Rod Dreher's Blog, page 626

Walker Percy Weekend 2016

Save the date: it’s happening on June 3-5, 2016, in St. Francisville. We had our first organizational meeting last night, and have some pretty great programming ideas. This year will be Walker Percy’s centenary, and this year, for the first time, we will have both of Walker and Bunt’s children, Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell and Ann Percy Moores, in attendance. What an honor. If you love Walker Percy, you won’t want to miss this very special weekend.

Watch this space for more information. If you know for sure you want to come, you would do well to make your hotel or B&B reservations NOW, because space is limited, and the town fills up pretty quickly. We will have the old favorites — the front porch Bourbon Tour, and hot boiled crawfish and cold Louisiana craft beer from Hot Tails — as well as some new things.

The Inconvenience of Rapey Refugees

Well, well, well: Deutsche Welle reports something ‘politically awkward':

City authorities identified some suspects in the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks as asylum seekers from Syria, detaining or questioning some of them, according to reports by local newspaper “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” and national daily “Die Welt,” which published an online preview of investigations by its “Welt am Sonntag” Sunday paper.

According to the newspapers’ reports, citing officers on duty on New Year’s Eve, officials checked the IDs of at least 100 people present at Cologne’s central station on December 31 after their behavior became conspicuous. Seventy-one people were identified, 11 people were remanded into custody and 32 criminal complaints were registered, according to the Welt am Sonntag (WamS) report.

“There were, quite to the contrary of what was said publicly, identity checks on numerous people,” the WamS quoted an unnamed officer as saying. “Most of them were recently-arrived asylum seekers.”

The first internal police report on the event – a so-called “wichtige Ereignis Meldung” (“important event announcement”) – spoke of a crowd mainly of “North African and Arab” origin. According to the Kölner Stadt-anzeiger, the officer leading the team at the station wanted the report to include mention of the Syrians and asylum seekers, but the senior officer writing the “WE-Meldung” decided not to, saying it would be “politically awkward.”

It is still unclear whether the same persons were involved in the assaults.

More:

WamS also received information contradicting another official statement by the city police, which said the main intention of the men in Cologne was to steal from passengers and that assault was secondary. However, “what actually happened was the exact opposite,” a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

“For the mostly Arabic offenders, sexual assault was the priority, or, to express it from their point of view, their sexual amusement was thepriority. A group of men would encircle a female victim, close the loop, and then start groping the woman,” WamS quoted the officer as saying.

The deputy chief of the trade union for police employees (the GdP), Ernst Walter, suggested that the Cologne police’s mishandling of the case could cost city police chief Wolfgang Albers his job: “I’m asking myself this,” Walter said. “How could the police publish a message on January 1, saying that New Year’s celebrations had been peaceful?”

So the authorities lied because the truth was “politically awkward.” And not just the authorities. Maajid Nawaz writes:

Though this all occurred on New Year’s Eve, the absolute scandal is that we only found out about it five days later. Amid accusations that it deliberately covered the incident up in order not to spark panic, the public broadcaster ZDF was forced to issue an apology for failing to include the assaults in its main evening news broadcast. It appears that, as the authorities and the media were choosing between stirring up racial tension and these women’s rights, we were faced with a conspiracy of silence.

Eventually, this was bound to happen. Recent mass migration patterns across Europe have meant that misogyny has finally come head to head with anti-racism, multiculturalism is facing off against feminism, and progressive values are wrestling with cultural tolerance.

Yes, it is racist to suspect that all brown men who look like me are rapists. It is bigoted to presume that all Muslim men who share my faith advocate religiously justified rape. It is xenophobic to assume that all male refugees are sexual predators awaiting their chance to rape. But let me be absolutely clear: What will feed this racism, bigotry, and xenophobia even more is deliberately failing to report the facts as they stand. Doing so only encourages the populist right’s rallying cry against “the establishment.”

If liberals do not address such issues swiftly, with complete candor and courage, the far-right and anti-Muslim populist groups will get there first. They have been doing so for a while now.

This is how it happens, though, in Europe, in America, everywhere: mainstream parties, institutions, and figures cannot bring themselves to deal with difficult truths, so they ignore them and dismiss people who pay attention to these things as racist, or otherwise bigoted. But the contradiction between observable reality and the Official Story may finally cause things to snap.

This, reported by the BBC, via Steve Sailer, only heightens the contradictions:

Ralf Jaeger, interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, said police had to “adjust” to the fact that groups of men had attacked women en masse.

Three suspects had been identified, he said, but no arrests had been made.

Scores of women say they were robbed or sexually assaulted by men, reportedly of Arab or North African appearance.

Mr Jaeger also warned that anti-immigrant groups were trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred against refugees.

“What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women,” he said. “This is poisoning the climate of our society.”

Right. Noticing what happened and drawing the “wrong” conclusions about it is “at least as awful” as actual rape and sexual assault. If Ralf Jaeger and the local authorities have any credibility at all with the German people, it is a miracle.

Writing at The Grauniad, Gaby Hinsliff bravely counsels her fellow liberals not to be afraid to ask questions about the sexual assaults, as long as the answer is always, “More immigration.” And:

Liberals shouldn’t be afraid to ask hard questions. Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless. But even if it does, the answer wouldn’t be to halt immigration – even if that were possible, which it isn’t regardless of whether Britain leaves the EU – just in case a few immigrants are sexually aggressive, any more than the answer to Savile is to keep all men away from children.

Think about what you just read: a liberal woman columnist at the left-wing Establishment newspaper in the UK has just said that it is “not madness” to see the Arab immigrant rapists as victims of political oppression at home and economic oppression in Europe. Anything — anything — to protect the Narrative. European liberals would do much better to pay attention to their Maajid Nawazes than their Gaby Hinsliffs and Ralf Jaegers. But they won’t.

UPDATE: Chancellor Merkel says the assaults will have far-reaching consequences. Chancellor Merkel is also refusing to put a cap on the number of refugees Germany will take in this year. As long as the right hand doesn’t notice what the left hand is doing, hey, no problem!

