Rod Dreher's Blog, page 634

The ‘Lynch’ Mob

It gets even more insane on campus:

Students at a small Pennsylvania college are demanding that administrators rename a building called “Lynch Memorial Hall” because of the racial overtones of the word “lynch.”

The building is named after Clyde A. Lynch, who was president of Lebanon Valley College from 1932 until his death in 1950.

Students want school officials to either rename the building entirely or add Lynch’s first name and middle initial, saying the word recalls the public executions of black men by white mobs in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

It was included on a list of demands that students presented to the school on Friday. Other demands include a more diverse curriculum, more sensitivity training for staff and regular surveys of the racial climate on campus.

School spokesman Marty Parkes said Tuesday that President Lewis Thayne is considering all of the demands and will address them at a forum next month.

More on the controversy here. You can’t make this stuff up. The man’s name is a trigger warning for these nuts.

The students demanding the changes are mostly black.  And the Lynch situation is

More backlash, please. I cannot for the life of me understand why President Lewis Thayne wouldn’t tell these undergraduate nitwits straight up that their name-change request is absurd, insulting, and will not be considered. What are men and women like him so freaking afraid of? It boggles the mind.

UPDATE: You just facepalm. The Ivies have lost their minds:

Following weeks of protests against racial insensitivity on college campuses across the nation, the University of Pennsylvania has opted to change the title of its faculty masters.

The tenured, full-time professors who live in student dorms will now be called faculty directors. They provide academic and personal support to residents.

Over the last two weeks, Princeton and Harvard Universities also have agreed to change the titles; Yale University students and faculty are debating whether to follow suit. Supporters of the change argue that master connotes a legacy of slavery.

“In the wake of what was happening at Missouri, Yale, and Princeton, among other places, the question came up as to whether and how the faculty master title could be changed,” said Dennis DeTurck, a Penn math professor, dean, and faculty director.

UPDATE.2: Oh dear. Will Loretta Lynch, our African-American Attorney General, have to change her name or stay away from college campuses to avoid triggering students?

The Knock That Spared His Future

Here’s my show w/Evgeny Vodolazkin about his coming to faith in the U.S.S.R. as a teenager. https://t.co/RVLjMnj0hGpic.twitter.com/h3uKC56jOa

— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) December 9, 2015

Toward the end of that show, Vodolazkin tells a story that he says he has never talked about before. He had become a Christian as a teenager, receiving baptism secretly, because, as he puts it, had the KGB known that he had been baptized, he would not have been able to go to college. One day, at 19, he was sitting in a mandatory college course about “scientific communism,” and the instructor asked the class, “Who in this room believes in God?”

No one said a thing. Then the instructor went row by row, asking each student to stand and say whether or not they believed in God. Vodolazkin was filled with anxiety, not knowing whether to tell the truth. He knew that if he didn’t tell the truth, he would lose all respect for himself. But if he did tell the truth, they would throw him out of the university.

As the classroom line-up moved closer to his desk, he says he thought that his situation was like that of the early Christians under Roman persecution. Would he have the courage to do as they had done? He didn’t know. And the inquisition was almost upon him.

When it was time for the young woman sitting in front of him to make her declaration, he watched her stand and say, “Yes, I believe in God.” Vodolazkin froze. Here, in front of him, was a woman who risked everything in the totalitarian atheist state to declare her allegiance to God. And him? What would he do?

At that moment, the door to the classroom opened, and someone stuck his head in to call the professor away. The professor left the room, and did not return that day. Vodolazkin never had to answer the question. In the interview, he tells Eric Metaxas that he believes today that he was delivered by God’s mercy from that moment of testing, because God knew how weak he was.

Think of that moment! Either answer he gave would no doubt have dramatically affected the course of young Vodolazkin’s life. Had he answered “no,” it’s possible, even likely, that he would have despised himself so much that he could not have continued in the faith, or at least that his spiritual sojourn would have been darker and more difficult. Had he answered “yes,” it seems certain that he would not have been permitted to continue studying at a high level, would not have been permitted to study at the feet of one of the country’s top experts in his field, would not have gained access to the medieval Russian manuscripts that became the focus of his professional research — and the inspiration for Laurus, the astonishing masterpiece of a novel about a man of faith in the Russian Middle Ages.

I was lying in bed last night listening to that interview, with my copy of Laurus on the bedside table. I have committed many words to praising that book, which is one of the deepest, most beautiful, moving, and skilled pieces of writing I have ever encountered. (And a shattering antidote to this kind of poison.) I am re-reading it now, more slowly, admiring its intricacy, appreciating it even more now than the first time. Listening to Vodolazkin tell that story, I realized that if not for what was surely God’s mercy at that moment, Laurus probably would never have been born. It’s as if a great white shark swam up to a bather at the seashore and, distracted at the last moment, turned and went in another direction.

