Rod Dreher's Blog, page 629

Christianity & History

Via David A. Graham, who has been critical of the president’s claims for their being a “right side of history,” I found this response from the Methodist writer Mark Tooley. Tooley agrees, I think, with Graham about the error progressivism makes about history having a side, and an inevitability, but he does not agree with trads who mock this sort of thing in general:

Traditional Christians abandon the language of history at their peril.  Scoffing at or dismissing appeals to the “right side of history” will only marginalize our cultural voice.  It also ignores the dictates of our own faith.  Isn’t God the Lord of history?  Aren’t all designs against His plans doomed to failure?  Won’t justice and truth, as cornerstones of His Kingdom, inevitably prevail, despite sin and human failure?

Christmas is the ultimate reminder that Christians and all who pursue decency and humanity in a corrupt and vicious world are on the right side of history.  We know He will make all the rough places smooth, and every valley shall be exalted.  He came to us originally as a child, yet the government will be upon His shoulders. To align with the Baby Jesus is decidedly to be on the right side of history.

Well, yes … but.

All we can know for sure as believing Christians is that history does have an end, and that end concludes with the triumph of the Good and the redemption of the fallen world and its re-harmonization with its Creator. But that does not tell us anything about what is going to happen to us in our own time. The End of History, from a Christian point of view, might be one thousand or 10,000 years from now. In the everyday sense of the way the concept of “the right side of history” is used, what realistic comfort can that possibly be to us?

Far as I can tell, it is a comfort in exactly one way: it tells us that evil, death, and injustice do not have the last word. To tell the last generation of Christians in North Africa that they were on the Right Side of History™ is not to say “the Muslim invaders will not defeat you and wipe you out,” but rather to say, “by uniting yourself to Jesus Christ, what looks like defeat in the mortal life is really victory.”

The martyrs, in this sense, were on the Right Side of History. So were the Hebrews carried off in bondage to Babylon, because they could have confidence that as long as they believed in God, their suffering had meaning, even if they could not perceive it in this life. It was not in vain. That is an extremely powerful conviction. It is the difference between optimism and hope.

Patrick Deneen once penned a very good essay responding to political theorist Joshua Foa Dienstag’s study on philosophical pessimism. Excerpt:

Linear time haunts modernity, and I think Joshua is right to note its world-altering importance. Linear time is a creation of modernity, a portent of progressive ideology, and a marking of temporality that comes to mock progress’s failure. The pessimist – having rejected optimism’s belief in progress – experiences linear time as a burden, a torment of meaningless successions that lead nowhere, that create expectations of a forward trajectory which can only disappoint. But, here again, we should notice that the pessimist is as thoroughly in the throes of superstition as the optimist – the pessimist accepts the conditions laid down by the optimist and then declares his dissatisfaction with them. But he does not dispute the underlying premise of the conditions. We are stuck with all the burdens of linear time, and enjoy none of its illusory compensations.

In several passing comments Joshua rejects out of hand the possibility that a more ancient “circular” conception of time is available to us moderns (16, 161). The modern mind is inescapably defined by the experience of linear time, he asserts. According to one of Joshua’s aphorisms, we moderns experience time wholly as a creation of culture and artifice, a division of the days and hours that provides the “appearance of order and continuity” (244). Joshua is particularly charmed by arguments that it is the invention of mechanical timepieces that inaugurates the era of linear time, that induces a belief in progress, that thrusts us into existential abstraction and alienation from ourselves and from nature. Linear time is the creature of mechanization, of artifices that “divorces the measure of time from nature” (13). I want to dispute this point, however. Here again, I think it is the case that the ideology of modernity obscures reality, not the clock – and reality is that terrestrial time remains fundamentally circular. Joshua states that “the revolutions of the heavens were displaced by clock and by calendar.” This is mistaken: the clock and calendar mark the movements of the revolutions of the heavens; they are based most fundamentally upon those movements. Even in our digital age, most people wear watches or consult clocks whose shapes are round. Our methods of time-marking are an acknowledgment of the cycles and revolutions of the heavens, of the daily turning of the earth, the monthly cycles of the moon (one that exerts influence alike over the daily tides and the monthly cycles of a woman’s body), and the annual rotation of the planet around the sun. Yes, the manner of division involves some arbitrariness – why base 60? – but the standard governing the division remains the motions of nature. Our experience of time is one of beginnings and endings, and again new beginnings and new endings. Each day, each month, each year we return to where we have started and begin anew. A clock and a calendar do the same.

Linear time is not a result of clocks; it is the result of the ideology of progress that believes that it can master and dismiss the circularity of nature. To paraphrase Machiavelli, nature is a woman’s cycles, and must be straightened into submission. In turn, the exertion to master nature appears, if for a time, to render those cycles irrelevant: thus, we can plant certain crops in any season thanks to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, build roads without regard to terrain or topography, and wear shorts indoors in the winter and sweaters in the summer. The pessimistic instinct – to recognize the falsity of these presumptions and the ultimate and ironic failure of these efforts – is the right instinct, but it goes too far in asserting that, because the presumptions of progress are wrong, the opposite must be true – and, as a result, you should expect nothing. Indeed, because of its rejection of circular time and its acceptance of linearity, pessimism most fundamentally shares with its optimistic counterpart the same ultimate desire to conquer nature: it denies a rhythm in the natural world and seeks to live aesthetically – to turn nature into art, or, as Joshua puts it, to “emphasize how [nature] is a function of man” (268).