Is ‘Commitment Pluralism’ the Answer?

David Brooks writes about our age of anxiety:

Fear is an emotion directed at a specific threat, but anxiety is an unfocused corrosive uneasiness. In the age of small terror this anxiety induces a sense that the basic systems of authority are not working, that those in charge are not keeping people safe.

People are more likely to have a background sense that life is nastier and more precarious — red in tooth and claw. They pull in the tribal walls and distrust the outsider. This anxiety makes everybody a little less humane.

In country after country this anxiety is challenging the liberal order. I mean philosophic Enlightenment liberalism, not partisan liberalism. It’s the basic belief in open society, free speech, egalitarianism and meliorism (gradual progress). It’s a belief that through reasoned conversation values cohere and fanaticism recedes. It’s the belief that people of all creeds merit tolerance and respect.

Emphasis mine. Brooks goes on to say that “the surge of anti-liberalism has meant one of the most important political fissures is now between those who support an open society and those who support a closed society.” And he says this anti-liberalism has been most notable on the Right. More:

It’s up to us who believe in open society to wage an intellectual counterattack. This can’t be done be repeating 1990s bromides about free choice and the natural harmony among peoples. You can’t beat moral fanaticism with weak tea moral relativism.

You can only beat it with commitment pluralism. People are only fulfilled when they make deep moral commitments. The danger comes when they are fanatically and monopolistically committed to only one thing.

The pluralist is committed to a philosophy or faith, but also to an ethnicity and also to a city, and also to a job and also to diverse interests and fascinating foreign cultures. These different commitments balance and moderate one another. A life in diverse worlds with diverse people weaves together into one humane, multifaceted existence. The rigidity of one belief system is forced to confront the messiness of work relationships or a neighborhood association.

Read the whole thing.  I have a few comments on it.

First, it is certainly true that anti-liberalism has been most prominent on the Right, but if Brooks is interested in defending a belief in “reasoned conversation,” and “tolerance” as fundamentally liberal values, I would love to see him make that case on college campuses — in particular at Yale, where until recently he taught a class. It is fine to speak critically of the illiberalism of someone like Donald Trump, but the illiberalism of college students and the administrators who encourage it, either actively or passively, is bound to have far more serious consequences for the country than a long-shot presidential candidate.

Similarly, it is hard for me to think of a more illiberal movement in our cultural politics than the gay rights movement and its fellow travelers in politics, law, media, academia, and big business. I’ve been writing about this for a long time, and in great detail, so I won’t walk into those weeds here. Conservative Christians individuals, business owners, and institutions know perfectly well what the advance in gay rights and the retreat of religious liberty means for them, and will mean for them, in post-Christian America.

“They pull in the tribal walls and distrust the outsider. This anxiety makes everybody a little less humane,” says Brooks, of the anxious. Well, why shouldn’t they? Last year, I had conversations with several law professors and administrators at Christian schools, all of whom said that the fast-advancing jurisprudence on gay rights is forcing Christian institutions to draw and defend hard doctrinal lines.

One headmaster with whom I spoke told me his school is struggling over whether to follow the advice of their lawyers and adopt a hardline policy on accepting homosexual students, or students with gay parents, or to take a more “pastoral” line within the theologically conservative framework of the school. The headmaster and the school’s leadership clearly wanted to take the pastoral path, but they had been told by their lawyers that doing so opened them up to lawsuits that could result in losing control over the overall direction of the school.

The point is, conservative Christians are right to be fearful and anxious about this stuff, because it’s going to cost them their institutions, their livelihoods, and even their jobs.  There is going to be very little tolerance and no respect for them in the fast-emerging order. Pulling in the tribal walls is plain common sense when the tribe is under attack.

Similarly, when working-class people are losing their jobs and their financial security because of de-industrialization and the kind of policies promoted by liberals (= classical liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike), why shouldn’t they “distrust the outsiders” who are attacking their sense of stability? Being mistrustful of the people who will do you and your tribe harm if they have their way is not a character flaw.

Since the first of the year, the stock market has staggered downhill. In 2007-08, when the economy crashed, there was an immense amount of widespread economic pain. Did people see the Wall Street bigs who made hundreds of billions building a “heads we win, tails you lose” system pay for what they did? Of course not. Why, exactly, should ordinary people trust the financial and political leaders of this country to be good, just stewards of the common good?

And while we’re at it, of all those who led us into the Iraq War, whose career has suffered? Who has been held responsible? In the Catholic Church, whose failure of leadership led to incalculable spiritual damage, to say nothing of a dramatic degradation of the Church’s moral authority, how many bishops were held to account by the Church for their failures? Do you really trust the police and the courts? And on and on.

Look, I’m not asking these things to be a noodge. My point is simply that people’s anxieties these days are often (but not always!) justified by the facts on the ground. I have proposed the Benedict Option — a pulling-inward — in part because I am convinced that the coming decades are going to be very hard for small-o orthodox Christians in the West, and we will need each other for support — and I have reason to believe this.

I have proposed the Ben Op mostly because fundamental forces stand to eliminate orthodox Christianity. These forces include radical individualism, globalism, hedonism, materialism, skepticism, and … well, the forces that created the modern world, and in so doing brought us many wonderful things. The forces of liberalism, which have the effect of depriving us of our past for the sake of freeing us to make our own future. But we are at a time in which that liberalism, and the radical autonomy upon which it is premised, appears unsustainable. As political theorist Patrick Deneen has written:

Liberalism thus begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly subject to the criterion of whether or not they have been chosen, and chosen upon the basis of their service to rational self-interest.

…

Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”

Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.

The second revolution, and the second anthropological assumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political. Premodern political thought—ancient and medieval, particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature to be part of a comprehensive natural order. Man was understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and so humanity was required to conform both to its own nature as well as, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which human beings were a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—thus, natural law—places upon human beings, and each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits, through the practice of virtues, in order to achieve a condition of human flourishing.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences, premised on the transformation of the view of human nature and on humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Could it be that liberalism has run its course? That it is unsustainable because it does not suit human nature? And/or, could it be that we cannot run a stable society that is radically pluralistic without a widely-shared basic set of assumptions that bound our choices? As I understand it, that is the gist of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism.

