Rod Dreher's Blog, page 611

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.

SJWs At The Opera

A musicology grad student writes:

This is something you might want to discuss in your on-going coverage of SJW insanity in academia. Check out this article and the discussion in the comments: http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/. This has become a big deal within the discipline really quickly, even causing the president of the American Musicological Society to send out an email today about it to try to quell the controversy. To say the least, I think the critics are crazy in finding offense over the most trivial of matters. But this is unfortunately the reality of the humanities these days. How depressing to think that I’ll have to deal with absurdities such as this for many years to come.

The linked article is a short piece by Pierpaolo Polzonetti, an award-winning music instructor, who starts it like this:

When Bard College asked me to teach a three-hour class on Haydn’s Creation at Eastern Correctional Facility, I did not know what to expect. I accepted out of curiosity. Eastern Correctional Facility is a massive neo-gothic maximum-security prison built in 1900 in rural New York. Crossing into the prison’s mighty walls and passing through the security checkpoint can be intimidating. Encountering the incarcerated students has an even more powerful effect, but in a positive way. To me these men seemed to have dissolved the prison walls, thanks to their intellectual curiosity and their eagerness to learn. They opened their minds and ears to music that sounded exotic to many of them. Eighteenth-Century oratorios and operas can appear meaningless or dull to listeners mostly accustomed to the blatant lyrics and pounding beat of rap music. Classical music and opera, like rap, are acquired tastes and their value is both intrinsic and contextual. Fortunately they had already carefully read the texts I had assigned, including passages from Milton, Ovid, and the book of Genesis. This allowed us to engage with Haydn’s Creation on the basis of a shared intellectual background that made the oratorio somehow familiar and approachable.

The experience was so enlightening that I decided to teach an entire opera history class for inmates entitled “Opera and Ideas.” I taught it at the Westville Correctional Facility in Indiana during the Fall semester of 2014.

Thus far, most of the debate on education in prison has focused primarily on the issue of whether it is ethical to make educational opportunities available to criminals.

 

Polzonetti goes on to make a case that yes, we should do things like teach opera to prisoners. It’s simply not true, he argues, that these rough, violent men can’t appreciate the most complex music. He concludes by saying that in his experiences with inmates, opera taught them how to understand the misdirected human passions that determined their fate, and even gave them a sense of peace:

Mozart’s Don Giovanni gave these students a chance to better understand real-life emotions that, when repressed or out of control, can be destructive: fear and fearlessness, guilt and remorselessness, sexual passion leading to compulsion, sexual abuse, even to rape and murder. It became obvious to all of us, all the more so in prison, that our world is full of Don Giovannis. There is no other place than prison where, even when played through small portable speakers, his hymn “Viva la libertà!” resounds with more power than in an opera theater, amplified by emotions that can break the heart, but heal the mind.

Read the whole thing. Ponzonetti didn’t have to go to a prison to teach criminals about opera, but he did, and both he and his students learned something about music and human nature.

Well, the poor SOB had no idea what was coming next. From the comments section:

I’m disturbed the tone of this piece, as well as some of the specifics. We can begin with the assumption that all incarcerated males listen to rap. Do none of them listen to pop, rock, country, jazz, or other genres? Is the author making assumptions about his student population? And are those assumptions based on race?

Next the author dismisses rap as having “blatant lyrics” and a “pounding beat.” Does “blatant” mean sexual? violent? speaking a truth? Does opera not exhibit these same characteristics at times? Are there no examples of so-called classical music with a pounding beat?

Next, why does the author feel he has to point out the race of the student who shouts “never” three times, with a frightening crescendo no less, thus associating the race of this student with frightening.

The assumption that opera can “heal the mind” reduced inmates of the correctional system in a way that suggests that the author never bothered to understand the complexity of their stories and life experiences.

While there are so many other points I found racist and elitist and entitled, I’ll point out this last one–why, in the 21st century–do certain musicologists believe that an understanding of formal elements of musics trumps a visceral emotional response, that you cannot truly understand the music and your response until you know what a descending rapid staccato scale or loud ascending octave leap is? I thought we were so over that.