The reality of circular time, however, tells us we are bestowed with the privilege to expect something – the sunrise, the return of rain and sun for our crops, the birth of a child even as we mourn the passing of a parent, the seasons, the years, the centuries. We can expect the cup of coffee, because the coffee farmer plants his seeds in their season with the expectation of a successful crop. This does not mean that he will not experience disappointments – droughts and plagues, hail and pests – but memory and hope tell us that we can expect the return of our crops – that their reappearance is “imperfectly true.” Memory and hope, Christopher Lasch argued – and not pessimism – are the proper antidotes to optimism.

This is quite good. I would only point out that “linear time” predates modernity (if by “modernity” we mean the period that began with the Renaissance), and came into our consciousness with the advent of Christianity. As many have observed (not least among them the agnostic English philosopher John Gray), secular progressivism’s philosophy of history, in both its Marxist and liberal democratic varieties, is little more than desanctified Christianity. Without a belief that there is an Author of History, history is nothing but circular. Well, I believe that history has an Author, and a direction, but that it moves in a spiral shape, both circling and progressing. We never really know where we are on the spiral, though.

It has to be enough to have faith that no matter how bad things look to us now, we are going somewhere good. Remember Tolkien’s wisdom:

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Remember too this wrinkle in Christian time: that according to Christian belief, just before the End of History and the Final Triumph of Jesus Christ, the world in general will be in unprecedented turmoil, and the church in particular will undergo the worst persecution in its history. Those who will die for their faith in those days will absolutely be on the right side of history, though it may not seem so at the time.

Among the Wrapped Too Tights

In response to my most recent Benedict Option Dark Side post, a reader tweets:

@roddreher What makes a “dark-side” experience is a certain inner tension, an “uptightness” in attitude. Easy to spot, hard to describe.

— Dean Abbott (@DeanAbbott) December 30, 2015

Boy, is that ever true. I call people like this Wrapped-Too-Tights. More from Dean Abbott:

@roddreher Something about trying to withdraw in order to create heaven on earth rather than just to live a peaceful life in a fallen world.

— Dean Abbott (@DeanAbbott) December 30, 2015

I think this is a helpful topic to discuss in teasing out what the Benedict Option could, and should, mean.

You know the old joke about how a Puritan is someone who is terrified that someone, somewhere, might be having fun? That’s not a bad way to described a Wrapped-Too-Tight. There’s a deep fear of losing control — of themselves, and of others around them. Contrary to what many outside critics think, it’s not that they are eager to impute sinfulness to others because they think they are so righteous. Often, in my experience, they fear loss of social control because they are all too aware of their own flaws and temptations. In fact, to the extent that I am wrapped too tight, it’s precisely because of this.

And you know, it’s not a bad thing at all to be concerned about this kind of thing. It’s necessary for a morally stable, healthy society. The problem comes when a desire for order overrides every other concern. This can express itself as joylessness, not because the WTT doesn’t want to experience joy, but because the WTT is so afraid that by experiencing joy, he and others might lose control of themselves, and … what? They often can’t say.

One of my great character flaws is that I can’t bring myself to enjoy the prose of G.K. Chesterton. Oh, I have tried. I really have. It’s like eating fruitcake: a thing of richness and comfort, but an acquired taste. And I have not acquired it. But I do consider myself Chestertonian, in the sense that I find real joy in Christian orthodoxy, and in conservatism. I prefer a poetic approach to life to a rational one. Chesterton has written:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

And he has also said:

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

I believe that man is tragic, but I prefer to embrace his comedy. It’s in my disposition. I would a thousand times sup with humane, Rabelaisian sinners than with grim and abstemious saints. But that’s just me. Things don’t have to make perfect sense for me to recognize their reality.

I think the Wrapped-Too-Tight, whether a religious conservative or a secular liberal, is someone who cannot abide disorder or injustice of any kind. Radical permissiveness, or Wrapped-Too-Looseness, is equally a problem. Again, I have the WTT tendency within myself, but it is overcome not by any sense of prudence of virtue, but by the fact that I like to eat and drink and to laugh, and I can’t help myself. Nor do I want to.

The kind of Christianity that I find ideal is Chestertonian: it finds joy and freedom in in orthodoxy, and within the boundaries orthodoxy sets. Prudence really is the key to all this, I think. And for individual Christians, and Christian communities, joylessness is a sign that you ain’t doing it right.

On the other hand, I could be guilty here of being like the gripey driver who says everybody who drives faster than him is a lunatic and everybody who drives slower than him is an idiot. Your mileage may vary. Anyway, Dean Abbott is right: WTTs are easy to spot, but hard to describe.

A good rule of hand, when confronted by a possible case of WTT-ness. Ask yourself: “What would Chesterton (or Lewis, or Tolkien) think?”

UPDATE: Just saw this in Gregory Wolfe’s newest essay collection:

Beware the temptation of moralism, which has reached epidemic proportions in our culture, both within religious communities and outside of them. Righteousness so easily becomes self-righteousness. To my way of thinking, moralism is the opposite of true religion. The antidote to moralism is presence: not “do this,” but “I’m here.”

 

More Ben Op Dark Side

The commenter who goes by the nom de blog “Raskolnik”  [UPDATE: This is how he signed his e-mail, but I forgot that there’s another Raskolnik who comments more frequently. Sorry for the error. — RD] writes of his own bad Ben Op-style experience. I have slightly altered this at his request, to delete the name of his college:

I’m going to be as simple as possible. I had the privilege of spending 6 years being raised in a conservative Mennonite church, after my Catholic parents felt that the Catholic church didn’t provide a “safe” atmosphere. After my parents left the Mennonite church, they returned to home schooling, and my sister attended Christendom College. I went to [university deleted] as a commuter and in state scholarship student, before moving to Russia and Asia as an ESL expat teacher. I have spent most of the last decade abroad, with only about a year in total spent in the USA.