To be clear, I agree with David that we must figure out how to get along in a condition of pluralism. That is what we Americans live in now, whether we like it or not. Besides, as a Christian, I am a believer in a religion that obliges me to love others, not to hate them, even if they are hateful. This is very, very hard to do, especially in an age of anxiety — and it is one reason why we Christians need strong communities committed to the orthodox, Biblical faith, versus the weak-tea theological and moral relativism of the Moralistic Therapeutic Deist churches. The Civil Rights marchers didn’t find the strength to face down Bull Connor, and to return hatred with love, from the pseudo-Christianity we call MTD. I want to be strong enough to stand up for what is right, and to stand against my own temptations to give in to fear and hatred — and I know I am not strong enough to do it on my own. As I see it, churches and Christian communities that practice the Benedict Option will do so to remember their (our) own stories, and to strengthen each other through the present and coming trials, which will wipe out all the MTD churches — but also be there to welcome those escaping the maelstrom and the plague. Because that’s what Christians do.

But I digress. The main point I wanted to make in answering David’s column is to say that it’s all well and good to talk about recommitting to classical liberal values, but people like me hear that kind of talk and think it’s language that cloaks an agenda that disempowers us, and tells us that we deserve it, that really, there could be no other reasonable way to live.

Here’s what I mean. The Catholic lawyer James Kalb wrote a very good book a few years ago, called The Tyranny of Liberalism. Despite the talk-radio-ish title, it’s a philosophically serious book. Again, by “liberalism,” he is not talking only about the general philosophy of the Democratic Party, but rather the rationale governing our politics and culture since the Enlightenment. Here is an excerpt of an excerpt:

Tyranny is not, of course, what liberals have intended. They want government to be based on equal freedom, which they see as the only possible goal of a just and rational public order. But the functioning of any form of political society is determined more by the logic of its principles than the intentions of its supporters. Liberals view themselves as idealistic and progressive, but such a self-image conceals dangers even if it is not wholly illusory. It leads liberals to ignore considerations, like human nature and fundamental social and religious traditions, that have normally been treated as limits on reform. Freedom and equality are abstract, open-ended, and ever-ramifying goals that can be taken to extremes. Liberals tend to view these goals as a simple matter of justice and rationality that prudential considerations may sometimes delay but no principle can legitimately override. In the absence of definite limiting principles, liberal demands become more and more far-reaching and the means used to advance them ever more comprehensive, detailed, and intrusive.

The incremental style of liberalism obscures the radicalism of what it eventually demands and enables it always to present itself as moderate. What is called progress—in effect, movement to the left—is thought normal in present-day society, so to stand in its way, let alone to try to reverse accepted changes, is thought radical and divisive. We have come to accept that what was inconceivable last week is mainstream today and altogether basic tomorrow. The result is that the past is increasingly discredited, deviancy is defined up or down, and it becomes incredible that, for instance, until 1969 high school gun-club members took their guns to school on New York City subways, and that in 1944 there were only forty-four homicides by gunshot in the entire city.

Human life is harder to change than are proclaimed social standards. It is easier to denounce gender stereotypes than to make little boys and little girls the same. The triumph of liberalism in public discussion and the consequent disappearance of openly avowed nonliberal principles has led the outlook officially established to embody liberal views ever more completely and at the same time to diverge more and more from the permanent conditions of human life. The result has been a growing conflict between public standards and the normal human understandings that make commonsense judgments and good human relations possible.

The conflict between public standards and normal understandings has transformed and disordered such basic aspects of social life as politics, which depends on free and rational discussion; the family, which counts on a degree of harmony between public understandings and natural human tendencies; and scholarship, which relies on complex formal rules while attempting to explain reality. As a consequence, family life is chaotic and ill-tempered; young people are badly instructed and badly raised; politics are irrational, trivial, and mindlessly partisan; and scholarship is shoddy and disconnected from normal experience. Terms such as “zero tolerance” and “political correctness” reveal how an official outlook deeply at odds with normal ways of thinking has become oppressive while claiming to have reached an unprecedented level of fairness and rationality.

In a society that claims to be based on free speech and reason, intelligent discussion of many aspects of life has become all but impossible. Such a state of affairs is no passing fluke but a serious matter resulting from basic principles. It is the outcome of rationalizing and egalitarian trends that over time have become ever more self-conscious and all-embracing until they now make normal informal distinctions—for example, those between the sexes—seem intolerably arbitrary and unfair. Those trends have led to the politically correct managerial liberal regime that now dominates Western public life and makes demands that more and more people find unreasonable and even incomprehensible.

What defines that regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs, sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. To implement such a program of social transformation an extensive system of controls over social life has grown up, sometimes public and sometimes formally private, that appeals for its justification to expertise, equity, safety, security, and the need to modify social attitudes and relationships in order to eliminate discrimination and intolerance.

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. “Discrimination and intolerance” are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties—sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings—on which independent, informal, traditional, and nonmarket institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure.

And:

Many people find something deeply oppressive about the resulting situation, but no one really knows what to say about it. Some complain about those general restrictions, like political correctness, which make honest and productive discussion of public affairs impossible. Others have more concrete and personal objections. Parents are alarmed by the indoctrination of their children. Many people complain about affirmative action, massive and uncontrolled immigration, and the abolition of the family as a distinct social institution publicly recognized as fundamental and prior to the state. Still others have the uneasy sense that the world to which they are attached and which defines who they are is being taken from them.

Nonetheless, these victims and their complaints get no respect and little media coverage. Their discontent remains inarticulate and obscure. People feel stifled, but cannot say just how. They make jokes or sarcastic comments, but when challenged have trouble explaining and defending themselves. The disappearance of common understandings that enable serious thought and action to be carried on by nonexperts and outside formal bureaucratic structures has made it hard even to think about the issues coherently. The result is a system of puzzled compliance. However ineffective the schools become, educators feel compelled to inculcate multicultural platitudes rather than to promote substantive learning. No matter how silly people find celebrations of “diversity,” they become ever more frequent and surround themselves ever more insistently with happy talk.

