Rod Dreher's Blog, page 68

Beauty, Brokenness, And Bill Willis

[Note to readers: Today is Orthodox Good Friday, so I won’t be posting. I do want to share something with you, though. I wrote this on my subscription-only Daily Dreher Substack newsletter this week (subscribe here if you like). So many people responded favorably to it, and several readers urged me to share it on this blog, to leaven the doom and gloom of late. So here it is. I wish my Orthodox readers a blessed Paschal weekend. — RD]

The other night at dinner, my host, noting that I am from the American South, mentioned that he had once known a Southerner when he lived in Marrakesh. “Have you ever heard of Bill Willis?” he asked. No, I said, I have not. Bill Willis was a decorator to elites living in Marrakesh, and that meant some of the biggest society names of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a close friend and interior designer for Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, the Gettys, the Agnellis, and others. My host said he visited Bill at home once, and admired a piece of furniture. Bill quipped that he had stolen it from Mick Jagger.

Back home, I looked up Bill Willis, and found this remarkable 30-minute documentary about his life and work in Marrakesh. It is many things, but to my eyes, above all, it is a glimpse into the messy workings of grace.

Bill Willis

Bill Willis (1936-2009) was born in Memphis. There’s a disturbing anecdote early in the film told rather bluntly by an artist who knew him in Marrakesh, in which Bill, as an adolescent boy, wanders away from home, and to the wrong side of the tracks. An older black man picks him up, and forces the boy to perform oral sex on him. Bill relayed that story to the artist later in life, telling her that all he has ever wanted to do in life was … that.

From that traumatic beginning, Bill set out for Europe as a young man, looking for adventure. He decided to become a kept man for wealthy patrons, and eventually made his way to Morocco. There he fell in with a fast, rich crowd. He lived a life of sex, drugs, drink, and general dissolution. In fact, Pierre Bergé testifies in the film that Bill never achieved the full due of his talent because of this complete lack of personal discipline. He wasted away so much of his potential in partying.

And yet, look at some of the breathtaking interior landscapes Bill did manage to create:

You get the idea. I really do hope you will watch the film — there are many more such images of overwhelming sumptuousness. Bill Willis was an aesthete of prodigious talent.

Yet there is fathomless melancholy in his story. Accompanied by Willis’s former housekeeper, and his former professional collaborator, the filmmakers visit his old house, which is falling into ruin. You see that all that beauty ultimately faded, as all beauty must (about half the people interviewed in this film are now dead). Isham, the housekeeper, points out that his former master used to stare out over the cemetery behind the house, and would say that he felt most comfortable among the dead. Isham says Bill was a sad man. Isham weeps.

Bill Willis’s story is as good an example of any as to the necessity to separate the artist from his art. Over on my blog, I lament the cancellation by W.W. Norton of its published biography of the late novelist Philip Roth, after a number of (as yet unproven) accusations of sexual assault against biographer Blake Bailey were lodged. Even if the allegations are true, that tells us nothing at all about the quality of Bailey’s biography of Roth. It is — or rather, it was — well understood that it is an elementary mistake to judge the quality of a work by the moral character of the one who made it. After all, what kind of blind man would reject a Caravaggio because the artist was a murderer, a brawler, a deadbeat, and a sexual rebel (including perhaps a purloiner of boys for sexual pleasure)?

That is one of Caravaggio’s most famous canvases, depicting the moment Jesus of Nazareth called the tax collector Matthew to follow him. Why did Jesus choose a tax collector, an ignoble profession? Well, why did the eternal and all-powerful God choose to incarnate as an itinerant rabbi from the lowlife town of Nazareth? Why did God bless the dissolute Bill Willis with a divine gift of aesthetic prowess, while leaving well-behaved and untroubled men with none? Why Mozart, but not Salieri?

It is a mystery. But that’s how the world really is. You cannot explain this mystery in a satisfying way, but you can recognize it, and enter into it. Artistic genius does not absolve one’s sins, but neither does one’s sins negate artistic genius.

Pierre Bergé describes Bill as a “dilettante,” a word that brings to mind Truman Capote, another flamboyantly gay Southern man who fell in with the European rich, and who was a shallow, self-centered aesthete who was capable of writing the most gossamer sentences. This passage from a 1948 sketch Capote wrote about traveling to Europe is one of my favorite passages from his writing, and since first reading it in my twenties, it has become a creed for me and my European travels:

In London a young artist said to me, “How wonderful it must be for an American traveling in Europe the first time; you can never be a part of it, so none of the pain is yours, you will never have to endure it — yes, for you there is only the beauty.”

Not understanding what he meant, I resented this; but later, after some months in France and Italy, I saw that he was right: I was not a part of Europe, I never would be. Safe, I could leave when I wanted to, and for me there was only the honeyed, hallowed air of beauty. But it was not so wonderful as the young man had imagined: it was desperate to feel that one could never be a part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. The sudden garden, opera night, wild children snatching flowers and running up a darkening street, a wreath for the dead and nuns in noon light, music from the piazza, a Paris pianola and fireworks on La Grande Nuit, the heart-shaking surprise of mountain visions and water views (lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes, the Mediterranean flickering at the bottoms of cliffs), forsaken far-off towers falling in twilight and candles igniting the jeweled corpse of St. Zeno of Verona — all a part of me, elements for the making of my own perspective.

Lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes. That very line rose in my mind as I peered out the window of an airplane flying over the Swiss Alps, beholding the beauty of mountain lakes below. Not a line from the Bible. Not a line from Shakespeare. A line from a gay Alabama dilettante who wasted his talent in high-society living, booze, pills, and gossip. Such is life.

How did the divine light shine through the disorder and brokenness of Bill Willis’s imagination, and in its projection reveal extraordinary beauty and harmony? It is easier for us — well, for Americans, at least — to consider a story like Oskar Schindler’s, and to understand the grace that allowed a sleazy German profiteer to deceive the Nazis and save the lives of hundreds of Jews. That was a moral act. We are much less comfortable trying to reconcile aesthetic achievement with personal vice. I think this says something about our very American distrust of beauty, thinking of it as merely a matter of pleasure.

When you see Bill Willis’s interiors, yes, there is undoubtedly sumptuary pleasure in the lines, the patterns, the lighting, the textures, and so forth. But there is more. I wrote about this in a December 30 newsletter. Excerpt:

Thinking about Chartres, about Dante, and about Penrose tilings, brings to mind a quality of beauty identified by Elaine Scarry, in her wonderful little book On Beauty And Being Just. She writes that all beautiful things share an “impulse toward begetting.

It is impossible to conceive of a beautiful thing that does not have this attribute. The homely word “replication” has been used here because it reminds us that the benign impulse toward creation results not just in famous paintings but in everyday acts of staring; it also reminds us that the generative object continues, in some sense, to be present in the newly begotten object. It may be startling to speak of the Divine Comedy or the Mona Lisa as “a replication” since they are so unprecedented, but the word recalls the fact that something, or someone, gave rise to their creation and remains silently present in the newborn object.

For Dante, the generative impulse behind the Divine Comedy was his love of Beatrice and her beauty — but, as she tells him when they are reunited at the peak of the mountain of Purgatory, he erred grievously when he made an idol of her, instead of seeing her iconographically: as a medium through which the glory of God shone, and a sign pointing him to the divine origin of all beauty and love.

Sir Roger Penrose found that the design beauty of what would come to be known as Penrose tiling produced fruits in mathematical computation. For me, the beauty of Chartres generated religious conversion, and new life. Later, the beauty of the Divine Comedy served as map and a guide leading me out of a period of great despair. The beauty of my wife led me to marriage (23 years ago tomorrow), and has produced three children. And on and on.

What is so wonderful — literally, wonder-full — about the Divine Comedy is how Dante reveals that life is a pilgrimage towards greater revelation of light, of beauty, of harmonious order, and of love. All of these are the same thing in God. As Dante progresses through Paradiso, his ability to see depends on his growing in holiness. He is too weak spiritually to behold the full glory of God, shining through the heavenly beings; the divine light shining through their forms would annihilate him. Gradually, though, as his intellect, his nous, become illumined, he is able to perceive more truth, behold greater love, become more united to God, and filled with the Light.

What was God doing in the soul of Bill Willis, who had the ability to perceive and to replicate beauty? To rest one’s eyes in a Willis interior landscape, in a spirit of contemplation, is to sense the goodness of life, to feel the consolation of harmony, and to perceive within oneself a capacity for life. To some of us, that is a mercy as meaningful as a morsel of bread given by a missionary to a hungry beggar.

I hope the soul of Bill Willis is at rest in Paradise, with Caravaggio, with Billie Holiday, and with all other artists who fared poorly in bearing the moral burdens that come with the ambiguous blessing of enormous aesthetic perceptiveness, and artistic talent. Kierkegaard said that an artist is like someone who is tormented alive in the public square, with the public marveling at the beauty of his screams and cries. Maybe that’s how it was for Bill Willis. Maybe that’s why his extreme aesthetic gifts and his inability to resist sex, drugs, and drink, came from the same place.

I’m not saying that God excuses the sins of men and women like Bill Willis because of their artistic talent. I am saying, though, that contemplating the works of a Bill Willis in light of the life he led gives one a certain perspective on “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Had Willis created ugliness, we would have thought: of course. But he didn’t; he created beauty that testified to the glory and goodness of life … and in several ways, the poor man longed for death. Like I said, a mystery. Once more, watch Bill Willis and make up your own mind.

The post Beauty, Brokenness, And Bill Willis appeared first on The American Conservative.

Finland Persecutes Christian Lawmaker

I had breakfast this morning in Budapest with a Hungarian-American businessman who follows my work, and reached out to invite me to meet him. “You look just like your Twitter photo,” he said when we met. He has been living in Budapest for some time, and conducts business internationally. Though born in the US, he grew up speaking Hungarian (his parents fled Communism), so he’s got the skills that enable him to flourish in transcontinental business.

We talked about many things, but at one point, he said, “My mother still lives in America. She tells me that it’s not the same country I left.” Of course he follows the US media, and told me that it is infuriating to read how Hungary is portrayed.

