal of the Republican Party’s leadership to concede that the Iraq War was a mistake, and to talk about what lessons it has learned from that disaster. If they cannot and will not discuss it, how on earth are we to trust them not to lead us into another such catastrophe? Here’s Linker, on the larger political point here:

Within the party’s establishment, the unwillingness ever to concede an error, rethink a policy commitment, or adjust an item on the agenda feels like a show of strength, tenacity, and resolution that will always be rewarded by voters who supposedly crave flamboyant displays of toughness. But from the outside, it can look like blind obstinance, rank stupidity, a cowardly denial of reality, and an unwillingness to shoulder a rightful share of the blame.

Which brings us back to Trump.

What voters hear when he rails against the stupidity of the country’s political leadership, the incompetence of George W. Bush, and what he likes to call the complete disaster of American policy in Iraq and the broader Middle East is a man willing both to face the ugly truth that they themselves perceive and to call out those who refuse to acknowledge it. If he gets a little carried away in countenancing some unsavory conspiracy theories, that’s a forgivable offense. Certainly more forgivable than Republicans failing to take even the least bit of responsibility for what they’ve done, and failed to do, while holding positions of power.

That’s exactly right. And it is why the ugly, barbaric, crude, demagogic Donald J. Trump, at times like these, is doing his country a favor. The Republican Party created this monster. He is Nemesis for the hubris of the George W. Bush years and all that has followed. They deserve him. Whether America does is a different question.

(And by the way, to the extent that Bernie Sanders lays into Hillary Clinton for the sins of the Democrats in doing Wall Street’s bidding under her husband’s presidency and beyond, he is serving a similar constructively destructive role in his party. I invite all my Democratic readers (and everybody else, but especially them) to watch this 2009 episode of PBS’s Frontline, called “The Warning”, or read the transcript.  It is damning to the Democrats as well as the Republicans in Congress. I wish Bernie would start talking about Brooksley Born, and what official Washington did to her, bipartisanally.)

Arguing For Marriage

The commenter “Jones” put a comment on a different thread. It was off-topic, and it was so good that I wanted to give it its own post. He writes:

This is not on topic. But I guess it sort of is, because I want to ask whether you’ve chosen the right topic.

This occurred to me after reading another article on this site, It has its problems, but the fundamental point is really valuable. We need systems other than law in order to come close to an optimal regulation of society.

Obergefell was clearly a crisis point for social conservatives. We lost the public debate on gay marriage; but more important was how we lost. Gay marriage showed that there was a great gap between what social conservatives want to say, and what the rest of the public is willing or able to hear. In short, what the process revealed was the inability of social conservatives to articulate, in a publicly convincing way, the basis of their own beliefs. The most striking fact about the whole process was this inarticulacy. When the crucial time came, SCs could not find the words to explain what they believed. For me, that was the crucial “revelation.”

I think you’ve decided that the problem is a retreat from Christian foundations of moral understanding. But whatever the cause is, we have a continuing responsibility to try to articulate these values in a way that is comprehensible in a secular debate—to correct our own inarticulacy. We have a responsibility to articulate our values, whatever their religious grounding may be, in a way that makes sense to people who do not necessarily share that grounding.

Often, this involves recovering a moral language that we have lost, or are at risk of losing. It also requires the humility to acknowledge that what you are saying doesn’t make sense to people, and trying to precisely diagnose why that is. As an intellectual task, this is huge. But it is far from impossible. Until we can speak in that moral language, and have it make sense to people, there’s no chance of going any further. I don’t think there’s any chance that these “lost values” will suddenly achieve mass appeal as a result of this basically interpretive project. But I think you first have to restore the intellectual credibility of those lost values. The fact that the odds are against it makes no difference. It has to be done if social conservatism is to survive in any form at all.

In this light, to say that the values inhere in Christianity, and therefore doubling down on Christian orthopraxy is the best we can do, is a mistake. Ultimately a big part of the burden is intellectual. For one thing, I think you forsake any elite appeal if you don’t take that approach, because elites will always want to know how a life of religious belief is compatible with modernity at all. As it is, there are clearly a lot of people who belong in the “elite” category who read your blog and are sympathetic to your views. These people are lost, but they obviously belong with your movement. Sooner or later, they will have to confront the contradictions that they live out everyday.

Readers, if you haven’t looked at , I strongly recommend it to you. In it, he says that we lose something valuable when we turn to the law to settle even minor disputes, turning them into a contest of rights.

 

About marriage, I think it’s more accurate to say the problem is a bit more complicated than Jones states. It’s true that social conservatives lost the ability to articulate in a persuasive way the case for traditional marriage. But it’s also true, I think, that there is no way to make this case persuasive because the default values of our society have made that impossible.

I’ve just spent the morning talking a friend through a terrible, and terribly complicated, situation in which she is trying to extricate herself from a dysfunctional relationship with the man with whom she has been living for seven years. They are not married, and for a bunch of reasons, many of them bad decisions on her part, he holds all the financial cards, even though she has been the main breadwinner in this relationship. I’m not sure how she’s going to get out of this thing unless she walks away losing all her investments and personal property. I’m going to try to hook her up with a lawyer.

The thing I kept thinking as she told her story was how much easier this would be if she and the guy were married. The law would be on her side, or at least make sure she got a fair cut of what they built together. But they aren’t married, and now she’s at his mercy. The thing is, my friend comes out of a culture in which people have more or less ceased to marry. They just move in together, even have kids together, but nobody makes commitments. My friend is in a godawful legal situation in part because she comes from and lives in a working-class culture where marriage makes no intuitive sense to folks. Nobody goes to church. There are no real norms left regarding religion, family formation, sexual behavior, any of it. Only drift.