Attempts to challenge the liberal hegemony occasionally emerge but always fail. No challenge seems possible when all social authorities that might compete with bureaucracy, money, and expertise have been discredited, co-opted, or radically weakened. When populist complaints make their half-articulate way into public life they are recognized as dangerous to the established order, debunked as ignorant and hateful, and quickly diverted or suppressed. Proponents of the standards now current always have the last word. Freedom, equality, and neutral expertise are the basis of those standards, and when discussion is put on that ground it is difficult to argue for anything contrary. Rejection of equal freedom and of expertise is oppressive and ignorant by definition, so how could it possibly be justified?

At bottom, the problem with the standards that now govern public life is that they deny natural human tendencies and so require constant nagging interference in all aspects of life. They lead to a denatured society that does not work and does not feel like home. A standard liberal response to such objections is that our reactions are wrong: we should accept what we are told by those who know better. Expertise must rule. Social attitudes, habits, and connections, it is said, are not natural but constructed. They are continually revised and reenacted, their function and significance change with circumstances, and their meaning is a matter of interpretation and choice. It follows that habits and attitudes that seem solidly established and even natural cannot claim respect apart from their conformity with justice—which, if prejudice and question-begging are to be avoided, can only be defined as equality. All habits and attitudes must be conformed to egalitarianism and expertise. To object would be bigoted or ignorant.

This. Exactly this. And this too:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

I sort of agree with David Brooks about “commitment pluralism,” as a practical way to live together in the condition of pluralism. But given the actual realities of who holds power and how they wield it, being the sort of person President Obama once derided as a “bitter clinger” as a rational response to those who want to take away things that are very dear — faith, family, livelihood, among others — and call it progress. What happens when your commitment to one belief or institution radically conflicts with your commitment to another, or others? Something’s got to give. In my own case, my faith, my family, and my local community will always and everywhere take precedence — and if not, may I repent.

The problem in America today is that we have made it impossible for the center to hold, and complain that people will not hold on to the center.

The Church of Jesus Christ, Nationalist

From a remarkable interview with Sergei Chapnin, until his recent firing a senior layman in the Russian Orthodox Church. Chapnin says that Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate’s embrace of nationalism has set in motion a series of disasters for the Russian Orthodox Church. Excerpts:

What about the realm of ideas? There is great geopolitical patriotism and fervor in our country today, which seems to be expressed even more strongly in the Church.



The main thing that happened in the ideological sphere in recent years is that Russia came to grips with its own history, so to speak. It decided that we can be proud of the history of the Soviet Union. The thought is: this is a mighty history, and we are its heirs, so we value that great and victorious history.

What does this mean? Today the Church—without any outside pressure—recognizes the general secretaries of the Communist Party as great rulers of the Soviet era. Whatever atrocities Stalin committed, it is thought that his great accomplishments cannot be diminished, since Russia won the war under his guidance. It’s as though that makes up for his crimes.

I see a serious spiritual and theological problem in the fact that the Church openly talks like this. In honoring Stalin as a “great leader,” we insult the memory not only of the saints who suffered during the years of persecution, but all those who fell victim to the Stalinist regime. The Church was virtually destroyed by Stalin, and now it recognizes his service to the nation. It’s an incredibly fragile position, and I would say, a spiritually unhealthy one. And now, Igumen Evstafii calls for Lenin’s remains to stay in their Mausoleum. Communists in various cities erect busts of Stalin, and the Church remains silent.

This is the first I’m hearing of this. It’s beyond shocking. More:

Well, then, what is the fate of the “liberal” wing? How does one go about being an “Orthodox European” in today’s Russia and its Church?



Of course, the “tentatively liberal” wing hasn’t gone anywhere. By the way, you should avoid this artificial dichotomy between “liberals” and “patriots.” The first are better called Christian democrats, and the second, followers of the post-Soviet civil religion. Christian democrats are those who do not see themselves as isolated from European Christian civilization. Many have been to the West and have seen how the Orthodox live in Greece, the Catholics live in Italy and France, and the Lutherans live in Germany. There are aspects of crisis there as well, but Christianity in Europe is much more rooted and vigorous.

Those Orthodox who participate in global Christian culture are not especially visible. For them the profession of faith is foremost a personal choice, an action. They do not feel the need for declarations, for public demonstrations, to fight for traditional values. The source of faith is Christ Himself, not fighting for values.

And plenty of Orthodox dioceses in Russia have long-standing and positive relationships with those very same Catholics. Orthodox priests easily visit them in Europe, befriend them, and arrange student exchanges; one receives a grant, another collaborates on social projects. It just goes unpublicized in order to fend off accusations of “betraying Orthodoxy.”

There are those who want to pick fights and find enemies, and there are those who just want to labor on the Church’s behalf. People who believe in Christ are peaceful.

Read the whole thing. Chapnin predicts major upheaval ahead for the Church, and says that all the money that has filled the Church with pomp and pride is running out. Says Chapnin, of his fellow Orthodox Russians,, “The ones who will remain are those who lived peacefully and prayed.”

UPDATE: You know, that last line is so very true of us American Christians, in a somewhat different context. But not all that different.

Merry Old Calendar Christmas

Photo by Rod Dreher

Pretty great coffee cup friends at church gave to the choir director, eh?

Institutionalizing Anti-Christianity

I received this e-mail from a small-o orthodox Christian reader whose identity I have confirmed. The reader really did graduate from one of the top American universities, one that produces elites who populate government, law, industry, and academia. I publish this with the reader’s permission:

This quote from your “Benedict Option Omnibus” post is even more accurate than you know:

“This is not about the church losing political power; this is about the Christian story having become not only unbelievable to many, but, increasingly, a menace to what a growing number of people believe to be the Good. And it is about the churches losing their own stories, and with them, their own people. It is about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism embraced as an ersatz substitute for Christianity — MTD being exactly the kind of pseudo-faith that late modernity, or post-modernity, requires as psychological support for its vanities and indulgences. “

During my studies at a very prominent American university, this attitude of growing hostility toward small-o orthodox Christianity was very thinly veiled.  Some of my classmates have worked in the White House under President Obama, and others have held positions in various parts of his administration.  Others still will rise farther if Secretary Clinton wins the presidency.  Whatever the case may be, many of them live in DC, and they are not planning to leave.  Moreover, most of them have not yet reached their thirtieth birthdays.  I say this to illustrate how rapidly this hostility will be institutionalized.