“God helped me,” Vodolazkin tells Metaxas. “God understood that I was not ready for this choice. It was a terrible choice. And he brought this choice aside.”

Nothing in Vodolazkin’s life would have been the same had he been compelled to answer that question. But he was spared for something great. Think of this moment when you read Laurus.

UPDATE: Vodolazkin e-mails to say that nothing, in the end, happened to the young woman. She was allowed to continue her studies at the university. “She was a daughter of peasants, and normally such people (as well as workers’ children) were permitted more than others,” he writes.

But in that moment of trial in the classroom, the young Christian woman could not possibly have known that she would suffer no penalty for confessing her faith. Says Vodolazkin today, “She was really brave.”

 

 

Among the Anti-Humanists

I have been moved, both in anger and in sadness, by the stories some of you have told here about how the academic study of humanities disciplines you once loved — history, English, etc. — drove you out of academia. Last night, one of you wrote a lengthy, detailed account of how the hyper-politicization of the literature field made him drop out of grad school, only to return as a (cynical) student in the hard sciences. He wrote that there was one class in particular, on a subject he passionately loved, but the professor — a leading scholar in the field — taught it according to strict and wildly implausible feminist ideology, which destroyed his passion for it.

(I say “wildly implausible” because the writer sent me links to the work of his professor, and if I told you the topic to which she was applying feminist analysis, you would laugh out loud. It would be like building a whole career on Marxism in the biography of John D. Rockefeller. But that particular scholar’s take is edgy and transgressive, and so … . The letter-writer asked me not to publish his letter or identifying details, because his missive is filled with specifics.)

I can publish this short excerpt without violating confidences:

And all around me, the stories I heard were of how impossible it was to find employment as an academic! So, the picture I came away from my year in [that university] with was 1) that getting a PhD required one to study increasingly mundane peripheral topics, 2) butcher everything interesting in that topic, 3) and be unemployed.

Well. In the humanist magazine The Point, Lisa Ruddick, an English professor at the University of Chicago, publishes a remarkable essay about the death of the spirit in her field. (Thanks to the three different readers who sent it to me.) It begins like this:

In the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in English for a book on the state of literary criticism, I’ve encountered two types of people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints familiar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a name; socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss.

More:

I have spoken with many young academics who say that their theoretical training has left them benumbed. After a few years in the profession, they can hardly locate the part of themselves that can be moved by a poem or novel. It is as if their souls have gone into hiding, to await tenure or some other deliverance.

Ruddick cites one academic article as an example of how academics in thrall to theory embrace vicious ideas that destroy our sense of humanity. Judith Halberstam wrote an analysis of The Silence of the Lambs in which Buffalo Bill, the psychotic serial killer, is equally a “hero” because his cutting the skin off of his female victims and wearing it “challenges the . . . misogynist constructions of the humanness, the naturalness, the interiority of gender.”

Halberstam isn’t a nobody. Now calling herself “Jack,” she is a professor of English and director of feminist studies at USC. She expanded her reading of Buffalo Bill into a subsequent book, and the essay itself was honored within the field, Ruddick reports. Ruddick adds:

In place of compassion for the fictional victim, Halberstam offers a heady identification with the “hero” who dismantles the victim to the glory of a field-honored theory about the artificiality of gender. The abstractions trump the human realities: this is the mark of sexy academic thought.

Kill what is human, because it is impure.

Ruddick goes on to write about how the radical ideology controlling literary scholarship denies the existence of the self, condemning it as a constructed artifact of bourgeois thought, and so forth. The examples Ruddick gives are eye-opening to someone like me, who is far outside of academia. These people are Dostoevskian devils. Ruddick surveyed nine years of the prestigious journal of literary criticism ELH: English Literary History, to test her sense that literary scholarship has suppressed the sense of the authentically human.

She found what she was looking for. I’m not sure she can give an adequate account of why things are as perverse and nihilistic as they are, but the piece she wrote is still a startling piece of work. In her study, over and over, Ruddick found that what most people would consider the normal idea of something as basic as the self, and boundaries of the self, is treated with radical suspicion, even contempt:

Yet there is a near silence as to whether there exist any positive, beneficial forms of self-organization, individuality, inwardness, or self-boundaries. The stigma of “humanism” has made these ideals look retrograde. Those pieces in ELH that do speak affirmatively about inwardness tend to take a muted, historicist approach. I think, for example, of a lovely article about the Quaker “inner light,” which, alas, views the latter as an effect of “early modern masculinity,” something contemporary academics would hardly identify with. By contrast, those who think little of interiority can reject this concept outright, with decades of theoretical opinion behind them. They can say, for example, without spending time defending their views, that “the truth of inner life” is a construct of “enlightenment thinking about selfhood” and an extension of “humanist” and “Christian” ideology.