“You are sitting next to the Fifth Avenue of Budapest,” he said, referring to nearby Andrassy Avenue. “The only people Western journalists ever seem to talk to live within a two-mile radius of this street.”

Later, as I was headed home from work, I thought about how someone could stand on Andrassy holding a sign saying, “Viktor Orban, Go To Hell,” and nothing would happen to them. What do you think would happen to someone standing on the corner of Fifth and 45th in Manhattan, holding up a sign saying, “Black Lives Matter Sucks,” or “Homosexuality Is A Sin”? Yet Hungary is the illiberal horror show, we are told.

I can tell you what would happen to you in the liberal democracy of Finland if you said homosexuality is a sin. It happened on this very day to Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish Lutheran member of Parliament. Here’s the press release from the state prosecutor. Google Translate version is below:

The Prosecutor General has filed charges against MP Päivi Räsänen for three incitements against a group of people, and against Juhana Pohjola, an agent and board member of the Finnish Luther Foundation, for incitement against a group of people.

… The charges are based on three different sets of issues.

Räsänen has written, “God created them as men and women. Gay relationships challenge the Christian conception of man.” In her writing, Räsänen has presented opinions and information that denigrate homosexuals. Among other things, Räsänen has claimed that homosexuality is a scientifically proven disorder of psychosexual development. Pohjola has published the article on the websites of the Finnish Luther Foundation and the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission.

In addition, Räsänen has published on her Twitter and Instagram account and Facebook page an opinion that denigrates homosexuals, according to which homosexuality is a shame and a sin. [Note: She tweeted out a Bible verse. — RD]

Räsänen, on the program of the Yle Puhe radio channel, in its episode “What did Jesus think about gays?” made derogatory statements about homosexuals. In it, Räsänen has said that if homosexuality is genetic, then it is a genetic degeneration and a genetic disease that causes the disease. In Räsänen’s view, homosexuals are also not created by God like heterosexuals.

According to the indictment, the statements further specified in Räsänen’s indictments are derogatory and discriminatory against homosexuals. The statements violate the equality and dignity of homosexuals, so they transcend the boundaries of freedom of speech and religion.

The Attorney General believes that Räsänen’s statements are likely to cause intolerance, contempt and hatred towards homosexuals.

Ever seen Päivi Räsänen speak? She is a small, middle-aged woman of surpassing gentleness — but she has more courage than tens of thousands of Finnish Christians who are afraid to take her side. Here is a good report from Dale Hurd at CBN just over a year ago, explaining the background of the investigation. Hear Päivi talk for yourself:

In 2019, I published an interview I did with Dr. Räsänen about the investigation. Here, by the way, is the tweet that got her criminally charged today (“Kirkko” is “church”; she’s calling out her own ecclesial body for endorsing the Pride celebration):

 

And so, in the liberal democratic nation of Finland, a Lutheran woman who is a member of Parliament has now been indicted for hate speech because she proclaimed Biblical teaching. There is absolutely no question that if American liberals could get away with it (that is, if not for the First Amendment), they would do the same thing.

But remember your catechism: countries like Hungary are the real illiberal democracies. All the people who write me constantly, telling me how afraid they are for their jobs and livelihoods if their employers or co-workers found out that they don’t endorse Black Lives Matter, or don’t agree with gender ideology — they officially don’t exist. The New York Times and the Washington Post never, ever pay attention to them. Nor, of course, do the networks, or NPR. The fact that the state prosecutor in Finland is going to put on trial a 61-year-old former Minister of the Interior for tweeting a Bible verse critical of homosexuality, and for writing a pamphlet 15 years ago laying out the traditional Christian view of marriage, will not even make the news back home. We Americans are being gaslighted by our own illiberal left-wing media.

But now you know about the persecution of Päivi Räsänen, because you read it here. Write a polite but firm letter to Ms. Raija Toiviainen, the Prosecutor General, at: valtakunnansyyttaja.syyttaja — at — oikeus.fi

Also, send a polite but firm letter to the Finnish ambassador to the US, His Excellency Mikko Hautala, at sanomat.was — at — formin.fi

It is outrageous that this anti-Christian persecution is happening, especially in a liberal democracy. Shame on Finland. You are better than this. I hope that the Finnish church finds its voice to stand up for Dr. Räsänen. Certainly Christians in the US and other countries have absolutely nothing to lose by speaking out for her.

UPDATE: Dr. Räsänen has made a public statement:

Yesterday morning, I received by phone the information that the Prosecutor General has decided to prosecute me in three cases. The application for summons has been delivered to the District Court of Helsinki. I am accused of criminal agitation against a minority group, which carries the sentence of a fine or imprisonment for a maximum of two years. The three charges filed against me are about the following cases. Firstly, a pamphlet I wrote in 2004 “Male and female He created them – Homosexual relationships challenge the Christian concept of humanity”. A charge have also been filed against Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, the Dean of Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland. The Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland was in charge of publishing the pamphlet.

The second charge is about a tweet I published 17 June 2019 in my social media accounts. In addition to Twitter, I published my tweet in Facebook and Instagram. In the tweet, I questioned the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s official affiliation with Helsinki LGBT Pride 2019 and accompanied my publication with a photo of Bible, from the Letter to the Romans 1:24-27. The third charge is about my views presented in one program of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, when I visited a talk show series hosted by Ruben Stiller and discussed the topic “What would Jesus think about homosexuals?”.

The decision of the Prosecutor General is surprising, even shocking. I do not think I have committed threatening, defaming or insulting a minority group. In all these three cases, the question is about the Bible’s teaching about marriage and sexuality. Ultimately, the three charges brought against me have to do with whether it is allowed in Finland to express your conviction that is based on the traditional teaching of the Bible and Christian churches. I do not see I would have in any way defamed homosexuals whose human dignity and human rights I have constantly said to respect and defend. The Bible’s teaching is, however, very clear in the teaching that marriage is a union between man and wife and that practicing homosexuality is against God’s will.

The Apostle Paul’s teaching is not only about defending marriage between man and woman, but about how a human being is saved into eternal life. If the teachings of God’s word about sin are rejected, also the whole core of Christian faith is made empty: the precious sacrifice of Jesus on the cross for the sake of everyone’s sins and the way He opened into eternity.

There is a difficulty here far greater than a sentence of a fine or an imprisonment: a demand for censorship: an order to remove my social media postings or a ban on the publication of the pamphlet. If one defies the court’s verdict, it leads to demands of penalty payments. This sort of judgement would open up an avenue leading to further publication bans for similar texts and modern book burnings.

It is noteworthy that with regard to the pamphlet case and the tv episode with Stiller, the police stated that there was no reason to suspect a crime. The pre-trial investigation should not have even been commenced according to their decision. The police stated in their decision: “if some of the views in the Bible were to be regarded as per se fulfilling the criteria of an agitation offense, the dissemination of or making the Bible available would in principle be punishable as an offense of agitation.” This has deeply to do with free speech and freedom of religion.

I will go to the court with a peaceful and brave mind, trusting that Finland is a constitutional state where the freedoms of speech and religion, which both are guaranteed in international agreements and in our constitution, are respected. A conviction based on the Christian faith is more than [a superficial] opinion. The early Christians did not renounce their faith in lions’ caves, why should I then renounce my faith in a court room. I will not step back from my conviction nor from my writings. I do not apologize for the writings of the Apostle Paul either. I am ready to defend freedom speech and religion as far as is necessary.

The offence of agitation requires intentionality. In our Criminal Code the concept of intentionality is placed as criteria regarding the purpose of the author and the fact that the author perceives the nature of the act as a culpable legal infringement. In evaluating guilt, one must strive to genuinely understand the background and purpose of the author. As a Member of Parliament, I has been involved in the enactment of this precise amendment to our legislation.  It did not even come to mind that my tweet or my opinions based on Christianity could be defamatory or insulting in any aspect.

I want to encourage others to use their freedom of speech and religion. This indictment shows that right now is the time to defend these foundational freedoms and rights.

The Prosecutor General has previously publicly told that she has, because of my cases, received inappropriate messages. I hope that no insulting messages would be targeted against her.

 

The post Finland Persecutes Christian Lawmaker appeared first on The American Conservative.

Springtime For Spengler

Another fantastic essay by Paul Kingsnorth, published on his Substack site. I strongly encourage you to subscribe. This time, he’s been reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and offers some thoughts. Paul begins by discussing wokeness:

Why is this happening and what is going on? Looked at through a wide lens, it is a deeply weird (not to mention WEIRD) phenomena. What sort of country is ashamed of itself? What people wants to be governed by a ruling class that holds it in contempt? What historical precedent is there for a lasting culture whose story-makers are embarrassed by their own ancestors? How can any culture continue into the future if it is teaching its children a deeply disturbing form of racialised self-loathing?

Defenders of the current moment will usually respond that such accusations are hysterical. What is happening in the West, they say, is a long-overdue ‘reckoning’ with our culture’s past: the empires, the colonies, the imposition of our ways of life on the rest of the world. They’re not wrong about much of that history, however partially they tell the story. We know, or we should, that there were plenty of dark chapters in the Western past. If any culture takes to the high seas with cannons blazing and proceeds to paint half the world red (on the map and often on the ground), then at some point a reckoning will arrive. Actions have consequences. God is not mocked.

But this is not a good enough explanation for what is now clearly a process of accelerating cultural disintegration. After all, plenty of other parts of the world – pretty much all of them in fact, humans being what they are – have dark pasts too, but you don’t see Russia’s cultural elites collapsing into spirals of performative shame over how Lenin and Stalin brutalised eastern Europe or killed millions of their own people (on the contrary, Uncle Joe is very popular there these days.) Japan’s murderous history in southeast Asia doesn’t seem to have led to a desire to dismantle its historic identity, and China is certainly not about to start apologising for the last four thousand years – count them – that it has been engaging in imperial expansion.