During our time in school, I was able to dialogue fruitfully with some of them, but not all.  And, even then, I suspect it was because we had spent time together in and outside of the classroom without immediately arguing about these things–they knew before these debates happened that I was not a bigoted homophobe.  How much more difficult, then, will it be to conduct these debates charitably when a) these men and women have actual power to implement their worldviews, and b) they will not have had the opportunity to get to know their intellectual/political opponents beforehand.

I do not wish to be fatalistic about it: many of them are good and smart people, and older age may moderate or change their views, as it does for many of us.  Hope, but not optimism . . .

One point I very much want to emphasize is that the most trenchant critics are either those who are themselves nominally religious (many putative Catholics) those raised in devout environments who are bitter, or those who are still religious but whose actual churches have effectively accommodated to MTD.  The hardcore atheists are far from what I fear most; it’s those who claim to speak in Christ’s name whom I most fear.  I believe these people act with the best of intentions, but it speaks to your point: we have forgotten our story.  That 20 centuries of Christian history and ethics can be forgotten in 1-2 generations may be horrifying, but it is a horror we must acknowledge and work to remedy, primarily but not exclusively in our education system.

This is why your idea of an “economic sequel” to the BenOp book is interesting.  We need to explore the public policies of which we avail ourselves and of which we may need to become more independent if we wish to maintain our communal integrity.  I hope the need for this exploration will speak to the importance not only of individuals assuming the burden of their own liberty (which Republicans already say they love, of course), but PARTICULARLY of communities and the strategies they can pursue to make themselves more robust.

Note well the reader’s expectation that the worst will come not from lifelong atheists, but from embittered ex-Christians and those who consider themselves Christians, but who have been assimilated into MTD churches.

KIG Ben Op Bleg

Readers, I’m off to the Nativity liturgy momentarily, but I have a bleg for you. Do any of you know anything about the Catholic Integrated Community (Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde), an international lay-clerical community founded by German Catholics in the wake of the Second World War? According to Catholic Online:

The Catholic Integrated Community was established in Munich in Germany, under the name “Junger Bund” immediately in the wake of the Second World War and the tragic events linked to it.

Under the leadership of Herbert and Traudl Wallbrecher, a group of young people began to reflect on the reasons why Christians fail to oppose the emergence of ideologies and dictatorships that sow death, or to contribute to solving social injustices affecting men and women; in other words, why baptized Christians are unable to become a people whose existence and lifestyle make God’s project for the world visible.

Communities like this would become the place in which the Christian faith is lived as history in which we can always play a part, based on the conviction that God is acting among us today as he did at the time of Abraham.

In 1968 the group changed its name to “Integrated Community,” and in 1996 it was given its present name. It was approved in 1978 by the archbishop of Paderborn and recognized that same year by the then archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Identity: In a world estranged from God and where people no longer believe in his saving presence in history, KIG sets out to retrace the biblical experience of the covenant between God and his people and to recover the substance of the Catholic faith.

Its members endeavor to make the Gospel present in all the dimensions of daily life in a way that enables even the most distant to find or rediscover access to the Church. The specific dimensions of the formative process for its members are the experience of the Christian message lived in unity, theological reflection on history, on the Old and the New Testaments and the history of the Church, and the proclamation of the Gospel message in contemporary society.

Formation covers a period of six years, of which three are the catechumenate, in which members and associates play an active part in the life of the community.

The preferred spheres of action are the world of labor, education, politics, health care, art, crafts, and missionary commitment. KIG is subject to the authority of the local churches in whose parishes it operates. Individual communities are established at the diocesan level and taken together they constitute the Confederation of Catholic Integrated Communities. In the pursuit of its objectives, KIG cooperates with the community of priests and the community of unmarried women and unmarried men that place themselves at its service.

Organization: Membership of KIG is open to members, co-workers, aspirants and friends. Each community elects a management council which coordinates and is responsible for the life and for the pursuit of the objectives of the community.

Each community is under the spiritual direction of a diocesan priest who is a member of the community of priests at the service of the Catholic Integration Communities, appointed by agreement with the local bishop.

Membership: KIG has about 1,000 members in seven countries, in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

Works: Members or groups of members of KIG have taken the initiative under their own personal responsibility to set up Catholic schools, a small clinic and nursing activities. In 2003, KIG inaugurated The Academy for the Theology of the People of God at Villa Cavalletti (Grottaferrata, Rome).

I will be traveling next month to Norcia for a short retreat with the Benedictines, on which I will be interviewing some of them for the Benedict Option book. A reader of this blog has tipped me off to the KIG, which sounds very much like what I conceive of as a Benedict Option community. Anything you readers can tell me about the KIG would be much appreciated. Perhaps I will have time to visit one of them while I’m abroad. I need to know soon, though, because I’ve got to buy plane tickets next week.

Off to church. Merry (Slavic) Christmas!

Grad School: No Christians Need Apply

At the Inside Higher Ed site, a review of an eye-opening new book about how academic elites weed out conservative Christians and other undesirables. Excerpt:

Ph.D. programs are one of the few parts of higher education where admissions decisions are made without admissions professionals. Small groups of faculty members meet, department by department, to decide whom to admit. And their decisions effectively determine the future makeup of the faculty in higher education. Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion.

That may change with the publication of Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping, out this month from Harvard University Press. Julie R. Posselt (right), the author and an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, obtained permission from 6 highly ranked departments at three research universities to watch their reviews of candidates, and she interviewed faculty members at four others. All the departments were ranked as among the top programs in their disciplines. To obtain this kind of access (not to mention institutional review board approval), Posselt had to offer complete anonymity. While her book identifies comments as coming from people in particularly disciplines, she reveals nothing about where the departments are, and she also hides most details about the applicants they reviewed.