More:

Our profession’s devaluation of selfhood, passed from one generation to the next, softens members up for the demands the profession makes on their own selves. If it is “bourgeois” to care about your identity and your boundaries, perhaps you might throw your own identity and boundaries on the altar of your career. I am struck, too, by the fact that current scholarship reflects a strong bias toward noncommittal sex. Our journals offer scant encouragement either for communion with oneself or for abiding connection to a partner—both experiences that could offer leverage against the encompassing group.

… I am aware of possibly sounding like a tub-thumper for monogamy. But the profession’s cynical attitude toward love is just one small aspect of its drive to flatten anything (except politics) that might nourish a human being with its aliveness. Our journals subtly discourage readers from believing that the world offers them a range of “integral objects”—a term the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas uses to describe any entity or experience whose unique form and vitality enrich our inner world.

It is telling that even in an essay like this. Prof. Ruddick anticipates that her mild, restrained criticism of what the academy does to the idea of ordinary human romantic love might get her hauled into the dock as a monogamist.

Ruddick goes on to talk about how “a small subset of work in ELH glamorizes cruelty in the name of radical politics.” She cites an essay about the work of Henry James, one in which the language of theory euphemizes what its author seems to be calling for: the acceptance of pedophilia. Ruddick writes:

One wonders who really believes in this kind of thinking. (And I would hardly assume that the author himself inhabits, for purposes of real life, the values here expressed.) But when the author’s book-length treatment of the same ideas appeared, even more explicit in its brief against the criminalization of pedophilia, colleagues did not criticize it in print. The book was evidently a hot potato, as it went virtually untouched by reviewers, pro or con. What would be so bad about saying that something is wrong here?

Indeed. Ruddick concludes by saying that young people trained in English scholarship learn to censor any thoughts or sensitivity within themselves that might get them denounced as “conservative” and “moralistic,” and affect their professional advancement.

“We do not teach our recruits any of the contemplative practices that might help them to keep their self-compassion intact in the face of such an abasement of self,” Ruddick laments. To save the academic study of literature, she says, scholars will have to discover the courage to be uncool.

The Russian novelist Evgeny Vodolazkin says that when he was a kid, Soviet ideology was so soul-crushingly dull and lifeless that he escaped it by reading Old Russian books — tales of the Middle Ages. There was life in those texts, despite what the ideologues insisted. The commissars on the humanities faculties can kill these books for many of those young people who come to them asking for bread, but who only get stones. But there will always, I think, be some people who love the tradition, who love life, and literature, and who are keeping the flame burning. We have got to help them. We have got to be those people. A friend of mine who is in academic publishing read my Dante book, and speculated that the reason so few reviewers and others in the mainstream media knew what to do with it is not so much the Christian content, but the fact that somebody actually turned to a work of great literature looking for solutions to his problems, and worse, actually found them in its pages. Having read the Ruddick column, I have a better idea of what he meant by that.

Anyway, read the whole Ruddick piece, and share it with your friends. It’s important.

Is it like this in other humanities disciplines, or is English a special case? I put the question to you readers who are in the academy. I have to tell you, to the extent that Ruddick’s take exemplifies the state of humanities scholarship, it deserves to die, and to be ruled a suicide.

Couple of thoughts from me. What happens in the academy doesn’t stay in the academy. Ruddick’s point about the fixation of English literary scholarship on “the thrill of destruction” — especially the destruction of anything that seems “normal,” even the self — is applicable to a significant degree to popular culture. This is especially true in the area of gender and sexuality. We find ourselves at a point where many people will watch this short video and — well, watch it first:

The short video is about a middle-aged Canadian man with a lumberjack build who decides that he is actually female, then leaves his wife and children to take up life as, get this, a six-year-old girl. I’m not kidding. He speaks tenderly about the elderly couple who has “adopted” him, and who serve as his “Mummy and Daddy,” and how he plays with their grandchild. This video was produced not as an audition for the Jerry Springer Show, but as part of the Transgender Project, an undertaking funded by the Canadian government as an attempt to normalize behavior like this.

Like that of a 6’2″ man in his early 50s who decides that he is really a six-year-old girl, and expects the world to treat him this way. “I’ve gone back to being a child,” he says. “I don’t want to be an adult now.”