My parents, for all their faults and mistakes, were and are good and decent people. I never experienced any abuse physical, sexual, or otherwise, at their hands, or the hands of any community figures. In this way, I wouldn’t put myself in the “darkside” Category of anything. But few, if any things, were as isolated and bizarre as converting to a extreme Anabaptist sect. It caused permanent issues for my sister, and completely turned me off to religious enthusiasm of any kind.

My parents, based on conversations about it over the years, seemed to be afraid of several different things. I would basically put all their behavior down to a single motivation, a metaphysical feat. Basically the belief that society would not allow a place for their children to mature without ruining them. My mother is strongly anti-psychology although not anti-medicine or anti-vax. She was afraid I would be a medicated child if placed in public school. Although my mother was active in homeschooling, the Mennonite church had mandatory parochial school to the 10th grade. The quality of the education was basic but extremely poor, in terms of a college prep level. The Mennonites are strongly against higher education, and many have only an 8th grade education.

Spending the years of 9-15 among the [a broader Mennonite community], I found out a few things about human nature, and the nature of small groups which self-isolate. Some of these are biased, and some of them are facts which I have found to be true of humanity in general, even in places such as China and Russia.

First, women in these communities are often treated as little more than baby making cleaning machines. It isn’t that the community sets out to enforce patriarchy, per se, but rather the whole society is so limited, that single women don’t really have a purpose. With limited education opportunities, and no real skills, unmarried women don’t really have any way of supporting themselves, and so cooking, cleaning, and house wifery really is the best thing a woman can do. The women compete with each other, seeing who can have the biggest garden, or can the most tomatoes.

Domestic violence is not any more or less common than it is anywhere else, but it is likely easier to cover up. A man who beats his wife is going to get a bad reputation, but as long as he isn’t to aggressive, and does serious damage, it will likely be a private affair. In fact, the desire for family matters to remain private is one area where American religious sects seem to be like East Asians.

People tend to thrive on alternative viewpoints or even outright opposition. The problem with a society based on a shared vision is that what happens if the vision differs slightly? As your example of pants shows, there was an argument about beards within the church. My father had a beard since he was 18, and refused to shave. Mennonites shave beards as a religious difference (opposite of the Amish), my dad was like “I’ve had a beard my whole adult life, and I’d look ugly!” so they let him keep it. However, people asked if his beard was a sign that he believed in a certain Old German Anabaptist belief. A few times, he was encouraged to shave.

Now the funny thing about all this, is that the beard thing isn’t a matter of doctrine. The Cathechism of the Catholic church contains very little explicit rules along the lines of how long are hem lines, or haircuts. Little cults however seem to go mad, and love saying that cars must be blue or black, with no stripe.

Another issue is the family. People who are related to bishops or ministers are more “powerful” and seemed to have rights and honor that regular people lacked. My parents repeatedly alleged nepotism was rife, and the powers that be simply ignored it. Of course this creates a seriously messed up society. It is also rife here in China.

The real serious issue was the future. By isolating, de-educating, and brain washing children, many people really had no ability to leave the church. Talking to “other” people was scary. I spent my entire life either being home-schooled or attending Mennonite schools, before going to [large secular university]. People talked about drugs, women, and alcohol, but I was so unpopular I ended up drinking after turning 21, having sex for the first time in Russia, and smoked my first marijuana in China! I felt like I had nothing in common with anyone. No tv shows, no popular music, and basically no “normal” memories made it hard for me to consider Americans my age to be “peers.”

Now having lived as an expat for years, I don’t have to get along with people. My wife is Chinese, and I mostly teach, play PC games, and relax at home. I have little interest in the “future” since I have seen first hand what happens to those who worry about their children’s life. My sister married an evangelical Lutheran boy scout leader, who is a great guy, if a little dumb, and very lazy. I married a Chinese atheist and live in Harbin. Neither me, nor my sister, has anything like the life my parents expected. Although they know I’m fairly content.

It seems the Ben Op is based on a faulty premise, that there is a connection between the events of late antiquity and today. I disagree, I believe that the destruction of western thought after WWI was permanent, irreversible, and total. China is the future, a godless, atheist, kleptocratic state that encourages “an orgy of consumption and a dearth of idea”. This is what many American think democracy means, the ability to but stuff at Walmart. The West is dead. You may chose to live in a Ben Op community, but you are simply avoiding, or at best postponing, the inevitable.

I think if you curtail your children’s education or vocational opportunities, by intention or by accident, they will abandon any and all the “spiritual lessons” you tried to teach them. Yes, mommy’s boys and scared virgins will stick around, but men will be men. Plenty of men went off to Paris, slept with Parisan hookers, and then returned to have a pretty normal, conservative, and traditional family life.

I know you say the Ben Op is not a cult, not a retreat, but it has to be. I mean TV is the message. Just think how much people talk about TV. Regular people I mean. Now don’t. I don’t watch Game of Thrones. I don’t watch True Blood. I don’t watch anything, and I know the names of these things! When your 16 year old who doesn’t know anything about pop culture meets his peers, he finds out he has no peers! There is no connection, and for many, it is easier to run into a nunnery. Christendom proved that, as parents sent their virgins there at a rate of almost 2 girls to every boy…or was it more?

Then, at Christendom, for four years the students learn Latin and Greek, like anybody cares, or there are jobs in the humanities departments? My friend is an adjunct at a community college teaching history for less money than a fry cook. What are all these people with a BA in Latin going to do? The rich ones go to law school, and hang out in Washington. The poor, well, they rose too high, too fast.