More:

In most cases Posselt observed, the committee members used banter and “friendly debate” when they disagreed with one another. They didn’t attack one another or get too pointed in criticizing colleagues. She describes one discussion she observed — in which committee members kept to this approach — that left her wondering about issues of fairness.

The applicant, to a linguistics Ph.D. program, was a student at a small religious college unknown to some committee members but whose values were questioned by others.

“Right-wing religious fundamentalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “supported by the Koch brothers.”

The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant’s GRE scores and background — high GRE scores, homeschooled — than it did with some other candidates. The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and, to laughter from committee members asked, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?”

Other committee members defended her, but didn’t challenge the assumptions made by skeptics. One noted that the college had a good reputation in the humanities. And another said that her personal statement indicated intellectual independence from her college and good critical thinking.

At the end of this discussion, the committee moved the applicant ahead to the next round but rejected her there.

But they care about “diversity”:

When Posselt probed on diversity, she found that many professors said they felt an obligation to diversify their graduate student bodies and thus — eventually — the collective faculty of their fields.

Diversity, of course, is only about race, gender, and sexuality, never about diversity of thought. Whenever you see an academic talk about “diversity,” you should assume that they mean “the homogeneity of people we like.”

Read the whole thing.  Prepare yourself to read in the comments section of this blog post a hundred explanations from liberal readers as to why this is just one instance, and we shouldn’t draw any conclusions from it, blah blah blah. And they’re right: this is one example. Still, it reinforces what the reader who wrote to me earlier said about the increasingly dire situation for dissenting Christians in post-Christian America. Excerpt:

Well, what happens when you pay $$$ for your kid to go to a small religious college (because the secular ones are more and more hostile) and then there’s no work afterward, and no hope of paying back those loans? I already hear stories from people in this sort of position, and it’s just going to get worse.

What happens when your kid can’t get into graduate school because she has attended a Christian college identified by educational elites as a bigot factory? It’s not persecution, of course, but these are the kinds of choices that orthodox Christians are going to face very soon. Will they, and their kids, be strong enough to give up dreams of reaching the top, because it’s not worth compromising their faith?

UPDATE: Additional thoughts on this from Denny Burk, including:

We already knew that this kind of discrimination was going on at elite universities. It is nevertheless jarring to see it described in such candid detail. It is discrimination based on a religious test, and it is the kind of thing that happens all the time without controversy or fanfare.

And the ones doing the discriminating think they are being virtuous.

Benedict Option Omnibus

I find myself deeply annoyed by people who regard universities putting on things like Social Justice Retreats in which students and professors are indoctrinated with prejudice, racial and otherwise, as just one of those silly things that colleges do to pacify the Social Justice Warriors. Wake up, people. These policies are having, and are going to have, a major effect on the psychology of hiring, of admission to colleges, and all kinds of things. Future elites are being trained to look down on certain people only because of their race, gender, and other factors. Along those lines, a reader writes:

I sometimes think that both education and government employment (post office, etc.) are the areas where we’re going to see the biggest push for “diversity” which means that everybody gets hired before straight white heterosexual Christians. From there it will spread to private employers (and it already has, in many places). Yet people still act like there’s no reason for the Benedict Option: just keep living like we are! they say. Well, what happens when you pay $$$ for your kid to go to a small religious college (because the secular ones are more and more hostile) and then there’s no work afterward, and no hope of paying back those loans? I already hear stories from people in this sort of position, and it’s just going to get worse.

This is why the Benedict Option is at some point going to have to have an economic aspect. It is too much for me to cover in this first book, but if the book becomes a best-seller, that is a good sequel. Or maybe somebody else (Caleb Bernacchio?) can write it.

I remind you what “Prof. Kingsfield,” a professor at an elite law school who is closeted as a Christian, told me last year, after the Indiana RFRA debacle, about what’s to come:

Businesses, however, are going to have a very hard time resisting what’s coming. Not that they would try. “The big companies have already gone over,” said Kingsfield.

“Most anti-discrimination laws have a certain cut off – they don’t apply if you have 15 employees or less,” he said. “You could have an independent, loosely affiliated network of artisans, working together. If you can refer people to others within the network, that could work. You won’t be able to scale up, but that’s not such a bad thing.”

More:

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

I pointed out that the mob hysteria that descended on Memories Pizza, the mom & pop pizza shop in small-town Indiana that had to close its doors (temporarily, one hopes) after its owners answered a reporter’s question truthfully, is highly instructive to the rest of us.

“You’re right,” he said. “Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”

More:

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

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

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

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

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

We will have to help each other get jobs. More:

It’s hard to say what kind of landscape Christians will be looking at twenty, thirty years from now. Kingsfield says he has gay colleagues in the university, people who are in their sixties and seventies now, who came of age in a time where a strong sense of individual liberty protected them. They still retain a devotion to liberty, seeing how much it matters to despised minorities.

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

Bottom line: the Benedict Option is our the only path forward for us. Indiana shows that.

Read the whole thing. If you don’t understand what’s coming, you will not be ready for it when it does. They are going to tell you over and over that you’re paranoid, until it happens, in which case they will tell you that you deserve it. The SJW seminars are all about preparing the displaced people for accepting that they deserve it.

 

Moving on to more mundane Ben Op stuff (more mundane, but more useful), Dean Abbott ponders what we can do right now in the lives of our families. This is very good. Excerpt:

There is, however, a more reasonable approach. It begins by asking, “How Much Benedict Option is Enough Benedict Option?” Getting the major benefits of a Benedict Option lifestyle doesn’t require hauling your family off to the woods. In fact, just a few changes result in big Benedict Option results.

The 80/20 Rule

Let’s apply the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle states that in most situations, 80 percent of the effects are due to 20 percent of the causes. The economist who developed this idea was fond of pointing out that 20 percent of the pea plants in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas. If you run a business, you can expect 80 percent of your profits to come from 20 percent of your customers.