That the AMS [American Musicological Society] continues to support this kind of rhetoric is shameful.

 

Here’s another:

Prof. Polzonetti may not be aware of the deep institutionalized racism that underpins the US prison-industrial complex, which his essay perhaps unwittingly reinscribes through its metaphorical language and “salvation through high/European art” narrative. As a native of Italy, like Prof. Polzonetti, I am well aware of how substantially less sensitive many Italians are to institutional racism — not because we don’t have racism in Italy, but because we’ve long been able to ignore or deny it with the excuse of maintaining an imperative of high-cultural homogeneity. While I find Prof. Polzonetti’s apparent unawareness of the classist and racist undertones of his narrative troubling, I can understand it because he may not realize how problematic it is within contemporary American social politics (though I hope he considers such implications as he works to finalize the expanded version, since I believe readers of the important Italian online journal that is due to publish it deserve better). I am, however, extremely puzzled that the editors of Musicology Now did not perceive publishing this essay as a potential setback to the very public musicology they have been working to cultivate, with what I consider some success. Any individual — scholar or otherwise — who reads this paean to elite art soothing the savage beast might well think of musicologists as self-congratulatory champions of art-for-the-sake-of-art helping violent brutes finally understand what it means to have well-controlled emotions. I’m saddened that our professional society would choose that public face.

Oh no. Oh no.

Oh yes. Another one:

I am outraged by this article — disgusted even! No, not by the supposed casual racism of the prose — frankly, the outrage is a little over-the-top, IMHO. But this line here just boils my blood: “But musical forms do convey feelings with immediacy only when understood, structurally, historically, and contextually.” As an ethnomusicologist, I think this is an outrageous claim! Really? Have we learned nothing from the Meyer-Keil debate on participatory discrepancies, pleasure, and form? Who among us really believes that opera can only be immediate and feelingful through sustained study? As an opera-fan, this assertion is deeply offensive.

Read the whole thing. The happy news is that there are an equal number of sane voices speaking up, but good grief! A music professor goes to a prison to teach opera, his students find that they like it, everybody’s happy, everybody learns something — but the Social Justice Warriors can’t stand it!

SJWs ruin everything. They kill everything they touch. Why would anyone want to work in a field where these nuts run rampant?

UPDATE: Having just approved comments to this post, I don’t think many of you who have commented realize that the AMS website is not a general interest website, but is a news and information source for musicologists. The people who read it and comment there are professional music teachers and advanced students. It’s not like peering into the comments section at The New York Times.

Letters From The Other America

Here are two extraordinary e-mails that came in last night from readers of this blog.

A doctor writes (I’ve slightly edited this to protect his privacy):

I’ve been reading you for years, and have enjoyed a lot of the trails I’ve followed you down. I gotta say: I appreciate your work more right now than I think I ever have. Funny what becomes urgent – but I just had to express gratitude for the way you’re trying to empathize with Trump’s voters, who are apparently objects of contempt or fear to the journalist caste, and in either case incomprehensible. Thanks for doing that.

Conor Friedersdorf did a good thing over at the Atlantic by noting contra the common narrative, Trump is doing remarkably well in all sorts of demographic classes. Which is the other reason I write you.

I’m a physician who reads Dostoevsky, leafs through Adbusters in the checkout line at Whole Foods, and drinks craft beer. I’m also an evangelical Christian. My extended family mostly have their finances in order. I do not live in an abandoned company town, but in a dense urban area with vibrancy and artisanal lumberjacks (hey handmake single and double-bitted axes for hipster outdoorsmen; they make great gifts), and the sort of zoning that would make Matt Yglesias, very, very happy. I am, in fact, the sort of guy who knows what sort of zoning makes Matt Yglesias happy. I have relationships at church that are meaningful and sustaining and I probably break bread with neighbors in my apartment complex a couple times a week. I personally will only benefit from increased immigration, and from more churn and fiercer competition among the desperate people who pick things and wash things and nail things together. And I am probably voting for Trump.