No, something else is surely going on in the West, and especially in the Anglosphere, which can’t be explained purely by historical karma. Over the last few years, a new and still-coalescing ideology, which has been gathering steam in the post-modern catacombs of America for decades, has burst out onto the streets and into the studios, and is now coursing through the culture, overturning what was until recently uncontroversial or unquestioned. The energy around it is not that of the self-declared love and justice. It tastes of deconstruction, division, intolerance, hatred and rage.

Indeed it does. I am so very, very grateful for the countercultural work done by classical Christian schools, who are not ashamed of our Western civilization, despite its many sins and failings, and are passing on the memory of it to students.

Paul says, correctly in my view, that the disintegration marked by wokeness is not a cause, but rather a symptom of a deeper sickness. And this brings him to Spengler. Paul explains Spengler’s theory of civilizational rise and fall, and why, in Spengler’s view, the West was arcing downward. More:

But even as the West was conquering the world, its own soul was seizing up. By the twentieth century, the direction was clear, and for Spengler the Great War only confirmed it. Only disintegration, followed by Caesarism, a ‘return to formlessness’, awaited us now. The twenty-first century, predicted Spengler, would be the period in which this would begin. The only realistic response was to adopt some version of stoicism, and hope for the coming of a cultured and suitably strong Caesar to steady the ship as she sank.

It’s probably not necessary to labour the point that one of Spengler’s readers did indeed become leader of Germany fifteen years later, and tried to fill the role he believed the author had allotted for him. Spengler was not impressed: the parvenu Hitler was not the Caesar he was looking for, and he had no time for his racial theories about ‘Aryans’. But all Spengler’s talk about ‘blood’ and the ‘vigour’ of nations, not to mention his fear of ‘coloured races’ usurping ‘Prussians’, and the need for a strongman to respond, had fed the tiger which would come to eat his country. He had discovered that we don’t get to choose the shape of our Caesars, or their designs. All we can do is try to make sure we do not prepare the ground for them to spring from.

I expect that those academic historians could still kick a hundred holes in the details of The Decline of the West. What else are academics for? But it is hard to argue that the broad trajectory which Spengler offered was wrong. Now, as we watch a new period in our decline unfurl, with fear and trembling, I find it useful to keep his model in mind. I find it useful to remember that we are the men and women of the Faustian age; that we were formed by it, that its values are in us even if we think we reject them, and that, like any people formed by any culture, we find it hard to see beyond the horizon to what might come next.

Paul argues that if Spengler is correct, then we shouldn’t try to shore up the ruins of a decaying empire, which can’t be saved anyway, but should rather tender the seeds of rebirth. More:

Whether or not that is true, the useful work now seems to me to be that outlined by Campbell: to conquer death by birth. As Simone Weil explained in the book I wrote about last time, the correct response to a rootless, lost or broken society is ‘the growing of roots’ – the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up the exhausted old plants if you need to – carefully, now – but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds.

This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a civilisation that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires – fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths – and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.

Do read it all. Seriously, please don’t take my quoting from the piece as anything more than a barely adequate summary of the essay. This essay only confirms my confidence that Paul Kingsnorth is fast emerging as one of the most important thinkers of our time.

Now, readers of The Benedict Option will see in the Kingsnorth essay the core of my idea, as laid out in that book. If you bypassed The Benedict Option, but find Kingsnorth’s essay stimulating, you should give TBO a try. The book sold well, but I think if it were making its debut right now, in 2021, as opposed to 2017, when it first came out, I think it would sell even better. The speed and intensity of our decay is much clearer now than it was then. And besides, there were lots of conservatives who had the idea that the Trump presidency would arrest the decline. As I wrote in the book, at best, Trump could delay it. The heart of the problem is not political, but spiritual.

In The Benedict Option, I tried to give voice to people who are good at preparing the seedbeds. My gift seems to be to see signs of trouble, and to identify the people who have a solution, or part of a solution, and to shine a light on them. I do not have a gift for “the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work” of building “new things, out on the margins.” But you know, so what? I am happy to use what limited talents God has given me to help with this enterprise, and support people like Paul Kingsnorth, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and others whose talent is to be builders of the Benedict Option, in whatever way I can.

In his piece today, Paul cites Spengler’s classification of history. It goes like this (what follows is not from the Kingsnorth essay, but from Wikipedia’s Decline Of The West entry):

Apollonian

Culture and Civilization is focused around Ancient Greece and Rome. Spengler saw its world view as being characterized by appreciation for the beauty of the human body, and a preference for the local and the present moment. The Apollonian world sense is ahistorical, it is why Herodotus claimed in his Histories that nothing of importance had happened before him. Spengler claims that the Classical Culture did not feel the same anxiety as the Faustian when confronted with an undocumented event.

Magian

Culture and Civilization includes the Jews from about 400 BC, early Christians and various Arabian religions up to and including Islam. Its world feeling revolved around the concept of world as cavern, epitomized by the domed Mosque, and a preoccupation with essence. Spengler saw the development of this Culture as being distorted by a too influential presence of older Civilizations, the initial vigorous expansionary impulses of Islam being in part a reaction against this.

Faustian

Culture began in Western Europe around the 10th century and according to Spengler such has been its expansionary power that by the 20th century it was covering the entire earth, with only a few Regions where Islam provides an alternative world view. The world feeling of Faustian Culture is inspired by the concept of infinitely wide and profound space, the yearning towards distance and infinity. Faustian is a reference to Goethe’s Faust (Goethe produced a massive effect on Spengler) in which a dissatisfied Intellectual is willing to make a pact with the Devil in return for unlimited knowledge. Spengler believed that this represents the Western Man’s limitless metaphysic, his unrestricted thirst for knowledge, and his constant confrontation with the Infinite.

Spengler awaited a Caesar, and I fear that we will soon have our own version of him. I await another, doubtless very different, St. Benedict — and any of us could be that St. Benedict. In his essay, Paul says that Spengler identified the “Magian” age of history as a time of “mystery.” In Spenglerian terms, the Benedict Option should be seen as a quest for replenishment in the Magian. Just over a year ago, when I was in Rome, someone who heard my speech about Live Not By Lies told me that I should read Ernst Jünger’s 1951 book The Forest Passage. I did, and wrote something about it on this blog. This passage from Russell Berman’s introduction to a 2013 edition tells you where Jünger is coming from:

Religion is important for Jünger because it taps into dimensions of irrationality and myth, the deep wisdom at home in the forest. It is not that Jünger proselytizes or engages in theological speculation, but he recognizes how irrational contents nourish the capacity for independence. No wonder the regimes of power celebrate the cult of reason instead. “How is man to be prepared for paths that lead into darkness and the unknown? The fulfillment of this task belongs chiefly to the churches, and in many known, and many more unknown, cases, it has effectively been accomplished. It has been confirmed that greater force can be preserved in churches and sects than in what are today called worldviews—which usually means natural science raised to the level of philosophical conviction. It is for this reason that we see tyrannical regimes so rabidly persecuting such harmless creatures as the Jehovah’s Witnesses—the same tyrannies that reserve seats of honor for their nuclear physicists.” It is worth noting how the two twin totalitarianisms of the twentieth century each posed as the carrier of a scientific mission: the biological racism of Nazism and the economic “science of Marxism- Leninism” in Communism. From our contemporary point of view, of course, neither is a science, but Jünger’s point is that modes of scientistic thinking are fully compatible with reigns of terror, while the integrity of faith may preserve a space of freedom, a leap of faith into the forest passage.

The “forest passage,” for Jünger, is a metaphor for exile to the woods, cut off from civilization, where we can gain the insight and strength to return and renew. He writes:

To overcome the fear of death is at once to overcome every other terror, for they all have meaning only in relation to this fundamental problem. The forest passage is, therefore, above all a passage through death. The path leads to the brink of death itself—indeed, if necessary, it passes through it. When the line is successfully crossed, the forest as a place of life is revealed in all its preternatural fullness. The superabundance of the world lies before us. Every authentic spiritual guidance is related to this truth—it knows how to bring man to the point where he recognizes the reality. This is most evident where the teaching and the example are united: when the conqueror of fear enters the kingdom of death, as we see Christ, the highest benefactor, doing. With its death, the grain of wheat brought forth not a thousand fruits, but fruits without number. The superabundance of the world was touched, which every generative act is related to as a symbol of time, and of time’s defeat. In its train followed not only the martyrs, who were stronger than the stoics, stronger than the caesars, stronger than the hundred thousand spectators surrounding them in the arena—there also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact.

To this day this is a far more compelling force than it at first seems. Even when the cathedrals crumble, a patrimony of knowledge remains that undermines the palaces of the oppressors like catacombs. Already on these grounds we may be sure that the pure use of force, exercised in the old manner, cannot prevail in the long term. With this blood, substance was infused into history, and it is with good reason that we still number our years from this epochal turning point. The full fertility of theogony reigns here, the mythical generative power. The sacrifice is replayed on countless altars.

To be clear, Jünger was not a Christian, though I think he did convert to Catholicism shortly before his death at 102. In any case, this is not a Christian book, though it can be read through Christian eyes. This weekend, as we Orthodox Christians — the most mystical of all forms of Christianity — celebrate the greatest mystery of all: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ — I will be meditating upon these truths, and praying for insight.

Join me, won’t you? Pray for the ability to see clearly the necessity to light out for the forest, and the courage to enter into its shadows.

 

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View From Your Table

I’m drinking my morning coffee at home from a paper cup I swiped from Scruton, the Budapest coffeeshop dedicated to the memory of Sir Roger. John O’Sullivan, my boss at The Danube Institute, wrote about it when it opened not long ago. Excerpt:

Last week a unique but apposite tribute was paid in Budapest to the late Sir Roger Scruton, the distinguished Tory philosopher who died earlier this year: A café was opened in his name. It goes under the designer label “Scruton—The Place to be” and is situated three blocks from the Hungarian Parliament at 10 Zoltan Street. It’s the first of several such cafes. A second has already opened in the city center, at least technically, and will open its doors in reality when the COVID restrictions are lifted. Several more are planned for Hungarian university towns where their natural clientele is likely to be found (until about three every morning if my own university life is any precedent).