Now, I have middle-class and upper-middle class friends who live by this ethic to some extent, but they usually have the good sense to keep their finances separate, and not to be snookered into being responsible for their partner’s debts. Whatever you might say about the morality of these relationships, at least if Jane decides she’s had enough of Jack, and wants out, she can usually leave free and clear because she’s been clever enough to protect herself in ways that never occurred to my working-class friend. My friend’s hard case is a good example of how more liberalized sexual values that the more educated and financially secure classes can handle stand to ruin the lives of the working class and the poor.

Over two decades ago, Robert Kaplan, in The Atlantic, wrote about “the coming anarchy” in what we still called then the Third World. As part of the article, he contrasted the chaotic poverty of the slums of West Africa with the slums of Ankara, in Turkey. All the Turkish poor lacked was opportunity; despite the poverty of their neighborhoods, Kaplan felt perfectly safe there, because those Turkish Muslims knew how to live:

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

There’s a lesson in that for us too. The “extensive slum life” among poor American blacks and, increasingly, among the white American poor and working class, has caused and is causing those cultures to decompose. I don’t say that judgmentally, but I do say we have to see this for what it is. Back when my folks were growing up, in rural poverty, the culture among the white poor (I don’t know about the black poor back then) was generally that of the Turkish slums. That is fast going, and has in many places gone.

What does this have to do with Jones’s point? We have reached a point in the broader culture in the United States in which many people do not instinctively feel the need for traditional religious values, or marriage. They do not understand what most cultures in human history have understood: that sexuality needs to be bound within authoritative structures in order to be controlled, for the good of the tribe and the individuals within it. This has meant untold hardship, usually falling on females, but strong marriage cultures also lessen the possibility of women like my friend falling into such a deep hole.

In the modern West, marriage is not tied to sexuality, childbearing, and integration into the larger community and family, unless those ties are chosen. There is little or no intrinsic and transcendent meaning to marriage. We marry because we wish to formalize the affection we have for our partner. Many people marry for more reasons than that, but the point is that the baseline in America today is that marriage is expressive and temporary by its nature. There is no penalty, either actual or felt, for having sex outside of marriage, or for a couple living together without being married. So why marry?

The case for traditional marriage makes little sense to modern people, even many modern Christians, because our sense of what marriage is has changed radically, especially after the Sexual Revolution. If marriage is only, or primarily, about two people (for now) formalizing in law and custom their mutual affection, then why deny it to same-sex couples? Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis made a powerful natural law argument for privileging traditional marriage. I read it, and it’s very solid. But I knew as I was reading it that it was futile. When you have to reason people into seeing the value of marriage, and keeping marriage between one man and one woman, you’ve lost the battle. Ours is a culture that has come to prize individual choice and personal autonomy above all things. You can show people on paper why this makes sense, but it’s not going to change minds, because their hearts are where the real decision is being made.

I read something from C.S. Lewis’s book The Discarded Image the other day that is relevant to this discussion. Lewis is talking about the collapse of what he calls the Model — that is, the metaphysical view held by the medievals, who believed that this material world was not self-subsistent, but rather anchored in transcendent reality. Lewis makes a point that would be greatly elaborated on decades later by Charles Taylor: that the metaphysical view of the medievals was one way of construing the world, and it is not necessarily a worse way than the way we do it. We think today that our model is better because it is truer, but this is much less true than we know:

There is no question here of the old Model’s being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.

… I hope no one will think that I am recommending a return to the Medieval Model. I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none. We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. But there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind. We must recognize that what has been called ‘a taste in universes’ is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such batter could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.

It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts – unprovoked as the nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in the witness’s mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest.

You can see the application to our own society’s concept of sex, marriage, and childbearing. I’ve mentioned here before that some Christian college professors told me once that they despaired over their students making solid, stable commitments to marriage and family, because so many of them had never seen it modeled for them. It is obviously not the case that it’s impossible to form stable marriages and families, but if you don’t see it around you, you may not believe that it is achievable. This, I think, is the situation my friend finds herself in, and it has affected her adult children too. In our general case, our society decided that it did not want the burdens of lifelong marriage, and of the standard that restricted sex to marriage, that it would find more fulfillment if it cast them aside. This fits perfectly with the general movement of the culture towards individual autonomy. Cultures are made up of people, and people will only ask the questions to which they are prepared to hear answers. They won’t hear what they don’t want to hear. This is where we are on marriage and family.

I never tire of quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s saying that the best arguments for the Church’s claims are not its propositions and syllogisms, but the art it produces, and its saints. I think this is the case for marriage too, at least in this decadent culture. People are not persuadable by reason, mostly because they do not share the premises on which the arguments are based. We have to accept that. They will live out the consequences of the ideas they have chosen to believe. The truth of the way Jones, as a believing Muslim, and I, as a believing traditional Christian, have chosen to live will be vindicated by our lives, and the lives of our families. That will be our witness; no other can persuade people in the grip of this madness. That’s the only reason I became a believing Christian. I had the arguments down pat in my head, but my heart refused to accept the consequences, until I had driven my life into a ditch.

As Philip Rieff taught us, people believe Truth is therapy; it’s what makes us feel good. That’s a powerful idea. It happens to be a lie. But it’s one that people are going to have to learn for themselves. They will start asking questions that the secular liberal Model cannot answer, but we can. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of suffering before the Great Re-Learning takes place. Trads like us, Jones, are going to have to be around to help the walking wounded, and to show them by our lives that there is a better way. We must be prepared to meet them with mercy, not judgment, because the way it went with them, it could have gone with us as well.