Rod Dreher's Blog, page 633

A Black Student Not Ready For Elite College

Here’s a very good short piece by Afi-Odelia Scruggs, who graduated from the University of Chicago in the 1970s, and earned a PhD in Slavic linguistics from Brown. She writes in response to Justice Scalia’s remark that black students who aren’t adequately prepared to do first-rank college work should not attend first-rank colleges, but lesser ones. Scruggs tells how she got into Chicago because of affirmative action, and it kicked her butt. But she worked really hard, graduated, and went on to great academic success. In the four years of grinding out her undergraduate degree at a place she was not ready for, Scruggs learned a few things. Among them:

How to advocate for myself: My teachers showed me subtly and overtly that they didn’t think I was smart enough to attend the university. I stopped trying to show them otherwise. My goal was to become a University of Chicago alumna. I found a mentor. I pulled all-nighters studying and writing papers. I raised the money to attend a summer language institute in Vermont. My teachers marveled when I returned speaking fluently. I knew then that my work had paid off.

How to become entitled: I watched the white kids around me with awe. If they wanted to drive across country, somehow they finagled a car, gas, and places to stay. If they decided to learn the blues, they ended up hanging out with the best guitarists on the South Side of Chicago. They took their good fortune in stride, as if it was the way of the world.

Until I came to college, I’d never lived intimately with people who assumed life would unfurl for them. My expectations swelled. I might have to yank at the knobs, but doors would open for me.

How culturally limited white people really can be: My dorm kitchen was the hangout, where we cooked and chatted. One evening a couple friends glanced at the vegetable I was chopping.

“What’re you fixing?” one asked.

“It’s a sweet potato,” I said, puzzled.

“A what?”

I was stunned. If sweet potatoes were foreign to them, what else was? More importantly, what did I know that they didn’t? Growing up in the South, I’d placed white folks on a pedestal. In college, I began to dismantle that throne.

There’s more here.  Scruggs’s piece doesn’t refute Scalia’s point, but it does provide a strong, if anecdotal, answer to it. Lots to think about there.

 

Hating the GOP Counterestablishment

A reader writes on the “Trump vs. the GOP Establishment” thread, in which I asked conservative and Republican readers if they hate the Republican establishment, and why:

What is the Establishment one is talking about? The Wall Stree/Silicon Valley money guys or movement conservatism? I’m not an insider by a long shot but I’ve tended to distinguish the two.

I think the leaders of both “groups” are sweating balls. And so be it. I’m a Moderate Republican who incessantly gets chided with the RINO epithete from ex-Democrats who tried to make the GOP into their own little Conservative chapel. As a I see it, Conservative Republicans are now getting served the über-version of what they’ve been peddling for the past 20 years or so on talk radio, on Fox, and in politics high and low. To the GOP’s Hubris, comes Trump whose true name is Nemesis.

That being said, I hope the best for the Republican Party.

The reader raises an interesting point that David Brooks takes on in his column today: that there are two Republican establishments. Brooks:

During the 1970s conservatives self-consciously built establishment institutions to counter the liberal establishment. But with the election of Ronald Reagan, the conservative establishment split into two. There was the regular conservative establishment, filled with mainstream conservatives who wanted to use the inside levers of power that Republicans now controlled.

But there was also a conservative counter-establishment. This was populated with people like Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Brent Bozell and others who were temperamentally incapable of governance. Many of these Old Right people broke with Reagan because he wasn’t ideologically pure on this or that policy matter.

Today the conservative community still has at least two establishments, or three if you want to throw in the young Reform Conservatives. The mainstream establishment tends to side with party leaders like Paul Ryan and whoever the presidential nominee is. The Old Right Counter Conservative Establishment has grown in recent years. For example, the Heritage Foundation, which used to be more or less conservative establishment, has gone more Counter Establishment.

The difference is the establishment wants to use the levers of power to practically pass reforms. The Counter Establishment believes that Washington is pervasively corrupt and is implacably hostile to the G.O.P. leadership.

Brooks’s column is devoted to discussing Ted Cruz as an avatar of the Counterestablishment.

Are you a conservative and/or a Republican who hates the GOP Counterestablishment? If so, why?

It occurs to me that if I’m asking readers to put their cards on the table, I should do the same with mine. In my case, I don’t “hate” either one. I don’t care enough about politics any longer to hate any faction, even among the liberals and the Democrats. That’s not so much a virtue as it is the effect of sheer exhaustion turning into indifference.

I am a conservative who doesn’t care for the GOP Establishment primarily because I see it as far too militaristic, eager for war, and beholden to Wall Street’s interests over Main Street’s. I think they tend to see society as a market, not a family. The party’s leadership sees social and religious conservatives as its useful idiots — and it can do this because it knows we have nowhere else to go with our votes. I may end up voting for this kind of Republican by default, but I don’t like it.

But I am a conservative who doesn’t care for the GOP Counterestablishment either. It is far too ideologically driven, and conspicuously lacks the virtue of prudence. Brooks is right: it is temperamentally incapable of governance. True, you have some antiwar people like Ron Paul, but most of the Counterestablishment strikes me as being just as hawkish as the Establishment (for example, Ted Cruz promised to nuke the Middle East). It’s powered not by principled reason, but by the passions of talk radio. I may end up voting for this kind of Republican by default, but I don’t like it.

There is no home for conservatives like me in the Republican Party. This is why my conservatism is primarily social, cultural and religious, and seeks social, cultural and religious expression.

So, let me repeat: Are you a conservative and/or a Republican who hates the GOP Counterestablishment? If so, why?

I request that only Republicans and conservatives answer this one. And I request that Republicans and conservatives who do answer keep their opinions about David Brooks to themselves, and stick to the question.

 

The Unkindness of Strangers

Whatever you do, if you find yourself at the theater in the vicinity of Dominique Morriseau, stay far away, or you may be at risk for physical assault. The black playwright tells the tale of how she nearly slapped a fellow theatergoer, and why this is a crisis for the American theatre.

Morriseau found herself in New York and wanting to go see an Off Broadway play. But she didn’t have a ticket, and couldn’t afford one. An elderly white woman going to see the play with her black husband gave Morriseau some tickets, and told her not to pop her gum. Morriseau wasn’t chewing gum at the time.

Then, during the performance, the old lady asked Morriseau to settle down in her seat and quit making so much noise. That was the last straw. Morriseau writes:

Now I know some readers will think: They were just a little socially inept, maybe even crazy. Write it off as a random moment of one crazy person and let’s keep moving. Let’s not indict theatre and the theatre community as a whole, or, even greater, all of society, for the actions of one rude woman. And of course it wasn’t about race, because her husband was black.

Well, yeah, that’s what I think. The old woman sounds codgery. It’s New York City, for crying out loud! Old people can be prickly codgers. When I was a movie reviewers in south Florida, which might as well be the sixth borough, I had to develop tolerance for grumpy old New York and New Jersey expats at the movie theater. It was part of life there.