But the first Scruton Cafe has some advantages that probably can’t be replicated indefinitely; Roger’s widow, Sophie, has given it some memorabilia of his life — books, records, an old-fashioned gramophone, his favorite brands of tea, his teapot, etc. — and it’s intended to be a place of intellectual and social conversation as well as of light eating and civilized drinking. Roger’s books will be on sale — he wrote more than 40 on topics ranging all the way from sex and wine to left-wing thinkers. So will opinion journals and magazines — principally conservative ones, of which Central Europe now has a good number such as the European Conservative, which Alvaro Mario Fantini edits from Vienna — with pride of place going to the Salisbury Review that Roger founded and edited for many years and that still flourishes modestly with regular contributors like the coolly formidable wit Theodore Dalrymple. There’s a space in the café for the occasional philosophical debate, poetry reading, or book launch, and its basement doubles as a television and internet studio that hosted its first event this month — see below.

All this is traditional in coffee houses going back to 18th-century London and indeed to Central Europe, especially from about 1860 to 1940. But the special appeal of the very English Sir Roger to Central Europeans is interesting and significant. It rests on three features of the man and his life.

You’ll need to read the whole thing to find out what those three features are. Scruton is a great space, and I can hardly wait for it to open up fully (for now, you can only get take-out coffee from there, because of Covid). Wouldn’t it be great if American university towns had a Scruton, as a hangout for conservatives, and a place to debate and discuss?

(By the way, ye with sharp eyes will observe on the mantel that I’ve brought along from home a couple of icons: a Virgin and Child, and my dear friends the Mechev fathers, St. Alexei and his son St. Sergei.)

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Today In Illiberal Leftism

The publisher W.W. Norton has decided to pull all copies of Blake Bailey’s recent biography of Philip Roth, after (unproven) allegations that Bailey is a sexual assailant:

Norton’s decision to take Mr. Bailey’s titles out of print marked an extraordinary response to the allegations against the author and raised questions about publishers’ ethical obligations to respond to controversies that extend beyond the contents of the books they publish.

“As a publisher, Norton gives its authors a powerful platform in the civic space. With that power comes the responsibility to balance our commitment to our authors, our recognition of our public role, and our knowledge of our nation’s historic failure to adequately listen to and respect the voices of women and diverse groups,” Ms. Reidhead wrote.

This is correct:

Norton (pub of my 2nd book) is taking the Bailey bio of Roth out of print. We live in a cultural world in which people think that inanimate objects possess occult powers requiring them to be expunged when those connected w them are accused of evil deeds.https://t.co/Ps7lb5nlHR

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) April 27, 2021

Yesterday, walking up Andrassy Street in Budapest, I passed a bookshop window, and saw this:

The Hungarian version of The Benedict Option finally hit the shelves this week! But look, it is next to a book by Michel Foucault, who traveled to Tunisia to rape boys. By the standards of today’s publishing progressives, I ought to march into that bookshop and demand that the manager remove the Foucault book from the display. Of course I would never do such a thing, because when it comes to books, I am a good liberal (besides, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev and I have the French creep surrounded). Seriously, Michel Foucault is probably roasting in hell now for what he did, but he was an enormously important 20th century thinker (alas, the dog!), and the public should be able to buy his books and judge them apart from his personal immorality.

What Norton has done is not exactly a book banning — as the head of Norton said, Bailey is free to sell his manuscript to somebody else — but it’s troublingly close. This is exactly what happened with Woody Allen’s memoir last summer. Now both books have a permanent taint, and neither Allen nor Bailey is ever likely to get a significant publishing deal again.

Which is fine, I guess; nobody is entitled to a literary career. But Woody Allen is a major 20th century film director, and though he may well be a man of poor character, attention must be paid to his life and work. Philip Roth was a major novelist, by all accounts an unpleasant and misogynistic man, but an extremely significant artistic figure — one who personally tapped Blake Bailey to be his biographer. Blake Bailey’s work on Philip Roth stands or falls on its own, not on whether or not Bailey is a sleaze. We absolutely have to maintain the art-from-the-artist distinction if we are going to have a culture worth having. Otherwise its socialist realism (woke realism?) all the way down — that is, art whose merit is decided by political criteria, not actual merit.

At the University of Toledo, they are well on their way to that kind of corruption. Here is a press release from Dr. Willie McKether, vice president of diversity and inclusion of the school:

This year’s Inclusive Excellence Awards from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion has launched a passionate and important conversation about how The University of Toledo works to ensure all individuals on our campus feel included and respected.

The awards were created in 2019 as a way to recognize the faculty, staff and departments on our campus who have put in the work implementing the University’s Strategic Plan for Diversity and Inclusion to make our campus a more diverse and inclusive place to study, work and grow.

When we talk about a diverse and inclusive campus we mean a community free from discrimination based on race, national origin, religion, beliefs, age, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. As a public university educating the next generation of leaders, we have a responsibility to consider diversity, equity and inclusion in the broadest context allowing for and encouraging differing perspectives, backgrounds and thought. We must teach our students respectful discourse for our society is at its best when we challenge one another respectfully and consider viewpoints that may be different from our own.

In this our second year of the Inclusive Excellence Awards, which was paused in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we reached out to the campus community for nominations this spring.

UToledo College of Law Professor Lee Strang received an overwhelming number of faculty nominations focused on his presence in the classroom where he “enjoys and respects a good healthy debate,” as one nominator wrote. The individuals who nominated Strang for the award recognized his conservative point of view as a minority in academia and a benefit to legal debate.

One nomination read: “Professor Strang always welcomes students to present and defend their perspectives while respectfully challenging them to consider points of view contrary to their starting point. I believe the academy at its best is a place where truth claims and viewpoints can contend with one another based on their own merits and scholars from all life experiences have the opportunity to wrestle with the arguments of others as well as their own assumptions.”

Another wrote, “As much as any demographic measure of diversity, the diversity of thought and perspective is at the very heart of our identity as an academic institution.”

It is for these reasons Strang was recognized with the 2021 award.

The intent of this award is to recognize those at UToledo who best represent our diversity and inclusion values and the feedback we’ve received on the nomination and review process is important as we continue to advance this new recognition into the future.

We have learned that more work is needed on our part to inform our campus community and our alumni of this recognition opportunity and to seek their nominations. Our UToledo alumni is an audience we had not actively engaged for nominations and will do so in the years ahead. In addition, we will broaden the review committee beyond the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to be sure we have diverse perspectives during the selection process for this honor.

In these first two years of the awards in 2019 and 2021, the recipients have been selected based exclusively on the nominations submitted. We are working to revise the nomination and review process to be sure we take a comprehensive approach in selecting the recipients to ensure their bodies of work represent our diversity and inclusion values.

As an institution we are committed to promoting a campus environment where every member of the UToledo community feels included and respected. I will continue to do my best to acknowledge and facilitate respectful discussions that enable us all to grow and do better.

Thank you for your commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Got that? Lee Strang was so admired by his colleagues that he received an overwhelming number of nominations for this award. They admired what he does to diversify “thought and perspective.” But he is a conservative, and just as bad, is, on evidence, a Pale Penis Person:

So naturally, the University of Toledo is changing the award criteria, to prevent anything like this from happening again: “We are working to revise the nomination and review process to be sure we take a comprehensive approach in selecting the recipients to ensure their bodies of work represent our diversity and inclusion values.”

Some people are more diverse than others, as Orwell might have said. Seriously, if there is a more Orwellian concept than “diversity and inclusion,” I don’t know what it is. It is precisely to exclude the Wrong Sort Of Person, and to congratulate oneself on one’s broad-mindedness in doing so.

Here’s an exquisite moment of white-progressive cringe:

AUDIO: Author Ben Philippe talks to CBC about his book, where he writes about trapping white people in a room, where they would then be blown up and gassed. pic.twitter.com/HdZ5yyzgVM

— Roberto Wakerell-Cruz (@Robertopedia) April 26, 2021

Listen to the audio. The interviewer, a Jewish woman, is audibly shocked by what Philippe, a black man, has written about gassing whites. Emotionally stunned, she says that her family includes Holocaust survivors. You can hear the gears grinding in her head as she processes this, and then she blurts out to this race-murder fantasist, “I’m so sorry that your experience of the world made you feel that way and made you feel compelled to write that.”

(Remember back in 2017, when I started writing about the race-murder fantasist Tommy Curry, a black professor of philosophy at Texas A&M? I quoted his white-hating academic and broadcast work, including a 2007 paper he wrote in which he favorably considered killing white people — and according to him, there are no innocent white people — to end what he regards as black oppression? The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about the ensuing controversy with sympathy towards Curry, eliding over the actual horror of what he wrote. This is how many white liberals are: they cannot bring themselves to condemn even the endorsement of genocidal hatred, if voiced by a person of color.)

Meanwhile, if you thought this primitive woke ideology was going to leave the hard sciences alone, you are quite mistaken. The Telegraph this week reports that Sheffield University is considering canceling Isaac Newton. Yes, the founder of modern physics. More:

Students at the university in the north of England will reportedly have lessons on Netwon’s groundbreaking three laws of motion, including the law of gravity, with explainers detailing the “global origins and historical context” of his theories.

Professors in the engineering department of Sheffield University will seek to “challenge long-standing conscious and unconscious biases” among pupils and to confront the supposed “white saviour” and “Eurocentric” view of science and mathematics, according to documents seen by The Telegraph.

A diversity consultant at several top universities in Britain decried the efforts to decolonise the curriculum, warning that the movement is expanding from the traditionally left-wing humanities departments into the hard sciences.

“I’m employed by universities to do this training but for me equality, diversity and inclusion training is equality of opportunity, diversity of thought and inclusivity of action – that’s all,” the unnamed consultant said.

“This is something different altogether. It is blatantly teaching people to be activists,” the consultant added.

A leaked copy of the university’s “draft inclusive curriculum development” strategy developed by the Russell Group research university claims that “much important engineering content and curriculum resources is based on maths developed in the 18/19th century”.

