Rod Dreher's Blog, page 63

Wokeness Destroying Medicine

In my book Live Not By Lies, I wrote this:

A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.

That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

That doctor told me in our interview that this was a policy decision made not by medical staff, but by the hospital management. It was 100 percent an ideological decision, not a medical one. If you think that medicine is immune from wokeness, you need to wake up.

To that end, writing in Bari Weiss’s invaluable Substack newsletter, Katie Herzog examines the crisis in medicine that the Cultural Revolution is causing. What you will read in that piece will shock and appall you. If you’re like me, you never imagined something like this could happen in America. But here we are. Excerpts:

They meet once a month on Zoom: a dozen doctors from around the country with distinguished careers in different specialities. They vary in ethnicity, age and sexual orientation. Some work for the best hospitals in the U.S. or teach at top medical schools. Others are dedicated to serving the most vulnerable populations in their communities.

The meetings are largely a support group. The members share their concerns about what’s going on in their hospitals and universities, and strategize about what to do. What is happening, they say, is the rapid spread of a deeply illiberal ideology in the country’s most important medical institutions.

This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it’s called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress. They say that it’s turning students against their teachers and patients and racializing even the smallest interpersonal interactions. Most concerning, they insist that it is threatening the foundations of patient care, of research, and of medicine itself.

These aren’t secret bigots who long for the “good old days” that were bad for so many. They are largely politically progressive, and they are the first to say that there are inequities in medicine that must be addressed.

More:

I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.

Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work.

“People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar.

When doctors do speak out, shared another, “the reaction is savage. And you better be tenured and you better have very thick skin.”

“We’re afraid of what’s happening to other people happening to us,” a doctor on the West Coast told me. “We are seeing people being fired. We are seeing people’s reputations being sullied. There are members of our group who say, ‘I will be asked to leave a board. I will endanger the work of the nonprofit that I lead if this comes out.’ People are at risk of being totally marginalized and having to leave their institutions.”

While the hyper focus on identity is seen by many proponents of social justice ideology as a necessary corrective to America’s past sins, some people working in medicine are deeply concerned by what “justice” and “equity” actually look like in practice.

“The intellectual foundation for this movement is the Marxist view of the world, but stripped of economics and replaced with race determinism,” one psychologist explained. “Because you have a huge group of people, mostly people of color, who have been underserved, it was inevitable that this model was going to be applied to the world of medicine. And it has been.”

Herzog brings up case after case of physicians being professionally denounced and punished for doing science that fails to validate ideological principles. And she says that the next generation of doctors are getting substandard training because their trainers are terrified to correct them out of fear of being cancelled.

And there’s this:

As another example of the generation gap, an ER doctor on the West Coast said he sees providers, particularly younger ones, applying antiracist principles in choosing how they allocate their time and which patients they choose to work with.  “I’ve heard examples of Covid-19 cases in the emergency department where providers go, ‘I’m not going to go treat that white guy, I’m going to treat the person of color instead because whatever happened to the white guy, he probably deserves it.’”

Read it all, and understand that this is not something coming in the future; this is America today. The woke are destroying modern medicine. It really is happening, but we hear not a peep out of it from those responsible for protecting the institutions.

The backlash is overdue. When it comes, it is going to have to be merciless. Wokeness must be destroyed before it destroys us. We’re not talking about the humanities departments here; we are talking about medicine. We are talking about life and death. Your life, your death.

If the Republican Party can put crazypants Donald Trump behind it, it could propose and run on a strong anti-wokeness slate of legislation — serious, substantive, comprehensive laws to roll this garbage back — and retake the House and Senate in 2022. They likely wouldn’t be able to pass much with a woke Democrat in the White House, but they would put fear into the Democrats, which would slow some of this down. And then, in 2024, comes the Counter-Revolution.

It could happen — if the GOP gets serious.

I know by now any of my readers who are likely to buy Live Not By Lies have already done so, but in case you haven’t, please understand that the kind of insanity Katie Herzog documents in her piece is exactly what the former anti-Soviet dissidents have seen coming for some time — and it’s what they offer advice in the book on how to resist. I hope you will consider buying it, or at least checking it out from the library, reading it, and figuring out what kind of plans you need to be making to be resilient in the face of this madness.

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Elegy For Catholic Ireland

In First Things, John Duggan writes a heavy, sad, but insightful review of a new book about the collapse of Catholicism in Ireland. Here’s how it begins:

Ireland nowadays seems filled with people who are content to ignore, forget, or step around what’s left of Catholicism, including the actual church buildings themselves. Don’t be fooled by the shaky residual attachment to things like First Holy Communion. As I write, almost uniquely in Europe under COVID, Ireland has made offering or attending Mass a criminal offense. Even outdoor confession is illegal. This is the true measure of how things stand.

Good God. In the video from which I took the screenshot above, the narrator says that the sex shop is open on Easter, but churches are closed. “This is the degenerate country we live in now,” she adds. More:

Scally goes on to burrow into some of the most notorious scandals, abuses, and cover-ups that triggered the implosion. He shows how victims, before they were abandoned to their anguish, were first rendered helpless and voiceless as the power of the few coalesced with the docility of the many. And he widens the lens away from just victims, perpetrators, and complicit superiors to those one might call the bystanders—everybody else, more or less. Scally’s reflections on the shifting burdens of shame and guilt are subtle and persistent. He speculates on whether habits of deferring to authority, or looking the other way, or avoiding too much fuss, are still at large in post-Catholic Ireland, in how the legacy of old scandals and the eruption of new ones are handled.

I know little to nothing about the sex abuse scandal in Ireland, but I do appreciate very much that Scally indicts the bystanders. This is one of the more appalling, but underreported, aspects of the abuse scandal in the US Catholic Church (and not just among Catholics, I hasten to say): how ordinary pewsitters far too often turned a blind eye to what they had reason to know was going on, because facing the truth would be too painful for them. I think of the broken older man I used to know in New York, in recovery from a life of alcoholism and debauchery, who was (he claimed) anally raped by the monsignor who was the principal of his Catholic school in Queens. When he told his working-class Irish Catholic mother about it, she slapped him and told him never to speak ill of a priest. He was twelve years old, and became the monsignor’s whore.

