Rod Dreher's Blog, page 646

Cardinal Turkson at Hare Krishna Event

This is  news, if you ask me: the pastor of Our Saviour Roman Catholic Church in New York City confirms that the Hare Krishnas chanted praise to their god inside his parish for an hour — and he gives more context to Church Militant. Quoting Father Robbins:

1. This was to be an ecumenical prayer vigil in solidarity with Pope Francis’ address to the United Nations (the next day) and his encyclical, Laudato Sí.  It turned out to be an interreligious prayer vigil similar to what the Holy Father conducted the next day at the Ground Zero Memorial.

2. The Vigil had been planned at another church in Midtown but at the last minute, Secret Service asked that it be moved for security reasons. Our site manager was approached about moving it to Our Saviour, which was outside of the secured area for the Pope’s trip.

3. My recollection is that I had agreed to the use of our auditorium. However, the vigil did take place in the church.

4. The event was not open to the public.

5. Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was in attendance. I was not.

6. The Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the church.

7. The basic outline was that each hour would be the responsibility of a different faith tradition.  I had been told that most of the time would be spent in silent prayer.

8. I think it would be a mistake to single out the parts without reference to the whole.  Inter religious prayer services are nothing out of the ordinary, especially since the pontificate of St. John Paul II.

A Roman Catholic cardinal stood there while Krishna was praised. According to a Krishna consciousness website, the chant means, “Oh energy of the Lord, please engage me in the loving service of Lord Krishna.” This is what a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church stood by watching chanted in a Roman Catholic parish.

I did not know that kind of thing was possible. But I should have known, because Father Robbins is right: this kind of thing started with John Paul II, and continued, in a slightly muted form, under Benedict XVI. And Orthodox prelates participated in those events as well.

If Cardinal Turkson had no problem with it, why should we? I do very much have a problem with it, still, but I guess Catholics who agree with me had better take it up not with Father Robbins, or even Cardinal Dolan, but with Rome.

Obama: Traditional Christians = Racists

The Obama administration today endorsed expanding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gays and transgenders, reports the Washington Post, “plunging into the next front in the national battle over LGBT rights.”

Oh good. That’s just what we need. What could religious conservatives expect if the Civil Rights Act covered LGBTs? Andrew T. Walker explains:

The Equality Act represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed. Were it to pass, its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be historic.

Aside from the enumerated protections that give rise to conflict between sexual identity and religious liberty, by elevating sexual orientation and gender identity to the level of race, the law’s effect would functionally equate those who don’t agree with it with racists and label them perpetrators of irrational bigotry. Indeed, to favor the Equality Act is to oppose and actively stigmatize the moral convictions that millions of Americans adhere to with abiding sincerity and deep religious precedent.

The bill’s stated intentions and its actual consequences are very different. While the bill purports to protect individuals from discrimination, the Equality Act would discriminate against those who do not agree with a regime of laws premised on sexually permissive understandings of human nature that deny sexual complementarity. It would thus create a new form of discrimination by socially isolating certain beliefs.

More:

In education, it would elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected class status in all public schools. … The Equality Act would require all entities receiving federal funding not to consider sexual orientation or gender identity as a factor in their programs. Again, this sounds acceptable in theory, but it would require withdrawing any public funds from institutions that believe that marriage is the union of one man or one woman or that men and women are not interchangeable categories. Moreover, it isn’t clear whether religious colleges who receive federal funding would be required to alter their student conduct expectations to align with federal law.

To complicate matters, the bill goes out of its way to strip away any notion of religious liberty by audaciously stipulating that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) cannot be appealed to by individuals, businesses, educational institutions, or religious institutions.

Were this bill to become law, traditional Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sexual morality would immediately be treated as suspect and contrary to federal law. This breathtaking attempt to relocate historic religious belief outside the bounds of polite culture is unacceptable and would have negative consequences for millions of Americans.

Ryan T. Anderson has more.

The bottom line is that every church, synagogue, or mosque that upholds traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will have the same status under federal law as racist organizations. It’s that radical. And the President of the United States is for it.

Fortunately, there is no chance of it getting through the GOP-controlled Congress. But we now know where the Democratic Party leadership stands on religious liberty. They are a clear and present danger to it. As a registered Independent, I am no great fan of the GOP, so I wish it were not so. But it is. Wake up, people!

 

 

The Anti-Social Media

University of Missouri professor Cynthia Frisby writes about her experiences with racism on and around campus. Excerpt:

I have had a student who said he couldn’t call me Dr. Frisby because that would mean that he thinks I am smart, and he was told that blacks are not smart and do not earn degrees without affirmative action. Yes, true story. I have so many stories to share that it just doesn’t make sense to put them all here.

What I am responding to is the frequent question I have been asked all week: How have I endured these many hateful experiences for over 17 years, and why am I still here?

I endured because God allows me to see the good and cup half full. I endured because I know my life is in God’s hands, and I do not walk alone. I endured because I find these to be teachable moments that I use in my classroom with my students. I endured (or better yet endure) because I have an amazing support system.

I endure because there are far too many of my white friends that have a heart of gold, love people of any color with a passion and who have a strong trust in and love for the Lord. I endure because I have friends who are white and daily show me that there are people who can hurt when I do and who sincerely want to make this culture a better place. I endure because I look to the Lord to help me grow and be the best person I can be.

I endure because I CHOSE AND CHOOSE to endure and overcome, and I choose to overlook ignorance. Choosing to overlook these idiots doesn’t make me a “sell-out” or an Uncle Tom. I choose to endure because my mom and civil rights leaders taught me to never run but stand straight, tall and do not run.

What a brave and inspiring woman. She continues, addressing the recent protests:

I understand the anger. I understand that we’ve had enough. I also understand and agree with my friend Traci Wilson-Kleekamp when she wrote, “Jonathan L. Butler and ‪#‎ConcernedStudent1950‬ please give space for mistakes, listening, learning and dialogue. This on the job training thing is powerful because it is SO VERY PUBLIC.” I not only see this as on-the-job training for our administrators at MU, but I also see it as training for some of my very educated white friends.

The saddest of all things for me is to see how a few of my white friends are responding to these events and basic conflicts in race relations in our nation (i.e., police shootings, the President, etc). It hurts my heart when I see posts from these friends who make fun of us because we find things hurtful like dressing up in black face costumes or Confederate flags flying high in my neighborhood. … What bothers me is that the few of my white friends who feel this way have not taken time or energy to reach out to me and ask me why these things hurt or to understand what is going on or even send an email saying they are confused.

I think Dr. Frisby is right: many, probably most, white people do not see what black people see. Some of it is deliberate; much of it is not intentional, is my guess. I could be wrong. I don’t know, because in my experience, white people don’t talk about this stuff among ourselves, unless we can be absolutely sure that everybody in the group already believes what we believe. Nobody wants to be called a racist, or thought of as a racist. In many middle-class professional circles — even all-white ones — to say something that somebody might construe as racist is to take on taint that can never be shaken off. You are much better off staying quiet, keeping your potentially controversial opinions to yourself. There is nothing to gain from questioning the orthodoxy, and potentially a great deal to lose.

