Rod Dreher's Blog, page 611

The Heady Wine of Trumpism

Reader, I drank it. And I did so in the company of a distinguished Catholic philosopher. It wasn’t pretty good. The conversation was much better.

At dinner earlier Friday night in Charlottesville, there was some conversation about Donald Trump. I didn’t check everybody’s party registration card, but I’m fairly certain that everyone around the table was conservative, and there was a great deal of concern about Donald Trump. I floated the idea that C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting For the Barbarians” may explain Trump. Here’s the poem:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?

Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What laws can the senators make now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate

on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.

He has even prepared a scroll to give him,

replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

And some who have just returned from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Is it possible that people want Trump to blow up the system because nothing seems to work for them, or at least to their satisfaction, because everything has become decadent, useless, stuck? Is the barbarian Trump, who promises to come in and smash things up, a kind of solution for a nation that’s exhausted? Note the ambiguity in Cavafy’s phrase; the barbarians of the poem are not a solution to the actual problems the people face, but they give the impression of a solution by relieving the people of the responsibility of muddling through. Trump would “solve” our current problems by giving us new and unprecedented ones to worry about.

Daniel Mendelsohn said several years ago that Cavafy’s poem was relevant to the political stalemate then engulfing Washington. Mendelsohn’s views are highly relevant to this year’s presidential election, and I commend them highly to you. Here’s an excerpt:

Those whom the poet does judge—and judge harshly—are leaders who abdicate their responsibilities, to principle and to their people. Cavafy had little patience for those whose self-interest (and, often, self-satisfaction) lead them to dangerous delusions. … The cardinal sins in Cavafy’s vision of history and politics are complacency, smugness, and a solipsistic inability to see the big picture.

More:

Inaction, of course, can be as destructive as ill-advised action. This is why the aimless standing around and waiting that Cavafy so brilliantly evokes in “Waiting for the Barbarians” is so contemptible. The vigor of the leaders, the effectiveness of their oratory, the political will of the citizens have been so atrophied by indolence and luxury and complacency that they can only hope for disaster as a means of renewing the state. Depending on your politics, you may be tempted to map the current political crisis onto “Waiting for the Barbarians” in any number of ways: Are the barbarians the Democrats or the Republicans? Is the “emperor” Obama or Boehner—or Reid? To Cavafy, those details would have been of little interest. The point was that these things happen again and again, and that whatever else they may mean, they are always, always tests of character—for individual politicians and for whole nations. It is even—or rather, especially—when the barbarians (whoever they are) are at the gates, when crisis is inevitable or even imminent, that right action is the only option, whether or not it’s likely to succeed. Even in politics, it’s the journey that counts, not just the destination.

See Charles Murray’s take on Trump, in which he says that his rise is not an example of working-class vituperation, but is actually rational, given how much the working class has suffered. Murray says that the cultural inegalitarianism we’re living with is without precedent:

Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck” in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?” Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s capital.

For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.

In the 1960s, Murray says, most white men of the working class were married and had jobs:

Then things started to change. For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015. Over that same period, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. (The numbers for nonwhite working-class males show declines as well, though not as steep and not as continuous.)

These are stunning changes, and they are visible across the country. In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income. Almost half aren’t married, with all the collateral social problems that go with large numbers of unattached males.

In these communities, about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs also have become a major problem, in small towns as well as in urban areas.

Murray says that is undeniable that racism and xenophobia informs a part of Trumpism. If you think that’s all it is, though, you’re missing the forest for the trees:

But the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class. During the past half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the rewards have gone to the working class. The economists can supply caveats and refinements to that statement, but the bottom line is stark: The real family income of people in the bottom half of the income distribution hasn’t increased since the late 1960s.

During the same half-century, American corporations exported millions of manufacturing jobs, which were among the best-paying working-class jobs. They were and are predominantly men’s jobs. In both 1968 and 2015, 70% of manufacturing jobs were held by males.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t fully agree with Murray. He’s a libertarian, and quite possibly for that reason dismisses cultural factors leading to working class decline (e.g., the loss of strong communal norms and expectations post-1960s). He also can’t bring himself to violate other libertarian orthodoxies about how government policy could ameliorate the living conditions of that beleaguered working class. David Frum addresses all this in his long negative review of Murray’s book about the decline of the white working class.