This is very good:

Casting a cold eye over the deeper past, Scally provides an excellent analysis of the ways in which Ireland’s calamitous nineteenth century provided the impetus for Church and people to embrace a form of moral perfectionism: it seemed the country’s best stay against returning to the abyss. A new Catholic Ireland, emancipated but highly disciplined, in possession of both the land and a watertight moral code, would never again succumb to squalor.

I finished this chapter confirmed in things I have long believed. The Irish Church provided a precious gateway to the transcendent. However, it often enforced a severe price of entry in terms of behavior and compliance—a price that many could not or would not pay, and that others only pretended to (itself a recipe for all kinds of nasty pathologies). Irish Catholicism was unable to find its way to being both orthodox and humane, both popular and intellectual; to both engaging and withstanding modernity.

This is the challenge for communities formed to live out some form of the Benedict Option, of course: to find their way to being both orthodox and humane.

Read it all. I cannot imagine wanting to return to a world in which moral certainty and the emotional and psychological comforts of religion were bought with the lives of sex abuse victims and silence enforced by communal agreement. Those days are gone, and I’m glad of it. However, look around you. Seriously, look around you at this degenerate society we have become. It seems that we have not gotten better, we have only, at best, rearranged the evil … and have jettisoned the one thing (religion) that could have helped us find our way back to sanity.

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Carl Trueman: Psychological Man’s Threat To Liberty

Now is a good time for me to remind you that Carl Trueman’s recent book The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self is one of the most important books of our time, an absolute must-read for anyone trying to understand how we reached this point of cultural insanity.

Carl has just published a terrific essay in Deseret News about how today’s cultural revolutionaries are abolishing the long-settled definition of what it means to be human — and what that means for liberal democracy. Excerpts:

In short, public policy is increasingly driven by the assumption that private psychological states or feelings are the basic foundation for personal identity — for who we think we are. The idea that bodies can contain the wrong mind and that bodies ought to be fashioned to our inner will and feelings is now widespread.

The political significance of this might not be obvious at first glance but becomes very clear when we reflect upon how our culture is changing as a result. Take, for example, the idea of freedom as traditionally understood in America. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are — or were — basic to the American experiment. They are enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, a placement which surely points to the priority they held in the minds of the founders.

These ideas, though, were also rooted in a certain understanding of humans: that they were made in the image of God and that they were deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet these truths — once thought self-evident — are under increasing scrutiny as new, and even revolutionary, ideas of the human person are sweeping Western culture.

And the alarming news for many is that, as much as religious conservatives might want to view this current trend as a simple battle of good versus evil or us versus them, Americans from across the ideological spectrum are all deeply implicated in the modern revolution of human selfhood. The way out will demand that we capture an older and more truthful understanding of who we are.

More:

For Jefferson, if something neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg, he did not think it something that the government should take an interest in regulating. But once the self becomes defined not by property or by a physical body but by an inner psychological space, the words and actions that hurt start to become rather more alarming.

That is why wars over words — pronouns, epithets — now dominate the public square, and why a careless tweet can ruin a career or reading the wrong Dr. Seuss book might get you canceled. And it is why society is becoming more authoritarian in the name of protecting the vulnerable. To protect the pursuit of happiness in a time when each decides what that means, some individuals and groups need to be suppressed so that others may flourish, especially if one group chooses to not privilege another’s chosen inner identity.

This is particularly difficult for religious conservatives. When traditional attitudes toward sexual behavior collide with modern notions of identity, religious conservatives may be labeled as anti-social or harmful to the sexual identity of others. When the belief that bodies are fundamental to who we are, and therefore no one can be “born in the wrong body,” crashes up against the notion of inner identities, those who hold such views are considered bigoted.

The causes for this are not entirely the election results over the last two decades or the consequences of a few liberal appointments to the Supreme Court. They are much more long-standing and deep-rooted. What we are witnessing today in the new culture wars is the latest stage in that inward, psychological turn of the human self. Only by recognizing this intellectual error can we find a way forward.

Read it all. We are not going to be able to sustain our political liberties under these conditions. Carl Trueman’s five-alarm essay explains in a powerful way how politics is downstream from culture, and why the soft totalitarianism of the Pink Police State is our fate if we don’t figure out how to turn this around.

If you want to know more about Carl’s thesis, check out this video interview with him. 

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Selling Conservative Books In The Biden Era

McKay Coppins reports that nobody wants to write anti-Biden books, because nobody wants to buy them. He’s too boring. Excerpt:

For now, the most successful conservative authors are training their f ire on more abstract targets, such as “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” A quick review of recent best sellers suggests that ignoring Biden can work just fine. According to BookScan, which tracks most hardcover sales, Andy Ngo’s book on antifa, Unmasked, has sold more than 77,000 copies (an unqualified success in political nonfiction), as has Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies, which bills itself as a “manual for Christian dissidents.” The talk-radio host Mark Levin’s forthcoming American Marxism—which will tackle, among other subjects, “the widespread brainwashing of students, the anti-American purposes of Critical Race Theory and the Green New Deal,” per its publisher—is expected to be a massive hit when it’s released in July.

Shapiro attributes this trend to a broader shift that he’s noticed in his audience. While conservatives may not care about Biden, he told me, they are petrified of the larger progressive forces they see at work in American politics. “What people are afraid of right now are not powerful public figures. What people are afraid of are their bosses, their neighbors, that they’re going to get mobbed on Twitter and get socially ostracized.” Shapiro is betting that’s where the focus will stay: His own book coming out this summer will cover what he describes as “the leftist takeover of every major institution.”