How to avoid being a cult? I suggest three things. First, the community must avoid all intrusion into the private life. No dress codes, no discipline, no holier than thou kind of rules. The church may suggest that people do things, but avoid making it into a contest. Since this is a voluntary organization, it must have a certain amount of freedom.

Second, there must be outside authority, a bishop, a pope, who is not related, by blood or marriage to the powerful people. Too many things revolve around families, especially when fertility is high. One generation and 40 kids later, things get ugly. The authority must not be easy to corrupt.

Third, there must be a transparent system in allegations of abuse. People in these communities often try to keep everything a secret, and without a clear process, abuse cases (sexual, embezzlement, adultery) can drag on, damaging people who weren’t initially involved.

Frankly I have a very low opinion of human organizations, and therefore find the idealism behind the Ben Op the most ridiculous thing. No matter how good the idea seems, it will, as always, turn into a rank pit of incest and corruption. It is the nature of things.

Seriously, I’m grateful for this, even though I disagree with some of it. I’m not going to answer this point by point. I do want to say a few things, though, for clarification’s sake.

I strongly agree that the church/group should be very careful not to get too intimate in the regulation of the private lives of its members. That said, Raskolnik’s idea that there can be no “holier than thou” rules (whatever that means) or discipline means that there can be no community. Every community, religious or not, has its own rules, mostly unwritten. The challenge is to be wise in their articulation and application. This is true for a church, it’s true for a school, it’s true for a Benedict Option community or institution, and it’s true for a homeowners’ association.

Second, the idea that you ruin your kid by not surrendering him to be formed entirely by popular culture is preposterous. My own kids have a fairly small-c catholic exposure to culture, both high and popular. There’s a massive amount of stuff out there that is good and true and beautiful. Sure, you can raise them in an airlock chamber if you want to, and set them up for rebellion. But you are not fated to do that. Again, I think Raskolnik posits extremes as the only realistic possibilities.

Third, the idea that there’s no realistic counter-response to the godless, consumerist, egocentric paradise that the globalists, the capitalists, the Chi-coms and others have prepared for us is bunk. I am not prepared to surrender myself or my children to it — and I don’t think that this requires us to turn into extreme Anabaptists. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I’m willing to take that risk. What else is there? Living at home alone, playing computer games, and refusing to dream of an alternative? This is obviously preferable to the Mennonite life? I don’t see it, at all.

Having said all of that, I am genuinely thankful for Raskolnik’s testimony here, because I think this kind of thing is a real temptation for idealists like me who have no experience at all with this kind of community or church. This is something that all of us thinking about the Benedict Option have to consider.

The Joy of Mexican Jail

I have no reason to believe the jails in Puerto Vallarta are any worse than central lock-up in Galveston, but it gives me a mean, dirty kind of pleasure to imagine that the wicked Tonya Couch and her rotten creep of a son Ethan are sweating it out in grim Touch Of Evil-style as they await return to the United States. The Couches are the Texas mother and son who have been on the lam for the past three weeks, apparently planning to live in exile. Here’s why:

Mr. Couch was 16 when he killed four pedestrians in a drunken-driving crash near Fort Worth and pleaded guilty to four counts of manslaughter. His case quickly made national headlines twice: When a defense witness testified that he suffered from “affluenza,” too influenced by privilege and his parents’ permissiveness to know right from wrong; and when a judge appeared to accept the argument, and sentenced him to 10 years’ probation, rather than prison.

The sheriff said on Monday that he was not at all surprised that Mr. Couch’s mother had not only helped him flee, but fled with him. It has clear from the time of the accident, he said, that “there’s just no chance that she will ever think he needs to be punished or held accountable.”

Earlier in December, a Twitter user posted a short clip of Couch fils violating his probation at a boozy party. That apparently provoked Mommy and Baby to hit the road for Mexico ahead of the cops.

Boy oh boy, I wish the cops would perp-walk those two dirtbags through DFW Airport. They represent a lot of what’s wrong with America today. The only thing I wish is that Jean Boyd, the now-retired judge who gave the miserable punk probation for killing four people, was in that jail cell with them.

Here’s the bad news, though, via the Dallas Morning News:

Ethan Couch fled the country while on probation for killing four people in a drunken driving crash, but the worst punishment the “affluenza” teen faces is four months in jail and another chance, authorities said Tuesday.

And you can blame state law for that, experts say.

More:

Texas law allows the juvenile judge to keep the case in his court — and allow Couch to go free after serving time in a detention facility until his 19th birthday in April, Wilson said.

Or the judge could hand Couch’s file to the adult court system, in which a criminal district judge could sentence him up to 120 days in jail. In this scenario, the district judge would supervise him for the rest of his probation.

But, if he violates any terms while on adult probation, he could be sent to jail for up to 40 years.

“I recognize the seriousness of this man’s misconduct. … I wish the system were different, but our system of law means the best result in this case would be, in our opinion, to get him in adult court.” Wilson [the Tarrant County district attorney] said.

I hope that the authorities tail that kid every second of his life, and if he so much as steps off the curb before the light turns green, that they put him under the jail.

In case you have forgotten the details of what Ethan Couch did to all his victims, here’s a refresher.

Man, this case gets to me. These horrible people and the judge who aided and abetted their contempt for basic human decency ought to be taken to a Tijuana dungeon and sat on by a 500-foot-tall perspiring and chili-stuffed Orson Welles till the end of time.