The man, called Stefoknee Wolscht, has gone missing this week, by the way, and police are looking for him. At the very end of the video clip, which is designed to portray him as happy and healthy, Wolscht lets slip that he’s had to be on psychiatric medication, and has had suicidal thoughts. If, God forbid, he turns up dead, I’m sure the usual suspects will blame society.

Back in 2007, which seems like an eon ago in this context, the libertarian thinker Will Wilkinson, contemplating the resistance of voters to gay marriage, said that liberals should not back away from their support for it, but instead should adopt a quasi-religious approach to fighting for their beliefs. Excerpt below; emphases mine:

Religious doctrine and religious feeling can and have been trimmed and shaped over time to accommodate the full plurality of liberal society. Illiberal patterns of feeling bolstered by religious sentiments, like disgust for homosexuality, can be broken through slow desensitization, or a shift in the way the culture recruits that dimension of the moral sense. In dynamic commercial societies, this happens whether we want it to or not. But we have something to say about how it happens. The culture war is worth fighting, one episode of Will & Grace at a time, if that’s what it takes.

Liberals must understand the profundity to others of feelings that are weak in them, but shouldn’t pretend to feel what they don’t. They can lead as well as follow. And it remains true that all Americans, conservative and liberal alike, are wide awake to the liberal emotional dimensions of harm and reciprocity. The American culture war is about how thoroughly the liberal sentiments will be allowed to dominate. If a thoroughly liberal society is worth having, liberals will have to spot the points of conflict between the liberal and illiberal dimensions of the moral sense, drive in the wedge, and pull out all the rhetorical stops—including playing on feelings of quasi-religious elevation and indignant moral disgust—to make Americans feel the moral primacy of harm, autonomy, and rights. When the pattern of feeling is in place, the argument is easy to accept.

Brilliant. The culture within English studies that Lisa Ruddick describes is an Orwellian orthodoxy that intentionally renders it impossible to think ordinary human thoughts, which the guardians of orthodoxy find impure. No wonder the souls of young literary scholars are dead or dying. But the same kind of radical proscriptiveness has emerged solidly in the popular culture around issues of sexuality and gender. LGBT activists and their fellow travelers in academia, media, law, and business, began to succeed when they “drove in the wedge” and “pulled out all the moral stops” to demonize dissent. And indeed, when the pattern of feeling was in place, the argument was easy to accept.

In short, the cultural left waged an essentially religious war, and are still doing it, and will not stop doing it until all heretics are silenced or otherwise crushed. This is not primarily about logic and argument, but about feelings, which come prior to logic and argument. We are slowly being desensitized to all sense of normality, as a precursor to destroying any thoughts, practices, customs, and institutions that stand in the way of the Choosing Self.

This is happening. And, as Wilkinson says, apparently with approval, this happens in “dynamic commercial societies,” whether we want it to or not. Unless you consciously resist, you are going to be compromised without even being aware of it. Whether people want to sell you a product, a service, a practice, an identity, or a lifestyle, the ultimate goal is to dismantle the normal human sense of right and wrong to get you to let down your guard and open the city gates to the barbarians in the dead of night.

Finally, I want to draw your attention to a line of Ruddick’s that she mentions almost in passing, about future literary scholars:

We do not teach our recruits any of the contemplative practices that might help them to keep their self-compassion intact in the face of such an abasement of self.

Think about that: a veteran literary scholar laments that professionals in her field don’t teach student apprentices how to stay humane (or, I would say, sane) in the course of doing their work. It’s as if they were training to analyze and teach literature, but to investigate child porn or torture animals.

The humanities. The anti-humanities.

You know how I feel about Donald Trump, and it’s not favorable, but let me say this: In a world gone as insane as our own, it ought not surprise us that to a lot of ordinary people, Trump is far from the craziest person on the public stage. I think he’s a dangerous man, but very far from the most dangerous man, or woman, in America. The thing about Trump is he’s willing to be uncool — and people like that about him.

There is power in not giving a rat’s rear end what people think. It can be used for ill, or it can be used for good. In the case of the humanities, it’s the only thing that will save them. And not just the humanities.

Liberals for the Benedict Option

A reader writes:

I really resonated with your post [“George Bailey is Dead”].  I am the son of blue collar union laborers from a rust belt city – steelworkers, auto workers, truck drivers.  My family wasn’t religious but I went to public school alongside tons of ethnic Catholic kids.  I was raised with pretty traditional working class values – the stuff that George Bailey stood for.  Now I’m like you — sitting out or feeling left behind.

I am a progressive socially.  That’s where you and I part ways.  But even there I feel left behind.  I am not the kind of militant, hateful liberal who would shut down a family pizza parlor for disagreeing with me on gay rights.  And I feel nothing but disgust towards the campus shenanigans you’ve been documenting.  I don’t know what it means for the future of this country when conservatives like you and liberals like me both need to hold our noses to vote and feel increasingly marginalized by the dominant discourse.  But I suspect it means a very hostile and broken and painful place for non-elites – for working people.  That breaks my union kid’s heart.