I was firmly anti-Trump at first when I saw Russell Moore and other wise, anointed voices of evangelicalism speaking out against Trump, who’s never been a man I admired. Even though that meant they were mostly advocating for Neocon and Corporatist elites that have treated people of faith as house elves for decades. Sure, Trump’s a villain. But I’m on Twitter, you know? And I read the news, too, and the editorials. And I see the constant plaintive-yet-imperious calls for immigration, which sounds remarkably similar whether coming from Soros or Merkel or Moore or the Pope, and I see how quickly those calls slide into accusations of (a) UNCHRISTLIKE ATTITUDES or (B) RACISM, and I think, gee. Pretty obvious what the right choice is here. Clearly the answer is importing a new electorate. The old one is so…unchristlike. And kind of awkwardly white.

You hit the nail on the head when you said that right-think about immigration was a cheap way for evangelicals in comfortable neighborhoods with safe schools to signal their own virtue. That doesn’t necessitate it being incorrect, but motives matter here. Or at least the people going all takfiri  say it matters. So it must.

I am no longer listening to the imaginary consensus of the evangelicals. As soon as you accept that immigration is at least a debate worth having, Trump suddenly makes sense. Debate about immigration has been pushed out of the bounds of polite discourse by our kakistocracy for the last twenty years. Evangelical leaders have been complicit in this, perhaps because they saw this as an issue where they could find common ground with the secular technocrats they alternately lobbied and fought.  Immigration is only part of our conversation now because at least a plurality of the electorate has in spite of propaganda demanded we talk about it (is that…democracy?)  The degree to which the other Republican candidates have had to shift on this issue marks how important Trump’s run has already been. Trump may be a more open narcissist than the other candidates: he’s the only narcissist who’s been speaking the truth about immigration. And yes, this issue…pre-empts others. It is an existential issue. It is in fact a values issue. It will determine the future of the country and will probably determine the extent to which – or speed at which – people actually start pursuing your Benedict Option.

American progressives have been utterly, transparently honest about their hope and plan of demographic replacement. The American Right has just been too…naive? to take them at their word. When they’re not crowing about it in articles they’re talking about it privately. We’ve all had the conversation with the worldly-wise professional we actually like a lot who just can’t stand these people from their miles and miles of shitty suburban sprawl but oh man their days are numbered. The meaningless will kill them if nothing else does. And you know, the worst thing about these white people of Wal-Mart is that they’re all kind of racist. 

And you can’t blame the Left for wanting to do this: plans A through Z depend on it. The demographics that elected Reagan would have elected Romney in a landslide. And the demographics that elected Reagan would probably have been a lot less unequal if they’d lasted till now, with both more upward pressure on wages from the bottom due to a tighter labor supply and more pressure toward social solidarity on the top due to shared language and culture and yeah, nationality. Good Liberal Robert Putnam, bless his heart, has the honesty to at least mutter what a lot of conservatives are too blinded by ideology (or fear) to say out loud: that the makeup of a community matters for social trust, and that people are not fungible. But, when you can simultaneously talk about increasing immigration as the only decent thing to do, and the poverty of immigrant communities and the native workers they displaced as anational shame that needs fixed right now: well, you’ve got yourself a stew!

This is not just an economic issue. If you concede the country to somebody else, you have conceded the country to somebody else. They will use their power to perpetuate their own value system, not yours. It’s important to note that every setback social conservatives have suffered in the political realm over the last twenty years has happened as our portion of the electorate has shrunk. And now we’re gonna pretend it’s virtuous to compound the problem? We are the sad sack training our replacement and hoping this means the company’s giving us a promotion and an assistant.

It is an insane morality that suggests we create value by firing our countrymen for strangers. It is certainly not Christ-like. There is nothing Christian about contempt for your brother. There is nothing kind or godly about creating brain drain in developing countries, about incentivizing years of remittances and the separation of families (every time somebody tells me that deportation separates families, I have to count to ten), about literally creating inequality and massive alienation by inviting outsiders in to work at wages your own countrymen won’t accept and pass those jobs on someday to their children (and if you don’t think that’s happening, do I have news for you.)