 

 

And At The Eighth Day…

Johnny Cash and St. John Maximovitch, on the wall at the Eighth Day Institute’s Hall of Men (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Well, folks, I have hit a professional career peak, and I am not exaggerating: Ken Myers interviewed me this past summer about my Dante book for the Mars Hill Audio Journal, and tells me that the segment is on the new, just-released Vol. 128 of the Journal. What a great surprise to discover that I share the venue with Carlo Lancellotti, a frequent commenter on this blog, as well as my friend and TAC publisher Jeremy Beer, and the philosopher Matthew Crawford, whose latest book I’m drawing on heavily for my upcoming Benedict Option book.

If you are a Journal fan, you know well what an honor it is to have been invited to be on it as a guest. I genuinely consider it one of the greatest things to have happened to me in my career, but I won’t be able to listen to it out of fear of stinking up the joint in which all those other guys will no doubt be brilliantly holding forth.

In related news, have you considered attending the Eighth Day Institute’s 2016 symposium next month (Jan 14-16) in Wichita?  If not, oh, y’all, please think hard about it — and think fast, because December 31 is the last day you can get the early bird registration fee. This year’s theme is “Soil & Sacrament,” and the speakers include Vigen Guroian, Mike Aquilina, Hans Boersma, Russell Arben Fox, and others, including Your Working Boy, who will be giving two talks: one introducing The Benedict Option (with a particular focus on reclaiming sacramentalism as the heart of the project), and another on the novel Laurus and living sacramentally.

Here’s more information about what our lot will be discussing there. I spoke at last year’s Symposium, and it was a blast. It’s centered around Eighth Day Books, one of the happiest places on earth, and let me tell you, this is just about the best meeting of small-o orthodox Christians you could hope for. I intend to profile the bookstore and the Institute for the Ben Op book — and just today I corresponded with Dr. Boersma, the Reformed theologian whose great book Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry explores the metaphysics of Christian sacramentalism in the Great Tradition, and whose thought is important to my Ben Op project. I’ll be interviewing him for the book while in Wichita.

I really do hope to see you in Wichita. If you come, bring plenty of room in your suitcase, because you will discover books in Eighth Day that you didn’t even know you wanted or needed. It’s that kind of place. (Did you see The New York Times’s profile of the store and its owner, Warren Farha, back in May?) A professor friend of mine and his wife are currently en route from Maryland to Wichita, driving halfway across the country to make a “literary and theological pilgrimage” (his phrase) to the bookstore. Once you’ve been there, this gesture makes perfect sense.

The fact that Mars Hill Audio Journal and Eighth Day Books exist are clear signs that all is not lost, and that God loves us, and wants us to be happy. That, and the fact that Warren serves cold Boulevard beer at the opening night reception in the store. Come on, sign up for the Symposium. You know you want to be there. The Venn diagram between “Mars Hill Audio Journal subscribers” and “Eighth Day Institute Symposiumgoers” is a near-perfect circle. Read this James K. A. Smith interview with Erin Doom, who runs the Eighth Day Institute, explaining what they do and why they do it. Excerpt:

JKAS: How do you see all of these pieces serving the goal of cultural renewal?

ED: I think about that all the time. First, the church has to get over its divisions and stand as one beautiful body. Christ prayed for the church to have the same kind of unity he has with the Father. Why? So that the world might believe. So cultural renewal depends on our unity. And that’s why all of our work promotes an “Eighth Day Ecumenism” by bringing Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants together for a dialogue of love.

But I also think our ability to get over our divisions depends on a retrieval of our common heritage. The church has handed down particular ways of birthing and dying, of marrying and remaining single, of fasting and feasting, of praying and worshipping. These holy practices have proved effective in the past. And we have to implement them in our families. We have to make our homes into little churches.

Ross Douthat says we’ve become a nation of heretics. He’s right, and I think it’s because we’ve forgotten our heritage. So all of our work at EDI promotes the unity of the church through a retrieval of our common heritage.

The community around the Eighth Day Institute and the bookstore are fantastic examples of the Benedict Option. Come experience it for yourself. I can think of no better antidote to cultural gloom and doom than to be in Wichita at this symposium, among these good people, in this good place.

Now, if you come, be sure to rub Russell Arben Fox’s tummy for good luck. He loves it when you do that.

The Hidden Lives of Sinners

A reader writes, on another thread:

I’m reminded of the introduction to Andre Malraux’s autobiography (entitled oddly, “Anti-Memoirs”). Malraux recalls a conversation with a parish priest in the 1940s, whom he asked what the confessional has taught him about mankind. The priest responds: “First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and then, the fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person.”

I have a question for readers of this blog who are pastors, psychotherapists, or who have otherwise been involved professionally in listening to ordinary people talk about their problems: What has your experience taught you about mankind?

The Dark Side of the Benedict Option

When I write the Benedict Option book over the next few months, I consider it very important that I include a chapter on the dark side of Ben Op projects — this, so those individuals, and communities that choose to do something in the Ben Op spirit are well aware of the dangers, and guard against them.

Let’s get two things straight: 1) there is no way to engineer any system that can defeat human frailty and wickedness 100 percent of the time, and 2) the inability to create something perfect should not dissuade us from trying to create something better than what we have now.

A conservative Catholic friend of mine and I were talking recently about the Benedict Option, and about how difficult it is for us both to get a handle on how people with the Ben Op mentality can abuse it. Both of us were raised in MTD religious environments, and came out of them longing for a more structured, purposive, disciplined life of faith. Yet we are also know people who had that very thing — and it went bad.

On this blog, for example, reader Another Matt was raised a fundamentalist Protestant, and it was such an abusive and miserable situation that he lost his faith — but not, thank the God he no longer believes in, his humanity. I greatly appreciate Another Matt’s perspective, because it is very far from my own experience. Yet I know it really happens, and it has to figure into my own thinking and writing about the Ben Op.