And though I am on the other side of the sexuality debate, I am a Christian and I still see a powerful need for a Benedict Option.  Not because of “the gays” but because of Who Runs Things Now and Where Things Are Going and what that’s going to do to families like the one I grew up in and the kind of men and women who raised me and those families with less social support and less robust economic means.  Folks who, I suspect, have much more in common with you and your family and the owners of Memories Pizza than with any campus liberal or corporate big wig.

What a great letter. It’s the second one I’ve received in the last 24 hours from a liberal Christian who supports the Benedict Option. I wonder what a liberal BenOp would look like?

I can’t see traditional Christians signing on for it, because to do so would require compromising on fundamental doctrines and teachings. Still, I want to affirm what is good among liberal BenOppers, and support them in ways that I can. Thoughts, readers?

George Bailey Is Dead

Here’s a half-hour video First Things interview with Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame political theorist, about religion in a fast-changing America. At nearly the 22-minute mark, Deneen begins to talk about how the kind of America we used to celebrate in films like It’s A Wonderful Life is dead. Watch: When Corporations Turned on Social Conservatives: The Indiana Affair from First Things.

The interview is based on Deneen’s piece in the magazine titled “The Power Elite” — a lengthy reflection on what it means for America that big business joined sexual progressives in overthrowing Indiana’s RFRA. Excerpts:

There is a deeper reason for corporate support [of gay rights laws], however. ­Today’s corporate ideology has a strong affinity with the lifestyles of those who are defined by mobility, ethical flexibility, liberalism (whether economic or social), a consumerist mentality in which choice is paramount, and a “progressive” outlook in which rapid change and “creative destruction” are the only certainties. The response to Indiana’s RFRA law shows very clearly that corporations have joined forces with Republicans on economic matters and Democrats on social ones. Corporate America is aligned with the ascendant ­libertarian portion of each party, ensuring a win for the political, economic, and ­social preferences of libertarianism. In effect, there is only one functional party in America today, seemingly parceled between the two notional parties but in reality unifying them in its backing by financial and cultural elites.

More:

What this means is that today’s cultural power elite is entirely aligned with the economic power elite, and they’re ready to steamroll anyone in their way. In the case of Indiana’s RFRA, corporate and gay activists combined to bring to heel conservative Christians in a rural, Rust Belt state that struggles at the margins of America’s global economy. The threat to demolish Indiana’s economy is only a more explicit expression of a project that corporations like Apple and Walmart have been carrying out with the ­assistance mainly of Republicans (as well as free-trade Democrats) for a generation.

To see the glee with which ­liberals joined forces with corporations revealed the deepest fact about the American ruling class: politicians and corporations will join forces to effect the change preferred by corporations, change that too often damages the working class and benefits society’s elites. Corporate America is willing to join any coalition that advances its financial interests and ­deeper philosophic commitments, at the expense of Americans on the wrong side of history, especially those Americans living in places like Indiana who aren’t part of the meritocratic global elite.

One more bit:

Americans of both parties once believed that no center of power in America should become so concentrated that it could force its views on every other citizen. What we saw in Indiana was not just a “miscalculation” by Republicans. We saw fully unmasked just who runs America, and the kind of America that they are bringing more fully into reality every passing day. It will be an America where the powerful will govern completely over the powerless, where the rich dictate terms to the poor, where the strong are unleashed from the old restraints of culture and place, where libertarian indifference—whether in respect to economic inequality or morals—is inscribed into the national fabric, and where the unburdened, hedonic human will reign ascendant. No limits reflected in political, social, or religious norms can be permitted: All are allowed except those who would claim the legitimacy of restraint.

Read the whole thing. It’s superb And do watch that video interview. In it, Deneen talks at greater length about how the real losers in America today are Democrats who believe in the rights of labor and economic solidarity, and social and religious conservatives. He says that people like the owners of Memories Pizza, the small-town Indiana pizzeria that shut down temporarily when it became the target of a grotesque national hate campaign from progressive militants, are the kind of people who don’t vote anymore. They used to vote for Democrats, then, in 1980, they started voting Republican. Now, says Deneen, in the last two presidential elections, they have sat out.

Funny, I did exactly that, and for the same reasons: neither party represents me.

Nevertheless, Deneen, at 26:42, forecasting the next few years, says that as a matter of religious liberty, it is “very important” that Republicans return to the White House. Nevertheless, he says, we should not be fooled about the fact that the unwinding will continue, and “it will be an extraordinarily difficult time for people of ordinary virtue.” The long-term prospects for traditional Christians are especially pessimistic, because increasingly, the liberalizing logic of both the Left and the Right requires that they be seen as a threat to the new order.