According to my most recent numbers, I’m closing in on 120,000 copies of Live Not By Lies sold — this, with the only attention paid to it by major media my September 28 appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. (Well, I was also on Morning Joe, in a contentious showdown with a woke Princeton prof, but unsurprisingly, that didn’t move the needle on sales; MSNBC’s audience is not mine.) I understand why Coppins said that conservatives like me are training our fire on “more abstract targets, such as ‘wokeness’ and ‘cancel culture,'” but I assure you that these aren’t abstract. My book, and I’m sure Ngo’s book too, are based on many concrete examples of what people are dealing with in their daily lives under the tyranny of wokeness. Ben Shapiro gets it exactly right: the biggest problem is not figures like Joe Biden (who is certainly problematic!), but the effects of wokeness having marched right to the top of institutions and planted the conqueror’s standard.It has not been easy to get conservatives I’m trying to get interested in Live Not By Lies to understand that totalitarianism does not have to come from the state. In fact, one of the things that makes this new totalitarianism unique is that the state, at this point, is a lesser player. The soft totalitarians are exercising their illiberal tyranny, and remaking of society, through liberal institutions. For example, Amazon has every right not to sell books it doesn’t want to sell. It just so happens that its decision not to sell books “that frame LGBTQI+ identity as mental illness” [which Ryan T. Anderson’s book doesn’t do, but never mind] means that in effect, no books like that will be published going forward, because no publisher can take the risk of coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. Newspapers and news media entities have the right to decide what they will and won’t cover. They have turned themselves into woke Pravdas for the sake of creating narratives that lead them to power. And so forth.In fact, while most conservatives were focused so heavily on Donald Trump’s presidency, the progressive march through the institutions became virtually a gallop. The mistaken belief by conservatives that Trump was somehow a serious obstacle to the progressives hid from their view the fact that they tightened their ideological grip on all major American institutions in the Trump era. This is not Trump’s fault, but it is nevertheless a fact. We Americans — not just conservatives — are so attuned by television to thinking of politics only in terms of personality that we miss the power of process.For conservatives, Uncle Joe does not have our best interests at heart. But he is not really the one you have to worry about. Your boss is. Your kid’s school is. All these institutions that ought not to have been politicized now having become political — that’s what totalitarianism is: the politicization of everything. And it might be soft in its approach, by comparison with the hard totalitarianism of the Stalinists, but your butt lands just as painfully on the sidewalk when you’re thrown out of your workplace for being politically unreliable.

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US Trolls Vatican With Pride Flag

The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See celebrates #PrideMonth with the Pride flag on display during the month of June. The United States respects the dignity and equality of LGBTQI+ people. LGBTQI+ rights are human rights. pic.twitter.com/Xentlnr16E

— U.S. in Holy See (@USinHolySee) June 1, 2021

Let me be clear: I think this was an outrageous insult to the Catholic Church, and it makes me embarrassed to be an American. That said, I suggested on Twitter that this might be less of an intended offense than it seems to conservatives like me, given how much pro-LGBT sensibility one sees among many Catholic institutions and figures. This statement ticked off some of my conservative Catholic friends, who seem to have read it as some kind of defense of the Embassy’s gesture.

It wasn’t that at all. Rather, it was an acknowledgement, from someone outside the Catholic Church (me), that the perception of what the Catholic position in on LGBT matters has changed a great deal. After all, consider that the State Department is part of the administration of Joe Biden, a regular massgoing man often described as a “devout Catholic” in the media. As vice president, he performed a civil marriage for two gay employees. During the Democratic primary campaign, he tweeted this:

Has there been any notable rebuke of him for any of this by the Archbishop of Washington, his ordinary? Any sustained criticism of him on this front by the US bishops? Maybe there was, and I just missed it. If I missed it, I doubt that I’m alone.

Years ago, when Pope Francis made his famous “who am I to judge?” comment about gays in his papal press conference, I received an angry e-mail from a reader in Tennessee, who taught moral theology at a Catholic school. He told me that he had been fighting hard against the popular culture to instruct his students in what the Church teaches about human sexuality, including homosexuality, against the powerful consensus of American culture. In a stroke, Francis destroyed all his work. His students were telling him that he was wrong, that the Pope says it’s fine.

In fact, what the Pope said was more nuanced than that, but the damage was done. This was one result:

The most visible Catholic gay rights campaigner is Father James Martin, SJ. He has been criticized by some orthodox Catholics, but his ministry thrives, and he was even named by the Pope as a special adviser. Father Martin is often in the national media advocating for LGBT rights, as a priest. This is not the fault of the Catholic institution, which has no control over who the media wish to spotlight. (And it’s obvious how useful it is to the liberal media to bring on a Catholic priest to advocate for liberal causes.) Still, from the point of view of the average Catholic, to say nothing of the majority of Americans outside the Catholic Church, the fact that Father Martin has been doing this (and doing it very appealingly) for years without effective rebuke sends a signal that the Church’s position is evolving.

I mentioned on Twitter that a few years ago, I visited the campus of the University of Notre Dame, and was shocked to see large rainbow Pride banners hanging from the front of the student center. From a branding perspective, Notre Dame is American Catholicism. And there it was, celebrating LGBT Pride, on a central campus building. What kind of message does that send to students? What kind of message does that send to campus visitors?

In 2017, a Francis-created cardinal did this:

 The word “pilgrimage” usually evokes visions of far-off, exotic places, but for some 100 gay and lesbian Catholics and their families, a pilgrimage to the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart here on a recent Sunday was more like a homecoming.

The doors to the cathedral were opened to them, and they were welcomed personally by the leader of the Archdiocese of Newark, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin. They were seated on folding chairs at the cathedral’s center, in front of the altar in the towering sanctuary, under the blue-tinted glow of stained glass.

“I am Joseph, your brother,” Cardinal Tobin told the group, which included lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics from around New York and the five dioceses in New Jersey. “I am your brother, as a disciple of Jesus. I am your brother, as a sinner who finds mercy with the Lord.”