True story: some years ago, long before the words “Benedict Option” ever occurred to me, I was thinking of moving to a particular conservative Catholic enclave, which struck me from the outside as a good place to raise a family. Turns out that somebody who lives there was a friend of a friend, and our mutual pal put us in touch. The person who lived in the community warned against it. This shocked me, because I had been told that this person, whom I’ll call X., was an orthodox Catholic, just like me.

X. was, but said this community was not a healthy one. It was driven by fear and extremism, and far too many people were obsessed by policing the boundaries on negligible things. I was trying to wrap my mind around what X. was saying, and put it to X. like this: “Are you saying this is the kind of place where, if I had a daughter someday and let her wear pants instead of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ dresses, people would shun us?'”

“That’s exactly what it’s like,” said X, and then gave me more examples like this.

I crossed that place off my list, though it’s a place that looked good from the outside.

Writing the “dark side” chapter is going to be tricky, because there are plenty of people who think that the Ben Op is destined to devolve into such dystopian places. If that were the case, then every single community (church, school, etc.) that operated according to a strong set of principles and a more or less disciplined communal life would inevitably become a culty conclave. That is simply not how life works — but it happens often enough that we should all be well aware of how it happens, and measures that we can take, both individually, in our families, and in our churches and other groups, to guard against them.

(Besides, no group can work without some trust, and taking some risk. You want to be guaranteed no marital strife and discord? Never get married. But if that’s the path you take, you cheat yourself out of the opportunity to experience and grow from many great things. There is no 100 percent safe way to get through life. The radically atomized individualism that we have been headed into for some time makes us safer in some ways from group exploitation, but creates new dangers for us too.)

With all that said, I want to offer you a portion of an essay written by a high school student who had been raised in a Ben Op-style community, and was nearly broken by it. This is going to be front and center for me as I write the Dark Side chapter. Excerpt:

When I was a kid, my parents taught me that the sun orbits the earth and evolution is a myth. I was never vaccinated, learned to fear doctors and secular government, and thought that Obama was the Antichrist, buoyed to power by Freemasons, homosexuals, abortionists, and the atheistic media.

I grew up in [rural town] a, which would be isolating enough without the added layer of exclusion which comes from membership in a fanatic religious community. My four siblings and I were home schooled, and our only approved social interactions were with the other kids in our bizarre little sect of Roman Catholicism. We were allowed to have friends over twice a year: once on our birthdays, and once on the feast day of our patron saint; sleepovers were absolutely out of the question. My mother took us to church daily, and led us through afternoon and evening prayers while my father went to work.

We were forbidden to read anything not on an approved list of books and authors, and so I mostly grew up on tales of the saints and political commentaries that bashed feminists, evolutionists, and non-Christians. Without a TV or even a microwave, there wasn’t much to keep me entertained but reading, and so I sped through the hundreds of religious books in our library before I was even 12, absorbing all sorts of terrible ideas along the way.

Back then the world was a horrible place full of monsters; I remember being terrified just going to the mall, seeing girls in tank-tops and tight jeans and feeling mortified as I swished over to Yankee Candle in my ankle length, lace-hemmed dress. My mother would make comments about the spiritual state of all the people we passed, telling me in detail what their fate in the afterlife would be while covering my eyes whenever we walked by Victoria’s Secret.

This young woman freed herself by sneaking to the library and reading every book she could get her hands on. She says that when she tried to share her doubts and questions with other kids in her church

That was a terrible mistake. I was bullied mercilessly, to the point of being pinned down and “exorcised,” which involved the other children pouring holy water on me and carving a cross into my hand … .

Today, this young woman — whose identity I verified, and whom, having learned more about her background, I believe — is no longer a religious believer. The very structure her exceedingly devout parents put into place to protect her and her siblings from the corruption of the world led directly to her abandoning the faith. And if I had been raised in that sort of environment, no doubt I would have done the same — just as reader Another Matt did regarding his fundamentalist Protestant childhood.

My point in telling you this is to make it clear that I’m not going into this project with utopian stars in my eyes. I believe strongly in the Benedict Option, but my own experience with abusive authority has, I think (and I hope) put me on high alert. We can’t forget that what looks to some people like an intolerable straitjacket is to others wise and normal — and may be exactly that. When my sister and I were growing up, the strictness of our parents in some areas brought them criticism from other parents, but now, as a parent, I find myself grateful for those sensible limits my folks put on us. So this stuff exists on a continuum. I get that. And I also get that our culture has become so permissive in many ways that upholding ordinary Christian standards and discipline strikes many as horribly oppressive. In those instances, we can safely roll our eyes and get on with it.

But some cases really are outside the bounds of sanity, in my view. If you have deep experience with this kind of thing, and believe you have some wisdom to share with me (versus simply ranting about it), I am eager to hear from you. Write me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com.

 

#AllLivesMatter After All

Here’s a pretty stunning piece by Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist, talking about the bubbles we live in, and how invisible suffering is to most of us. Excerpts:

One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people.

I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ranked one of the best places to live in the country. If there’s anywhere that you might dare hope wasn’t filled to the brim with people living hopeless lives, it would be here. But that hope is not realized. Every day I get to listen to people describe problems that would seem overwrought if they were in a novel, and made-up if they were in a thinkpiece on The Fragmentation Of American Society.

Alexander goes on to give details about the kinds of problems he’s seeing, and to point out why he thought maybe he’s seeing the worst people because he’s, you know, a psychiatrist, but how that just doesn’t pan out. More:

The world is almost certainly a much worse place than any of us want to admit. And that’s before you’ve even left America.