Anyway, the old lady gave Morriseau free theater tickets. That doesn’t give her a right to be rude, certainly, but this cannot be the first time Morriseau has had to deal with crotchety old folks. Chalk that one up to “people are weird,” yes?

No. Morriseau tells us why we have no right to shrug this episode off:

But we fail to understand the multiple layers of white privilege, elitism, and entitlement when we make such bland rebuttals. We fail to understand that this isn’t only one incident. This is part of an elitist and supremacist culture. But more on that in a minute.

Morriseau recounts how the rest of the evening went from bad to worse. After the show, when the old lady overheard Morriseau griping to her (Morriseau’s) friends about her, she confronted Morriseau — who says she had to restrain herself from physically assaulting the elderly woman, who is an example of the “white privilege and elitism problem” in the American theatre. More Morriseau:

There is an environment that is fostering this kind of behavior. Our collective institutions—artistic staff, marketing departments, etc.—are placating the older white audiences, and are afraid to challenge them, or even educate them. We take their donor money and put them on boards, and we brush their microaggressions off as our old grandma or grandpa who might be a little racist and elitist but are otherwise harmless.

To that I ask: harmless to whom? I am telling you it is not harmless. It is harmful. It further marginalizes audiences of color and tells them they are not fully welcome in the theatre, except by permission of the white audience. It tells the upper-middle-class white audience that theatre is their home first and the rest of us are just guests.

Kluckers Off Broadway! Read the whole thing. Dang, but drama queen Morriseau is a piece of work, making a federal case out of something very minor. What a brittle, unpleasant person she must be.

Note that attendance at the theatre continues to decline, so actors and playwrights can’t exactly afford to be so thin-skinned with patrons — not the people who buy tickets to their shows, nor those who donate money to their perpetually underfunded theatrical organizations. Good luck with that, Dominique Morriseau, spiting the people who keep the theatre financially viable, for not being willing to sit there and have you harass and insult “challenge them, or even educate them.”

So that’s what Dominique Morriseau has done for peace, understanding, and reconciliation this week.

Outside of the rarified world of the arts, and on college campuses, do these kinds of things happen? In my part of the world, black folks and white folks deal with each other every day, without incident. Same deal with old folks and young folks. People seem to be willing to give each other more grace, more room for error. More leeway to be fallible — which is to say, human — without it becoming a culture-war casus belli.

Maybe I just live in a nicer place than many others do, but it makes more sense to think that this kind of hypervigilance about microaggressions is a phenomenon of the educated elite (of all races). Seems to me that you have to be educated into thinking that being a b*tch to a difficult old lady who had given you theater tickets is an act of public virtue. Seems to me that you have to be cultured into thinking that every act of rubbing up against the broken humanity of others, no matter how minor, gives reason to fuel rage against them, and against society. Seems to me that it takes an advanced kind of viciousness to elevate quickness to anger and the robustness of hate to the level of righteousness.

Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Any of us? I can believe our elites do. Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award for an angry, despairing book in which he denies that blacks and whites can ever live in peace and justice. In the book, he tells the story of blowing up at an old white woman coming out of a movie theater in New York City, who asked his little boy to move out of her way on the escalator. This so-called “microaggression” — which most people would call “the condition of being a pushy old lady in Manhattan” — occasioned TNC causing a massive scene in the theater, in the face of which a patron threatened to call the police. He recounts this story as an example of injustice, and how white supremacist society might have called in cops, which might have done terrible things to him. That kind of mindset is what wins National Book Awards and fulsome praise from the cultural establishment these days.

Fine. But I don’t want to live in a world like that, and I will avoid every opportunity to interact with people of any race, or either gender, who are eager to be offended, and who believe that that’s how you treat people. A world like that is, in fact, unlivable. Thomas Hobbes held that the state of nature is “a war of all against all.” Our most civilized (theoretically) citizens are advancing our society back to the Hobbesian state of nature, and calling it progress.

A reader writes to tell me that a top leader in one of the universities that has been at the center of national controversy this fall is telling friends that she’s leaving the university and academia entirely, because the atmosphere is too poisonous to work in these days. I’m not going to say who the person is or which university it is because it’s not yet public. “Another gifted academic abandons academia,” says the reader in his e-mail.

Trump: A Brick Through GOP Establishment’s Window

Robert Costa and Tom Hamburger of the WaPo report that senior GOP leaders are preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention. Excerpt:

Weighing in on that scenario as Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listened, several longtime Republican power brokers argued that if the controversial billionaire storms through the primaries, the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative, the people said.

The development represents a major shift for veteran Republican strategists, who until this month had spoken of a brokered convention only in the most hypothetical terms — and had tried to encourage a drama-free nomination by limiting debates and setting an earlier convention date.

Now, those same leaders see a floor fight as a real possibility. And so does Trump, who said in an interview last week that he, too, is preparing.

Revisiting a commentary by David Frum from back in September:

After the Fox debate, I received an email from an old friend who advises one of the Republican Party’s very largest donors. I quote an extract with his permission:

This is the first time I’ve ever done anything but throw cold water on this idea, but I think the Republican Party is about to split.

The establishment’s utter failure to even consider what Trump’s rise means, much less how the Republican Party must accommodate Trump supporters rather than the other way around, means a split. And a good thing, too.

I have never voted anything other than straight-ticket Republican ticket in my life, nor ever considered doing so. But I think I’d be happy to cast one for Trump as a protest vote.

But, but, but … I wanted to say to my friend, you and your boss are the Republican establishment, or at least two of its very most important members! If we’ve reached the point where even the establishment hates the establishment, the mood is dangerous indeed.

It has only intensified since then.

I have a series of questions exclusively for this blog’s right-of-center readers. Do you hate the Republican establishment? If so, why? Be specific. Whether or not you plan to vote for Trump in your state’s primary, do you think the damage he is doing to the GOP establishment is, on balance, a good thing or a bad thing? Explain your answer.

Only conservatives and Republicans on this thread, please.

Doug Wilson & Serial Plagiarism

Rachel Miller presents a lot of evidence that the controversial Calvinist pastor Doug Wilson has engaged in serious plagiarism in his new book.  I looked at the side-by-side comparisons of pages from Wilson’s book, co-written with Randy Booth, and pages from the works of other writers. It’s astonishing. She’s nailed them.

Canon Press, the publisher, has withdrawn the book, and put out the following statements:

CANON PRESS STATEMENT:

Canon Press has investigated the charges of plagiarism and improper citation in A Justice Primer, and it is abundantly clear that the editor and co-author, Randy Booth, plagiarized material in multiple instances from a number of different sources. Such negligence and editorial incompetence is a gross breach of contract and obviously does not meet Canon Press’s publishing standards. As such, we have discontinued the book, effective immediately. Refer to the author statements below for more information. We would like to specifically thank Rachel Miller for bringing this to our attention so we could take the necessary steps to immediately correct such a serious error.