The welcoming of a group of openly gay people to Mass by a leader of Cardinal Tobin’s standing in the Roman Catholic Church in this country would have been unthinkable even five years ago. But Cardinal Tobin, whom Pope Francis appointed to Newark last year, is among a small but growing group of bishops changing how the American church relates to its gay members. They are seeking to be more inclusive and signaling to subordinate priests that they should do the same.

Again, I say: it should not surprise Catholics if other Catholics, and non-Catholics, assume that what was once forbidden (and still is forbidden in Catholic teaching) is now allowed. In 2019, 61 percent of Catholics supported gay marriage. Look at these Pew numbers from 2014; there is no reason at all to assume that in the last six years, they have moved in a conservative way:

 

There’s a principle in law that says if a company refuses to protect its brand over time, it will lose the legal right to that brand. That’s why if you use the word “Dumpster” as a common noun, you might hear from the legal department at the Dumpster company telling you to stop. It’s important that they act to protect their brand, or it will be dissolved into popular usage. The same principle (though not legally) is at work here, for the Catholic Church. It will be interesting to see if the Vatican files a formal diplomatic protest against the US for the Embassy flag. If not, what conclusion should one draw?

This, by the way, is not just a problem for the Catholic Church. I was talking to an Orthodox priest not long ago about gender ideology, and suggested that Orthodox parishes needed to step up education of parents and children about what the Church teaches about the meaning of maleness and femaleness, and so forth. Kids are being bombarded with trans messaging in schools and in popular culture, and parents are confused. The priest said no, that we Orthodox need to keep the culture war out of our churches.

This is incredibly naive. The anti-Christian culture knows well what it believes, and is not shy about promoting it. It has an immensely powerful propaganda machine, one that never stops. Perhaps the only place where children and families will receive a countercultural message is in church, and in church institutions. If clerics and lay leaders are willing to rest on the assumption that simply stating official church teaching is sufficient, they are going to be steamrollered.

Neuhaus’s Law holds that wherever orthodoxy is optional, it will eventually be proscribed. We are seeing right now at Baylor University, the Texas Baptist institution, this at work. The school is finally granting some legitimacy to an LGBT student group. Within a decade, maybe a decade and a half, I predict that student groups on that campus who espouse the Biblical teaching about homosexuality will be fighting for their existence as LGBT advocates say the campus must be protected from “hate.”

The bottom line is that I agree with what the Catholic Church teaches about LGBT, and I wish she would defend herself. I believe that the US diplomatic gesture was likely a provocation; the State Department is doing the same thing in Central and Eastern European countries, where LGBT rights are more contested. But I also think that a reasonable person, looking at the Catholic Church from the outside in 2021, after years of this pontificate, would conclude that the Catholic Church is much more accepting of LGBT claims than it used to be. Again, I remind you that the Catholic president of the US, a man who civilly married a gay couple, and who has called transgender rights “the civil rights issue of our time,” is the chief executive overseeing the State Department. I would be willing to be money that in a poll, most US Catholics would either support the Vatican embassy Pride flag, or would see no problem with it.

One last thing: according to this report, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that US embassies may fly the Pride flag during June, but that it is not required. He also advised not doing it in countries where it might cause offense. This would appear to have been a decision made within the US Vatican outpost. Again, it will be interesting to see whether or not the Vatican protests.

And by the way, in case you were wondering if the US Embassy to the Holy See was having second thoughts about its stance in the wake of social media reaction, here’s its latest tweet:

.@SecBlinken: “As we celebrate Pride Month this June, let us not only observe how far we have come in the struggle for the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons, but also acknowledge the challenges that remain.” Read Secretary Blinken’s statement: https://t.co/Gdopgeceor pic.twitter.com/RbMH41opHt

— U.S. in Holy See (@USinHolySee) June 1, 2021

They’re trolling the Vatican. I hope they don’t get away with it. But if they do, that will send a powerful signal, and not a good one.

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What’s Happening To America?

I went to a garden party tonight over in the Buda hills. I met there a journalist who writes about national security and defense for a Hungarian magazine. He said to me, “It really upsets us to see what’s happening to America. It’s not the America we knew. I was at Georgetown not long ago, and met this student from the Midwest who wanted to go into the foreign service. I asked him what he wanted to do with his career. He said, ‘Destroy white supremacy.’ He is as white as I am! These are the people who will be running America one of these days. Your country is tearing itself apart, and this is hard for us to see. We loved America. We looked up to it.”

The man seemed genuinely sad, and uncomprehending. What could I say?

I fell into a conversation with two men, one a journalist, the other a retired diplomat. They spoke with awe about the speed of the collapse of our civilization. They agreed that what’s happening to America is going to happen to Hungary sooner or later. Neither of them could account for the rapidity of the collapse through rational explanation. They agreed that there is something supernatural going on here. Hungary is a very secular country, so I assumed they were speaking metaphorically. They weren’t.

Someone said to me that American culture is still immensely powerful. “Nobody cares about Germany. They make great cars, okay. But what else? Nothing. America is still cool.” We may be decadent as hell, but our culture still matters to these people.

I shared a taxi back to the Pest side with an American graduate student studying here. He’s a Christian who reads this blog. He said he saw the Blue’s Clues segment with the drag queen singing about the Pride parade including the beaver family with the trans member sporting mastectomy scars. “That show meant a lot to me as a kid,” he said. “It started the year I was born. It was a big part of my childhood. Now … .” His voice faded off.

“It’s like Sohrab Ahmari says: ‘Look around you,'” said the student. “Look around you, and you can’t believe the depravity. You want to ask God, ‘How long?'”

Something dark and depraved is coming. It’s already here, and it’s going to get much worse. Prepare, prepare, prepare. These people who have lived through totalitarianism know what they’re seeing.