Yet it will also be a “clarifying time,” says Deneen, because it will compel us to understand what it really means to live as a Christian — and may strengthen us in our faith, and make us “better Christians, if not necessarily better Americans.”

Of course I believe this too; the Benedict Option is a response to these conditions. What’s important — very important — for trads to understand is the political dimension of all this. The trite liberal response is that this is nothing more than pouty Christians taking their football and going home. Don’t you believe it. Here is an older First Things essay by Deneen on the topic of “unsustainable liberalism,” in which he explains the deep dynamics of this crisis. Here’s a taste:

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

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

The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should seek the mastery of nature by employing natural science and a transformed economic system supportive of such an undertaking. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with a belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress and transformation. While these two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, we would do better to understand their deep interconnection.

 

And:

If my analysis is fundamentally accurate, liberalism’s endgame is unsustainable in every respect: It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it continually provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back slowly but inexorably into a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression.

The ancient claim that man is by nature a political animal and must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we lament and attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s idea of liberty but not the deeper sources of those symptoms deriving from the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments.

I don’t want to overquote the piece, so read the whole thing. Deneen says we had better start thinking about what comes after liberalism, because if his theory is correct, the system is not going to survive major shocks to it. In my own view, the Benedict Option is primarily about religious life and community, but it has an inescapable political component — which Deneen writes about in these essays.

We conservatives should note especially this point Deneen makes:

Contemporary “conservatism” does not offer an answer to liberalism, because it is itself a species of liberalism. While the elders on the political right continue to rail against “environmentalists,” they fail to detect how deeply conservative (conservationist) is the impulse among the young who see clearly the limits of the consumptive economy and the ravages it bequeaths to their generation. What these elders have generally lacked is a recognition that one cannot revise one of liberalism’s main commitments, today characterized as “progressivism,” while ignoring the other, particularly economic liberalism. A different paradigm is needed, one that intimately connects the cultivation of self-limitation and self-governance among constitutive associations and communities with a general ethic of thrift, frugality, saving, hard work, stewardship, and care. So long as the dominant narrative of individual choice aimed at the satisfaction of appetite and consumption dominates in the personal or economic realms, the ethic of liberalism will continue to dominate our society.

Finally, to complete our round up of Deneen Day, here’s an essay he just published in Ethika Politika, billed as “a warning to conservatives.” Excerpts:

Against the rising specter of engrossing statism, conservatives have grown accustomed to invoking liberty, especially liberty grounded in individual rights and autonomy. We should recognize that liberalism has an equal, if not greater, claim to provide liberty.

Conservatives, he says, need to stop falling back on the unqualified rhetoric of “freedom” and “liberty,” because it does not mean what they think it means:

Even as we are about to be buffeted by countless political slogans, we need to recognize that conservatives have not cornered the market in promoting “liberty,” and if that is their totem, the Progressives will win the debate, as on most fronts they already are. What distinguishes Conservatism historically is not that it believes in liberty understood as individual autonomy, but that it has always understood that liberty—understood as freedom from an over-imposing state—is the necessary but not sufficient condition for living a human life in families, communities, religious institutions, and a whole range of relationships that encourage us to practice the arts of responsible self-governance.

What conservatives like me long for is the emergence of political leaders among Democrats and Republicans who stand for an updated version of the virtues of the George Bailey world. It was not a paradise by any stretch, but neither was it a hellhole. If we are going to reclaim some of what was best about that time, we are also going to have to accept limitations on ourselves and our liberties. Alan Ehrenhalt has written about this in his book The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America, about the transformation of postwar Chicago:

There is no point in pretending that the 1950s were a happy time for everyone in America. For many, the price of the limited life was impossibly high. To have been an independent-minded alderman in the Daley machine, a professional baseball player treated unfairly by his team, a suburban housewife who yearned for a professional career, a black high school student dreaming of possibilities that were closed to him, a gay man or woman forced to conduct a charade in public — to have been any of these things in the 1950s was to live a life that was difficult at best, and tragic at worst. That is why so many of us still respond to the memory of those indignities by saying that nothing in the world could justify them.

It is a powerful indictment, but it is also a selective one … Our collective indignation makes little room for the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. They are still around, the true believers of the 1950s, in small towns and suburbs and big-city neighborhoods all over the country, reading the papers, watching television, and wondering in old age what has happened to America in the last thirty years. If you visit middle-class American suburbs today, and talk to the elderly women who have lived out their adult years in these places, they do not tell you how constricted and demeaning their lives in the 1950s were. They tell you those were the best years they can remember. And if you visit a working-class Catholic parish in a big city, and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican II, they don’t tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they cold have it back. For them, the erosion of both community and authority in the last generation is not a matter of intellectual debate. It is something they can feel in their bones, and the feeling makes them shiver.