Last night, I received an e-mail from a young academic who has, early in his career, learned to keep his/her mouth shut and his head down, because, he/she says, there is no arguing with the SJW opinions in his department. The academic is right: to utter an opinion that might in some way be taken as dissenting from racial/sexual/gender orthodoxy is to identify oneself as Unreliable, and possibly even an Enemy.

This academic is starting to consider leaving the academy entirely, rather than face an entire career in fear of saying the wrong thing. This is a serious thing. If I were a young journalist just starting out, I would be thinking the same thing.

Obviously I don’t know Dr. Frisby’s friends, and I accept her expression of puzzlement as sincere. I would ask her to consider, though, that more than a few of those friends haven’t reached out to her because they are afraid to say the wrong thing. I have been in that place many times, wanting to know more, wanting to have an exchange of views, but not taking the risk of reaching out, because the risk was too great if it blew up in my face. I am confident that there are things that I did not know about the black experience that I would have benefited from knowing, and that I was not by any means closed to knowing. But it is simply too risky to make oneself vulnerable in this way.

There was a situation in one of the newsrooms where I worked in which I referred to Islamic terrorists as “savages,” triggering a complaint by a minority colleague to management that I had created a “hostile work environment” by using that word. I folded completely after that, because I knew where this would go if I stood up for myself: to the human resources department, where it would become a Thing, and the company would probably find some way to demonstrate its Commitment To Diversity™ by easing the right-wing white guy out of his job, or at least sending me to internal re-education. All this for using the word “savages” to refer to Islamic terrorists. You think I’m eager to reach out and talk to minorities I don’t know and trust as friends about these issues? You have to be out of your mind.

It is never going to be easy to talk about race in this country, given our history. We know this. But liberals (black, white, and otherwise) ought to understand that they have raised the stakes so high in this conversation that they have rendered an honest dialogue impossible. “Diversity” is a sham, an Orwellian term used to describe mandatory abasement before Social Justice orthodoxy.

Look at what’s happening at Yale. The perfectly reasonable letter from the assistant master of a college, questioning whether or not the university ought to be policing the Halloween costumes of its students, has caused mass hysteria, and the predictable groveling of university authorities before the emotional demands of students. If I were Nicholas or Erika Christakis, I would worry about my job. And to think that the entire row was sparked by a letter as anodyne as Erika’s (which, if you haven’t read it, here it is).

The campus is freaking out over that letter. Worse, at Mizzou, campus police have just sent out a letter this morning urging students to call them if they hear “hurtful speech.” I am dead serious. They want kids to call the cops if they hear words that hurts their feelings:

The University of Missouri is now threatening police force against speech. #Mizzou pic.twitter.com/rex4XcB7Z1

— Thomas Bradbury (@Thomas_Bradbury) November 10, 2015

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on the free speech clash, and includes three November 9 tweets from the black group that instigated the campus protests — tweets that have now been deleted, apparently:

There were media personnel who were very hostile toward us when we asked to have certain spaces respected. — ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950)

It’s typically white media who don’t understand the importance of respecting black spaces. — ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950)

If you have a problem with us wanting to have our spaces that we create respected, leave! — ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950)

This is not a movement for liberty. This is about left-wing fascism. In this environment, you would have to be brave or crazy as a white person to open your mouth to express anything but total solidarity with the mob. Here’s what it’s really about:

Power https://t.co/uYgkM73dux

— ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950) November 9, 2015

I would pull my student out of Mizzou at the end of this semester or academic year. A university where the campus police have empowered every thin-skinned malcontent to intimidate free speech is no longer a place where education can take place.

The only place I can imagine the kind of conversation Dr. Frisby wants to have is within the church, where all, white and black, can admit that they are sinners. The church would be the only conceivable safe space — and even then, with social media, you’d have to be extremely trusting, if not downright naive, to say anything you wouldn’t want broadcast on Twitter.

I started this post out planning to write about the church as safe space for having cross-racial conversations. As I was writing it, the Mizzou campus police thing broke, and I realized that the campus police do not seem to have any interest in protecting the First Amendment rights of journalists on campus, but rather intimidating opponents of the SJWs into silence. And so, I had second thoughts about “church as safe space.” I realized that people like me would be fools not to assume that everything we said in church can and would be used against us in the court of social media.

And then I would turn around and go home.

Social media, the Social Justice Warriors, and the craven authorities who accommodate them are the most anti-social force today.

The Happiest Place On Earth

Erin Doom leads James K.A. Smith on a tour of Wichita’s Eighth Day Books and the affiliated Eighth Day Institute — two of the happiest places on the planet, if you ask me. (The New York Times wrote about the bookstore back in May.) Excerpts from Jamie’s Q&A tour:

[Erin Doom] As you can see, those forty thousand books are in all sorts of places. The children’s books are in the basement, which Warren named the Hobbit Hole, based on the Tolkien quote on this sign: “It was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” There are books in every room and nook and cranny and on every floor of the house. He even has books in the upstairs bathroom.

But the heart of the store, in my estimation, is right here. This wall of shelves covers what used to be the original home’s fireplace. It holds writings and studies of the early Church Fathers and monasticism. I’ll come back to the Fathers in a bit.

In 2002, I helped Warren move the bookstore from its original location about eight blocks up the street. It looked and felt very similar to this new location. It also had a decorative placard with a famous quote by Jorge Luis Borges: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” This gives you a sense of the kind of place Eighth Day Books is.

And the Institute? Tell us, Erin, about the Hall of Men:

I left Eighth Day Books in 2005 for a high-school teaching position at Northfield School of the Liberal Arts. While teaching Greek, Medieval History, Great Books, and Western Civ., that initial idea finally began to come together. It’s also where I met George Elder.

After graduating from Northfield in 2003, George took off for Clemson University. Instead of partying and bar hopping, from the moment he arrived he set to work building a table and a kegerator. He also began brewing beer. And then he invited the young men of Clemson to join him in his garage for dinner, home-brewed beer, and a lecture on a hero. He called it the Hall of Men.

After graduating from Clemson, George returned home with that table. But it was a large table—twelve feet long, to be exact—and he didn’t have a place for it. He also wanted to continue the Hall of Men tradition.

I first met George while he was visiting Northfield, shortly after his return from Clemson in 2007. In that initial conversation, he explained the Hall of Men format to me. I was intrigued by the idea. But when he told me that he mounted an image of the hero being presented to his garage wall—which sounds like the Orthodox practice of commemorating saints through story and icon—the deal was sealed.

At that point we were incorporated as the St. John of Damascus Institute. We also had a long space—this hall. And George had a long table—this table. So we partnered and launched the Hall of Men in November of that same year. With a few exceptions, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant men have been gathering here twice a month ever since.

We still basically follow George’s original format. We eat dinner together, we drink beer, and we celebrate a hero through lecture and image. But we have developed an Eighth Day Convocation that precedes the lecture. It includes a hymn (usually Protestant), an evening prayer called “O Gladsome Light” (the earliest Christian hymn outside of the Bible still in use today), a reading from the Fathers, a Gospel reading, Christ’s prayer for union in John 17, the Nicene Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer.

If you look around at these walls, you can see the heroes we’ve presented. They make that passage in Hebrews about the great cloud of witnesses come alive. And really, that’s the point of the Hall of Men: to surround men with heroes of the faith who spur us on in our own faith. But it’s also meant to push us back out into our community to renew culture. In fact, that’s the only requirement for presenters: to imagine their hero has arrived from heaven to tell us how to renew our culture.