UPDATE: Looks about right for the country we have become:

The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See celebrates #PrideMonth with the Pride flag on display during the month of June. The United States respects the dignity and equality of LGBTQI+ people. LGBTQI+ rights are human rights. pic.twitter.com/Xentlnr16E

— U.S. in Holy See (@USinHolySee) June 1, 2021

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Lab Leak And Media Narrative

Ross Douthat says that if it turns out that Covid really did come to the world through a leaky Chinese lab, then that’s a very big deal:

First, to the extent that the United States is engaged in a conflict of propaganda and soft power with the regime in Beijing, there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.

The latter scenario would also open a debate about how the United States should try to enforce international scientific research safeguards, or how we should operate in a world where they can’t be reasonably enforced. Perhaps that debate would ultimately tilt away from China hawks, as David Frum argues in The Atlantic, because the lesson of a lab leak would be that we actually need “more binding of China to the international order, more cross-border health and safety standards, more American scientists in Chinese labs, and concomitantly, more Chinese scientists in American labs.” Or perhaps instead you would have an attempted scientific and academic embargo, an end to the kind of funding that flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the U.S.A.I.D., an attempt to manage risk with harder borders, stricter travel restrictions, de-globalization.

Either way, this debate would also affect science policy at home, opening arguments the likes of which we haven’t seen since the era of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island about the risks of scientific hubris and cutting-edge research. This is especially true if there’s any chance that the Covid-19 virus was engineered, in so-called gain of function research, to be more transmissible and lethal — a possibility raised by, among others, a former science writer for this newspaper, Nicholas Wade. But even if it wasn’t, the mere existence of that research, heretofore a subject of obscure intra-scientific controversy, would become a matter of intense public attention and scrutiny.

He’s right about that, but it’s also true, as others have pointed out, that the increasingly likelihood that the lab leak hypothesis is accurate calls into question the authority of our media, including social media controllers. Discussion about the lab leak hypothesis was squelched last year because Reasons (e.g., if true, it might benefit Donald Trump; if true, it might boost anti-Chinese racism). This kind of thing happens a lot more than we think, I believe: the unconscious (or conscious) ruling out of bounds of certain discussions because they might lead to unwelcome conclusions.

I first saw this kind of thing displayed nakedly in 2002-03, in the initial wars between Catholics over the abuse scandal. On the Catholic Right, we (I was a right-wing Catholic then) avoided talking about the possibility that celibacy culture in the priesthood played a role in the scandal. We said, no doubt correctly, that there is no reason to think that a commitment to celibacy makes one more likely to sexually abuse children. But that wasn’t the claim, at least not among serious critics. The claim was that the existence of a clerical system that depended on celibacy made it easier for men who had deeply disordered sexual attraction to hide within it. It may or may not have been true, but the point is that we did not want to discuss it.

For their part, the Catholic Left ruled off-limits a discussion of homosexuality in the priesthood, and homosexual networks. You couldn’t talk about it. This prejudice was upheld by the mainstream media, and allowed a massive part of the scandal to go unexplored — and has to this day. True story: in 2002, I agreed to brief the reporter hired by Fox News to cover the Dallas meeting of the Catholic bishops — their first since the scandal broke. The reporter was a freelancer who was not a Catholic, and needed to be brought up to speed on who the players were among the bishops, and what the issues were. I prepared a thorough briefing. When I got to the part about homosexuality in the priesthood, she cut me off, and said, “We can’t go there.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “You can’t understand the scandal without understanding this aspect.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Orders from the top.” I understood her to mean Roger Ailes’s office. Not even Fox wanted to touch that third rail.

I’ve seen this happen a lot in journalism, the professional world I know best. You will never, ever see a news story exploring any negative side of LGBT life. It’s almost entirely advocacy. You will rarely if ever see a story calling into question some fundamental aspect of the so-called antiracist movement. Another true story: well over a decade ago, I once sat in a meeting of senior journalists in which the speaker was discussing survey data showing that a strong majority of particular target audience had no confidence in the media’s truth-telling. Someone in the small audience remarked, “Isn’t that said. People will only believe what they want to believe.”

Are there any other industries in which, upper management having learned that most customers or potential customers doubted the integrity of the product, a manager would react by criticizing the customers for their moral and intellectual failings? If our media truly didn’t care if reporting stories upheld the purported right-wing version of events, it would look different. But it doesn’t; in general, everything must support the Narrative.

Look:

Yes, exactly. It is staggering that it has come to this. The only story I could find about it in the mainstream media was this puff piece from NBC’s Today website,and a short, descriptive piece in the New York Post.

If it weren’t for independent media (like this blog you’re reading), you wouldn’t know that there are lots of people who are sickened and disgusted by this. Take a look at this great, gonzo interview with tech mogul Marc Andreessen, who talks about what the Internet has done for us. Excerpt:

You are a Titan of the Internet. In fact, you were inducted into the World Wide Web Hall of Fame way back in 1994. Without you there’s no LinkedIn. No Tumblr. No Reddit. No Instagram. No DeviantArt. How responsible do you feel for the horrible state of the world as it is today? Feel free to apologize to everyone.

As with everything in life, it’s a question of the counterfactual. I’m old enough to remember life pre-Internet. There were only three largely identical television networks (plus PBS if you lived near enough communists, which I didn’t), a few radio stations, a newspaper or two, three printed news magazines, a handful of book publishing houses, and a few mimeographed newsletters. That was it. We misremember the past as a Golden Age of Shared Understanding. In reality it was nothing like that; it was a time of information starvation. I think things were actually getting a lot worse in the run-up to the Internet; television was increasingly dominant, and it’s been scientifically proven that TV makes you stupid.

What does the Internet do? I think it’s clear the Internet is both an engine and a camera. To some extent it does drive behavior, but it also shows us ourselves in vivid detail. That is bound to make us uncomfortable, but is also very useful. The Internet can reinforce existing beliefs and misconceptions, but it also reveals underlying truths that otherwise would remain hidden. For example, the Internet makes it far easier to discover when an authority figure is lying to us, which is an overwhelming good.