 

RANDY BOOTH STATEMENT:

“This is a mea culpa for the citation omissions in A Justice Primer. A few years ago I approached Doug Wilson about a combined effort to produce a book on justice. He had begun to write some on the subject as had I. The idea was to blend the writing, and I was in charge of accomplishing this. As best I can tell, all the problems are mine and not Doug’s. As a pastor I was drawing on a wide range of materials and notes that I had collected over a number of years to use in sermons or lessons with no intention of publishing that material, thus citations were often missing in my old notes. Concerning the ‘definitions,’ I didn’t see the need to cite those sources. I have also been a student of Dr. Greg Bahnsen for over twenty-five years, and undoubtedly some of his material has found its way into sermons and Bible studies over the years, which were cut-and-pasted as I prepared for this book.  Regarding the material taken from Paul Rose (2003) and Wayne Blank, I freely acknowledge that I originally collected their material but did not have it cited in my notes from years ago. This is a serious mistake on my part (not differentiating my own material from others in my research and study). While this was not intentional plagiarism on my part, nevertheless I clearly did use their words without proper citation and for this I publicly confess.”

 

DOUGLAS WILSON STATEMENT:

“I was disappointed to find out today that there are serious citation problems in A Justice Primer. In light of this, I am completely supportive of Canon Press withdrawing the book from circulation. For further details on what happened and how, I would refer you to the statements by Canon Press and Randy Booth.”

In 2004, Wilson and a different co-author were busted in another plagiarism scandal, in which Canon Press (which is owned by Wilson’s church son) had to withdraw the book.

Randy Booth, the co-author of A Justice Primer, is the man Wilson appointed to investigate the way he and his church handled accusations of sexual abuse within the church. Credibility? None left. Not a shred of it, if ever there was.

 

Trump, Alienation, & the Benedict Option

I don’t think a lot about Donald Trump, but his enduring popularity is forcing me to look at the Trump phenomenon more broadly and deeply than I have been doing.

I had to laugh sympathetically at Steve Sailer’s notion of Trump’s Luck, which Sailer defines as “the pattern that whenever the national media announces that This Time, Trump Has Gone Too Far, the next day’s headlines will be about some outrage validating Trump’s general point.” Like so many of my fellow pundits, I have rolled my eyes at Trump all year, and figured he would be a footnote to the campaign by now. I watched his rally in Mobile this August, and could not understand why anybody would take this egotistical demagogue seriously. But here we are in December, and the man who was expected to be the GOP front runner, Jeb Bush, is in low single digits in the polls, despite all his money and GOP establishment cred, and Trump is dominating the race on the Right.

I commend to you again Noah Millman’s piece pointing out that Establishment politicians of the Left and Right are in many ways no better than Trump on the whole “fascist” thing. They just have a different way of talking about the things they do, to keep them respectable in polite society. In the end, I don’t believe that Trump is going to be the GOP nominee, and I believe that the American people will be forced to choose between a Democrat and a Republican who are the problem, not the solution. Don’t get me wrong here: Trump’s not a solution either. What his candidacy reveals, at least to me, is how little authority the US political establishment has.

Maybe there is no solution.

I’m starting to think there is no solution.

In fact, I am certain that there is no political solution to our fundamental problems, but politics can make things better or worse. What I find most interesting about the Trump phenomenon is what it reveals about the bankruptcy of credibility of the American center — its figures and institutions. I don’t know about you, but more and more, I feel that what happens in the inner rings of power — in Washington, but not only in Washington — may as well be occurring on another planet.

I have no expectation that our leaders will be responsive to people like me, or care about people like me. This doesn’t make me angry because for now, at least, I feel financially secure. I know, though, that many, many of my fellow Americans, including most of my friends, don’t have this luxury. And I also know that it could disappear overnight.

The farther I get down the road from the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, the more I appreciate how that experience left me deeply cynical about institutions — this, even as I recognize that every society needs authoritative institutions. What I saw over and over and over is the depraved indifference of the clerical class, especially the Catholic bishops, to the welfare of their people, especially the most vulnerable ones. You read some of the transcripts from trials, and the documents, and you cannot believe that men of God would be capable of doing such things. I’m not talking about the pervert priests, of whom there were a relatively small number. I’m talking about the bishops and other priests who, when confronted with this evil, refused to act, or to act meaningfully. They trusted in their own goodness, and in the acquiescence of the faithful.

It all blew up in their faces, as we know. For me, the entire experience left me unable to trust religious authority, even as I believe in its objective claims. That is, if I were still a Catholic, I would believe in the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, despite the failures of particular people within the institution. I am an Orthodox Christian, and believe that the Orthodox bishops have apostolic authority, though I have no reason to believe that on balance, they are any better than the Catholic bishops.

I confess: this is unfair to good bishops and others within the institutional churches. Note well that I am describing my own inability to trust as I once did.

It’s the same way with politics. I had so much faith in the good sense of the Republican Party and in the conservative governing vision. I didn’t expect them to be perfect, heaven knows, but I thought they — we — know what we were doing. But we did not know. And I see no evidence that the Republican Party has learned a damn thing from the catastrophic Bush administration. It cannot even articulate a convincing defense of the traditional family, or of religious liberty. I will likely end up voting Republican in the 2016 presidential race, only because I expect a GOP president would be better on the religious liberty issue than Hillary Clinton. But I will have no faith in that Republican president. I haven’t voted in the last two presidential elections because I had no faith that either party would make the country a better place than they found it.

I don’t have faith in the news media to be fair, though as a journalist, I probably have more faith in the media than I do in political institutions and religious institutions. I don’t have faith in colleges and universities, as a rule; with some clear exceptions that come to mind as I write this, I believe that they don’t exist for any reason other than to perpetuate themselves. And you know, maybe we the people are fine with this, as long as the universities give us our credentials — and here in Louisiana, produce a winning football team.

In short, I have come to believe that the institutions of American society have lost their telos. Let this excerpt from an article about the Catholic Church in the conservative Catholic magazine New Oxford Review stand for American institutions in general. It begins like this:

Late one Friday afternoon in the spring of 2001, my fiancée and I sat on a backless couch in a priest’s dusty office in an angular church in Columbus, Ohio, undergoing premarital counseling. The priest, a monsignor nearing retirement, had always struck me as the embodiment of the best of Irish-American Catholicism. His impeccably orthodox homilies proudly proclaimed the ideals of the faith but were openly skeptical about our ability to live up to them. Try to shock him and you would just get a raised eyebrow, one more line on an incredibly furrowed forehead. It was impossible to imagine him raising his voice or running his Masses a minute over or under his standard time — he was Hilaire Belloc’s ideal priest.

Most of that afternoon’s counseling session went exactly as I expected it to. The monsignor delivered sage and world-weary advice about resolving conflicts and handling finances in his cynical mid-American wheeze. Then we came to what is for many the question. “Do you understand the Catholic Church’s position on birth control?” he asked.