I’ve been to the Hall of Men, and wrote about it back in January, in a post called “The Joy of Wichita”. It’s a terrific place. It’s just what you want: a Christian speakeasy where you drink beer and talk about books and ideas. (Check out the “About Us” link for more on their vision.) They’ve recently started a women’s version of the Hall of Men group. It meets in the same place and talks about the same kind of stuff. Thirty-seven women showed up for the first event; next week, they’ll be meeting to talk about Julian of Norwich.

If you’re like me, you first encounter Eighth Day Books and Institute and think, “Wait, there’s a place like this in the world? That you can actually go to?” Yes, there is. Here’s the Benedict Option rationale behind this very Benedict Option place:

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



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

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

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

Read the whole thing. It’s so, so good. If you are feeling down and out and hopeless about our culture, go to Wichita and take part in what they’re doing there. Here’s a link to Eighth Day Books, the most wonderful bookstore on earth, and here’s a link to the Eighth Day Institute, a non-profit that is one of the worthiest endeavors I can think of, and which always needs support.

In January, the EDI is hosting its Sixth Annual symposium; this year’s theme is Soil and Sacrament: The World As Gift. I’m going to be one of the speakers, and I’ll be talking about the Benedict Option. Please come if you can; this little community on the prairie is the spiritual heart of the Benedict Option, if you ask me. Come see what they have accomplished. You might be inspired to go home and try it yourself. Be forewarned: you will go home with sacks of books. Once you get into the bookstore, you will not be able to help yourself.

In “The Suburban Hermit,” his new blog on the Benedict Option, the Catholic priest Fr. Dwight Longenecker says this about reading old books:

The old books are the ones that have stood the test of time. The ones that are built on the rock survive the tempest. The ones built on shifting sand have been washed away.

Studying the old books helps the monk put down roots and this builds stability and peace. By knowing the conflicts and struggles, the trials and traumas of the past and seeing how truth wins we gain confidence and trust in God’s providence.

The old books widen our minds and our souls. We broaden our perspective and deepen our insights. We go beyond our borders and puncture our prejudices and move beyond our comfortable nests.

To read old books and talk about them around a long table with good friends, a pint of ale at the elbow — really, it’s heaven on earth. And in Wichita! Who knew?

Mizzou Mob Tramples First Amendment

You have to watch this video clip. It shows a brave student journalist, photographer Tim Tai, holding his ground against a mob of Social Justice Warrior fanatics. He tries to tell them that he has a First Amendment right to be there photographing their protest, which was happening in a public place, but they refuse to listen, and bully him — at the end, physically.

One of the bullies is Prof. Melissa Click, who teaches, get this, in the communications department at the university. She can be heard in the beginning ordering the photographer away, and instructing the students to drive him off. From her faculty page:

Dr. Melissa A. Click earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences

Melissa Click

disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs. Melissa is Vice-Chair of ICA’s Popular Communication Division and is Chair of the committee hosting the Console-ing Passions conference at the University of Missouri in April 2014.

So you have on this video a college journalist having to school a communications Ph.D. in the First Amendment. I suppose this Social Justice Warrior Queen was too busy studying Lady Gaga and Fifty Shades of Grey to pay attention to the Constitution of the United States.

This is the kind of fanatic that the University of Missouri board has capitulated to. They gave in to a student mob, instigated in this instance by a radical professor, that shoves a journalist off of public land, where he has a perfect right to be.

The University of Missouri ought to be standing with Tim Tai and his colleagues, and against the thuggish Melissa Clark and her mob. So should the faculty and students there. Honestly, a communications professor urging a mob to shut down a journalist. At the end of the video, before a wall of students shoves photojournalist Tai out of the way, Click is heard shouting, ““Hey who wants to help me get this reporter out of here. I need some muscle over here!”

It beggars belief. She ought to be fired.

Also prominent in the video ordering the student journalist away is Janna Basler, who is assistant director of the office of Greek Life and Leadership. Watch the video. She behaves like a thug. The whole lot of them do.

Where are the campus police, protecting the journalists here? What is wrong with the University of Missouri?

Here is another result of this shakedown: new diversity policies announced by Mizzou:

“The board of curators will not tolerate hateful activities on our campuses – period,” said Cupps. “We are taking additional measures beginning today to ensure that our campuses are free of acts of hatred, so that our campuses all embody a culture of respect.”

Today the board announced a series of initiatives to be implemented over the next 90 days to address the racial climate on its campuses, including:

A first-ever Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer will be appointed for the UM System. Accountability and metrics will be established for the position going forward;

A full review will be initiated of all UM System policies as they relate to staff and student conduct;

Additional support will be provided for students, faculty and staff who have experienced discrimination and disparate treatment.

Additional support will be provided for the hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff;

In addition, the board announced its plan to ensure effective next steps through an open communication process that invites perspective from across the system. These steps are to:

Create a diversity, inclusion and equity task force to develop both a short- and long-term strategy, plan and metrics for the UM System based on an inventory and audit of current programs, policies and practices.

Establish campus-based task forces to develop diversity, inclusion and equity strategies, plans and metrics.

Ensure that each UM System campus has a Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer reporting to the chancellor;

Launch a diversity, inclusion and equity leadership training and development education program, which includes the board of curators, president and administrative leadership, followed by broader faculty and staff training.

Specifically, on the MU campus:

There is a process in place to identify external diversity, inclusion and equity consultants to conduct a comprehensive assessment of diversity and inclusion efforts on campus.

There will be mandatory diversity, inclusion and equity training for all faculty, staff and future incoming students.

We will continue the comprehensive review of student mental health services to ensure that students are referred to the most appropriate resources for their needs.

Let’s re-read this part, shall we?:

“The board of curators will not tolerate hateful activities on our campuses – period,” said Cupps. “We are taking additional measures beginning today to ensure that our campuses are free of acts of hatred, so that our campuses all embody a culture of respect.”

Bull. The board of curators is quite happy to allow disrespect for the First Amendment, for student journalists, and, you watch, for anybody else who stands up to this SJW mob. Cowards, the lot. And now they’re mandating political re-education for “all faculty, staff, and future incoming students.”

Why would you want to study at a place like that?

(Thanks to the reader who put me onto this development.)

UPDATE: Look at the Twitter exchange about the First Amendment between sociologist Tressie Cottom and David Simon, a former journalist and creator of The Wire. Both of them are liberals. Simon defends the First Amendment in the Mizzou journalism spat; Cottom takes the opposite side. The reader who sent this to me called it a “brewing liberal civil war,” and added, “Needless to say I’m with Simon, and so are many of us who call ourselves liberal.”

The Tyranny of Social Justice Warriors

A friend messages to say:

The next Robespierre is currently 17 years old and trying to decide between Harvard and Yale.

Yep. Earlier today, I received the e-mail below from a reader, which I publish with his permission. I have edited it slightly to protect his privacy and the privacy of someone he mentions below. I looked him up online, and he is who he says he is:

I currently identify very strongly with Conservatism, and read TAC and your blog daily. That’s me now, anyway. Before now, I spent almost ten years as a radical Leftist, participating in the anarchist movement, Earth First, Occupy. In other words I’ve been in the heart of the “Social Justice” campus radicalism that you’ve been writing about on your blog.