This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says “People in Group X need to realize they have it really good”, or “You’re a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.” The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it. And whenever some online thinkpiece writer laughs about how good people in Group X have it and how hilarious it is that they sometimes complain about their lives, it never fails that I have just gotten home from treating a member of Group X who attempted suicide.

This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. But people have a bad tendency to follow it up with “And so now most people have it pretty good”. I don’t think we have any idea how many people do or don’t have it pretty good. Nobody who hasn’t read polls would intuitively guess that 40-something percent of Americans are young-Earth creationists. How should they know how many people have it pretty good or not?

Read it all. In my life, I have known some folks who to outsiders, were on top of the world. You want to see your cover model for White Privilege Quarterly? Them. And yet, they were profoundly miserable, and miserable for serious reasons. Their money and their social position did nothing to spare them from the pain of broken families, addiction, and on and on. I’ve also known more white working class and poor people who were just barely hanging on. Every time I hear some bigmouth black student at an Ivy or a costly liberal arts college talk about how oppressed they are because somebody microaggressed against them, I think about the people who live right here in my part of the world — black and white alike — who are suffering deprivation and dysfunction that would beggar belief of these elites.

On the other hand, some of these same people are probably happier, on balance, than these expensively educated elites, because they have a greater capacity for happiness, despite material deprivation. Funny, but a Harvard study last year found that two of the five happiest cities in the nation are in Louisiana: Baton Rouge and Lafayette.  Corrupt, poor, hot, backwards Louisiana. Imagine that.

Can we really say that we have it better, on balance, now, than we did in the old days? Most people probably do, but how do we measure this? Yes, I would rather live today in a time of air conditioning and effective anesthesia than in the old days, and so would you. But there are many more kinds of suffering, you know. Perhaps people in the “old days,” whenever that is, did not perceive certain kinds of suffering to be as bad as we imagine it must have been, because they had greater spiritual and communal resources to help them bear it. As I’ve mentioned here before, my father told great stories about growing up in the rural South during the Great Depression. God, they were poor. If the only meat you have to eat many nights is squirrel, you are poor. But Daddy said very few people back then perceived themselves as especially poor, because everybody was in the same boat. Looking back on that time from the vantage point of today, they were suffering terribly. But that’s not how they saw it.

Anyway, I was moved by Scott Alexander’s reflection on the depth, complexity, and intensity of the pain he sees behind the well-groomed façade of his wealthy college town. Judge not, lest ye be judged is not just a high moral ideal, but the most practical wisdom.

Tamir Rice: No Indictment

You have by now heard the news that a Cleveland grand jury has declined to indict white police officers in the shooting death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black kid who had been playing with a realistic looking toy pistol on a public playground. More:

In announcing the decision here Monday, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said he did not recommend that the grand jury bring any charges. McGinty added that he believes both of the Cleveland police officers involved in the deadly encounter were reasonable in their belief that Rice had a real weapon, and that new analysis of the video of the shooting leaves it “indisputable” that the boy was pulling the weapon from his waistband when he was killed.

“The outcome will not cheer anyone, nor should it,” McGinty said. “Simply put, given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police.”

More:

In a statement issued not long after the prosecutor’s announcement, attorneys for Tamir Rice’s family decried the grand jury process and renewed their calls for the Department of Justice to bring federal charges.

“It has been clear for months now that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment,” the family attorneys said. “Even though video shows the police shooting Tamir in less than one second, Prosecutor McGinty hired so-called expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand jury their conduct was reasonable and justified.  It is unheard of, and highly improper, for a prosecutor to hire ‘experts’ to try to exonerate the targets of a grand jury investigation.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio said Monday that federal officials monitored the grand-jury process, and that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is currently conducting its own independent investigation into Rice’s death.

The entire Washington Post account is here. 

Rice had been playing with a fake gun from which he had removed the orange safety tip that signals to others that the gun is a toy. It also emerged that Rice, despite his age, was 5’7″ and 175 lbs., which allegedly caused the two police officers to mistake him for a fully-grown man.

Robby Soave at Reason says:

Never mind that Loehmann [the cop who shot Rice] was previously fired from a police department for incompetence with firearms. Never mind that he shot Rice the very second his car arrived at the teen’s location. Never mind that the officers prevented Rice’s sister from assisting him as he lay dying of a gunshot wound. Never mind that they did absolutely nothing to help him until an FBI agent happened upon the scene.

The only thing that matters is whether Loehmann thought he was justified in killing Rice, and the law is such that no one is qualified to second-guess Loehmann’s decision except Loehmann himself. This is the level of deference we extend to police decision-making, and it is the reason the quest for justice in Rice’s unconscionable murder was doomed from the start.

Well, the cops preventing Rice’s sister from helping may have been wrong, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified given what the police knew at the time. Still, how crazy is it that we are in a situation in which the police might well have acted non-criminally, but still decided to speed up to the scene and start firing almost instantly?

Look, I did not sit on that grand jury, and I didn’t review all the evidence, and hear testimony. I have no way of knowing if its decision in this case was justified, and I doubt you do either. Seems to me that the way people respond to this decision depends heavily — and perhaps even wholly — on whether they are inclined to trust the police as a general matter. I have long been predisposed to give police the benefit of the doubt, but the outrageous conduct of Chicago police and city officials in the Laquan McDonald case makes it hard to know whom to trust.

A white reader who works for a large city, inside the city government, told me an interesting story the other day, one I forgot to blog about. In his city, the violent crime is almost exclusively in the black part of town. He said that the things police in his city have to deal with in terms of drugs and gun violence beggar belief. (I asked him for examples, and he gave me a few.) He also told me that he has personally witnessed police brutality against black crime suspects on more than one occasion. He said the abusive cops that he’s seen are both white and black, and that he fears his city is prime for a riot.