Obviously, attempts to escape a deteriorating culture are more difficult to quantify than the number of peas in one’s garden. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the bulk of the goods one accrues from withdrawing from the surrounding culture will stem from only a few choices.

That has certainly been true for us.

Our family is already pretty opted out.  Just a few choices on my wife’s and my part have had a major impact on how much access the organs of the culture have to our daughters. I am pleased with how they are developing, especially when I consider the behavior and attitudes of their more culturally conformed peers.

I’m not going to tell you the four lifestyle choices that the Abbott family has made that have made a big difference in their lives, because I want you to read the whole thing.  I am going to tell you that our family made the same choices, and it has made an enormously positive difference, in the Benedict Option sense. There is more to be done, but these four things are a terrific start. As Dean Abbott writes:

Yet, it must be said, that the biggest upside to making these choices isn’t so much that they keep the culture outside the home at bay, but that they make space for the culture inside it to flourish. [Emphasis mine — RD] When the influence of the surrounding culture is minimized, the family itself becomes a healthier culture to rear children in, a more vital “little platoon” as Burke might say.

Achieving this is easier than it might seem. It’s tempting to fall into Benedict Option fantasies of moving to the backwoods to live off the land. It’s better to start small, with things that are actually feasible. Focus on those few choices that bring the bulk of the benefit. Do this, and see if what it produces isn’t exactly enough.

Enough, I would say, as a start. But what a great start! Read his post. 

Moving on again, I’ve been meaning to respond for a while to the Methodist writer Mark Tooley’s post suggesting the “Wesleyan Option” over the “Benedict Option.” He writes, in part:

The Benedict Option despairs of redeeming postmodern Western Civilization and counsels a Christian retreat into separatist communities to rebuild Christian culture through faithful discipleship. The model obviously is St. Benedict, who founded a vibrant monastic movement in the ashes of the imploding Roman Empire.

No doubt the Body of Christ and wider culture would benefit greatly if more Christians were to pursue some form of the Benedict Option, creating centers of self-denying devotion, prayer, learning and charity, even celibacy. May this movement, to the extent it fosters Christian growth and witness, grow and prosper!

But just as in Benedict’s day, roughly 99 percent plus of Christians will decline to actively pursue this option. Maybe some don’t have the spiritual insight and discipline. But many more likely don’t have the calling. Throughout the church’s history most believers have had a vocation to live and work within the world, with all of its temptations and snares.

Because I really like and respect Mark’s work, and think he’s made an honest mistake here, I’m going to break my rule of ceasing to engage with people who insist that the Benedict Option is only about running off to the hills in separatist communities. As I say in the Benedict Option FAQ:

Do you really think you can just run away from the world and live off in a compound somewhere? Get real!

No, I don’t think that at all. While I wouldn’t necessarily fault people who sought geographical isolation, that will be neither possible nor desirable for most of us. The early Church lived in cities, and formed its distinct life there. Most of the Ben Op communities that come to mind today are not radically isolated, in geography or otherwise, from the broader community. It’s simply nonsense to say that Ben Oppers want to hide from the world and live in some sort of fundamentalist enclave. Some do, and it’s not hard to find examples of how this sort of thing has gone bad. But that is not what we should aim for. In fact, I think it’s all too easy for people to paint the Benedict Option as utopian escapism so they can safely wall it off and not have to think about it.

Isn’t this a violation of the Great Commission? How can we preach the Gospel to the nations when we’re living in these neo-monastic communities?

Well, what is evangelizing? Is it merely dispersing information? Or is there something more to it. The Benedict Option is about discipleship, which is itself an indirect form of evangelism. Pagans converted to the early Church not simply because of the words the first Christians spoke, but because of the witness of the kinds of lives they lived. It has to be that way with us too.

Pope Benedict XVI said something important in this respect. He said that the best apologetic arguments for the truth of the Christian faith are the art that the Church has produced as a form of witness, and the lives of its saints:

Yet, the beauty of Christian life is even more effective than art and imagery in the communication of the Gospel message. In the end, love alone is worthy of faith, and proves credible. The lives of the saints and martyrs demonstrate a singular beauty which fascinates and attracts, because a Christian life lived in fullness speaks without words. We need men and women whose lives are eloquent, and who know how to proclaim the Gospel with clarity and courage, with transparency of action, and with the joyful passion of charity.

The Benedict Option is about forming communities that teach us and help us to live in such a way that our entire lives are witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel.

Yes, I know, this is what the church is supposed to be for. If the churches were doing what they (we) are supposed to be doing, we might not need to talk about Benedict Options. But they aren’t, so we must.

Anyway, back to Mark Tooley’s post, which, I’m afraid, turns the Ben Op into a straw man here:

Supposedly, even amid our unprecedented wealth, comfort and numbers, we live in very bleak times. Widespread Christian engagement didn’t create Zion in America, therefore it was all for naught. The earlier generation of Christian culture warriors are now supposed to have been an embarrassment for which the church should now atone. But no amount of apology will forestall the imminent apocalypse, which mostly includes critical internet commentary about Christianity and the occasional same sex rite at the local court house or empty Unitarian church. Woe is us as we drive our SUVs into the parking lots of megachurches in prosperous suburbs. Scary times indeed!

Of course, the secular culture does and has always posed serious threats to faithful Christian living. This spiritual warfare is permanent until the parousia. But all in all, Christians in 2015 America, even as the Devil still roams about like a roaring lion, have it better than any previous generation. Who among us would really prefer to live in 1950, 1850, or 1750, when America and Western Civilization were supposedly more Christian, never mind slavery, segregation and a thousand other social wickednesses countenanced by society and church?

Again, because I believe that Mark (whom I don’t know personally) writes out of good faith, I’ll point again to the Benedict Option FAQ as a way of saying that I do not imagine a Golden Age of Faith. The world has always been going to hell, so to speak. The sum total of sin in the world has no doubt been constant throughout the ages. We make progress against one sin, and two others worsen. It will be that way until the end of time. This “because we didn’t create Zion it was all for naught” business is a straw man the size of Sasquatch.