I said a moment ago that I identify with Conservatism and I meant it. As of right now I’m planning on voting for Ben Carson. Over the past two years as I’ve lost my faith in Leftism I’ve read and greatly enjoyed C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Russell Kirk, Roger Scruton and David Bentley Hart, in addition to reading TAC, First Things, and other online right-leaning media. However I doubt very much you would identify with me. You would probably consider me a “SWPL,” and maybe I am. That’s a conversation for another time, though.

In connection with that, there are 3 things I’d like to tell you.

1. Thank you. My journey away from the radical Left actually began almost 3 years ago, when I found myself 30 years old living in a tent in a friend’s back yard. I’ve realized that it’s around that age where true Leftists have only two options available: They become full time criminals or they become college professors. (I suppose “journalist” is also an option but I roll that in under number two.) Neither appealed to me, so I began withdrawing myself from my former comrades.

But it wasn’t until a year ago a major breaking point came. At that time my girlfriend and I were renting a room in a house here in [West Coast city]. It had been okay for a little while, but then something changed. Several residents moved out, and the people who replaced them were college students in their early 20s.

The following sequence of events happened about a year ago. My young roommates and their friends all saw the movie “Dear White People.” Many of them were people of color. One is a girl who is half black. She comes from a very wealthy [East Coast] family, had been to 100 countries by age 22, and studies at [the local university]. She’s very pretty and I can’t imagine has ever been told “No” in her life. In fact, her second week here she walked into a store and was randomly offered a job by the owner. Not the sort of thing that has never happened to me. I was raised by a single mother in rural Pennsylvania. We lived with her parents who were still raising three kids of their own. I refused then and refuse now to accept that my young friend is “oppressed” or that I have “privilege” with respect to her.

The thing is, I didn’t, initially, respond with anger to this suggestion, although it makes me angry. I argued my case, which I think is pretty airtight. (My logic goes like this: Wealthy North American college students are not only not oppressed, they are the prime beneficiaries of America’s imperial power in the world. Period.) For this I was called racist and all other manner of terrible names. My girlfriend and I had to move out of the place we had lived in longer than anyone. I lost friends.

Now, as of this time, I am immensely grateful for all of that. I needed a final break from campus radicalism. Where you come into this, and why I am thanking you, is that during this time your blog was one of my only sources of comfort. It really felt– and still feels– like going insane sometimes. Knowing that there were other people out there who were willing to speak up against the Social Justice nightmare helped me more than I can say.

2. It is every bit as bad as you’ve heard. But not only this, it’s getting worse. Every incoming crop of college freshmen makes it worse. They simply cannot hear anything that they disagree with, and they form up into an hysterical mob to destroy anything that challenges their views. I can say this from having been a victim, but also having been a perpetrator.

You have to understand that within radical Left circles it’s rather like the Communist Party under Stalin. Communism itself is entirely passé, though. I think at least one reason for this is that Communism at least pretends to concern itself with class, and Social Justice Warriors are almost universally wealthy. (If you ever point this out to them, you are told “Yes I’ve heard many white male activists insist that ‘only class matters.'”) But it’s like the Communist Party in that the closer you are to the Inner Ring (deliberate Lewis reference) the more you stand at risk for purging. In every radical set I was ever a part of purges were a constant factor.

Now, the person purged is almost always a young man on the outer edge of the inner circle. In other words, a socially vulnerable individual. And what this points out, and this is a big deal, is that nature of these movements. They are organized like wolf packs. They will often tell you that “We don’t have leaders” or “We govern ourselves by consensus.” They are lying, both to you and to themselves. They organize themselves as a primate social hierarchy.

3. I don’t know what will stop these people. It might be that nothing will, until they have blood on their hands. Even then that might not stop them. In “the movement,” we used to constantly joke about killing people, especially policemen. Here’s an example, a “joke” which you heard often: “Q: What’s the difference between a cop and an onion? A: I cry when I cut open an onion.” The people involved in these movements have no self awareness. They have no self-consciousness. They have no sense of shame or any notion that there might be any reason to restrain oneself.

I am more than a little convinced that the nature of our contemporary society is part of the problem. Isolated suburbs, helicopter parents, internet from age three. It’s telling that the younger kids are worse than the older ones. The younger generation has never been without smartphones. In other words, they have never been without permanent, constant distractions. They have, therefore, never had the opportunity to develop an inner life or anything like self-awareness, and social media trains them to follow the crowd and jump on every bandwagon. They are in a very real sense not human. There’s this great line from Epictetus where he talks about how easy it is for human beings to act like beasts, by becoming slave to their instincts and passions, by not cultivating the life of the mind (soul, spirit). That is exactly what is going on here. Exactly.

He adds in a follow-up:

One thing I’d like to make clear– this probably isn’t a big deal, but I feel like I need to say it– is that I’m not holding myself up as a paragon of virtue. I did bad things when I was part of that movement and I still do bad things now. But part of getting free of radicalism, for me, has been getting sober through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which forces me to examine myself daily and take responsibility for my actions and the flaws in my character. One of the things that frightens me most about the radical left is that they show absolutely no willingness to even consider that they may have acted incorrectly, let alone immorally.

I’ll say it again:

The next Robespierre is currently 17 years old and trying to decide between Harvard and Yale.

Social Justice Warriors are the product of a culture that trains its young to think that their every desire is self-justifying. If they feel it, it must be true.

Robespierre once wrote:

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.

It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?

He, too, was a Social Justice Warrior, slicing through everything that stood between himself and Perfect Justice — even the necks of his enemies.

SJWs vs. Free Speech

“Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go.” @CoMissourian #ConcernedStudent1950 pic.twitter.com/5YD4Zcao1j

— Ellise Verheyen (@ellisenichol) November 9, 2015

The University of Missouri has one of the best journalism schools in the country. And now Social Justice Warriors among the undergraduates do not want the media writing about what they’re doing. They are threatening journalists:

Safe space. #ConcernedStudent1950@CoMissourian@CS_1950pic.twitter.com/aGq16RgW0a

— Ellise Verheyen (@ellisenichol) November 9, 2015

This is what you get, University of Missouri board, when you kowtow to the mob. More from Mediaite. And here’s a tweet from a sports journalist who was there this morning:

The students at Mizzou have built a human shield to block reporters from interviewing peaceful protesters pic.twitter.com/YCZjuvIZDL

— Benjamin Hochman (@hochman) November 9, 2015

Well, why not? Social Justice Warriors don’t want there to be any speech that contradicts their preferred narrative. Hey, University of Missouri systems board, you brought this on yourself.

Mizzou: No Longer An Actual University

This is truly shocking:

Amid a wave of student and faculty protests over racial tensions that all but paralyzed its flagship campus here, the president of the University of Missouri system resigned Monday, urging everyone involved to “use my resignation to heal and start talking again.”

The president, Timothy M. Wolfe, had grown increasingly isolated, with opposition to his leadership reaching a crescendo in the last few days: a graduate student, Jonathan Butler, has been holding a highly publicized hunger strike, saying he would not eat again until Mr. Wolfe was gone; the university’s student government on Monday demanded his ouster; and much of the faculty canceled classes for two days, in favor of a teach-in focused on race relations.