“Yes, I…,” I replied, leaning forward. I was about to exposit my own ideas about human sexuality and set them before an older, wiser, and obviously more objective authority. I imagined I was about to learn something.

But the monsignor immediately cut me off. “You already gave me the answer I needed. Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know; conscience and all that. It’s just on the list of things I have to ask.”

This experience has often struck me as emblematic of the state of American Catholicism around the turn of the twenty-first century. I was a member of a nervous and awkward Church that wished to know as little about the lives of her members as possible, an anonymous suburban organization where — as the Pew Forum has verified — the flock receive Communion habitually but confess rarely or not at all.

Could be that I’m too gloomy about things — I’m trying to be aware of my own biases and limitations here — but I bet that some version of the sentiment expressed in those paragraphs could apply to most of the institutions of American life. The malaise filling our political life is present throughout the public square.

This is why more and more I am committed to the Benedict Option — a strategic withdrawal into local community where I can learn how to pray, to serve, to love, to create, and to stay rooted in these tumultuous times. Once again, look at these lines from Alasdair MacIntyre, about the end of the Roman Empire in the West:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

It is hard to muster the wherewithal to maintain faith in the institutions of the imperium, even as we keep participating in them, without much passion or conviction, because nobody has a better idea. We will go on, in the present condition of what Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” and amid the rise out of soft despotism of what James Poulos terms the “pink police state”. Nearly everything that is coming is hostile to the survival of traditional Christianity and its sense of the human. However, we traditional Christians still, for now, have the freedom to create new ways of living in the world, and new institutions (MacIntyre’s “new forms of community”) like schools, and revitalize old structures (e.g., parish churches), within which to live out our faith together, to remember who we are, to fast and to feast, and to keep that memory of truth and beauty alive through whatever chaos and strife is to come. The Benedict Option, as I see it, offers us Christians the possibility of living out, in post-Christianity, both an individual and communal telos that leads us beyond ourselves and our passions, and give us the capacity to endure in faith, hope, and love, despite our political and cultural marginalization.

The persistence of Trump as a defining political personality is a sign of decadence and a canary in the coal mine. The answer is not to give up in despair, but rather to think, to pray, and to act within the possibilities that present themselves to us. This is a time for imagination. That is the realm in which I believe I have agency. That’s where my hope for the future lies.

Note From the Academic Christian Underground

A great, great letter from a reader. I’ve obscured some identifying details at his/her request:

I have been reading your blog for some time, but in the wake of recent incidents on college campuses, I feel compelled to respond, especially as a newly minted PhD who is a) a theologically conservative Christian, and b) of Asian descent.

This isn’t my real Gmail account; I’m writing pseudonymously.  I did my undergraduate years at one of the elite colleges currently embroiled in SJW fury. Currently I am a tenure track professor of English.

These thoughts might be a bit scattered but the gravity of the situation, multiplied by the ordinary pressures of being a tenure track professor with an overflowing list of obligations, makes it hard to deliver an airtight piece of writing. Consider this some scattered thoughts.

1.  Thank you for covering this!

I am immeasurably grateful for this blog’s coverage of campus politics and the suppression of unfavorable views.  It’s like coming up for fresh air in a suffocating room.  I’d like to share about my experience as some context for my gratitude.

I spent last year teaching in a Great Books program, and my supervisor was a prominent scholar in her field.  She was undoubtedly helpful in guiding me to refine my pedagogy; however, she also took for granted the equation of Christians and narrowmindedness.  I’m sure she wouldn’t characterize herself this way, but after sitting in a meeting in which she casually treated “Republican senators” as a stand-in for all of contemporary Christianity, I could reach no other conclusion.

She was speaking about Christians, by the way, because we were teaching the Gospels in the course.  At the end of the year, I wrote a letter in which I both thanked her for the positives and called her out on her prejudice (as gently as I could, and with wine attached, to be extra ingratiating).  In the process, I had to out myself as a Christian.  I still haven’t heard from her.

The Great Books course was in general a nightmare for me, as I was thrown into the task of teaching one epic work after another with very little training (this is another subject — the way that universities expect already overburdened graduate students to do the same work as professors, at a fraction of the pay, and in fields outside their specialization).  On top of this, I had to deal with the casual condescension towards Christianity that prevailed when it came time to teach the Bible.  In addition to my supervisor’s comment, when they brought in a guest lecturer to “instruct” faculty on how to teach the Bible, his lecture consisted of labeling Luke as implicitly anti-Semitic and John as explicitly so.  There was no hint of respect for the purely literary merits of either text, a grace afforded the parade of misogynist Greek texts we read in the preceding eight weeks.

All of which is to say — the struggle is real, and if it weren’t for support from people outside the system like you, pursuing a degree in secular academia would feel wholly like an exercise in futility.  By the way, I also taught Dante, and included a primer in theology during my lecture – making sure the students did not see religion as a mere code for politics, but as profoundly central to Dante’s thinking in its own right.

2.  Please support Christian academics who are in the secular academy, especially academics of color.

I’m not writing from my personal Gmail account because I don’t even want to take a possible chance of running afoul of thought policing.  I literally just started teaching at my position, and I have zero guidance for how to obtain tenure while remaining true to my beliefs.  This would have been hard enough had campus activists across America not turned my field into a dystopian novel.  Now, however, I am especially paranoid of being found out.

However, I also still believe in the reason I started this degree in the first place: as impossible as it seems, there still need to be voices in the secular academy who will bear witness to this generation.  Moreover, the truth is that Christians of non-white descent have a much better chance of being heard right now than non-Christians.  We are the ones who have the best shot at pointing out the inconsistencies in cultural Marxism, and at forcing the Social Justice movement to recognize the religious roots of its own identity.

Most of these elite colleges are obsessed with framing themselves as ‘global institutions.’  As you well know, a truly ‘global’ institution would have to recognize that Asia, Latin America and Africa are thriving centers of orthodox Christianity.  While I do not wish to discount the contributions of thoughtful white academics like Alan Jacobs, I am convinced that a strong cohort of Christian academics of color – whom I have to believe are out there, but afraid of speaking up – can tie the current obsession with racial/ethnic difference to a recognition of non-Western Christianities, which will be impossible to ignore in the coming decades.  In doing so, perhaps we can use the Enemy’s tools against him, so to speak.

This is not to say that I have found the perfect strategy for speaking up while also avoiding mob fury, but I believe it’s worth trying.  I have much respect for the Benedict Option you discuss, but in recent posts, I find your despair over secular academia somewhat discouraging.  People like me are out there and we need help!  We have no mentors in academia, and certainly very little support in the church, where the dominant mood is shoring up the strength of Christian colleges.

3.  Please support Christian professors in secular English departments specifically.

There are a few that I know of in my own department, perhaps surprisingly.  I read the post on engineers saving the academy, and I do have to say that I thought it rather defeatist on the subject of “language” as it’s taught.  The engineering prof writes, “Writing and reading should be real as tractors.  It was once, and can still be again.”