Still, don’t miss the broader point: Trumpism may be crazy, but it’s by no means irrational. I don’t think it’s at all irrational either to be deeply concerned about what a strongman like Trump would mean for our country. Me, I think that we face the same problem with Trumpism that we face with Black Lives Matter: not allowing the intolerant, illiberal extremism of the leaders and some of the followers distract us from the fact that both phenomena arise out of real and legitimate grievances.

View From Your Table

Charlottesville, Virginia

I’ll be 49 in a couple of days, and have gotten this far in life without ever having tasted hot toddy … until today, courtesy of my Reform-minded host, Greg Thompson, who shaped up my cocktail lassitude. That’s Greg in the background. We were at the Whiskey Jar. Man, I could have sipped those things all night, cold as it is outside.

Oh, here was my lunch from earlier in the day: my first-ever bowl of bibimbap, from a joint called Zzaam Fresh Korean Grill. Was delicious, but I wish I had avoided the sauce, because it was hard to pick out the specific flavors:

Bunnies Fire Back

All my Catholic academic friends are infuriated by what’s happening at Mount St. Mary’s, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Emmitsburg, Md. Former TAC blogger John Schwenkler, who once taught philosophy there, tells the shocking tale. Excerpt:

Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland, a low-profile Catholic university, is suddenly the focus of heavy national publicity. “Drown the bunnies,” (Let’s get rid of academically weak freshmen), announced as a policy by the school’s president, Simon Newman, attracted  attention, but when the bunny-drowning strategy was followed by the firing of two people, one a tenured professor, a small, curious story blossomed into large national headlines.

Wait … drowning the bunnies? Shoving the weak overboard? At a Catholic university? The student newspaper broke the story that school president Simon Newman was going to secretly use a survey of freshmen students to force out 20 to 25 of them he deemed least likely to succeed — this, to bolster MSM’s retention numbers. There’s more:

Yet when my good friend Gregory Murry, an untenured history professor at Mount St. Mary’s who helped administer the survey objected to the endeavor, President Newman told him to stop caring: “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

Naberhaus and Egan were fired for helping to reveal this callous attitude toward student welfare and Murry’s job is apparently in jeopardy, too.

Crux reports that after over 6,000 people nationwide signed a digital petition demanding the fired professors’ reinstatement, Newman sent out an e-mail defending his actions to parents of MSM students. Newman, by the way, had never run a college before, but as an MBA holder, had lots of experience in the world of … private equity finance.

Yes. They hired Gordon Gekko to run a small Catholic liberal arts college in rural Maryland. And now look.

.@chronicle pic.twitter.com/lbllbZCfYL

— Sam Cohen (@cohenss) February 10, 2016

Laurus Review & Contest

Photo of book jacket by Rod Dreher

A rave review for Laurus in the LA Review of Books. Excerpt:

Under the spell of Laurus, we imagine what it would be like to measure life in seasons and harvests rather than clocks and clicks, to walk in hallowed paths and receive ancient wisdom, to suffer and cleanse the soul. It deposits us, much like the 2007 Russian film The Island — about a man who becomes a contemporary holy fool — into a magical world steeped in voluntary suffering, devotion, and answered prayer, which stands in opposition to Western skepticism and aversion to irrationality.

Unlike a saintly figure one might find in other postmodern Russian work, Vodolazkin’s holy man and his medieval world are drawn with sincere, uncynical affection. As such, the novel embodies a break with immediate post-Soviet literature, which is heavily skeptical and leavened with irony.Laurus contains stylistic similarities to contemporary Russian works — the fracturing of time, the linguistic playfulness — but within the confines of a tale of faith. The result: an instructive saint’s life keyed for a sophisticated contemporary audience, and suggesting an alternative to materialism, irony, and despair.