As with any technological change, it’s important to consider who is the most threatened by it…..who freaks out the most. The Internet can be thought of as a cream that you rub on undeserving gatekeepers to drive them insane. I think it has all the right enemies.

More:

Two of your latest investments are in highly successful ventures: Substack and Clubhouse. Both have already caused some controversy, but everything is ‘controversial’ these days. Rather than focusing on pointless agendas, I’d rather turn towards the actual success from both of these ventures. Substack has taken off wildly and seems to have filled a void left behind by legacy media. There is an audience hungry for journalism that is not filtered through an ever-narrowing band of acceptable opinion, and this audience is now settling in at Substack. What are the defining features of its success, and what does this tell us not only about the state of media today, but where it is headed in light of this challenge?

The most startling aspect, to me, about the modern institutional media is its hyperconformity. (Note here, I am not criticizing the *content* of the hyperconformity; simply that it is hyperconformist. I don’t even think the hyperconformists would deny this.) This hyperconformity seems to have developed in two phases: Phase One was a collapse of previously distinct media types (network TV, cable TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, et al) into just “web sites” and now “mobile apps”. This was not their fault. Phase Two was the virtually universal industry-wide adoption of a strident ideological monoculture. This is their fault. I’m a First Amendment absolutist, so I don’t begrudge anyone the freedom to say and write what they think, but we are told that we live in a marketplace of ideas. But if you mainly consume the standard media product, what you are experiencing is closer to a marketplace of idea.

This monoculture challenges two of my most fundamental beliefs. First, in business — and these are businesses — you seek to differentiate, to offer a unique product that your customers can’t get anywhere else. In economic terms, differentiation is the key to pricing power, which is the key to profits, which is the key to staying in business. This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect. Second, civilizational progress happens not by top down unanimity and ideological instruction, but by debate and dispute. That this should happen, but is not happening, in the institutional media today is obvious.

And so I think it’s obvious that the incumbents are handing us, by their own considered and determinedly executed choices, a sparkling opportunity to both build better businesses and an actual marketplace of ideas. I’m intensely proud of both Substack and Clubhouse and have very high hopes that they can deliver.

For all the many problems caused by the Internet, I think one clear good is that it makes it harder for the gatekeepers to impose their Narrative. The challenge for the rest of us is to know how to tell the difference between dissident reports that tell us the truth, and those that groundlessly flatter our prejudices.

UPDATE: Read the Bret Stephens column about the media failure here. He says it all.

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Man Against The Machine

If you haven’t yet subscribed to Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack, what are you waiting for? It’s fantastic stuff. The English novelist and essayist is trying to sort out the nature of the battle in front of us all. In his latest entry (subscriber only), Paul suggests that the standard theory of disenchantment is not quite right. Excerpt:

But in an interestingessay for Aeon magazine a couple of years back, the historian Eugene McCarraher took issue with this notion. Modernity, he claimed, did not in fact dispense with the West’s sacred order, leaving only dessicated materialism in its place. Our replacement value system is just as enchanted as before – but we have failed to acknowledge it, because it poses as something else:

Since the 17th century, much modern history has provided good reasons to show that ‘disenchantment’ is more of a fable, a mythology that conceals the persistence of enchantment in ‘secular’ disguise. Capitalism, it turns out, might be modernity’s most beguiling form of enchantment, remaking the moral and ontological universe in its pecuniary image and likeness.

If McCarraher is right, we have not junked a sacred order for a profane one. We have instead enthroned a new god, and disguised its worship as the disenchanted pursuit of purely material gain. We have dressed up as a mere ‘economy’ our new idol and sovereign: the Machine.

He goes on to discuss Lewis Mumford’s views on this:

But, says Mumford – and here is the connecting tissue that links him to Spengler to Macintyre to McCarraher – no society would go to all this effort for purely material ends. The Machine is not simply a vast, soulless mechanism for accruing material wealth. It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment:

Communities never exert themselves to the utmost, still less curtail the individual life, except for what they regard as a great religious end … where such efforts and sacrifices seem to be made for purely economic advantages, it will turn out that this secular purpose has itself become a god, a sacred libidinous object, whether identified as Mammon or not. 

This is what Mumford calls ‘the myth of the Machine’. Sometimes, in our age, we call it growth. Sometimes we call it progress. Sometimes we don’t need words, for no words can ever circumscribe a deity. But a deity it is – and throughout human history, from Egypt to Babylon, Sumeria to Rome, whenever the Machine falls, we work to build it up again, because at some level we need to hear the story that it tells us about ourselves:

The one lasting contribution of the megamachine was the myth of the machine itself: the notion that this machine was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible – and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent. That magical spell still enthrals both the controllers and the mass victims of the megamachine today.

That it does. Across the spectrum, from conservatives to liberals, Marxists to fascists, socialists to greens, believers to atheists, very little serious criticism of the enwtined myths of progress, growth and materialism will ever be heard in the public sphere. Ultimately, most of us accede to our sovereign, happily or otherwise. We are told daily, after all, that there is no realistic alternative to pursuing what, in Mumford’s telling, is the ‘fundamental animus’ of the Machine:

The effort to conquer space and time, to speed transportation and communication, to expand human energy through the use of cosmic forces, to vastly increase industrial productivity, to over-stimulate consumption, and to establish a system of absolute centralised power over both nature and man.

Conquest and expansion are the essence of the Machine. If it could be said to have an ideology, it would be the breaking of bounds, the destruction of limits, the homogenisation of everything in its pursuit of its continued growth. The end result of this is the flattening of the world – cultures, ecosystems, landscapes, traditions: any forms of resistance which limit the scope of its kingdom. The Machine is, to its core, anti-limits and anti-form: which means anti-nature, and thus anti-human. As such, its endpoint is already clear: it’s been explored in a thousand novels over the last centuries (I recently added my own effort to the list) and predicted and warned against by philosophers, film-makers and scientists. The Machine is aimed squarely at what C S Lewis termed the abolition of Man, which is also the abolition of nature itself.