Writing and reading still are as real as tractors! A statement such as this cedes far too much ground to postmodernist scholarship, as if the postmodernists really did have the power to magically transmogrify language into a matter of “burning cornfields at night.”  Writing and reading still are dreadfully, wonderfully real; if anything, the incendiary power of Erika Christakis’ email testifies to this fact.

I came across a lot of bullshit during my time [in college], but I also came across a lot of grad students and professors who are disenchanted with pure identity politics. Postcolonial scholars overlook Edward Said’s explicit love of Austen, Bronte, et al. For Said, a love of the Great Books’ literary form and a critical eye towards their politics were not mutually exclusive perspectives.  He called for living with the tension, rather than banishing it in the name of either left- or right-wing shibboleths.  Many in the academy remember this love of literary form, and – especially in Victorian circles, my specialty — insist on attention to form just like the best of the old school critics.

This new attention to form coincides (again, in my field at least) with a renewed attention to/respect for religion.  For decades, people taught Victorian literature as the story of Matthew Arnold’s retreating Sea of Faith, the disenchantment of the world against which pious believers fought in vain.  Now, people increasingly recognize that no such retreat occurred, save among the elite intelligentsia.  (One influential book, Callum Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain, dates widespread secularization in Britain as late as the 1960s!)

All of which is to say that there are also signs of a renewed appreciation for language that might, against all odds, work hand in hand with a renewed desire to figure out what the hell religion is, anyway.

Again, all this with the qualifier that I know my own field best.  It may be different elsewhere.

4.  Preserve, in the name of evangelism and God’s kingdom, a sensitivity to systemic racism.

I believe Edward Said was right – appreciating literary form and recognizing literature’s complicity in structures of oppression need not be at odds with one another.  Similarly, I believe that the recent flare-ups represent an opportunity to reject the old culture wars, precisely by scrambling the Left’s hoary stereotypes of grumpy white people concerned about all the colored folk demanding “free stuff.”  This is why I believe that, even as we decry the Christakis and Wolfe incidents as bullshit, we must refuse to cede discussion of systemic racism to the secular Left or to heterodox mainline Christianity.

Here, I’m a big fan of Conor Friedersdorf‘s defense of his position.  I think he’s done it beautifully, and he bears witness to the lunacy of the Left attacking a journalist who has done at least as much as anyone else to protect the speech of anti-racist activists.  To his points, I only add that we must see this as a missional opportunity to reach the SJW population.

This may sound like lunacy to you – especially as someone who emphasizes fortifying Christian identity via strategic retreat!  I think such retreat is vitally necessary, and that your writing about the Benedict Option raises urgent concerns for Christians across the country.

But, Rod, I also think that this should go hand in hand with a determination to evangelize people we might be tempted to dismiss as snowflakes, loons, etc.  Indeed, I think one of the best ways we can remember what it means to be a Christian is to preserve the Great Commission at the center of our faith; one of the hardest things we can do, in the name of preserving our identity, is to reach those we might consider unreachable.

To some degree, this means following the Apostle Paul’s injunction to reach the lost by any means necessary: to those under the law, I became as one under the law, etc.  In this context, I believe we must resist the temptation to deride SJW’s and their cause.  In a very real sense, they adhere to their own heretical variant of Christianity, a la Ross Douthat’s bad-religion thesis.  I’m swiping this from a comment I saw on a recent Yale Daily News op-ed, but it makes total sense.  It especially makes sense when I think of the story you relayed the other day, about the non-Christian black student who bluntly rejected the concept of forgiveness.

This is a movement that worships at the feet of Justice, forgetting that Justice cannot exist without a Judge.  This is a tragedy.  To reach them, to restore the image of the unknown God whom they worship in ignorance, one simply cannot ignore what is legitimate in their analysis of contemporary America.  In all honesty, this is why I was a bit put off by your analysis of the South Carolinan cop who threw the student across the room.  I know you acknowledged that the cop may have overstepped his bounds, en route to an insistence that the teen was out of line.  Why not reverse the formulation – although the teen was out of line, the cop’s response was outsized and inappropriate?

(Indeed, the cop in that video and the students calling for Erika Christakis’ blood seem to be unlikely kindred spirits!  Just a thought.)

I know this is already a very long email, but I guess what I’m saying is this: precisely because these times are so trying, we cannot simply give up on Christ’s call to fight oppression.  This includes both the oppression of illiberal PC policing and the oppression of systemic racism.  It requires discernment (sadly, more discernment than a lot of people have) to distinguish an Eric Garner case from a Halloween costume controversy.  But if Christians don’t do it, I don’t know who will.

A final thought: maybe if we are on point about decrying racism while also maintaining conservative sexual ethics, we can make it harder for the Left to conflate race and sexual orientation, as it seems hellbent on doing.

I’ve written long enough.  Perhaps you can see this as a compliment – I wouldn’t have written this much if I didn’t think it was worth it.  God bless you and yours.

Sometimes, I just love my readers.

Freaking Out Over Scalia

Drama at the Supreme Court yesterday, as the justices heard oral arguments in an affirmative action case:

The University of Texas has determined that if it excluded race as a factor, that remaining 25 percent would be almost entirely white. During the oral arguments, former US Solicitor General Greg Garre, who is representing the university, was explaining this to the justices. At that point, Scalia jumped in, questioning whether increasing the number of African Americans at the flagship university in Austin was in the black students’ best interests. He said:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.

He went on to say, “I’m just not impressed by the fact the University of Texas may have fewer [blacks]. Maybe it ought to have fewer. I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”

Well, that caused a freakout on the left, where a number of folks overinterpreted this to mean that Scalia was saying that all blacks belong at “slower” schools (as distinct from those blacks who get into UT-Austin despite disqualifyingly low grades, because of affirmative action). The freakout seemed also based on the presumption that there is no basis for what Scalia said.

In fact, there is. In the Washington Post today, Yanan Wang explains that there is research indicating that admitting black students to academic programs for which they lack adequate preparation hurts them. There is research data to dispute this, but the point is, Scalia didn’t make this up.

Back in 2003, the black linguist John McWhorter wrote a piece meditating on his own “diversity” experience at his undergraduate school, but saying that what his college meant by diversity, and what diversity has generally come to mean at universities (more minority faces, regardless of qualification), are not the same thing. McWhorter wrote:

The dismal failure of the “diversity” experiment of the last two decades offers an important lesson for a post-affirmative-action admissions policy. Even as we seek diversity in the worthy, Simon’s Rock sense, we must recognize that students need to be able to excel at college-level studies. Nobody wins, after all, when a young man or woman of whatever color, unprepared for the academic rigors of a top university, flunks out, or a school dumbs down its curriculum to improve graduation rates. The problem, then, is to find some way to measure a student’s potential that still leaves administrators enough leeway to ensure that campus life benefits from a rich variety of excellences and life experiences.