 

‘You Should Have Seen the Gat In My Pink Panties’

Excerpt:

There was Ms. Wolfe the indefatigable budget traveler. “You meet a lot of people when you travel, especially if they spill something on you,” she said in 1974. “On the plane to Cannes from Paris, I sat next to a nice Fascist from Monaco. He liked Nixon, so I let him pay for the wine.”

There was Ms. Wolfe the accidental participant in history, as when, in Venezuela to take a job as a governess, she wound up aiding the revolutionary cause of a new friend, Rómulo Betancourt — he would became the country’s president — by hiding his gun in her lingerie.

“You should have seen the gat in my pink panties,” she told a newspaper at the time, “all wrapped up so the cops wouldn’t find it.”

There was Ms. Wolfe the tenacious, impecunious tenant of a rent-controlled apartment, who battled the threat of eviction as perhaps only she could.

“I walked into the courtroom and saw this kid,” she said in 1989. “I said: ‘You’re the judge? I could be your mother.’”

 

I dare you not to

 

Erika Christakis Quits Teaching

Did you hear this?:

A Yale lecturer who came under attack for challenging students to stand up for their right to decide what Halloween costumes to wear, even to the point of being offensive, has resigned from teaching at the college, the university said Monday.

The lecturer, Erika Christakis, an expert in early childhood education, wrote an email in October suggesting that there could be negative consequences to students ceding “implied control” over Halloween costumes to institutional forces. “I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious,” she wrote, “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

And now, because Yale University lacked the guts to stand up to those pathetic undergraduate brats who went to pieces over this, a professor has resigned, feeling that she cannot continue to teach in such an environment. This, because she offered an opinion that offensive Halloween costumes are not that big a deal.

Contemptible, just contemptible. The Washington Post adds:

“I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems,” she said in an email to The Washington Post.

Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist who runs his own lab at the university, said Friday he will take a sabbatical in spring 2016 and thus not teach his popular lecture, Health of the Public. He said he is not teaching next semester so that he can focus on his laboratory research and on the needs of students in Silliman.

This fall, Erika Christakis was teaching two seminars: The Growing Child in Global Context and Concept of the Problem Child.

A course evaluation for Concept of the Problem Child states: “This seminar is phenomenal and Professor Christakis is, hands down, my favorite professor that I’ve had while I’ve been here.”

Well, too bad for you all. Your protesting classmates are horrible people who ought to be ashamed of themselves, and the additional faculty, administration, and alumni who signed that disgraceful open letter against the Christakises are cretins who will, if they’re lucky, come to regret their viciousness and stupidity.

Oh, this winds me up!

‘Laurus’ Author on Metaxas Show

Eric Metaxas & Evgeny Vodolazkin, NYC, 12/7/2015

Your Working Boy raved about the newly translated Russian novel Laurus to his pal Eric Metaxas, who read the book and loved it so much that he invited author Evgeny (Eugene) Vodolazkin to dinner in Manhattan on Monday night. That’s them above. On Tuesday, EV will be in the studio with Eric for two radio shows. Listen live here at EricMetaxas.com from 2 to 4 ET, but if you can’t, the show will be archived there.

If you haven’t seen my short review of Laurus, check it out here. And if you missed my interview with Vodolazkin, that transcript is here.

And hey, New York readers, EV and translator Lisa Hayden will be at the wonderful independent shop Book Court, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, on Tuesday night at 7. Details here. Go! My Florence traveling companion Casella went on Monday afternoon to hear EV’s lecture, and said it was terrific. “I finished Laurus this morning on the train ride into Grand Central,” Casella e-mailed. “This was truly a beautiful novel.” Evgeny signed it for him. If you are in NYC and have even the slightest interest in Laurus, I urge you strongly to go to the bookstore and hear him, meet him, and buy a copy for him to sign. Trust me, when you’re done with the book, the fact that the author’s signature is in your copy will make it a special treasure.

Trump Trashes Religious Freedom

Here’s a formal statement — not an off-the-cuff remark, but a formal statement — by Donald J. Trump. Excerpts:

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing “25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad” and 51% of those polled, “agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.” Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won’t convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.

Mr. Trump stated, “Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again.”