The concern with the “Russian soul” and life of the spirit reemerges regularly in Russian culture — marked by a turning away from the West, the need to reestablish who we are in terms of who we were, and of how we differ from others. It’s not surprising, in these uncertain decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to see a book like Laurus take the big awards in Russia. The materialism that seized that country at the end of the Soviet Union left behind a spiritual hunger, and set the national identity adrift. Ironic literature can meet despair with a kind of gallows humor, but it doesn’t successfully address the deeper need. Laurus’s loving portrait of the medieval world and the holy man’s bildungsroman, couched in entertainingly playful postmodernist language, offers an enticing alternative to contemporary cynicism. And we in the West might also consider the extent to which longing for such certitudes might be surfacing within us, like an old water bottle under the snow.

Read the whole thing. And if you have not yet done so, please buy a copy of Laurus. 

I found out just now that Laurus will be out in paperback this September. The publicist has generously offered ten copies to readers of this blog. I would like to have a contest to give them away. For people who have already read Laurus, please give me between 150-250 words explaining how Evgeny Vodolazkin’s novel of medieval Russia is relevant to our lives as 21st century Americans. Because I don’t want to disadvantage those who have not yet read Laurus, and who would do so if they received a copy in the mail this autumn, I would like to invite those readers to explain in 150-250 words what we contemporary Americans have to learn from Russian spirituality, as expressed in one or more works of Russian literature of the 19th or 20th century.

You have till midnight Sunday to participate. E-mail me your responses at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Use the subject line “LAURUS CONTEST”. I’ll post the ten best entries on Monday. Please let me know if you want me to use your name and city, or just your initials, when I publish your entry. Also, if you are one of the winners I’ll be sending your e-mail to the Laurus publicist, who will see to it that you get a paperback copy when it comes out in September.

Thomas Jefferson’s Trinity

Sorry I’ve been away for most of the day. I did a breakfast interview with some sources for the Benedict Option book, then drove out to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s country estate. I had never been. It really was a remarkable thing to see, and I’m very glad I went. It’s much smaller than I imagined it would be. His library and office, though, were thrilling places to be. You really do get a sense of the greatness of the man’s intellect and character.

I had a very disconcerting moment, an unusual feeling, I think, for an American to have in a place like Mr. Jefferson’s house. We stood with the guide in the parlor, admiring the oil portraits Jefferson hung along the wall — most of them of historical figures he admired. On the southern wall were three portraits in a row: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke — described by Jefferson as “my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.” That, plus the marble bust of Voltaire flanking one side of the door in the entrance hall, really brought home to me how much a man of the Enlightenment Jefferson was. All the Founding Fathers were, but ignorant as I am about colonial history, I had not realized how deeply Jefferson identified with the Enlightenment.

As someone who has been doing a lot of reading lately in European intellectual history, and who has very mixed feelings about the Enlightenment, I was startled by the feeling that Jefferson was, well, wrong about some important matters. Obviously this is contestable, and I expect that most Americans would disagree. The only reason I bring it up was because I felt a bit profane, even unpatriotic, having those thoughts there. It reminded me, in a small way, of how I felt when I visited the Panthéon in Paris — but only in a small way. I was frankly repulsed by that exhibit, stolen from the Church and made into a museum of Enlightenment and Progress. I felt nothing like that at Monticello, please be clear, but I had a faintly similar sense of alienation. I wondered: Had I been alive during the Revolution, would I have been a Loyalist to the Crown, for the same reasons that being in Jefferson’s house and being confronted in his art by his Enlightened sensibilities made me feel so surprisingly alien.

Mr. Jefferson’s Trinity: Bacon, Newton, Locke. And Voltaire standing guard by the door. I wish there were a Gothic cathedral nearby so I could go rebalance my chakras…

UPDATE: Yes, obviously I know Jefferson was a slaveowner. I didn’t think I had to mention here that I believe he was very wrong about the morality of slaveowning, because everybody knows that. What startled me was how out of kilter it felt to be confronted by how deeply he was a man of the Enlightenment. I should have known that, but somehow, I didn’t, and it didn’t hit me until I saw the art he had in his house.

Ta-Nehisi’s Voting Sanders

Seriously, this might be big for Bernie Sanders in South Carolina:

AMY GOODMAN: Will you be voting for Senator Sanders?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I will be voting for Senator Sanders. I have tried to avoid this question, but, yes, I will be voting for Senator Sanders. I try to avoid that, because I want to write as a journalist—do you know what I mean?—and separate that from my role as, I don’t know, a private citizen. But I don’t think much is accomplished by ducking the question. Yes, I will vote for Senator Sanders. My son influenced me.