As it turns out, we have—and use—the measure: the Scholastic Aptitude Test. James Conant invented the SAT as a meritocratic tool to smoke out talented individuals from the wide range of life circumstances in American society, not just the WASP elite who made up the vast majority of Ivy League student bodies in the pre-SAT era. Nowadays, a creeping fashion dismisses the SAT as culturally biased, claiming that it assesses only a narrow range of ability and is irrelevant to predicting students’ future performance. But while it is true that the SAT is far from perfect—if it were, students wouldn’t be able to boost their scores by taking SAT preparatory classes—the exam really does tend to forecast students’ future success, as even William Bowen and Derek Bok admit in their valentine to racial preferences, The Shape of the River. In their sample of three classes from 1951 to 1989 at 28 selective universities, Bowen and Bok show that SAT scores correlated neatly with students’ eventual class ranks.

For gauging student potential in the humanities, the verbal SAT, or SATV, seems particularly useful. Rutgers University English professor William Dowling compared the grades of kids in one of his classes over the years with how they did on the verbal test. “What I found,” Dowling notes, “was that the SATV scores had an extraordinarily high correlation with final grades, and that neither, in the many cases where I had come to know my students’ personal backgrounds, seemed to correlate very well with socio-economic status.” The reason, Dowling thinks, is painfully obvious: having a strong command of English vocabulary, usually gained through a lifelong habit of reading, is hardly irrelevant to how one engages advanced reading material. As Dowling argues, a student of any socioeconomic background who can’t answer correctly a relatively hard SAT question like this one—“The traditional process of producing an oil painting requires so many steps that it seems______to artists who prefer to work quickly: (A) provocative (B) consummate (C)interminable (D) facile (E) prolific”—will be fated to frustration at a selective university, at least in the humanities.

My own experience reinforces Dowling’s. I’ve taught students who, though intelligent, possessed limited reading vocabularies and struggled with the verbal portion of the SAT. I have never known a single one of these students to reach the top ranks in one of my classes. “I think I understand what Locke is saying,” one student told me in frustration while preparing for a big exam. But Locke isn’t Heidegger—his prose, while sophisticated, is clear as crystal. This student confessed that he was “no reader” and possessed only a “tiny vocabulary.” Without the vocabulary, he was at sea. Conversely, my textaholic students are usually the stars, gifted at internalizing material and interpreting it in fresh ways—and this is especially true of students immersed in high literature.

A post-preferences admissions policy, then, must accept that below a certain cut-off point in SAT scores, a student runs a serious risk of failing to graduate. As Thomas Sowell, among others, has shown, placing minorities in schools that expect a performance level beyond what they have been prepared to meet leads to disproportionate dropout rates—41 percent of the black students in Berkeley’s class of 1988, to take one typical example, did not complete their education, compared with 16 percent of whites. Many of these students may have flourished at slightly less competitive schools. Moreover, when minority students attend schools beyond their level, note Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber inIncreasing Faculty Diversity, poor grades often deter them from pursuing graduate degrees, contributing to the dearth of black Ph.D.s. Black and minority students overwhelmed on a too-demanding campus can succumb, too, to the bluster of seeing themselves as “survivors” in a racist country—becoming part of an embittered minority rather than proud members of a national elite. To prevent this kind of damage, the SAT can supply us with the rough parameters within which our admissions search for different kinds of merit—diversity, rightly understood—will proceed. All this makes the recent efforts by the affirmative-action claque to get rid of the SAT misguided in the extreme.

It makes sense to ask, as Scalia did, whether or not it serves the interests of minority students to admit them to a university for which they are not academically prepared. The answer might be “yes,” but that would require a good explanation. One doesn’t need to embrace a “Bell Curve” explanation for the poor preparation of black students for top-level college work. It could well be that a disproportionate number of black students come from bad public schools, or from impoverished families and cultural backgrounds where reading and academics were not given priority. These things are not the fault of the students, necessarily, but you cannot make up for them by affirmative-action fiat.

When I read the Scalia remarks and the controversy, I thought about my own humiliating experience with math. In junior high and high school, I was a straight-A student. I had to work harder in math, and didn’t really like it, but my grades were almost always As, or high Bs. In the fall of 1983, I entered the junior class at a public boarding school for gifted kids from all over Louisiana. Trigonometry hit me like a 2×4 upside the head. I couldn’t keep up. I looked around me and saw that other students from bigger schools had no problem following the accelerated pace at which our teacher went. I had been one of the top students in my old high school in rural Louisiana, but here, competing against some of the best students in the state, I was nothing.

I handled it badly. I shut down emotionally, and pretended that what was happening to me wasn’t really happening. In truth, I was not a bad math student, just one on the high side of average, which made me top of the class in my rural high school, where our math teacher, Mr. McKey, was terrific. Put in a classroom under conditions for which I was not qualified, I choked — and quit going to class, because facing my own severe limitations made me despise myself. I failed that class. I had never failed anything before, nor come close to it. I blame myself for not responding to that adversity by working harder, but boy, was it ever a psychological blow.

I never did quite recover from that. Math had been interesting to me before, but far from a passion. After that, math terrified me. It was the thing that made me feel like a failure, because I had failed at it. True, I demonstrated weakness of character by coming up against great adversity and collapsing, but the fact is, I was not remotely prepared to work at that school’s level in math, and there was no way to hide my weakness. Reading about the Scalia controversy made me reflect on all this, and on how damaging my experience in that math class was. Again, this is not the fault of the teacher or the school, and maybe not even entirely my fault either; after all, I was at the top of my class in math at my ordinary high school, and had no way of knowing my limitations, and my inability to exceed them. I’m almost 49 years old, and I still have anxiety dreams about that class, because the experience of failure was so traumatic that it made me radically doubt my own worth.

My own reasoning, and my own personal experience of academic failure, tells me that it is not good to put students in a position where they are set up to fail, and not just students. I’ve seen this happen with diversity hires in the workplace, in which everyone else in the office had to pretend that what was happening was not, in fact, happening — until the truth could no longer be denied, because work was not getting done. The point is not “no minorities should be hired or admitted because minorities can’t do the work,” but rather “people who aren’t qualified by training and background to do the work should not be hired or admitted because they are minorities.”

Maybe I’m wrong — but why can’t we at least talk about it? The fact that the audience in the Supreme Court chamber audibly gasped when Scalia made his comment indicates how taboo this commonsense point is for discussion among American elites. Steve Sailer is correct here:

I’m not sure if Scalia’s question is totally true, but, obviously, it’s essential to discuss it to have an intelligent debate on affirmative action. And that’s precisely why it was so shocking that Scalia dared bring it up. Respectability in modern America is proportional to the number of plausible and important ideas you would never dream of mentioning, even if you are a Supreme Court justice or a Presidential candidate.