But it was the football team that delivered what might have been the fatal blow to Mr. Wolfe’s tenure, when players announced on Saturday that they would refuse to play as long as the president remained in office, and their head coach, Gary Pinkel, said he supported them. The prospect of a football strike drew national attention, and officials said that just forfeiting the team’s game next weekend against Brigham Young University would cost the university $1 million.

Well, now we know: the football team at Mizzou takes priority over everything else. The University of Missouri is a football team with a university attached to it. More:

“It is my belief we stopped listening to each other,” Mr. Wolfe said. “We have to respect each other enough to stop yelling at each other and start listening, and quit intimidating each other.”

“I take full responsibility for this frustration,” he added, “and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred.”

Thousands of students and faculty gathered Monday morning at the Speaker’s Circle, at the heart of the campus, to discuss racism and ramp up pressure on Mr. Wolfe and the Curators to act. They erupted in cheers at word of his resignation, and Mr. Butler said he would eat for the first time in a week.

Well, Tim Wolfe’s dietary habits aren’t the same as my own, because to quote e.e. cummings, cited in an earlier post this morning, “There is some sh*t I will not eat.”

Here is the list of demands protesting black students made:

So, how far is Mizzou willing to go to satisfy these radical demands? If they think forcing Wolfe out will settle matters, they’re dreaming.

Here’s some background from the Washington Post, on events leading up to the Wolfe self-immolation:

The problems in Columbia began on Sept. 11. That’s when Payton Head, the Missouri Students Association president and an African American, was racially abused as he walked home.

“Last night as I walking through campus, some guys riding on the back of a pickup truck decided that it would be okay to continuously scream N—– at me,” Head wrote on Facebook the next day. “I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society.”

African American students became upset when it took university chancellor R. Bowen Loftin nearly a week to respond to the incident. After several other black students experienced similar abuse, Butler and others organized a rally.

“The University of Missouri does not care about black students,” Danielle Walker shouted into a microphone. “Racism lives here. Not in Ferguson. Not in Baltimore. Not in South Carolina. Here. Right here.”

OK, wait. Why does jackass behavior by a group of white racists riding around in a pick-up truck on campus — racists who might not even be part of the university community — require a response from the chancellor of the university? Why is the lack of a response a sign that the University of Missouri does not care about black students? When I was an undergraduate at LSU, drunk frat-boy types would sometimes drive by groups of us walking down Highland Road to the bars, and yell abuse at us, usually “Faggots!” or something like that. It never occurred to any of us to demand that the university chancellor Show That He Cares. Did any of us think that the university administration actually approved of idiots calling undergraduates names from passing cars? Of course not. If violence had been threatened, that would have been a different matter, but the general understanding was that you will always have jerks among us, and drunken stupidity was not generally a cause for making a federal case.

Well, not anymore, I guess:

Barely a week later came another ugly on-campus incident.

Shortly after midnight on Oct. 5, members of the Legion of Black Collegians (LBC) were in a campus plaza rehearsing for a play the following night when “an inebriated white male” called them “n—–s.”

This time, the university responded more promptly, with Loftin issuing a statement denouncing the incidents. “We support free speech in the context of learning, spirited inquiry and intellectual discussion, but acts of bias and discrimination will not be tolerated at Mizzou,” he wrote.

Sanction that jerk, then. What he said was unacceptable. As the Post notes, Mizzou is a campus of 35,000 students. It should not shock anybody that among that vast population are racists and drunkards, as well as all manner of sinners. When one of them sins by getting drunk and saying something racist, the proper response is to punish the racist drunkard. It is not a Crisis™. And lo, the university identified the white drunk and kicked him off campus! But that wasn’t enough.

Days later, a group of black protesters surrounded a car carrying Wolfe in a parade, and refused to let him pass. Wolfe’s driver “bumped” a couple of protesters in an effort to get away. Well, if you are going to prevent a car from driving on a road, don’t be surprised when you get bumped, morons! But that was seen as another sign of the racist character of the Mizzou administration.

And then someone painted a swastika in feces on a residence hall wall. This person has not been identified. Nobody knows if this was a genuine act of hate, or a hate crime hoax carried out by a provocateur (this has been a documented problem on campuses). But it didn’t matter to protesters. It was useful to the cause.

Here is Allan Bloom, reflecting in 1987’s The Closing of the American Mind on the destruction of university culture by the 1960s protest movement:

Indignation or rage was the vivid passion characterizing those in the grip of the new moral experience. Indignation may be a most noble passion and necessary for fighting wars and righting wrongs. But of all the experiences of the soul it is the most inimical to reason and hence to the university. Anger, to sustain itself, requires an unshakable conviction that one is right. Whether the student wrath against the professorial Agamemnons was authentically Achilleans is open to question. But there is no doubt that it was the banner under which they fought, the proof of belonging.

It wasn’t just the football team and black students. The Post writes:

Tensions were high on campus Monday morning — with a student on a hunger strike, others camped out in solidarity, faculty members canceling classes, a petition and boycott. In the morning, the Missouri Students Association, which represents the school’s undergraduates, formally called for Wolfe’s removal. In a letter, it decried the administration’s silence after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a black man, by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and charged that Wolfe had “enabled a system of racism” on the Columbia campus and had failed the students.

Here’s the letter the MSA sent:

Think about this. The university students have allegedly fallen apart because the university administration did not take a public position on the shooting and riots in Ferguson, which “forced [them]to face an increase in tension and inequality without systemic support.” This is outrageous! These grown men and women could not bear to think about events in Ferguson without Daddy and Mommy the university administration telling them that it felt their pain? The university has “failed” them by not creating “spaces of healing”? My God, students today. What entitled, privileged children they are. Little emperors.

And what is this “culture of racism” that Tim Wolfe has “enabled”? Surely there is more to it than a drunken idiot dropping the N-word on students, or (perhaps equally drunken) rednecks yelling racist epithets at a black student. So, tell us? Are we really to believe that the University of Missouri campus is a bastion of racial hatred? Just because a group of students says so? Let’s hear the reasoned public case that the racial situation on the U of M campus is so bad that it required the resignation of the university’s president. Just because Daddy Tim Wolfe did not say “yes” to the students’ demands does not mean that he didn’t listen to them. One gets the impression that college undergraduates today have been told “yes” so often by their parents that they cannot understand that their desires are not self-justifying. Maybe Tim Wolfe really was a lousy college president, and maybe he ought to have done more, or done things differently. But that has not been demonstrated by the evidence presented. Race and racism really are a big deal in our society — but on the basis of the evidence presented, Tim Wolfe has not created a “culture of racism” on campus.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter: Tim Wolfe is out. He was saying as late as Sunday that he wasn’t going to resign, but he must have been told in this morning’s meeting of the board that he didn’t have their support anymore. Well, we now know what the University of Missouri is — and is not.

We have seen today at Mizzou the acquiescence of reason to indignation — or, to be more blunt, the acquiescence of reason to football. Naturally, the White House praises the mob:

White House press secretary Josh Earnest praised the protesters. They showed that “a few people standing up and speaking out can have a profound impact on the places where we live and work,” Earnest said. It would require continued “hard work” on the part of students and administrators to ensure progress continued, he said, and he noted that similar debates are taking place at other campuses, such as recent protests at Yale University.