The most popular black public intellectual in the country has just come out for Bernie Sanders. That can’t be good for Hillary. If I were Bernie Sanders, I would be blanketing South Carolina with ads citing this endorsement.

Party Establishments Vs. America

David Frum has a great short analysis of the New Hampshire results, calling them a victory for democracy over out-of-touch party establishments. A majority of Democratic voters, he says, showed themselves to be unwilling to accept the second coming of the shameless, money-grubbing Clinton machine. Those voters are not satisfied taking whatever warmed-over establishment slop the Democratic Party is serving them. More:

On the Republican side, the upset was, if possible, even more stunning. For 20 years and more, Republican presidential contests have operated as a policy cartel. Concerns that animate actual Republican voters—declining middle-class wages, immigration, retirement security—have been tacitly ruled out of bounds. Concerns that excite Republican donors—tax cuts, entitlement reforms—have been more-or-less unanimously accepted by all plausible candidates. Candidates competed on their life stories, on their networks of friends, and on their degree of religious commitment—but none who aspired to run a national campaign deviated much from the economic platform of the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth.

This year’s Republican contest, however, has proved a case study of Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed.” Republicans, it turns out, also worry about losing health care. They also want to preserve Social Security and Medicare in roughly their present form. They believe that immigration has costs, and that those costs are paid by people like them—even as its benefits flow to employers, investors, and foreigners. They know that their personal situation is deteriorating, and they interpret that to mean (as who wouldn’t?) that the country is declining, too. “Hope,” “growth,” “opportunity,” “choice”—those have long since dwindled to sinister euphemisms for “less,” “worse,” and “not for you.”

Read the whole thing.  Clinton said last night in her NH concession speech, “Wall Street can never be allowed to once again threaten Main Street, and I will fight to rein in Wall Street, and you know what, I know how to do it.” Oh? Politico reports on her Goldman Sachs speech:

When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.

Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman’s workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.

So as long as your Wall Street firm can show good results on hiring and promoting women and minorities, you can do whatever you want on the market, and Hillary Clinton won’t complain. Well, that was more or less the point of Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project shakedown. But I digress.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat is sitting in his basement under a 40-watt bulb, drinking rye neat out of a jelly jar, contemplating the Republican Götterdämmerung. Excerpt:

Or should we begin to root for Donald Trump — not as a candidate actually to champion, now or in the fall, but as an agent of divine retribution for a corrupt and stumbling party, a pillaging-and-torching Babylonian invasion of which it must be said: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

I think that temptation still deserves to be resisted. But stay tuned.

The Triumph of Trans Lysenkoism

The Narrative says that only right-wing nuts are against Science™. Well, consider the frankly horrifying case of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, as reported by Jesse Singal in New York magazine. Excerpts:

On paper, Dr. Kenneth Zucker isn’t the sort of person who gets suddenly and unceremoniously fired. For decades, the 65-year-old psychologist had led the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic (GIC), in Toronto, one of the most well-known clinics in the world for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria — that is, the feeling that the body they were born with doesn’t fit their true gender identity. Zucker had built up quite a CV during his time leading the clinic: In addition to being one of the most frequently cited names in the research literature on gender dysphoria and gender-identity development, and the editor of the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, he took a leading role helping devise diagnostic and treatment guidelines for gender dysphoric and transgender individuals. He headed the group which developed the DSM-5’s criteria for its “gender dysphoria” entry, for example, and also helped write the most recent “standards of care” guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health  —  one of the bibles for clinicians who treat transgender and gender-dysphoric patients.

An impressive career, yes, but it’s doubtful any of this gave him much comfort on December 15. That was when he was called in from vacation for an 8:30 a.m. meeting with his employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), one of the largest mental health and addiction research hospitals in Canada. Given the long-brewing investigation of his clinic by the hospital, it’s unlikely Zucker was feeling optimistic about what awaited him in downtown Toronto.