This kind of thing, says Victor Davis Hanson, partly explains the enduring popularity of Donald Trump:

The public no longer respects U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS, the VA, or the GSA. Even the once-hallowed Secret Service has become a near laughingstock of incompetency, corruption, and politicization. Is the purpose of NASA really Muslim outreach, as NASA chief Charles Bolden suggested in 2010?

The world that we are told about by our government bears no resemblance to what we see and hear every day.

More:

In short, millions of citizens think the nation is headed for a financial reckoning. They feel threatened by radical Islamic terrorism. They sense that cultural and social stability has disappeared. And they know that expression of these worries can be a thought crime — hounded down by politicians, media, universities, and cultural institutions that do not enjoy broad public support and are not subject to the direct consequences of their own ideologies.

Amid these crises and the present absence of responsible leadership, if there were not a demagogic Donald Trump ranting and raving on the scene, the country would probably have to invent something like him.

Whole thing here. Hanson is right.

I do not like Donald Trump. I think that he is an empty-suited demagogue. The one thing I will say for him, though, is that I admire his willingness to say what he thinks, and I enjoy the fact that the GOP establishment is powerless before him. As Ross Douthat writes today, after the failures of the Bush presidency, the Republicans have little authority. They have created the situation that now vexes them. And so have liberal elites, in part by making legitimate questions about public controversies taboo to discuss. People don’t stop talking about those things privately, or thinking those things, just because the managerial class has made it impossible to speak those concerns in the public square. Trump says them crudely, because he does not give a rat’s rear end for respectability, and nobody can fire him for political incorrectness.

David French writes about the role Trump plays in shaking up the boundaries of national discourse:

While many of Trump’s actual proposals are misguided, nonsensical, or untenable, by smashing the [Overton] window [Note: the range of ideas it is permissible to talk about in public — RD], he’s begun the process of freeing the American people from the artificial and destructive constraints of Left-defined discourse. Serious and substantive politicians like Ted Cruz will get a more respectful hearing, and PC shibboleths about allegedly boundless virtues of Islam and immigration will be treated with the skepticism they deserve.

To be clear, this change is occurring both for good and for ill. The shattering of the window reflects the shattering of the American consensus, and the result will likely be deeper polarization, and even less civility, with further strains on the ties that bind our nation together. At the same time, however, the Left’s very success at defining the terms of discourse meant that the price of civility and unity was all too often an acceptance of liberal norms and manners. It meant swallowing liberal pieties and confining your discourse to Left-approved terms. In other words, it often meant surrender.

French says that this does not justify saying anything you want to just because it makes lefties mad, which seems to be the Trump strategy most of the time. Still, the “OMG Scalia is a racist!” freakout today serves as a great example of why Trump thrives, and why it’s mostly, but not entirely, a bad thing that he does.

 

Culture, the Basis of Resistance

Here is evidence of why I think the newly translated Russian novel Laurus — and by extension, art like it — is such a powerful antidote to the nihilism and hedonism pervasive in our culture. This letter came from a young English literature professor at a small college. I publish it with his permission, with only a couple of slight changes to protect his identity. He said to me, when I asked permission, that the academic world outside of his campus “is so firmly pitted against people like us that I don’t want to risk anything. I wish that weren’t the case.”

The professor writes:

I read two things this morning. First, as I drank my coffee, I read your post about Ruddick’s article (which I’d read) and the anti-humanists. Obviously, the article is depressing — and completely accurate. You may recall that I emailed you last week about the institutionalization of Foucault’s ideas in the humanities, and about the permanent movement to destabilize, disrupt, and destroy all discourses of power. As you point out, this now includes our most basic notions about the self. We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Now that we “know” the self is merely a social construction (along with race, gender, and the whole tired litany), it cannot be immune from what my colleagues in graduate school called the work of “troubling” and “interrogating” and “problematizing.” Because after all, if the self is a constructed “text,” and it has exerted influence in culture, then it is a discourse of power — and must be disrupted. Transgender theory, as I asserted last week, represents some kind of cultural apex of this idea. The self does not exist; it is only willed and chosen and created.

So if this is the sad state of academic English, why do people like me carry on? Because of the second thing I read this morning: the final 30 pages of Laurus. I first bought it after Kalfus’s write-up, but finally started it after your praise of it. I don’t know the last time I read such a beautiful novel (and reading novels is basically my job; I read 60 to 90 a year), or one that so powerfully — and yet so quietly and peacefully! — evokes the enchantment of the world that we seem to have lost. Arseny is the perfect representative counterpoint to the project of the Willed Self. His path is dictated by his connections to the past; his actions are shaped by the needs and exigencies of real humans; his travel and tasks are the product of a capital-C Created self: a self made in the image of God, with obligations to others far outweighing concerns about himself, and which contains the inherent dignity granted to all those who recognize the sheer miracle of their existence.

I have already made a photocopy of my favorite passage from the book, which I hung on my office door. It’s the part where the elder explains to Arseny that a journey without a destination is a deeply misguided task. The elder says we should not get hung up on horizontal motion, and then points up and says we should focus on vertical motion. (The scene is much more emotional and powerful, as you know, than it is here, decontextualized.)

I blogged that passage here. A repeat:

And so, O Savior, give me at least some sign that I may know my path has not veered into madness, so I may, with that knowledge, walk the most difficult road, walk as long as need be and no longer feel weariness.

What sign do you want and what knowledge? asked an elder standing [nearby]. Do you not know that any journey harbors danger within itself? Any journey — and if you do not acknowledge this, then why move? So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort; knowledge is obvious. Faith assumes effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.

But were the venerable not aspiring for the harmony of repose? asked Arseny.

They took the route of faith, answered the elder. And their faith was so strong it turned into knowledge.

Arseny says he wants to know the general direction of his journey, especially the part that concerns him and the person he hurt early in his life.

But is not Christ a general direction? asked the elder. What other kind of direction do you seek? And how do you even understand the journey anyway? As the vast expanses you left behind? You made it to [here] with your questions, though you could have asked them [in your local monastery]. I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. Do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great] who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.

Then what should I be enamored of? asked Arseny.

Vertical motion, answered the elder, pointing above.

In the center of the church’s cupola there gaped a round, black opening reserved for the sky and stars. Stars were visible but they were fading from sight. Arseny understood day was breaking.]

Back to the professor’s letter:

I wish we could get every SJW, every devotee of the Gospel of Progress, every “disrupter” and self-willer and tradition-destroyer, to read this passage. Your journey doesn’t even necessarily have to be toward God, and it doesn’t have to be a Christian path. But it needs to have a telos. We must be progressing toward something. If we don’t have an idea of the transcendent, of the ideal, then we are going nowhere.