The scale and source of the concerns at Yale are different, Earnest said, but both go to the “fundamental issue of ensuring that there is home for everyone” on college campuses.

Great, so now the White House sides with SJWs.

Now we will see if Yale will similarly acquiesce. If the university administration and faculty do not stand 100 percent behind Nicholas and Erika Christakis, the university will disgrace itself. It must not accommodate those mewling undergraduate neurotics one bit. I wish I had confidence that Yale was going to do the right thing, instead of the expedient thing. Maybe it will surprise me.

Maybe I’m a romantic about such things, but I have to believe that there is a silent majority of undergraduates and even faculty members in American universities who are sick and tired of being bullied by Social Justice Warriors. They must know that their vocations and their livelihoods are on the line here, and that if they don’t stand up to it now, while they can, they are going to be swept away as surely as Tim Wolfe was. Do you undergraduates and professors at Mizzou realize that the football team — the football team! — pushed out the president of your university? Do you really want the football team to decide how the university runs itself? Because that’s what just happened.

I hope that none of my children want to become professors in American universities. When a university president can be forced to step down for, among other things, failing to create a “space for healing” for its insatiably aggrieved students, we are witnessing an astonishing degree of intellectual and moral corruption. Lop off the head of one university president, teach a thousand, I guess.

It’s all Trumpbait. You know this, right?

UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf on the SJW spasms at Yale:

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”

What Yale students did next vividly illustrates that phenomenon.

According to the Washington Post, “several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.” These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can’t bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings?

Another Silliman resident declared in a campus publication, “I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.” One feels for these students. But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain.

Conor, further:

 “We simply ask that our existences not be invalidated on campus,” the letter says, catastrophizing.

This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.

The same thing ought to be said to the black students at Mizzou. No truckload of racist rednecks or no wandering racist drunk has the power to threaten their existence or worth. The idea that the university administration’s failure to react as they would have had them react to Ferguson is a threat to them is just crazy — and yes, perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Mizzou. But now that they’ve witnessed the power of righteous indignation, it won’t stop here. Now, all eyes are on Yale.

UPDATE.2: Now the University of Missouri chancellor has resigned. Two scalps. Impressive. Three cheers for National Review‘s editorial about the mess. Excerpts:

Wolfe, black students insisted, has “enabled a system of racism” at the university. What exactly that system of racism consists of remains vague. The complaints include the by-now-familiar litany, beginning with the fact that the university administration was silent on the matter of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a year ago. Multiple investigations of the Brown shooting, including the one conducted by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, have concluded that there was no criminal conduct by police in the case. But even if there had been, what business is it of the University of Missouri? The purpose of a university administration is to administer the university, not to provide a salve for every hurt, real or imagined, that besets the increasingly childish adults it is intended to serve. Other racial incidents have been reported by Mizzou students with varying degrees of documentation: A student says he was twice described with a racial slur, and a swastika was found applied to a dormitory wall with feces. But the University of Missouri is not besieged by the Ku Klux Klan. It is besieged by hysteria. Hysteria needs to be stood up to, not cravenly fed with acquiescence.

When men with souls made of cotton candy wilt in the face of this sort of absurdity, it encourages it. Wolfe is, by his resignation, rewarding destructive and deeply illiberal behavior.  … University of Missouri students desperately need to grow the hell up and start acting like adults.

Time and Laurus

You may recall my raving about Laurus, a prize-winning Russian novel that has just been translated into English. My friend Eric Metaxas read it on my recommendation, and says it’s mind-blowing. Frederica Mathewes-Green just started it, and she says she can’t put it down. It really is that good. BBC Radio 4 has posted a PDF of the first chapter of the novel. It’s a very short introductory chapter, only a few paragraphs, but it gives you a glimpse of what’s to come, and you get to read the translator’s introduction too.

Laurus is the story of an inadvertent holy man of the Russian medieval period, Arseny, who experienced love and tragedy at a young age, and whose life became both a real and a metaphorical pilgrimage in response to this suffering. I’ve been in touch with the novel’s author, Evgeny Vodolazkin, and will be interviewing him next week (so watch this space). One of the things we will talk about is Time, which is a great theme of the novel. In a short interview Evgeny did with BBC Radio 4, he talked briefly about how he handles Time in such a way in the novel as to convey the idea that Time does not really exist, that it’s a human construct.

Confronting this concept in Laurus, I was reminded of this passage from Canto 33 of Dante’s “Paradiso,” when the pilgrim Dante reaches the end of all his journeying, and beholds the Holy Trinity:

O plenitude of grace, by which I could presume

to fix my eyes upon eternal Light

until my sight was spent on it!

In its depth I saw contained,

by love into a single volume bound,

the pages scattered through the universe:

substances, accidents, and the interplay between them

as though they were conflated in such ways

that what I tell is but a simple light.

I believe I understood the universal form

of this dense knot because I feel my joy expand,

rejoicing as I speak of it.

[trans. Hollander]

Or consider this translation of the same text, by Anthony Esolen:

O overbrimming grace whence I presumed

to gaze upon the everlasting Light

so fully that my vision was consumed!

 

I saw the scattered elements unite,

bound all with love into one book of praise,

in the deep ocean of the infinite;

 

Substance and accident and all their ways

as if breathed into one: and, understand,

my words are a weak glimmer in the haze.

 

The universal Being of this band

I think I saw — because when that is said,

I feel the bliss within my heart expand.

“Substances” and “accidents” are Aristotelian categories that were key to medieval thought. Here’s an explanation of what they mean; roughly, a “substance” is the essence of a thing, and an “accident” is a particular expression of substance. As the website to which I link says, “Accidents are the modifications that substance undergo, but that do not change the kind of thing that each substance is.” In his notes, Esolen says:

The first of the three mysteries beheld by the poet is that of the unity of all things and their harmonious dependence upon and permeation by the providence of God. The image of the book derives from Bonaventure: “From this we may gather that the universe is like a book reflecting, representing, and describing its Maker, the Trinity” (Brev. 2.12).

Dante’s point is that at the end of the universe — that is to say, when he reaches the throne of God — he perceives that everything that ever was and is to come already exists within the totality of Being, which is to say, God. The poet Dante, describing his pilgrim self’s experience, says that what he discloses in his poem is barely a glimmer of radiant Reality.

There’s a great book called The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, by a scholar at the University of Notre Dame, Christian Moevs. In it, he discusses how one of the most important discoveries that the pilgrim Dante makes on his journey is that Time does not exist in reality. Moevs writes:

To experience and live the improbable postulate that even though consciousness (as in humans) appears to exist in, and depend on, the spatiotemporal world, the truth is the opposite (all space-time is a creation or projection of conscious being): it is to free oneself from the obsessive lure of the ephemeral through faith (action and experience, not just words and ideas) and take one’s rightful place in the Empyrean [eternity, the kingdom of Heaven — RD]. It is to know oneself not only as a thing in space-time, but also as one with the source of space-time. It is to awaken to onself Christically as the subject, and not only an object, of experience, by voluntarily sacrificing the attachment to, or obsessive identification with, the finite. It is to experience oneself as attributeless, extensionless, immune to all contingency: one with the ontological ground that spawns and knows all possible object of experience as itself. It is to know oneself as everything, and as nothing, which is to love all things literally, and not just metaphorically, as oneself. It is to achieve salvation, or eternal life.