What makes this time different from the past is that we are now living in a post-Christian culture, one that has ceased to assume the fundamental truths of Christianity (or, if you prefer, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles) as normative. This is not about the church losing political power; this is about the Christian story having become not only unbelievable to many, but, increasingly, a menace to what a growing number of people believe to be the Good. And it is about the churches losing their own stories, and with them, their own people. It is about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism embraced as an ersatz substitute for Christianity — MTD being exactly the kind of pseudo-faith that late modernity, or post-modernity, requires as psychological support for its vanities and indulgences. The Benedict Option, among other things, is about fighting the cultural amnesia that has overtaken the churches in the West.

I suppose it’s unfair to blame people who don’t read this blog regularly for badly misinterpreting the Benedict Option. I will be glad when I have this book finished, and can say, “Here is the detailed vision I have, in one place.”

So, on to the meat of Tooley’s post, which is very good. He says we should look to John Wesley, not St. Benedict, for a more realistic and effective example:

Benedictine Option enthusiasts should like the Wesleyan example because it was built around small, intensely committed prayer and accountability groups with rigorous discipline who created distinct communities within a pervasively corrupt society and spiritually lax institutional church. Evangelism, discipleship, self-denial, service to others, and Christian joy were central emphases.

Wesleyans weren’t just focused on the spiritual charisms of their own movement. They self-consciously envisioned their vocation for spiritually renewing society and temporal polities. Wesley himself kept his movement out of direct political engagement. But he knew that as Methodism preached personal and social holiness throughout Britain and America there would be societal and political fruits. Wesley saw his times and culture as part of Christendom but also deeply in rebellion against God. He used the available foundations of a “Christian” nation, which included a relative legal religious liberty, despite howling hostile mobs, to proclaim the Gospel.

Early Methodism in America seized much of the frontier, where religion, formal or otherwise, was often absent. Methodist populism and revivalism, with its concern for social redemption, helped create America’s self-understanding of its democracy. It also contributed spiritual tools within civil religion for perennial social and political reform movements that continue to this day.

To varying degrees Methodism has repeated much of this process of personal and social renewal in once non-Christian cultures in Asia and Africa.

Methodism saw its surrounding culture as often wicked and hostile to the Gospel, which is perennially true, even in ostensibly Christian societies. Yet this challenge did not inspire cultural withdrawal but challenged Methodists to aggressively confront and work to change the cultures it spiritually invaded.

Read the whole thing.  It’s good, but I would ask Mark this: Where did the spiritual and communal resources to fuel this aggressive Methodist confrontation come from? I can’t think of anyone in America who has done a better job than Mark Tooley of detailing the decline of Methodism in particular and the Protestant Mainline in general into an effete chaplaincy to secular liberalism. (Here is his latest on that front.) How did this happen? How can it be resisted, even reversed, within Methodism?

The way I’m approaching the Benedict Option is as a varied renewal movement within small-o orthodox Christianity. If I’m successful in thinking through and articulating my vision, Mark and other orthodox Wesleyans like him will be able to draw from it inspiration and methods (heh) to revitalize their own tradition. Some Christian traditions will have it easier than others, because of their theology and ecclesiology, but all the orthodox should be able to benefit at some level. That is my hope.

 

Germany & Refugee Kitsch

A German reader writes, on the “Merkelized Germany” thread:

I remember that after 9/11 I followed US politicians and media with amazement as they marched towards war with Iraq. To me as an outsider it was incomprehensible how an entire country (or at least its political class and its media) could be so uncritical, so misguided, so stupid, so deluded in a manner that was so completely obvious.

Now, for about the last year and a half, I have had to witness the same thing in my own country in the “refugee” crisis. Different issue, different motives, but the same incomprehensible degree of obvious delusion and stupidity. The result will be equally disastrous, only that the US will one day overcome and forget the consequences of the Iraq war and Germany will have to live with this idiocy for generations.

As someone who was caught up in the pro-war frenzy, this gives me an interesting insight into what Germany is going through. In the march-up to the Iraq War, it was, for many of us (mea maxima culpa) inconceivable that there could be any morally valid or even logical objection to the Iraq War. You remember the infamous National Review cover denouncing the founders of The American Conservative and conservatives who were against the coming war as “unpatriotic”? That’s what it was like. I had just left NR when that cover came out, and though I winced at it, I can’t say that I was outraged. That’s what it felt like to be inside the pro-war bubble back then.

Speaking for myself, I thought back in 2002 and early 2003 that the only reasons one could be against the war was that one was a naive fool, or a moral coward. I am not proud of that today; I only bring it up to point out how difficult it was to conceive of an honorable, or even sensible, opposition to the war. Here’s the important point: it was so very, very important to be morally right, marching through history on the side of the righteous.

I am reminded of Milan Kundera’s concept of the “Grand March of History” in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being — an idea captured in these lines:

“The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies.  The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”

More Kundera:

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

Mind you, Kundera was writing as an exile from Communism, but it doesn’t take much imagination to alter his quote like this, in light of the pro-war madness of 2002-03:

What makes an American an American is not geography but his ability to integrate any war into the kitsch called the Grand March.

… that is, the Grand March to liberal democracy. Because I well remember how right it felt to be waging that war. The naïfs and the cowards and Old Europe would not prevail. We who had the vision and the courage to stand against terrorism, show our great and terrible face to the enemy, and impose liberal democracy on the Middle East would be vindicated. Again, Kundera had my number:

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. … Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

There were lots of second tears in America in 2002-03, with regard to the war and Grand March of History, led by George W. Bush. I was guilty too.

Sounds like there are lots of second tears in Germany 2015-16, with regard to the refugee situation and the Grand March of History, led by Angela Merkel.

This is not to say that it’s always wrong to accept refugees, or that it’s always wrong to go to war. I’m making a point about the role sentimentality and conformity unconsciously play in our decision-making. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. Precisely. It is so difficult to think clearly and without sentimentality when you are in situations like this because asking questions strikes one as indecent. Everyone is vulnerable to this weakness. Every single person. Thinking that it could not possibly happen to you is to make it more likely.