It goes on to say that scientists such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Paul Dirac, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Newton could all “be considered as benefiting from colonial-era activity”.

I hope, at the end of the 20th century, when the Chinese masters of the globe write the history of the West’s decline and fall, they note that it was a suicide. Seriously, yesterday I was having a beer with a Hungarian journalist, and mentioned to him that it troubled me that the Hungarian government is going to welcome a Budapest campus of Fudan University, the first foreign outpost of the Shanghai college. Fudan U. is one of the best in China, and best in the world. My Hungarian interlocutor observed that “there won’t be any wokeness at Fudan.” As much as I recoil at the idea of Communist China establishing a beachhead in Hungary, on second thought, it would not be obvious to me that it’s more dangerous to do an academic deal with the Chinese devil than with the Western devil. As we see daily, wokeness is destroying the West. If this insanity takes hold in Hungary, it’s going to tear Hungary to bits. There’s an argument to be made that a country would be better off with ChiCom College than with the University of Baizuo (the Chinese term of derision for “white leftists”).

UPDATE: From Thomas Friedman’s column today, about the prospect of a US-China war:

Meanwhile, the failure of the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to produce the pluralism and decency hoped for after 9/11, coupled with the 2008 economic crisis and the current pandemic — together with the general hollowing out of America’s manufacturing base — has weakened both American self-confidence and the world’s confidence in America.

The result? Right when China, Russia and Iran are challenging the post-World War II order more aggressively than ever, many wonder whether the United States has the energy, allies and resources for a new geopolitical brawl.

Friedman is missing the role that cultural degeneration among America’s elites plays here. Again, if you were a Hungarian leader looking West, do you see anything healthy or strong in the cultures of the US, of Britain, or western Europe? No, you see cultures being cannibalized by self-hating elites and woke barbarians.

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Woke Capitalists As Mini-Chinas

Crispin Sartwell writes, in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled):

Capitalism and communism, opposed in ideology, turn out to be compatible in the real world. And perhaps the conceptual opposition is also collapsing in the West, as capitalism goes woke and sneaker commercials become indistinguishable from AOC campaign materials except by their production values.

More:

If China’s communists have appropriated capitalism, in “woke capitalism” the capitalists have appropriated socialism. This is applied both internally, as companies focus on the ideological re-education of their employees with diversity training and the like, and externally, as those companies relentlessly if implausibly portray themselves as the agents of an egalitarian future. The new voter laws in Georgia will fall, if they do, to challenges not from the Justice Department or the courts, but from Major League Baseball, Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, which operate at once as profit-making concerns and political organizations. Rather like mini-Chinas.

This is why the Chinese social credit system will be the way our American oligarchs, corporate and state, will control us. Let me explain.

Now that I’m temporarily living within the borders of the European Union, every time I go to a new website, I am confronted with the fact that the website wants to insert cookies into my browser. Europe has a law — a good law — requiring websites to get consent before installing cookies. We Americans simply never know what is being put into our browsers to track us, without our consent. I suppose most people here accept the cookies, but the point is they at least have that choice, because the laws force surveillance capitalists to tell consumers what they are doing, and to get permission to do it.

It’s a stark reminder of how business tracks us all the time, to try to sell us things. From Live Not By Lies:

Consumerism is how we are learning to love Big Brother. What’s more, Big Brother is not exactly who we expected him to be—a political dictator, though one day he may become that. At the present moment, Big Brother’s primary occupation is capitalist. He’s a salesman, he’s a broker, he’s a gatherer of raw materials, and a manufacturer of desires. He is monitoring virtually every move you make to determine how to sell you more things, and in so doing, learning how to direct your behavior. In this way, Big Brother is laying the foundation for soft totalitarianism, both in terms of creating and implementing the technology for political and social control and by grooming the population to accept it as normal.

This is the world of “surveillance capitalism,” a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff, a former Harvard Business School professor. In her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes and analyzes a new form of capitalism created by Google and perfected by Amazon and Facebook. Surveillance capitalism hoovers up detailed personal data about individuals and analyzes it with sophisticated algorithms it to predict people’s behavior.

The aim, obviously, is to pitch goods and services tailored to individual preferences. No surprise there—that’s merely advertising. The deeper realities of surveillance capitalism, however, are far more sinister. The masters of data aren’t simply trying to figure out what you like; they are now at work making you like what they want you to like, without their manipulation being detected.

And they’re doing this without the knowledge or informed permission of the people whose lives they have colonized—and who are at present without means to escape the surveillance-capitalists’ web. You may have given up Facebook over privacy concerns, and may have vowed never to have a smart device under your roof, but unless you are a hermit living off the grid, you are still thoroughly bounded and penetrated by the surveillance capitalist system.

“This power to shape behavior for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorizing,” Zuboff told The Guardian. “It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs [italics added].”

More:

Why should corporations and institutions not use the information they harvest to manufacture consent to some beliefs and ideologies and to manipulate the public into rejecting others?

In recent years, the most obvious interventions have come from social media companies deplatforming users for violating terms of service. Twitter and Facebook routinely boot users who violate its standards, such as promoting violence, sharing pornography, and the like. YouTube, which has two billion active users, has demonetized users who made money from their channels but who crossed the line with content YouTube deemed offensive. To be fair to these platform managers, there really are vile people who want to use these networks to advocate for evil things.

But who decides what crosses the line? Facebook bans what it calls “expression that . . . has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others.” To call that a capacious definition is an understatement. Twitter boots users who “misgender” or “deadname” transgendered people. Calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” or using masculine pronouns when referring to the transgendered celebrity, is grounds for removal.

To be sure, being kicked off of social media isn’t like being sent to Siberia. But companies like PayPal have used the guidance of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to make it impossible for certain right-of-center individuals and organizations—including the mainstream religious-liberty law advocates Alliance Defending Freedom—to use its services. Though the bank issued a general denial when asked, JPMorgan Chase has been credibly accused of closing the accounts of an activist it associates with the alt-right. In 2018, Citigroup and Bank of America announced plans to stop doing some business with gun manufacturers.

It is not at all difficult to imagine that banks, retailers, and service providers that have access to the kind of consumer data extracted by surveillance capitalists would decide to punish individuals affiliated with political, religious, or cultural groups those firms deem to be antisocial. Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice. Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce. The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

Nor is it hard to foresee these powerful corporate interests using that data to manipulate individuals into thinking and acting in certain ways. Zuboff quotes an unnamed Silicon Valley bigwig saying, “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior.” He believes that by close analysis of the behavior of app users, his company will eventually be able to “change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions.”

Maybe they will just try to steer users into buying certain products and not others. But what happens when the products are politicians or ideologies? And how will people know when they are being manipulated?

Buy the book and read the whole thing. It’s coming, this merger of consumer sales and social control. This is why it matters massively if Woke Capitalists use their market power to compel certain political outcomes. Again, consider Amazon’s decision to stop selling books that put forward a critical point of view on transgender ideology. I have explained here that this is perfectly within Amazon’s legal rights, but given Amazon’s stranglehold on book retailing, its decision has the effect of powerfully discouraging that any books like that will ever be written. This is left-wing illiberalism, tout court.

Left-wing illiberal democracy won’t come to us via pure autocracy, as in China. It will come from the merger of elites in government, business, and other institutions, and their enforcement of their ideology through the market, and via technology embraced by surveillance capitalists — and by the rest of us, as the cost of participating in the modern economy.

Unless we can stop them.

 

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A Liberalism Of Whores

Bret Stephens says that the neoracist obsessions of progressives is going to bring a severe backlash. Excerpt:

The result will be a liberal crackup similar to the one in the late 1960s that broke liberalism as America’s dominant political force for a generation.

Morally and philosophically, liberalism believes in individual autonomy, which entails a concept of personal responsibility. The current model of anti-racism scoffs at this: It divides the world into racial identities, which in turn are governed by systems of privilege and powerlessness. Liberalism believes in process: A trial or contest is fair if standards are consistent and rules are equitable, irrespective of outcome. Anti-racism is determined to make a process achieve a desired outcome. Liberalism finds appeals to racial favoritism inherently suspect, even offensive. Anti-racism welcomes such favoritism, provided it’s in the name of righting past wrongs.

Above all, liberalism believes that truth tends to be many-shaded and complex. Anti-racism is a great simplifier. Good and evil. Black and white.

This is where the anti-racism narrative will profoundly alienate liberal-minded America, even as it entrenches itself in schools, universities, corporations and other institutions of American life.

Well, let’s hope. What has yet to happen is enough people willing to risk professional or social martyrdom to refuse to live by these abusive lies. We need for Havel’s greengrocers. Until then, though, we can still count on the secrecy of the voting booth. If the Republicans can manage to produce non-crazy antiwoke candidates, they will be swept into office in 2022. Many people will be happy to vote against their bosses, who are forcing wokeness on them. As Stephens writes:

Because in this era of with-us-or-against-us politics, to have misgivings about the left’s new “anti-racist” narrative is to run the risk of being denounced as a racist. Much better to nod along at your office’s diversity, equity and inclusion sessions than suggest that enforced political indoctrination should not become a staple of American workplace culture.

Next time, let’s not vote for candidates who say the right things against wokeness. Let’s vote for candidates who actually do serious things to fight it — especially if it ticks off Woke Capitalists.

I heard from a reader, who writes:

I think the key thing on contemporary breaks with liberalism is that it is abundantly clear most of the activist left has little use for the fundamental aspects of liberalism, including civil society, free speech, freedom of conscience, equal opportunity, and a whole host of particulars. Civil society can’t exist when you aren’t allowed to disagree, free speech is being significantly curtailed, freedom of conscience is just summarily dismissed as an excuse for bigotry, and equal opportunity is being scaled back in the name of racialism. You can call this a lot of things but it absolutely isn’t liberalism as it was understood by classical thinkers. If anything it is every bit as much of an emerging hybrid model as Hungary with a self-styled enlightened technocracy whose claims to fundamental rights look from the outside as cheap as those made by the communists. They are sticking with liberalism and the American constitution for branding purposes but really have little love for either and simply want to wear them as skin suits.