This language is not easy, nor is the book. What Moevs says here is that the pilgrim Dante, on the verge of achieving theosis, or metaphysical unity with God, understands that everything that exists is only the projection of the mind of God, bound together by Love. We cannot “read the book” of reality with our minds, only with our hearts, through Love, which is the Logos, or ordering principle. Once you understand that Time does not exist in the mind of God, that everything is part of eternity, you become detached from created things, and love only God. This is not to say that you hate created things (because God created them, after all, and declared them good, and can be known partially through His creation), but rather that your love for them is subordinated to your all-consuming love of God. Moevs continues:

In the Comedy salvation is rather a self-awakening of the Real to itself in us, the surrender of sacrifice of what we take ourselves and the world to be, a changed experience that is one with a moral transformation. We cannot know what we are until we surrender what we think we are, with all its attendant desires. Dante could say with Wittgenstein that he aims to prevent understanding unaccompanied by inner change, and that there can be no true understanding without moral perfection (perfect selflessness, the dissolution of the ego)…

The point here is that to know God is to know Reality, and even more, it is to know God/Reality not with one’s mind, but with one’s heart. One cannot comprehend intellectually the fullness of Reality, standing outside of it, but one may unite with that Reality, by conversion of the heart, which is to say, through the purification and illumination of the nous (pron. “noose”).

In my earlier blog post here about Laurus, I quoted from an interview that Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and an ardent reader of Russian literature, said about Dostoevsky:

RW Dostoevsky and some of his followers would say ethics is not about good and evil; it’s about truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. The right way to live doesn’t amount to a series of approved actions. It’s about living in recognition of reality.

LC I like this idea of a true reality beaming its message out from Dostoevsky’s great novels, but on the face of it it’s so airy-fairily metaphysical I wonder whether we can persuade many people today to buy it.

RW Reality is an underlying conviction of harmony. The sense that there is a unity to human experience, that somewhere every river runs into the same sea.

 

This metaphysical truth is exactly what Vodolazkin bears witness to in Laurus, and exactly what Dante says in the Commedia. The journey of the pilgrim Dante  is ultimately the same as the journey of Arseny: towards unity with Reality, which is to say, with the God revealed to us in the Bible. Theosis.

Again, this concept may sound airy-fairy mystical, but when you encounter it in the pages of Laurus, you understand. All Christianity held this vision until the end of the High Middle Ages in the West. Orthodoxy still maintains strongly. One of the things I most cherish about Orthodoxy is the way time seems to stop when you enter into a church for the Divine Liturgy. All the icons on the walls remind you of the reality that we stand among a great unseen cloud of witnesses from all ages of the Church, worshiping. Here is a photo of the interior of Holy Theophany church in Colorado Springs, where I attended liturgy a week ago. All these colors and images are signs pointing to Reality:

Finally, on the subject of Time, here is a comment about Laurus by a young writer named Grigory Ryzhakov, who attended a lecture on medieval history and literature that Vodolazkin delivered recently at Oxford. Excerpt:

When the Q&A started, I asked the author about his latest book, Laurus, and why it was written.

Vodolazkin said that he wrote it from the heart. He felt a compulsion to write about a kind, virtuous man. There is a lot of decadence, ‘sh*t’, and negativity in the modern literature. Vodolazkin intended to counter all that with a story of a saint, which he could only find in the medieval times. [Emphasis mine — RD]

In his opinion, literature is all about reaction, reflection, and it should raise questions and make readers attempt to answer them. In Laurus, Vodolazkin depicted a path that one could choose to follow or decide not to. The moral questions aside, the author tried to make it an exciting read.

Someone asked the speaker why the saint was a man, and not a woman. Vodolazkin said it was easier for him to write a male protagonist, though the story was not about a man, but a human. In fact, it was inspired by the life of Blessed Xenya of St Petersburg, who, after her husband had deceased, decided to live his life for him and wandered for 45 years, often wearing her husband’s uniform. So, in a way, Laurus is a ‘fool-for-Christ’ type of text (юродивый), so nobody would take it too serious. One shouldn’t not ‘portray’ a serious Wise Man, the seriousness should be inside.

I am sure Vodolazkin doesn’t deny that there are saints in the post-medieval period. St. Xenia, for example, died in 1803. Perhaps what he is saying is that the Middle Ages were a time when sanctity was easier to perceive. I don’t know; I will ask him. I can say that part of my passion for the Benedict Option is a desire to live out that same sense that the medievals had of the divide between the temporal and the eternal being an illusion, and of God being everywhere present and filling all things. That is Reality — a Reality that is harder to perceive in our present Dark Age.

Academia’s Saul Bellow Moment

A reader writes from inside the academy:

Watching the video you embedded of Christakis surrounded by SJWs, pleading along the lines of, “But we’ve eaten together for years, you’ve taken classes with me, how could you think I’m the kind of person you’re now accusing me of being? Doesn’t our having known each other count for anything, at all?” my mind went immediately to a scene from Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, when Joseph, the narrator, encounters a former Party comrade in a restaurant. It’s a long scene, so I’ve bolded the relevant parts, skipping some of the Bellovian ranting (though that’s quite good, too). It’s especially useful to think of his friend Myron (who doesn’t wind up giving him the job in question) as a university administrator, too.

Of course, there’s something a little naive and innocent about Comrade Jim’s rejection of Joseph — he’s an honest-to-God revolutionary; he’d never try to manipulate the apparatus of institutional power to get him fired! Do that, and you’ve sold out to The Man just as much as Joseph did when he decided to fix the world by treating a few sores at a time rather than tearing it all down and building up something new in its place! I want to say that it’s the Left eating its own again at Yale — but in the ’40s, the Left was content to let this all be internecine warfare. Now it’s got to be Revolution™, dammit — and those Trotskyists need to be the first to go!

One day, hopefully soon, we’re going to reach a point where those of us who dissent from the antiliberalism of the campus Left will simply announce, with e.e. cummings, that “There is some sh*t I will not eat.” I think in the refusal to apologize on that campus lawn, there’s a step toward it. (My breaking point came when I refused to write an e-mail apologizing to several colleagues for my insufficient expression of outrage at the “racist condiments” in the department break room. No one had asked me to; I just knew I needed to. And then I realized what I was doing and closed my computer. That was a thing that really happened in my life.)

Anyway — the long passage in question is:

An unusual explosion of temper this afternoon, when I was with Myron Adler. I behaved unaccountably, greatly surprising myself and of course, bewildering Myron altogether. He had phoned me about a temporary job which would consist of asking people questions for a poll he is conducting. I hurried down to meet him at the Arrow for lunch. I arrived first, took a table toward the back, and immediately fell victim to depression. I had not visited the Arrow for a number of years. It was at one time a hangout for earnest eccentrics where, at almost any hour of the afternoon or evening, you could hear discussions of socialism, psychopathology, or the fate of European Man. It was I who had suggested that we eat there; for some reason it had been the first place that came to my mind. Now it depressed me. Then, as I looked around at the steam tables and the posters of foundering ships and faces of Japanese, I saw Jimmy Burns sitting at a table with a man I did not know. Since the days when we had been Comrade Joe and Comrade Jim, we had seen each other no more than two, perhaps three, times. He looked changed; his forehead had grown higher and his expression more severe. I nodded to him, but got no recognition for my pains; he looked through me in the way which is, I suppose officially prescribed for “renegades.”