This is disgusting. I believe that it is reasonable to be restrictive about Islamic immigration to the US, and I despise the way the mainstream media has always gone out of its way to avert its eyes from domestic Islamic radicalism. But there is nothing reasonable about banning travel to the US on the basis of religion. What kind of respect does Trump have for religious freedom? It’s a relief to know that should Trump become president and try to implement such a plan, the Supreme Court would shoot it down in a heartbeat. Still, that a leading presidential candidate would take such a stand is profoundly disturbing.

Religious freedom matters, and not just for people who pray like the rest of us do. It is within the realm of possibility that one day in the far future, the US government will be compelled to implement such an extreme measure for the sake of national security. But if we do arrive at such a day, America as we know it will be over anyway. Conservatives would be fools to hasten the day by cheering for Trump’s radicalism.

 

Looking East From the West

Reader Elizabeth writes:

I gave Christianity a try when I was in my twenties and entered the Episcopal Church, which was liberal-ish but seemed mainstream (what did I know? – I was raised UU). It was a response to an inner yearning for something ancient and true.

Within a couple of years I left that too, because there was no remembering. No daily practice, no effort to pull converts in to a community of believers. It was a nice upper-class congregation in the center of the city, many of whose members drove in from the exclusive exurbs to which they’d long ago fled. After I joined, no one asked anything of me except for the annual pledge. Newcomers were on their own.

Eventually I found Theravada Buddhism. A fellow-former Episcopal convert, who’d gone through classes at the church with me, pointed out that ” these people actually tell you what to do.” Instead of a nice feeling from a great service surrounded by good looking, healthy people in stunning yet conservative fashions, in a gorgeous cathedral church with paid soloists, you get silent retreats (4 hour to three month), classes on renunciation, meditation, contemplation, preparation for death, and specific exercises that show one how to stop running from greed, anger and delusion, and to face suffering head on and see directly its ultimate cause.

If Christianity had shown me a genuine path of daily practice that fed the hunger in my heart, it would have been worth staying for.

I think this is an excellent comment, one that resonates with me. So many of us Western Christians, at least we of an intellectual inclination, spend a lot of time and energy thinking about and arguing over doctrine and ideas, and not enough on practice, aside from the “good works” kind. Elizabeth’s comment reminds me of this passage from Kyriacos Markides’s book on Orthodox Christian spirituality, The Mountain of Silence:

Once I freed my mind from the shackles of agnosticism and scientific materialism, I assumed that in order to seriously engage in a spiritual, contemplative practice for personal transformation and inner experience, one had to take up methods of meditation such as those practiced by the lay mystics that I had studied or the yogis of India, preferably under the guidance of a master. More romantically, one perhaps had to journey to the exotic East and sit at the feet of self-realized gurus who dispensed their wisdom from Himalayan mountaintops.

Then, in 1991, a friend invited him to make pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the monastic center of world Orthodoxy. More:

I realized then that the spirituality I encountered on Mount Athos with its millennial history had all the hallmarks, and perhaps more, of what we were searching for in the Vedas and Upanishads, of India. “Mount Athos,” I mused to Antonis as we sailed away from that first visit, “Is like a Christian equivalent of Tibet.”

Markides adds:

What are the basic characteristics of Athonite spirituality as it was preserved and shaped over the centuries in those ancient monasteries and hermitages? Why have Western scholars virtually ignored this experiential form of mystical Christianity at a time when numerous Westerners have turned their gaze toward Hinduism and Buddhism? What does Mount Athos have to offer to the Western world today that is not available within the mainstream churches?

His book, which is very, very good, answers those questions.

It would be misleading to say that ordinary Orthodox Christianity for laymen is quite as rigorous as Elizabeth indicates Theravada Buddhism is. But in my experience, it’s a lot like what she says. It is possible to go to an Orthodox liturgy and keep yourself on the outside of the spiritual experience. But if you are interested in taking the tradition seriously, Orthodoxy offers you, from a profoundly Christian perspective, “renunciation, meditation, contemplation, preparation for death, and specific exercises that show one how to stop running from greed, anger and delusion, and to face suffering head on and see directly its ultimate cause.”

Again, I don’t want to give you the impression that if you go to an Orthodox church, you will find a gaggle of lay mystics engaged in deep contemplation. Most churches are not monasteries, and while I am extremely fortunate to have a solid priest who is a good spiritual guide, the Orthodox Church is as imperfect and sinful as any other. My point is simply that I identify with Elizabeth’s restless spiritual quest, and how difficult it is to satisfy it in Western Christian practice. For Christians who are dissatisfied with the spiritual approach they encounter in the West, and who are drawn to Eastern religion (or away from Christianity entirely), I suggest they seriously examine Orthodoxy. Markides’s book is a good place to start. Had Elizabeth read it and found her way into Orthodoxy, she might still be Christian today.