Paul lists what he believes are the Characteristics and the Core Values of the Machine. Here they are:

Characteristics

Centralised, hierarchical, large-scale society.Effective bureaucracy, able to order and monitor citizenry.Military/police might sufficient to enforce order.Large population, mostly urban/metropolitan, reliant on Machine for survival and thus inclined to defend it.Centrally-directed economy; powerful financial institutions.Need to expand via colonisation (via military might, international treaties or commercial pressure) to secure further markets and resources.Propaganda system, designed to normalise the above (‘the media’).Drive to replace human parts with technological parts; expansion of technological system to all areas of life.Advanced universal communications network, able to both propagandise and monitor/track population (‘the web’).Sophisticated matrix of production and distribution of goods and services (‘the market’).Economic ‘efficiency’ as sole/primary assessment of value. Commerce as primary driver and value of society.

Core values

Progress: central myth of Machine age. Material improvement in all areas is both necessary and inevitable. The future will always be better than the past.Openness: limits are shackles, borders are offensive, self-definition is a right. All should be exposed, taboos must be shattered. Happiness will result from fewer restrictions.Universalism: Machine values are applicable everywhere and should be available to everyone by right, given their liberatory nature (see above).Futurism: Against the past, against place. History is to be escaped from, roots are limits to progress, and possibly darkly prejudicial.Individualism: fragmentation of place-based communities, family units and other traditional ways of organising, in favour of the promotion of personal desire and ambition.Technologism: new technology is benevolent and inevitable, and despite hiccups should be embraced. ‘Technology is neutral’ and has no telos: it can be used for good or ill.Scientism: ‘Science and reason’ as ‘objective’, utilitarian arbiters of value.Commercialism: market values infiltrate all areas of life; fulfilment is to be found through material consumption.Materialism: Gods, ghosts and other backward superstitions are to be transcended.TINA: ‘there is no alternative’. The Machine is ‘absolutely irresistible … and ultimately beneficent.’ Opposition is naive idealism at best, and a dangerous denial of its benefits to the needy at worst. Anti-Machine frustration directed into ‘art’, now a neutered and saleable commodity.

He invites readers to add to the list. I really hope you will subscribe to his Substack. He is doing some hugely important thinking and writing there.

What Paul has done here is talk about the fundamental basis of the new totalitarianism, upon which the particular ideology (wokeness, roughly speaking) is built. To be clear, you don’t have to be woke to accept the Machine — indeed, most modern people of all political and religious confessions are more Machine-oriented than they think; and in any case, the Machine precedes wokeness — but the Machine makes wokeness possible, even inevitable. Why inevitable? Because wokeness is the current iteration of Marxist social utopianism, in which a perfectly planned and moderated society brings about total control. But this is by no means an exclusively left-wing thing.

What do you think? Other characteristics and/or core values?

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Baylor At Breaking Point With Bible

I’m hearing that at Baylor University, the Texas Baptist university that has been surrendering to aggressive wokeness (see my recent “Every Knee Shall Bow”), there are faculty and staff who are urgently concerned that the institution is about to pass the point of no return. One of my readers, an alumnus who is very well connected at the university, writes:

You recently reported that the Baylor Board of Regents had entrusted President Linda Livingstone with chartering an LGBT group that provided community and support for Baylor’s LGBT students and yet also was consistent with the University’s stated position on sexuality. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/every-knee-shall-bow-baylor-lgbt-live-not-by-lies/

As a Baylor alum, I have to wonder why on earth the regents would trust Livingstone to do this given how her administration has handled Title IX training for faculty and students. Remember the “tea video” that you discussed here? https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tea-and-sexual-sympathy-at-baylor/

How about the slides from the faculty and staff Title IX training that mandated trans inclusive language? https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/title-ix-transformation-of-baylor/

Now the word around the campfire is that after you posted ‘The Title IX Transformation of Baylor’ that training was taken down within a day. There remains at least one Baylor regent who draws breath and has not bent the knee to Baal somewhere.

So the administration was trying to sneak trans-inclusive language into their faculty and staff training, and they got caught red-handed. The faculty and staff training was better the following year. But now staff tell me that the administration has now started making the training super-woke again. I suppose the administration decided that if they couldn’t explicitly signal Wokeness by mandating trans inclusive language, they could implicitly send that message through the training. Despite LGBT being only a fraction of the population, they dominate the training. There is clearly a message being sent here.

 

The alumnus continues:

Now ask yourself, what do these slides communicate in the context of being part of the official training for Baylor University? There’s a message being told here and it is not a message authorized by the regents or consistent with Baylor’s position on sexuality. It is not a message that values holiness and which flees from unrighteousness.

What does it tell you about the administration that after being explicitly reprimanded for including trans dogma in the Title IX training explicitly, they have shifted to pushing the message implicitly? Do any of the slides I have sent explicitly violate the letter of the law that the regents have laid down regarding sexuality? No, they don’t– but I think that’s the problem. This administration has deliberately and carefully sought out a space that undermines the University’s position on sexuality, but in a way where they can’t be pinned to the wall. There’s no explicit violation here, no red line has been crossed, but there is clearly intent to undermine the official University policy and to tip-toe right up to the line without crossing it.

That sort of delicate attention to detail–finding the line and yet not crossing it tells you everything you need to know about this administration and where it stands on sexuality and on what its goals are. Nobody does that fine a job finding and then setting up camp on the threshold unless they are up to no good and looking to subvert. Certainly this is not the sort of training materials you would expect from an administration which embraced the University’s position on sexuality–the righteous flee from all wickedness. Holiness is about separation and distance from sin, not seeing how close you can get to it without getting in trouble.