When Myron came in a few minutes later and started at once to talk about the job, I said impatiently, “Wait a second, now. Just hold on.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Something very special,” I said. “Wait till I tell you. You see that man in the brown suit over there? That’s Jimmy Burns. Ten years ago I was privileged to call him Comrade Jimmy.”

“Well?” said Myron.

“I said hello to him, and he acted as if I simply wasn’t there.”

“What of it?” said Myron.

“Does that seem natural? I was once a close friend.”

“Well?” said Myron.

“Stop saying that, will you!” I said in exasperation.

“I mean do you want him to throw his arms around you?” asked Myron.

“You don’t get the point. I despise him.”

“Then I don’t get the point. I confess I don’t get it.”

“No. Listen. He has no business ignoring me. This is always happening to me. You don’t understand it because you’re a person of no political experience But I know what this means, and I’m going to go up to him and say hello whether he likes it or not.”

“Don’t be a fool. What do you want to make trouble for?” said Myron.

“Because I feel like making trouble. Does he know me or doesn’t he? He knows me perfectly well.” I was growing angrier by the minute. “I’m surprised that you shouldn’t be able to see it.”

“I came here to talk to you about a job, not to see you throw a fit,” he said.

“Oh, a fit. Do you think I care about him? It’s the principle of the thing. It seems to escape you. Simply because I am no longer a member of their party they have instructed him and boobs like him not to talk to me. Don’t you see what’s involved?”

“No,” Myron said carelessly.

“I’ll tell you what’s involved. I have a right to be spoken to. It’s the most elementary thing in the world. Simply that. I insist on it.”

“Oh, Joseph,” said Myron.

“No, really, listen to me. Forbid one man to talk to another, forbid him to communicate with someone else, and you’ve forbidden him to think, because, as a great many writers will tell you, thought is a kind of communication. And his party doesn’t want him to think, but to follow its discipline. So there you are. Because it’s supposed to be a revolutionary party. That’s what’s offending me. When a man obeys an order like that he’s helping to abolish freedom and begin tyranny.”

“Come, come,” said Myron. “You’re making too much fuss over it.”

“I should be making twice as much fuss,” I said. “It’s very important.”

“But you’ve been through with them for years, haven’t you?” Myron asked. “Do you mean to say you’ve just discovered this now?”

“I haven’t forgotten, that’s all. You see, I thought those people were different. I haven’t forgotten that I believed they were devoted to the service of some grand flapdoodle, the Race, le genre humain. Oh, yes, they were! By the time I got out, I realized that any hospital nurse did more with one bedpan for le genre humain than they did with their entire organization. It’s odd to think that there was a time when to hear that would have filled me with horror. What? Reformism?”

“I’ve heard of that,” said Myron.

“I should think so! Reformism! A terrible thing. About a month after we parted company, I sat down and wrote Jane Addams a letter of apology. She was still alive.”

“Did you?” he said, looking at me curiously.

“I never mailed it,” I said. “Maybe I should have. Don’t you believe me?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“I changed my mind about redoing the world from top to bottom a la Karl Marx and decided in favor of bandaging a few sores at a time. Of course, that was temporary too. . . .”

“Was it?” he said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! You know that, Mike,” I said loudly.

The man who was sitting with Burns turned around, but the latter still pretended not to see me. “That’s right,” I said, “Look the other way. Go on. That boy is mad, Myron. He’s never been sane. Everything has changed, he’s been left far behind, but he thinks it’s as it used to be. He still wears that proletarian bang on his earnest forehead and dreams of becoming an American Robespierre. The rest have compromised themselves to the ears, but he still believes in the revolution. Blood will run, the power will change hands, and then the state will wither away according to the in-ex-or-able logic of history. I’d gamble my shirt on it. Let me tell you something about him. Do you know what he used to have in his room? I went up with him one day, and there was a large-scale map of the city, with pins in it. So I said, ‘What’s this for, Jim?’ And then—I swear this is true—he started to explain that he was preparing a guide for street-fighting, the day of the insurrection. He had all the critical streets marked in code for cellars and roofs, the paving material, the number of newsstands at each corner that could be thrown into barricades (the Parisian kiosks, you remember). Even abandoned sewers for hiding arms. He traced them through City Hall records. The things we used to accept as natural—why, it’s unbelievable! And he’s still in that. I’ll be he still has the map. He’s an addict. They’re all addicted people, Mike. Hey, Burns! Hey!” I called out.

“Shut up, Joseph! For God’s sake. What are you doing? Everybody’s looking at you.”

Burns glanced briefly in my direction and then resumed his conversation with the other man, who, however, turned again to examine me.

“What do you know about that? Burns won’t give me a tumble. I can’t arouse him. I’m just gone. Like that.” I snapped my fingers. “I’m a contemptible petty-bourgeois renegade; could anything be worse? That idiot! Hey, addict!” I shouted.

“Have you gone mad? Come on.” Myron pushed back the table. “I’m going to get you out of here before you start a fight. I think you would start a fight. Where’s your coat, which is it? Why, you’re a madman! Come back here!” But I was already out of his reach. I halted squarely before Burns.

“I said hello to you before, didn’t you notice?”

He made no reply.

“Don’t you know me? It seems to me that I know you very well. Answer me, don’t you know who I am?”

“Yes, I know you,” Burns said in a low voice.

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” I said. “I just wanted to be sure. I’m coming, Myron.” I pulled my arm away from him and we strode out.

The academic who sent me this added that people in his department were so excited that the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s inside higher education were over, and they could all get back to teaching. Now that’s over — and professors are burned out by the reality of having to go through all this again.

One is reminded, of course, of The Closing of the American Mind, the famous 1987 book by Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom. This passage cuts deep:

My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material, not from outside or from an alien perspective, but believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance. There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief.

I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but cliches, superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.

And this from his chapter titled “The Sixties”:

“You don’t have to intimidate us,” said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a group of black students who had just persuaded “us,” the faculty of Cornell University, to do their will by threatening the use of firearms as well as threatening the lives of individual professors. A member of the ample press corps newly specialized in reporting the hottest item of the day, the university, muttered, “You said it, brother.” The reporter had learned a proper contempt for the moral and intellectual qualities of professors. Servility, vanity and lack of conviction are not difficult to discern.

The professors, the repositories of our best traditions and highest intellectual aspirations, were fawning over what was nothing better than a rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having understood the most important moral issues, the proper response to which they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change the university’s goals and the content of what they taught. As I surveyed this spectacle, Marx’s overused dictum kept coming to my mind against my will: History always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The American university in the sixties was experiencing the same dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the thirties. No longer believing in their higher vocation, both gave way to a highly ideologized student populace. And the content of the ideology was the same — value commitment. The university had abandoned all claim to study or inform about value — undermining the sense of the value of what it taught, while turning over the decision about values of the folk, the Zeitgeist, the relevant. Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same.

Bloom went to see the Cornell provost at the time in defense of a black student whose life had been threatened by a black faculty member over the student’s refusal to participate in a demonstration. The provost refused to defend the student. Bloom:

I saw that this had been a useless undertaking on my part. The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. … No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later — immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected — the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pesudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.