A classic work on this process is Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon In Democracy. In it, Legutko shows how in the postcommunist era, the mechanisms of liberal democracy in Europe have been used to achieve goals shared by Communism. As I wrote back in 2017, when rich, powerful, secular globalists have commandeered liberal democratic institutions and structures, and are using them to impose illiberal left-wing governance designed to destroy national traditions and religion, people have a right to fight back.

In our own country, consider what has happened in these past few weeks with proposed laws to protect female athletes from unfair competition by male-to-female transgendered athletes. In many states, they have been defeated by heavy lobbing from corporate America, and from the NCAA. These are undemocratic institutions who (therefore) do not answer to local people, but who are imposing their own cultural standards on those same people by threatening to punish them if they don’t surrender. This, even though Big Business has no material interest at all in whether or not Bobby-turned-Brianna can run girls track.

This is not liberalism as we have known it. When people stand up to it, we all get gaslighted by the left-wing media as being bigoted, or in some way illiberal. At some point, you’ve just got to quit giving a damn.

If you in the English-speaking world have heard anything at all about Hungary’s politics, it’s that Viktor Orban is a horrible monster of illiberalism, and that all decent people must despise him. Let me say up front that I don’t know enough about the political situation in Hungary to make any grand pronouncements about the Orban government. I have heard some things that disturb me about the way his party has governed, mostly about crony capitalism; I expect to learn more about this during my three-month stay here in Budapest. But I do know enough to tell you that if you are depending only on the Western media to tell you what’s going on in Hungary, you are being lied to and manipulated.

The other night at dinner, I was speaking to an American Jewish researcher who is here studying anti-Semitism. He repeated something he had been told by a local Jewish leader: that the allegations of anti-Semitism against the Orban government are nonsense. As far as I can tell, the allegations come entirely from the bitter clash Orban has had with the billionaire financier George Soros, who was born in Hungary, and who has dedicated much of his fortune to liberalizing Hungary and the other countries of the former Eastern bloc. Orban has certainly demonized Soros, who has returned the favor. Soros’s sympathizers in the Western media propagate the line that to criticize Soros is to be guilty of anti-Semitism. It is the same kind of rhetorical trick that the Left uses to silence criticism of race radicals.

A few years ago, I wrote about how Soros’s Open Society Foundation teamed up with the Obama-era USAID to translate Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the Macedonian language. They seeded the country with the destabilizing tract, in an effort to overturn support for the conservative, Orthodox government. USAID also sought to fight that country’s traditional Christian morality by sending money to fight for LGBT rights. 

You might have thought that the US Agency for International Development was all about economic development. Wrong. Washington, in collaboration with Soros, funds culture-war mercenaries.

In 2018, I wrote on this site about Orban kicking Soros’s university out of Budapest. Excerpt:

I will not defend this move, because my general stance is to oppose the closing of universities, period. But I won’t criticize it either, at least not without more information, because I know that the standard Western narrative holding Soros to be the innocent victim of the malign autocrat Orban is nonsense.

From Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe:

In October 2015 the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, criticised Soros publicly as one of a circle of activists who “support anything that weakens nation states.” Soros responded publicly to confirm that the numerous groups he was funding were indeed working for the ends described by Orban. In an email to Bloomberg, Soros said that it was his foundation which was seeking to “uphold European values,” while he accused Orban of trying to “undermine those values.” Soros went on to say of Orban: “His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” The dialogues ceased before anyone could ask Soros how long those European values might last once Europe could be walked into by people from all over the world.

In his email to Bloomberg Business, Soros referred to this plan, which you can read in full on the Soros website (GeorgeSoros.com). Excerpt:

First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly – a principle that a qualified majority finally established at last Wednesday’s summit.

Soros continues:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has now also produced a six-point plan to address the crisis. But his plan, which subordinates the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants to the security of borders, threatens to divide and destroy the EU by renouncing the values on which it was built and violating the laws that are supposed to govern it.

Orban was exactly right! Soros believes that borders are less important than moving a million “refugees” into Europe each year, indefinitely. This is not a secret. The globalist billionaire Soros is — was — funding a university in Budapest whose purpose is to radically undermine the political and cultural order of Hungary.

Three years later, having seen the damage that these malignant ideologies cultivated within American universities have done to my own country, I am more sympathetic to Orban’s plainly illiberal move. I would ask you to consider how you would feel if you were a citizen of this small European country, and you were watching powerful globalists and their sympathizers work towards the effective dissolution of national sovereignty — this, after your country emerged from forty years of vassalage at the hands of the occupying Soviet power — well, how would you feel? How are these countries supposed to defend themselves and their cultures? If liberal democracy is a cultural suicide pact, then it’s going to be a hard sell.

George Soros has given $32 billion of his own fortune to support his Open Societies Foundations. Open borders, gender ideology — if it advances a progressive social agenda, Soros billions are going to fund it. One of their causes is the legalization of prostitution. Here, Team Soros explains why it supports this. 

But you have to wonder…

Nambla leftism at it’s finest. pic.twitter.com/CC6BwEyxTW

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) April 27, 2021

And:

This is what George Soros is about. It’s not the only thing he’s about — some of what the Open Society Foundations do is unobjectionable — but you should understand that neither he nor his NGOs has the best interests of anyone who cares about national sovereignty, traditional religion and morality, or cultural conservatism at heart.

Why does it matter so much to this old man to propagandize the world to legalize people selling their bodies into prostitution? Seriously, will our world be better if more people are encouraged to buy and sell their bodies? This is madness. Here is a link to a short, NSFW Vimeo presentation on “Objects Of Desire,” a Soros-supported Berlin exhibition designed to normalize and celebrate prostitution. Like I said, it’s not safe for work, but I hope you will watch it at some point, to grasp just how perverted all this is. Now consider that one of the richest men in the world is putting his fortune behind this stuff. And consider how it is connected to his other obsessions, including migration.  At one point in this creepy five-minute film, a narrator says that the stories of “sex workers” in Berlin are also “stories of migration” that showcase the “dynamic community.”

This is the kind of progressive globalist oligarch that Orban and others like him are up against. You don’t have to take the side of illiberal rightists like Orban to recognize that the Western public is not getting the full story about the conflict here.

Yet the question before us American conservatives is this: can liberalism be redeemed? That is, can we retreat from left-wing illiberalism and rebalance towards the center? If not, where does that leave us? If we have to choose between left-wing illiberalism and right-wing illiberalism, then that’s no choice at all, is it?

If liberalism can be saved, then right-liberals like Bret Stephens, David French, and David Brooks, and their left-liberal counterparts, had better raise their voices loudly against left-wing illiberalism (as Stephens has done in his column today). Left-wing illiberalism is well-funded, weaponized decadence. It controls all the cultural and institutional high ground in America today. It is probably the case that, as David Rieff has said, the liberal democratic order is coming to an end; the cultural consensus that made liberal democracy possible has come to an end, so we shouldn’t be surprised. As Stephens points out, there is nothing at all liberal about woke racialism. If people come to believe that the only way they can defend themselves against this decadent illiberalism being forced on them by powerful financial, media, and cultural interests is by voting for illiberal right-wing candidates, they certainly will. It is critically important to reject the self-serving media narrative that the conflict is between liberal democracy supported by the Left, and illiberal democracy supported by the Right. Where is the liberal democracy of the Left? It has been consumed by Wokeness; Bret Stephens’s column tells one part of that story.

But Ross Douthat’s column this past Sunday tells a more troubling part of that story. Excerpt:

On the center and the liberal center-right, meanwhile, there’s a sense that the way out of this mess is for decent conservatives to recommit to the liberal order — “to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side,” as my colleague David Brooks put it this week.

But that might not be enough. In the end, conservatives need to believe the things they love can flourish within the liberal order, and it isn’t irrational to turn reactionary if things you thought you were conserving fall away.

If liberalism means that the things cultural conservatives value most cannot flourish in the so-called liberal order, then why should we be loyal to it? As socially and religiously conservative Americans come to realize how weak we are within the current order, and how vulnerable to being rolled over by powerful progressive forces aligned with capital, media, academia, and the professions (e.g., law, medicine), well, perhaps we will begin to understand why Hungarians turned to Viktor Orban.

In that respect, I find it fascinating to come to the former Eastern Europe, talk to people, and realize how poorly served we Americans are by the journalists on whom we depend to explain this part of the world to us. If the only thing you knew about Hungary was what you read in our papers, you would think it’s a country of growly anti-Semites who hate immigrants and love autocracy. But then, we are poorly served by the ideologically blinded journalists on whom we depend to explain our own country to us, so I guess it should be no surprise.

 

The post A Liberalism Of Whores appeared first on The American Conservative.

Antiracist Bullies Torment Mentally Ill Worker

This is who Tariq Nasheed is:

I had never heard of him. He is apparently an evil person, as you’ll see below. A reader sent in this letter:

Americans don’t want a race war in this country, but that’s exactly what they’re going to get if this sort of thing keeps happening.

It starts with self-described “race-baiter” Tariq Nasheed posting this video on Twitter:

A white Holiday Inn Express worker has a nervous breakdown after he got scolded by a Black customer because of a mistake in the reservation system. pic.twitter.com/KUEyqUSgsM

— Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) April 25, 2021

I’m not sure who filmed this video, but, I highly doubt this person is going to get canceled for harassing a service worker, whom we’re frequently lectured by our betters to never mistreat. For the record, I believe in treating everyone in any occupation with due respect, whether they’re high on the totem pole or at the bottom.

Anyway, it turns out, like always, there was more to the story:

New info: Turns out the guy has BPD and the dude recording was calling him homophobic slurs. pic.twitter.com/lYsjkEaJaV

— fooly (@mashcore4mums) April 26, 2021

Rod here. If you click on the image, it purports to be comments by the young white man in the video. He says that he has bipolar disorder, and was having a meltdown, and that the black guy harassing him called him a “faggot” (he’s gay). Here’s a close-up:

Back to the reader’s e-mail:

Now, I realize all this isn’t exactly verifiable. Hard to tell where actuality begins and ends anymore on social media. However, none of this is shocking. Certain people in this country are handed free license to do and say whatever they want under the guise of oppression. They’re not second-class citizens, as they assert, but they’re actually among the most privileged in this country, because there’s no greater power than to be able to behave however you want without consequence.