Given the deceitful and reluctant performance of the administration on the Title IX training, do you really think Linda Livingstone is going to charter an LGBT group that upholds the BGCT [Baptist General Convention of Texas] position on sexuality? That sex is for marriage between a man and a woman and that male and female are not gender identities we identify but are marked on our bodies by the author of our nature? Give me a break.

The regents have been fooled, they were citing suicide statistics on their explanation for the decision and yet as many of us know now, those statistics don’t tell us anything about the danger of not entering into the delusion of those with ROGD [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] but that these women are deeply mentally unwell. There should be support for transgenders at Baylor but it should be godly and courageous support–the support that mitigates the danger of their delusion and keeps them from things like surgery which vastly increases the risk of suicide. I would recommend every regent read Irreversible Damage to get a handle on the real story of mentally unwell teen girls acting out that is driving the trans phenomenon. The talking points being delivered to the regents (probably by Baylor’s own School of Social Work) are ideological untruths. I could go on and on about the influence of the School of Social work; see here from a professor:

and this charming lady (link to her pastor page) is on the “board of advocates” for the BSSW:

(Here’s a link to the column.)

but I think we all know where the hard push from the Left on campus is coming from.

Linda Livingstone is not a Social Justice Warrior. She’s isn’t woke–not really. She is of course quite liberal, but that’s not the same as being an ideological fanatic–she isn’t one. She is a competent, pragmatic, and risk-averse administrator. That’s why right now and in this day and age, she is the exact wrong person to lead Baylor–Baylor does not need a manager to ease Baylor into conformity with “best practices” of the secular world.

“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” James 4:4

“You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Matthew 10:22

Baylor certainly does not want someone risk-averse, someone afraid of confrontation with the world at the helm. To be Christian in a secular age is to be in conflict and to face scorn and ridicule. Baylor needs a leader who will confront the secular world and who is unafraid to speak truth against the lies of fashionable ideologies. If Baylor is not willing to stand up to lies of trans ideology and speak truth, it is better off shutting its doors. Conforming to the world in general is not an option–that is to lose one’s saltiness, to become lukewarm. But to actually lead young ones into sin? Jesus had harsher words for such and it involved a millstone.

We live in an extraordinary time characterized by deep spiritual darkness. The darkness that is descending over the U.S. is as ominous as any iron curtain. Most people, even the good people, are quietly acquiescing out of fear. The universities are ground zero for this movement that distorts the truth, which deifies self, which leads young people astray with soothing and deceitful words. To see Baylor succumb would be sad in and of itself, but is especially bitter to accept when Baylor has so many solid and faithful Christian faculty who have not bowed down before this darkness. Baylor could be a refuge or a stronghold against this movement. Despite the fait accompli narrative pushed by the media regarding the trans hysteria, most Americans and Christians are not on board with the nonsense on pronouns and gender identity, they do not support mutilating young women, and they resent the use of suicide victims as hostages for a program of social revolution.

If ever a Christian reading stories of the ancient martyrs or other great pivotal times in history wanted an opportunity to be a witness for Christ against deceit of the world, now is the time! The moment to give testimony of the truth that stands in sharp relief to the world has arrived! This is the time you have been preparing for, praying, fasting, and disciplining yourself so that you’ll be ready when the time of testing reaches you. This is one of those rare moments where the contrast between the light of Christ and darkness of the world is greatest–the crest of the wave. When in our own time have we ever seen such spiritual hunger and desperation? Young people would flock to the truth if anyone would be bold enough to tell it, to risk the wrath of the world. Any current faculty you lost for proclaiming Christian truth would be replaced by the faithful ones laying low in secular universities, seeking a place that would stand for truth. To paraphrase Gibson’s William Wallace, If you would just lead them, they would follow you.

Maybe the decision will be to play it safe, keep your head down, go with the flow, repeat the lies. This is of course what most ordinary people did in both Germany and Russia when poisonous ideology became orthodoxy. Maybe when all the risks are calculated, the enrollment and endowment numbers are crunched, our long term viability just looks better when we tell lies in the short term. Surely the trans hysteria will pass as all such movements do; we can weather the storm for the next few years by blending in and regurgitating the ideological tenets. We’ll live to a ripe old age, never offending any cultural elites or having our names dragged through the mud by activists on twitter. But man, I’d hate upon arriving in that great company of witnesses to have to tell St Peter or any martyr that during the great time of testing that I lived through, I didn’t do anything–just “shoveled shit in Louisiana.”

He goes on:

The regret from playing it safe could come much sooner. Just in the past year, the Baylor regents have found it necessary to admit the University’s complicity in another great evil–slavery. Assuming that the shame expressed was genuine and not a calculated PR move that coincided with the June protests, how embarrassing is it to have to admit that while liberty was being preached at Hillsdale, Baylor was repeating the lies of the antebellum South–which was no doubt the safest route; Baylor after all lived to tell the tale.

For a contrast to Baylor’s safe complicity with slavery, check out what Baptists were doing at the same time at Hillsdale.

When the dust settles on the trans hysteria–when doctors pay millions in settlements, when gender reassignment surgery reaches the company of electroshock therapy and the experiments of Mengele, people will find it amazing the untruths about male and female and about language and identity that were told on college campuses and they will marvel that anyone could have ever been so foolish or cowardly not to speak the truth against such outrageous and obviously corrupt ideology. The regents of Baylor at that time may be forced once again to apologize for the school’s complicity in perpetuating this darkness and again be humbled by places like Hillsdale.

Man, that was something. This is what it means to lose an institution to an ideology. If Baylor breaks with the Bible, it’s not coming back.

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Some Me TV

Did you know that I do a weekly podcast with Kale Zelden? Here are the last two. The first one is from my Paris hotel room. I look like Serge Gainsbourg felt most mornings:

And here’s an interview I did for the Orthodox Order of St. George:

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