Zucker’s crime? He is against the idea that children who experience gender dysphoria should be rushed into transitioning via hormone therapy and surgery, preferring instead a more cautious approach, given that unstable gender identity in childhood and adolescence sometimes resolves itself in time. This position is anathema to trans activists. Note well: Dr. Zucker is in favor of gender transitioning; he simply says that the scientific knowledge we have at this point advises a more cautious approach.

For this, he got fired, and his clinic shut down. More:

Zucker, his colleagues, and their many allies in the world of academic sex research see things differently. To them, the real scandal here is how CAMH responded to a sustained campaign of political pressure: by allowing a vital scientific question — vital not only to gender-dysphoric and transgender young people, but to anyone who is a parent or will one day become one — to be decided by activists on the basis of flimsy, anonymous allegations. They think the activists’ claims about the clinic are unfounded, and argue that the controversy has more to do with adult agendas than with genuine concern for gender-dysphoric children and youth. As Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist with a research focus on gender-identity issues, explained in an email, this fight resembles many other culture-war battles: “[C]hildren serve as proxies for the competing value systems of adults.” Indeed, some parents of GIC patients feel that as a result of the clinic’s closing, their children have been cut off from a place that was — despite rumors to the contrary — a safe, nurturing environment for young people to explore their emerging gender identities.

… And if you look closely at what really happened — if you read the review (which CAMH has now pulled off of its website), speak with the activists who effectively wrote large swaths of it, examine the scientific evidence, and talk to former GIC clinicians and the parents of patients they worked with, it’s hard not to come to an uncomfortable, politically incorrect conclusion: Zucker’s defenders are right. This was a show trial.

One more thing: Zucker apparently thought his job was to do responsible science, not master ideological politics:

The consensus among those who know Zucker is that while he’s a gifted clinician and researcher, he isn’t great at playing politics. He is, well, an old-school white male research scientist: “He responds to every question with a methodical three-part answer,” noted Hanna Rosin in a 2008 article in The Atlantic, “often ending by climbing a chair to pull down a research paper he’s written.” Over the summer of 2015, more than one friend and colleague tried to explain to Zucker that he needed to defend himself more assertively (though he was in part stymied from doing so by a restrictive CAMH media policy). But while Zucker may lack certain self-preservation instincts, or may have wrongly believed his perch atop the sex-research hierarchy afforded him protection from activist pressure, a close reading of the External Review suggests none of this really mattered at that point. The review is a markedly unprofessional document that takes many of the worst claims about the GIC at face value — without bothering to check them.

Read the whole thing. It is long and very well-reported. You need to do this. These activists stop at nothing — and manifestly, they have allies in high places. Note well that their sleazy protests against Zucker would have come to nothing if not for the intellectual and moral cowardice of his superiors. These are the same people who are compelling the US Government to sue school districts that won’t allow biological males into high school female locker rooms. This is how they work: screaming that anyone who doesn’t bend to their demands is causing trans suicides, is creating unsafe spaces, and so forth. When applied to science, it is LGBT Lysenkoism, the Soviet-era agricultural disaster caused by trying to make science fit into Stalinist political correctness.

This Radical Moment

Having slept on it, I don’t have much more to say about the blowout victories of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders than you’ve read in a thousand other places. Hillary is bound to get the Democratic nomination, but so far, we have seen a massive vote of no confidence in the Democratic establishment by its voters. That more than a small minority of Democratic voters are choosing an elderly socialist over Hillary Clinton tells you how out-of-touch the Democratic establishment is with its voters.

Same is true for the GOP and its voters. A Trump-Cruz race is a nightmare for Republican bigs. If the Establishment could have settled on a candidate, it would still be competitive, but it has not, it apparently cannot, and so while Bush, Rubio, and Kasich fight for the scraps, Trump and Cruz will both roll through South Carolina, where they are both far ahead of the pack in polls — and where Trump is far ahead of Cruz. That a trash-talking New York billionaire who violates Republican Party orthodoxies is by far and away the leading choice of the grassroots, at least to this point, is a staggering blow to the GOP establishment. Read Byron York’s post-NH report:

In late January, the New Hampshire Republican Party held a gathering that attracted GOP officials, volunteers, activists, and various other members of the party elite from across the state. At the time, Donald Trump led the Republican presidential race in New Hampshire by nearly 20 points, and had been on top of the polls since July.