This is more evidence at how baked in racialism has become in this country. Being LGBTQ and mentally ill, two other causes celebres for the Woke Left, won’t save you if you’re White and accused of racism by someone who’s Black. The hotel clerk in that video is already fighting an uphill battle, but he now has to deal with being exposed to the world because someone chose to get very angry at him. I watched a video yesterday with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter (both Black) who talked about the pervasiveness of the “Bad-Ass Motherf**ker” mentality within the Black community and how they feel they have to behave in such a degenerative fashion because that’s what gives them credibility in society. What we see in the encounter with the hotel clerk is precisely that.

Lots of respondents might say, “Don’t make a big deal out of one incident just because you saw it on social media.” First, social media has become our new public square. Second, if this were a White person harassing a Black, gay, mentally ill hotel clerk, would this not be a big deal? Third, I’ve experienced this sort of behavior firsthand and known people, including hotel clerks, who experienced the same incident like the one seen in the video above. Third, watch this next video. How many times have you seen this play out before? And look at how nobody intervenes. Nobody intervenes because they don’t want the fists turned against them and also because they don’t want to be accused of racism in the process. What other group in this country wields this sort of power over all others?

“Urban Decay.” pic.twitter.com/AmBQHp6yVD

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) April 26, 2021

What troubles me about this isn’t so much that its happening (unfortunate as that is). What troubles me is, as a society, we’re in complete denial about it and will tolerate it out of fear and out of a sense of justice. Kind of makes you wonder what else we’re willing to tolerate out of fear and a sense of justice…

Well, yes. If you watch the video of the white guy, it’s both infuriating and heartbreaking. He is being tortured by this jackass who only wants to make a video that he can hope goes viral. The poor young man sobs, “You’ve ruined my life,” then exits to wail. He no doubt was thinking that this cruel video was going to be used to “prove” that he is a racist, and cancel him. In fact, it shows that the black man who made it is a lowlife of the highest order. The fact that Tariq Nasheed promotes this sadistic trash as some sort of antiracist victory makes him equally a lowlife.

I hope you will watch the video — you can’t really see the hotel worker’s face; if you could, I would not have posted it — and see just what kind of hate gets dished out and celebrated for the sake of “social justice” and “antiracism.” As the reader says, this is not going to end well for America.

 

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The Cranmer Option

Douglas Murray chronicles the latest spasm in what may be the death throes of the Church of England. Now the bishops and the church bureaucrats are grunting about — what else? — antiracism. Excerpts:

And the church’s theology too must change. The curriculum for ordinands must include participation in ‘an introductory Black Theology module’. They must ‘diversify the curriculum’, ‘produce a workable plan for increasing racial diversity’ and ‘formally adopt Racial Justice Sunday in February of each year’. All this will be overseen by the creation of a ‘Racial Justice Unit’, to be funded in these cash-strapped times ‘for a five-year fixed-term basis in the first instance’.

As though there is a vast ‘pipeline’ of people wishing to enter the C of E, those who make it through must be forced to examine ‘the underlying theological assumptions that shapes racial justice such as Eurocentrism, Christendom and White normativity’. The report stresses the need to ‘decolonise Theology, Ecclesiology and possibly examine official teachings of the Church that follows prejudicial theological value system’.

More:

After this year of absence from our national life, the C of E proposal for going forward is to go backwards once again to the issue of slavery. It must again ‘acknowledge, repent and take decisive action to address the shameful history and legacy of the Church of England’s involvement in the historic transatlantic slave trade’. The reason is that all now stands in a different perspective. ‘The BLM movement and in particular the dumping of the Colston statue in Bristol docks shed new light and brought needed urgency to the C of E’s consideration of its own contested heritage.’ The report makes it clear that the church is going to have to bring down monuments and statues that disturb the modern mind, for ‘Our churches should be welcoming spaces for all and we must deal with any part of the church building that may cause pain or offence’. I would give the crucifixes two years, max.

In conclusion, the church itself must change. One ‘barrier to inclusion’ for people from ‘UKME backgrounds’ has been the challenge of ‘cultural assimilation’ into the church, ‘where there is perceived to be little or no room for cultural expression outside of a normative culture which is predominantly white, middle class’. Apparently there is an ‘expectation upon UKME communities to abandon their own cultural heritage and current expression in favour of traditional host approaches’. And so, the Archbishops’ report concludes, it would seem to be easier all round if the host chose to abandon its own heritage, working alongside ‘BLM and other interest groups’ to facilitate change.

While reading this intellectually and morally degraded pap, I think over all the congregations I have seen in my life, in this country and around the world: from Nigeria to Iraq, America to Australia. And I reflect, not for the first time, that the institution being described is not remotely the institution that I know. And that the tragedy for those of us who were fond of the old religion is that its leadership is intent on nothing but making it a simulacrum of the new one.

Read the whole thing. Douglas Murray is a treasure.

So that’s one Anglican way of facing the crisis — moaning and breast-beating and waiting to die. Here’s a very, very different one: the Cranmer Option, the orthodox Anglican vicar Daniel French’s take on Anglicizing the Benedict Option. It’s a long, rich reflection. Excerpts:

By the early 1990s what became obvious was that the majority of British churches lacked the manpower and the spiritual clout to take mission to the next stage, irrespective of their denomination. This particularly affected the thinly spread Anglican presence which aimed to have a viable parish in every town and village. Statistically, the Church of England is slowly bleeding to death. Statistician Peter Brierly’s The Tide is Running Out (2000) and also Callum Brown’s seminal The Death of Christian Britain (2000) established in me the possibility of retiring in 2040 to a denominational husk, a Church of England with lots of chiefs but devoid of membership. As it stands today fewer than 1% of Millennials identify as cultural Anglicans, let alone believers, and it is likely that the 2021 census will further highlight this gulf.

Predictably the liberal Anglican establishment tried to dig the national Church out of its hole by restructuring and reorganizing. There is something in the culture of all Boomer revolutionaries that by the 1990s seemed to reduce all revolutions to an increase in paperwork and an army of supernumerary experts. The bishops on the whole fell for this in the same way as did the administration of Tony Blair or Bill Clinton.  Conservative congregations by contrast invested in new evangelistic initiatives such as the popular Alpha Course, and were also comfortable planting what became known as Fresh Expressions. Other tools such as Cursillo never got traction, while the alternative worship scene (“rave in the nave”)  became a historical footnote in George Carey’s time when the colossally popular Nine O’clock Service was exposed as a safeguarding cesspit of abuse and cultism.

Personally, these initiatives continue to appeal to different bits of me: the ecumenical, the artistic, and the evangelistic. I can see how courses in the Alpha mold can be used to fire up any local church while also reaching out to newcomers. However, it pains me to say that the shared weak link is that they are inherently consumeristic, seeking to bend and morph Christianity around the seeker, rather than vice-versa. They abandon the idea of a learned communal “cult” in the traditional sense of the word and seem embarrassed that anything distinctively Anglican should be at the core of developing churches. Instead, Anglicanism is portrayed as getting in the way of reaching new converts or even strengthening the church. Comparably it is as if French government, after paying out an advertising agency in some mad brainstorming session, decided that tourism could only be improved by excising anything particularly French about France and encouraging a diversity of languages.

It is my view that if the Cranmer Option is to have any success, then orthodox believers must find the courage and imagination to grasp the nettle of historic Anglican culture and see it as part of the solution and not the problem. This has to be one of the footstools of forming the kind of thick communities that Dreher envisages. That familiarity with our liturgy and customs is the springboard to teaching the Christian faith to the next generation because the necessary truths of the Gospel are nested inside our key texts. Banal criticism of this often makes the schoolboy category error of confusing dusty traditionalism with living tradition, the former being the work of the devil while the latter is of the Holy Spirit.

A good instance of this is the 1662 vision of holy matrimony compared to Common Worship (2000). Comparing the two prefaces we can see that the modern liturgy encapsulates marriage as a romantic enterprise with some spin-offs for society, therefore inverting BCP theology. Whereas Cranmer places marriage as primarily a foreshadowing of the mystical union between Christ and his Church, Common Worship’s preface alludes that this is merely incidental. It also completely glosses over Cranmer’s psychological key insight into the potential of human monstrousness. Men and women contain the raw possibility of being “brute beasts that have no understanding.” It would seem that in an attempt to modernize the vows (which may be marginally justifiable) the Church threw the baby out with the bathwater. The “Little Mermaid” fairytale supplants the Gospel because this is what the consumer wants, and what the consumer wants the consumer gets. It tells us what we want to hear, not what we need to know.

Whereas medievals like Cranmer understood freedom as a freedom from desire, modernity envisages freedom as a freedom to possess anything we desire and to enjoy limitless choice. Hierarchy and authority in this new cosmology are therefore to be shunned and dismantled, decolonized, because these conspire to impose restriction. In The Benedict Option, Dreher quotes the sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud: “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.” A reasonable person will understand that this rubbishing of order and tradition, a hermeneutic of discontinuity, is infantile and a societal cul-de-sac. Even old-fashioned liberals on the Left now recognize that this pathway undergirds a collective madness and encourages a sort of illiberal liberalism. Historic Anglicanism in its Prayer Book, formularies, five centuries of intellectual tradition, aesthetics, and post-Reformation saints, has the means to be a robust counterculture to this.

Preach it, Father Daniel! More:

[T]he weak links in an Anglican version of the Benedict Option are to be found in application and theory. A vicar trying to set up something like this will certainly come up against the rampant individualism that runs right through British Christianity and, in particular, the Anglican churches. The myriad of liturgies on offer barely unites us, and it is rare to find parishioners who do not think that they are their own pope. It does not help that recent liturgical reform and theological liberalism endemic to Anglicanism has pushed a therapeutic religion whose vernacular is social justice, not the supernatural vision of the New Jerusalem.