I was startled to hear this because this reader’s city has not been in the news for police brutality. I did a Google search to see if something had come up that I had missed, but nothing did. I verified that this reader really is an employee of his city’s government, and asked him subsequently about the lack of media coverage, given that his city has both a newspaper and TV stations. Said the reader, “I am constantly amazed by the things that go on here that I know about personally, that never make the news.”

The reader gave more detailed information than I’m able to share here, out of an abundance of caution for his privacy. If this reader is correct, then this whole situation in his city is about the failure of institutions. The police are failing. The local media are failing. The family and institutions that shape morality in that city’s black community are failing. I googled information about the public schools in the reader’s city, and with a few exceptions, they’re a disaster.

But about the police. I don’t know about you, but I’m coming to regard the police as an institution with the same mistrust that I have come to have for the church, academia, and the media as institutions. I have friends who are priests and pastors, as well as friends who are police officers, academics, and journalists. All of them are, to the best of my knowledge, good and trustworthy people; if they were not, I wouldn’t be friends with them.

But in observing the behavior of these institutions, I sense a strong defensiveness, and an unwillingness to be self-critical, leading either to a denial of institutional problems, or a private recognition of problems, but a public unwillingness to deal with them out of fear of losing face. I suppose it has always been that way, and we are only now learning the truth of what has been there all along, given human nature. Maybe.

Still, there is no question that the public’s trust in its institutions is at a historic low. Gallup has been polling on this since 1993, and in 2015’s results, found that overall, confidence in US institutions is lower than it has been since ’93.

Where did the Trump phenomenon come from? Do we really have to ask?

Three years ago, National Journal wrote a piece about the decline in confidence in American institutions. They began by telling the story of Johnny Whitmire, an unemployed white working-class man in Muncie, Indiana, who had been pretty badly battered by life. Excerpt:

Muncie is a mi­cro­cosm of a na­tion whose motto could be, “In Noth­ing We Trust.” Sev­en in 10 Amer­ic­ans be­lieve that the coun­try is on the wrong track; eight in 10 are dis­sat­is­fied with the way the na­tion is be­ing gov­erned. Only 23 per­cent have con­fid­ence in banks, and just 19 per­cent have con­fid­ence in big busi­ness. Less than half the pop­u­la­tion ex­presses “a great deal” of con­fid­ence in the pub­lic-school sys­tem or or­gan­ized re­li­gion. “We have lost our gods,” says Laura Hansen, an as­sist­ant pro­fess­or of so­ci­ology at West­ern New Eng­land Uni­versity in Spring­field, Mass. “We lost [faith] in the me­dia: Re­mem­ber Wal­ter Cronkite? We lost it in our cul­ture: You can’t point to a movie star who might in­spire us, be­cause we know too much about them. We lost it in polit­ics, be­cause we know too much about politi­cians’ lives. We’ve lost it—that ba­sic sense of trust and con­fid­ence—in everything.”

We’ve been through this be­fore, and Muncie is again in­struct­ive. Nearly nine dec­ades ago, so­ci­olo­gists Robert and Helen Lynd moved here to doc­u­ment the trans­ition away from an agrari­an eco­nomy. Amer­ic­ans were battered by un­bridled com­mer­cial­ism, sty­mied by an in­com­pet­ent gov­ern­ment be­hold­en to spe­cial in­terests, and flustered by new tech­no­lo­gies and new me­dia. The Lynds found a loss of faith in so­cial in­sti­tu­tions. But, some­how, in­sti­tu­tions ad­ap­ted or gave way to vi­brant new ones. The Cath­ol­ic Church took on poverty, ill­ness, and il­lit­er­acy. The Pro­gress­ive move­ment, em­bod­ied by Theodore Roosevelt, grappled with the so­cial costs of mod­ern­iz­a­tion and equipped the gov­ern­ment to off­set them. Labor uni­ons reined in the cor­por­ate ex­cesses of the new eco­nomy. Fraternal or­gan­iz­a­tions, a new concept, gave people a sense of com­munity that was lost when knit­ting circles and barn-rais­ings died out.

Per­haps the prob­lem is merely cyc­lic­al. “To a de­gree un­like any time since the Lynds’ time, we’ve lost trust in one an­oth­er and the in­sti­tu­tions that are sup­posed to hold us to­geth­er,” says James Con­nolly, dir­ect­or of the Cen­ter for Middletown Stud­ies at Ball State Uni­versity here. Yet un­like that earli­er era, vi­brant new in­sti­tu­tions are not gen­er­ally spring­ing up to re­place the old ones. And even when they do, they don’t al­ways re­store Amer­ic­ans’ faith in in­sti­tu­tions and each oth­er. Schools are worsen­ing (es­pe­cially re­l­at­ive to com­pet­it­ors abroad); politi­cians are lim­ited to small-bore, par­tis­an meas­ures; and cor­por­a­tions’ power over people like Johnny Whit­mire is rising. What if, this time, in­sti­tu­tions don’t re­cov­er—and our faith dies with them?

I think it is entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that the Cleveland officers committed no crime in the Tamir Rice situation. That it’s just a terrible tragedy. If so — if so — then the legal system worked. That said, does anybody in Cleveland — black, white, or otherwise — come away from this event with more confidence in the Cleveland police force? Can we at least agree on that?

Father Marty McFly

In the Philippines, a not-at-all-undignified priest concluded Christmas midnight mass by cruising the aisle of his church atop a Hoverboard.

Why do clerics do this kind of thing? I will never understand it.