I was immediately reminded by that passage of the famous story of John Senior in the famous KU humanities program a few decades ago. Clear Creek Monastery recounts it:

In preparation for that first lecture, the students were required to read Homer’s “Odyssey.” At the beginning of that first class, John Senior asked, “Where is Ulysses going in this story?” After the three professors discussed the story, one of the students responded, “He is going home.” John Senior then addressed the class, “Where are you people going?” Abbot Anderson said that this was rather offensive for most of the students. In their youthful arrogance, most of them believed they were enlightened. They had experimented with drugs. They had considered Eastern religions. They had liberated themselves from the constraints of Christian morality through the sexual revolution. Of course they knew where they were going! The question was a shocking challenge to the students, an indictment on their knowledge and education. “Back in the dorm, we were discussing the lecture. I could not believe (the professors) had the audacity to say these things, but they caught our attention and we were totally surprised,” reflected Abbot Anderson.

Would that we would all receive such indictments! Laurus is the kind of book that has the selfsame feeling as Senior’s challenge to the class. It’s the kind of book that virtually drips with spirituality, but not in a cloying or self-help megachurch kind of way. It’s a quiet and powerful book. I’m already working on a proposal to teach a course on it next year, along with books by Tolkien and Lewis and Dostoevsky, here at my humble little college. Perhaps courses like that one can be a small version of Burke’s little platoons, or a modest example of the Benedict Option: a committed teacher and some curious students, gathered around a book that tells a quiet story about a time when we may not have been as rich in panem et circenses, but we sure were more metaphysically integrated.

And that’s my point, I guess. Books like Laurus give me hope for the discipline, and for the academy, and for the culture of letters at large. If I can get one student to read it and respond thoughtfully to it, maybe that’s enough. And though you and I may get depressed by the “scholarship” of [radical feminist transgender academic Judith/Jack] Halberstam and the endless shape-shifting of gender theory, perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that her department at USC also includes two writers of phenomenal talent whose work is rooted in real lives: T.C. Boyle and Percival Everett. The astonishingly prolific Boyle has written great stories about the limits of humans, and Everett is surely one of our top ten living American novelists. His novel Erasure is a perfect skewering of the world Halberstam represents, and his Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is a stirring meditation on fathers and sons.

Halberstam et al may get the headlines, the grant money, the attention, the controversy, and the loud applause from the apostles of progress. Maybe we can take comfort in the sheer fact that books like Laurus can even exist, and be read and praised and awarded and discussed by people who care about culture. I’m fond of Eliot’s dictum, which strikes me as somewhat BenOp-ish: “To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” I cannot recommend Laurus highly enough. Thank you for bringing it greater attention.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I recall here the words that a Catholic professor gave me when I asked him for advice on writing the Benedict Option book: he told me to think about what Father Karol Wojtyla did in response to the Nazi occupation. “What was that?” I asked.

“He formed a theater company,” the professor said.

Having read Laurus, I begin to understand more deeply what the professor means. It really is a first-rate work of literature, not agitprop or cheesy Christian propaganda, and you don’t have to be a Christian to see that. It embodies a view of the world, and of what it means to be fully human, that strikes the reader with the force of revelation. In his radio interview with Eric Metaxas, Vodolazkin said that as a child in the USSR, being raised by agnostic parents, he was so alienated from the dry, empty, monotonous Soviet ideology that he sought escape in literature from Russia’s distant past. And he began to pray to an unknown god. Eventually he found the true God, and was baptized.

The point is, the old literature served as an icon for him through which the light shone into a very dark place, and showed a little boy hungry for truth and beauty the way out. Eventually it led him to God. Maybe apologetics would have done this too, but I doubt it. It was art, and literature, that pierced the spiritual and intellectual darkness with truth and beauty.

This is why I believe classical schools, especially classical Christian schools, will be key to the Benedict Option.

I have just started watching The Man In The High Castle, the dystopian Amazon.com-produced series set in 1962, in an America ruled by the Nazis and the Japanese, who won the Second World War. I’ve only seen one episode, but so far, it lives up to the hype. In the show, resistance to the occupation is based on a secretive figure (the title character, in fact) who produces films that give people hope by telling alternative stories to the official one. Jane Clark Scharl says the series is a great example of how to resist ideology with myth. Excerpts:

Despite the fascist iconography in nearly every frame, the setting is more reminiscent of Stalinist Russia than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. The show is set in 1962; there is no war to “justify” atrocity. Instead, atrocity is simply part of survival. It’s more The Lives of Others than Army of Shadows. The only ray of hope is not a weapon or a revolutionary political leader. It’s a myth.

A myth is not a falsehood or a fairy story, as people often think. It’s a narrative that offers, however obscurely, an explanation of the relationship between God, oneself, and the world. The myth in The Man in the High Castle is so powerful than anyone exposed to it is changed: either they become obsessed with destroying it, or they find in it the strength to resist evil.

She writes about the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, and his discussion of how even surrounded by a communist culture of mass conformity, symbolized by the greengrocer who puts a pro-communist sign in his window, just to avoid trouble, some brave people found ways to resist. More Scharl:

Obviously not everyone who lived within the USSR supported it. But it is undeniable that even though millions and millions of people hated the regime, the greengrocers continued to put the sign in their windows, and the regime persisted. Havel ascribes this to the power of the myth.

Against totalitarian regimes there is usually a resistance. Sometimes it is political, sometimes violent, always risky. But the strongest resistance is able to transcend politics and battle against not the structures but the ideology sustaining them. Resistance at its best is a sustained, strategic defense of an alternative myth. It can’t be solely political. Resistance must win the battle for the imagination, which politics alone can’t do. Only myths, narratives about oneself, God, and the world, can do that. For Havel and the Czechoslovakians, resistance ultimately meant creating a whole alternative society that operated under and alongside Soviet society until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.

Finally, Scharl says:

We shouldn’t wait for The Man in the High Castle or the horrors of the Soviet regime to become realized in America to start thinking about resistance. Resistance must begin as soon as a society’s metaphysics define human nature as something other than simultaneously free, fallen, and dignified. In other words, each generation must be a resistance, a rediscovery of truth and a reintegration of it into daily life, society, and government.

Resistance, like virtue, is simple but not easy. Begin by looking around; ask yourself what story the current regime is telling about God, yourself, and others, about freedom, sin, and dignity. If that story is not true, if it does not account for reality, resist it.

Absolutely. Read her entire essay, and take it to heart. Watch The Man In The High Castle because it’s very well done, and because it tells us something about the power of myth and art to inspire people to resist lies. Read Laurus, because it is true and beautiful in an extraordinary, galvanizing way. And have hope, because the culture of the counterrevolutionary resistance is taking shape.

Classical Christian Homeschooling Hope

That’s a new promo video for Sequitur Classical Academy, a Baton Rouge-based hybrid of homeschooling and classroom instruction. Our oldest child was part of it in its start-up year (Fall 2012). Sequitur has grown by leaps and bounds over the last three years. It was started by two young guys who love God, books, art, and culture, and who love to teach; and by some parents who shared their vision. Now look what they’ve accomplished.

I highlight the video to say: maybe you and your tribe could do this too. I consider this one facet of the Benedict Option. Have hope!