What was extraordinary about the gathering was that I talked to a lot of people there, politically active Republicans, and most of them told me they personally didn’t know anyone who supported Trump. Asked about the Trump lead, one very well-connected New Hampshire Republican told me, “I don’t see it. I don’t feel it. I don’t hear it, and I spend part of every day with Republican voters.”

Readers of the story came to one of two conclusions. Either New Hampshire Republican leaders were so out of touch that they couldn’t tell something huge was happening right under their noses, or there really weren’t very many Trump voters, and the Trump phenomenon was a mirage that would fade before election day.

Now, with Trump’s smashing victory in the New Hampshire primary, we know the answer. There really were a lot of Trump voters out there, and party officials could not, or did not want, to see them.

York goes on to say that “Trump won everybody” in New Hampshire, indicating that his base there was broad. And because of that, says Ramesh Ponnuru, there is no clear anti-Trump strategy for Republicans. Though Matt Sitman’s suggestion suggests that Trump is in actuality a Reagan Slayer:

Perhaps conservative establishment needs to try strategy other than “Trump isn’t authentically conservative according to 1980s dogma”

— Matthew Sitman (@matthew_sitman) February 10, 2016

We really are into uncharted waters in American politics. Who on earth would have thought that the two candidates who represent the vitality in American politics in 2016 would be old guys from Brooklyn (Sanders) and Queens (Trump)? This is true too:

Trump, on his and Sanders’ wins: “We’re being ripped off, and he and I are the only people saying that.”

https://t.co/PLOm1R02L3

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) February 10, 2016

And this really gets to the radicalism of the present moment:

This is the first election of my adult life when one or both parties might not nominate establishment neoliberals.

— Daniel McCarthy (@ToryAnarchist) February 10, 2016

I’m going to be traveling today, and won’t be able to approve comments quickly. Please be patient.

A Surprising Fact About Medieval Cathedrals

The other day several of us were bothered by the fact that the medieval Peterborough Cathedral in England now rents out its nave for social functions, most recently an insurance company dinner. It seemed vulgar and sacrilegious to us. Well, I just came across this passage from Universe of Stone by Philip Ball, a history of the 12th century Chartres cathedral. Here he’s speaking of medieval cathedrals in general:

[T]he cathedral was the focus of the spirituality that permeated the social fabric of the age. Yet it was precisely because religions was so central to all aspects of medieval life that townspeople did not necessarily adopt a disposition of hushed awe when they passed inside its walls. The choir and sanctuary, in the eastern end of the building, was a holy place, hidden from the laity by the rood screen. But elsewhere in the church, the ordinary people made themselves at home. When a service was not in progress, they would meet their friends here, bring in their dogs and their hawks, arrange trysts, eat snacks. The poor might even bed down for the night in the gloomy recesses. Stalls clung like limpets to the walls of the building. At Strasbourg, the mayor held office in his pew in the cathedral, meeting burghers there to conduct business.

Wine merchants, probably employed by the chapter itself, even sold their wares from the nave of Chartres — by selling inside the church, they were exempted from the taxes imposes by the count of Blois and Chartres. …

It is entirely characteristic of medieval theology that such prosaic concerns should coexist with the idea that the church is a representation of heaven. That may, in fact, stand as a metaphor for the very paradox that these buildings present to modern times. They are surely the most profound expressions of the Christian faith, and with it the ontological framework, of the Middle Ages. And yet they remain resolutely material: stone and glass, wood and iron, shaped by the hands of unlettered men, who sometimes enjoyed a great deal of latitude for injecting their own preoccupations and ideas into the fabric. They are prodigious collaborations between the tangible and the spiritual, the mundane and the transcendental, the public and the personal. They embody a kind of union that art has long forgotten how to make.

Maybe I and others owe poor Peterborough an apology. Except for this sad fact: wine merchants and all manner of men could conduct profane (as in: not sacred) business inside the cathedrals because religion was at the center of medieval life. In the 21st century, insurance salesmen can sup in the nave of the Peterborough cathedral because religion is so far from the center of contemporary life.