It is an insane political ideology that serves not a nation, which has a people, but a platonic ideal of a country, which could be populated by any people. And assumes, like we did after we invaded Iraq, that we can declare any group of people like us  and see them become assimilated folk who delight in our laws.

The big story for me these last few months was Angus Deaton’s paper in PNAS. Everybody knows the basics, but I guess it didn’t hit everybody as hard. If one thing pushed me to Trump’s camp, that was it. The schadenfreude of the left was revolting (ha, whites are finally suffering! minorities have always been suffering!), and the right was weirdly quiet about it. Maybe because the implications were so clear, and so disturbing, and so unsolvable by the Club for Growth: this was a group of people collectively self-destructing. People without meaning or hope. We created this. We sold our brothers and sisters for that stew.

As a Christian, and as a physician who physically cares for genuinely wonderful and suffering illegal immigrants every day, and who cares for genuinely self-destructive American-born narcotics addicts, both white and black, I want Trump’s campaign to continue. I want him to force us to deal with immigration, and with the way we’re treating brothers and sisters like garbage people. I don’t trust Trump to do much, but I trust him to keep talking about immigration, and I think there’s a decent chance he wouldn’t actually betray his voters on it (I mean, Rubio and Cruz and Bush…). I guess I’m a Trump supporter with a (narrow) ideological motivation? If you look you’ll find more like me. I’ve got truly respectable friends in academia and the business world who know the secret handshake.

Far more than I thought I’d write. For obvious reasons, if you share any of this, I’d prefer you leave my name out of it.

Meanwhile, this letter from a Massachusetts professional in the same class as the previous writer, and who is a liberal that gets Trump:

Great posts about Trump and Trumpiana today.

I just want to respond, positively, to something you said about traveling around Louisiana over the last few years. I have actually travelled quite a bit inside the U.S. over the course of my life, and it became obvious to me a long time ago that one’s politics are usually profoundly influenced by where one lives (heck, they ought to be, if you have any meaningful relationship to the place you inhabit). I live near Boston, but I know if I lived in the country somewhere near Tucson, where I have visited (just to take one example), my attitudes about guns and border control – to name just a couple of issues — might be a bit different. Anyone inclined to pontificate about politics should travel more, and imagine how these policies look different to people in different places, before we condemn others’ views.

Anyway, one thing that has become clear lately is how devastating globalization has been to rural America. I go to Western Maine on a regular basis, and it’s apparent that there are no jobs, and that young, able-bodied people are all leaving. Rural Maine is emptying out. Those that remain are often people who would have a hard time finding employment in any circumstances. If you’re a business owner in Oxford, Maine, I’m sure it looks to you like everyone is on disability and not pulling their weight, because you don’t see the talented, hardworking young people who grew up in your town — they’ve left. I’m sure this is true across the country.

Check out this old Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Where the Brains Are.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/where-the-brains-are/305202/

It shows, graphically, how college educated Americans have become increasingly concentrated in a few major metropolitan areas over the last generation. Rural areas that used to have a reasonable share of the country’s educated citizens have lost them. The economies of the cities where they now concentrate are booming, unemployment is low, and the plight of rural Americans is invisible.

The differences between Republicans and Democrats have always been (at least in the last 30-40 years) squabbles between different factions of the American elite. Both of those factions have grown increasingly out of touch with people outside the country’s wealthy urban centers.

Democrats shouldn’t take comfort from the Trump phenomenon. On the one hand, it may be reassuring to see that a substantial bloc of Republican voters thinks the Republican establishment is full of shit – a point on which they and the Democrats may agree. On the other hand, the Democrats have utterly failed to capitalize on the alienation of this bloc from the Republican elite.

I wish I could write more. I enjoy your blog a great deal. My politics are quite different from yours, but it fascinates me that I agree with you as often as I do.

Thanks for writing, you two. Lots to think about here. In short, if the Republican leadership were not so caught up so much in their economic dogmas, and the Democratic leadership were not so caught up in its social and cultural dogmas, we would be looking at something very different, and something far less Trumpish. But they are, and we are. So it goes.