A deep-rooted practical quandary is that Anglicanism for the past four hundred years has systematically ejected the sort of believers who were good at community building, preaching, and resisting the world around them. For all its claims to liberalism, Anglicanism, and in particular English Anglicanism, has an Erastian streak which does not tolerate dissent and particularly religious fervor. The consequence is the tragic loss of experts in ghetto living. Our clubbiness and standoffishness caused pilgrims to cross the Atlantic and found non-conformist communities, which subsequently became the basis of the world’s major superpower.

Over the centuries, those dissenting communities that remained in Britain also fell afoul of the established religion and largely broke away or did their own thing. They adapted to the Industrial Revolution far better than the Established Church and formed groundbreaking communities in the process. A good instance of this must be the Quakers, whose cooperatives and non-conformist villages became the basis of much of the chocolate and confectionary industries in this country. The problem is that your average Anglican church does not have this collective memory of dissent and exclusion from the world, aside from Cromwell’s Commonwealth. It was therefore no surprise that when the Anglican-Methodist Mission-Shaped Church (2004) report came out, the writers dismissed as alarmist any talk of a Benedict Option-styled strategic retreat. So in their view, contrary to Alasdair MacIntyre’s vision in After Virtue (1981), the West did not need a “new and doubtless very different St. Benedict,” but rather better negotiating skills with the barbarians governing us. This officially sponsored acquiescence to secularity has been nothing but heartbreaking to watch, like a slow-motion car crash.

But he has some ideas for how to overcome that. Read the whole thing. It’s an exciting attempt to understand the Benedict Option in a particularist sense, and to make it work. I love this, and am eager to see more things like it from Christians in other denominations. One thing that I find especially interesting in Father French’s essay is his speculation that a Cranmer Option Anglicanism might be possible if rural life becomes a viable way of living for English Christians. He explains why something like it might be necessary, in fact; it seems to me that one good thing the Covid crisis has done is revealed how much of our work can be done without coming to the office. I don’t know a thing about broadband in Britain, but in the US, if we could have a national campaign to bring broadband service to rural areas, we might be able to revive rural life, and make Benedict Option communities there more possible.

Anyway, I’m eager to read what you Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic have to say about Father French’s proposals, and what you have to add to them. To this outsider, the Church of England’s au courant antiracism initiative is a deep sigh of despair, decline, and doom. Daniel French is trying to think a way forward for those in the church who actually want Anglican Christianity to survive.

The post The Cranmer Option appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Rational Reactionary

At dinner last night on a restaurant terrace on the Buda side of this city, I met an American conservative who recently moved to Budapest in despair over the state of our country. He’s trying to figure out where in the Visegrad countries he’s going to settle. “America is over,” he said, angrily.

Earlier on Saturday, out and about in my neighborhood, I found myself in conversation with a Hungarian conservative. I mentioned that a lot of disaffected Americans on the Right look to Hungary and the other Visegrad countries with longing, even envy. My interlocutor said this is a mistake.

“You all need to be careful about how you think of us. We are not that far behind you, especially in the younger generations. This country, Hungary, is not a religious country anymore. We are just as materialistic as you are. Maybe we haven’t fallen as far as you all have, but we don’t have the antibodies anymore to resist the viruses that are eating your American brains. It’s just a matter of time.”

I thought of these two conversations just now when I read Ross Douthat’s column about the “two crises of conservatism.” The first crisis, he says, is that Republicans don’t know how to win elections anymore. This will eventually be solved, just as the Democrats solved the same problem for themselves eventually. The second crisis is much deeper and more destructive. Douthat:

What does it mean to conserve the family in an era when not just the two-parent household but childbearing and sex itself are in eclipse? What does it mean to defend traditional religion in a country where institutional faith is either bunkered or rapidly declining? How do you defend localism when the internet seems to nationalize every political and cultural debate? What does the conservation of the West’s humanistic traditions mean when pop repetition rules the culture, and the great universities are increasingly hostile to even the Democratic-voting sort of cultural conservative?

At least you can still defend the heroic entrepreneur, say the libertarians — except that the last great surge of business creativity swiftly congealed into the stultifying monopolies of Silicon Valley, which are leading the general corporate turn against cultural and religious forms of conservatism as well.

This set of problems explains the mix of radicalism, factionalism, ferment and performance art that characterizes the contemporary right. What are we actually conserving anymore? is the question, and the answers range from the antiquarian (the Electoral College!) to the toxic (a white-identitarian conception of America) to the crudely partisan (the right to gerrymander) to the most basic and satisfying: Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.

On the center and the liberal center-right, meanwhile, there’s a sense that the way out of this mess is for decent conservatives to recommit to the liberal order — “to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side,” as my colleague David Brooks put it this week.

But that might not be enough. In the end, conservatives need to believe the things they love can flourish within the liberal order, and it isn’t irrational to turn reactionary if things you thought you were conserving fall away.

Well, that’s pretty much where I am. But the thing is, there’s no place to escape to. I’ve been coming to Central Europe for three years now, and I’ve been hearing the same things from young Catholic conservatives in these countries that I heard from the Hungarian I chatted with today near the National Museum: what you Americans and western Europeans are today, we will be tomorrow. 

Thinking further about that conversation, I recall the Hungarian telling me that the laws having to do with the Sexual Revolution, broadly, are still strict relative to American laws, but the way people actually live is becoming much more lax and tolerant, along the American model. Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party may be in power, said the Hungarian (who supports Orban), but the culture is moving away from what Fidesz stands for. The Hungarian says that absent some kind of religious revival, social conservatives are fighting a losing battle.

I thought about that as I walked around the city later in the afternoon. This is what the death of God means to a civilization. You might remember this 2019 interview I did with the literary scholar Louis Betty, who is an expert in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. Betty wrote a great book analyzing the metaphysics of Houellebecq’s work, which Betty describes as being examinations of individuals and societies that no longer live under the “sacred canopy.” Excerpt from my interview:

RD: When we think of totalitarianism, our models are Nazism or Communism. Happily, the rebirth of either seems very unlikely. That said, many of the cultural and social factors that Hannah Arendt said opened the door for 20th century totalitarianism are also present today — especially radical atomization and loneliness, and the discrediting of familiar hierarchies. Unlike in the last century, liberalism seems not nearly so robust an alternative. What do most people on the left and the right today miss that Houellebecq sees?

LB: One of Houellebecq’s most remarkable qualities is his consistent anti-liberalism—“liberalism” meant here in the classical sense as an idea about human moral and

Louis Betty

economic freedom that emerges from the Enlightenment (I’m not referring to left-liberalism in the US). On the one hand, his novels paint a gloomy portrait of the consequences for family and community of the sexual revolution; essentially, they expose the underbelly of a social movement, championed by the modern left, that fancies itself sacrosanct and morally unassailable. So, in the moral sense, and especially vis-à-vis moral concerns surrounding sexuality, his treatment of the sexual revolution has a way of shocking left-liberal sensibilities.

On the other hand, MH is no great advocate for unfettered economic freedom. His novels suggest (or even demonstrate, if that’s a proper term for describing the work fiction does) that moral and economic liberation go hand in hand, and that it’s the very ideas and conditions that allowed for human economic emancipation centuries ago that eventually gave us the sexual revolution and the moral dissolution that arguably followed it (i.e., an increase in the divorce rate, more children born outside of marriage, etc.). The modern right, which likes to sing the praises of the free market but tends also toward moral and religious conservatism, isn’t primed to appreciate this rapprochement of material and moral license.

Ultimately, Houellebecq’s fiction points to a fundamental incoherence in modern, liberal political thought. You don’t get sexual freedom without the sort of economic emancipation free markets allow (it’s hard to multiply sexual partners when, say, you’re totally beholden economically to a spouse. That is, at least not without significant danger to yourself—just read some 19th-century social novels and you’ll see what I mean!). At the same time, you don’t get economic freedom and self-determination without a loosening of the moral constraints that material necessity used to hold in place. In any case, whatever side you’re on politically, the most important thing to understand as far as reading MH is concerned is that both of these visions—human flourishing understood either as economic or moral-sexual liberation—are materialistic and reductive.

And, rather obviously, they also fail adequately to address human beings’ metaphysical needs, which liberalism is content to leave up to the individual. Religion’s purpose, as I see it, is to order collective life sub specie aeternitatis, but you don’t get that when the hard work of metaphysical consolation becomes a private affair. In the vacuum, alternatives inevitably arise, some of the most pernicious of which we see today: ethnic and racial identitarianism, religious extremism and terrorism, and a tolerance and even embrace of totalitarian rhetoric across the political spectrum. I’m synthesizing a bit on Houellebecq’s behalf, but I think this vision can help us make sense of much of the tension we’re seeing today.

RD: Though he’s not a religious man, Houellebecq believes as a matter of sociological fact that no society can endure without religion. By “religion,” let’s use a broad definition that means “metaphysical framework” — though as you point out in your book, Houellebecq believes that transcendence itself is not enough; a resilient religion also has to offer some form of immortality. Is his case persuasive to you?

LB: Here it’s important, I think, to distinguish between religion as a human phenomenon and the specific case of Christianity in Europe. I don’t think such a thing as a “society without religion,” in the sense of having a metaphysical framework, really exists; to me, that’s akin to imagining a society without a language, or some notion of kinship, or ways of preparing food. I’m not an anthropologist, but it seems clear that any human society worthy of the adjective “human” is going to articulate some metaphysical system that makes sense of reality and offers consolation and a sense of meaning in the midst of natural vicissitude.

In the case of Christianity in Europe, I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I. This isn’t a political or polemical point. Imagine taking as an anthropological platitude the claim that human beings will be religious and, moreover, that civilizations are built upon the metaphysical systems they create (or which are revealed to them, to give credit to the metaphysical on its own terms). It’s obvious from such an assumption that the collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else. This should be deeply alarming to anyone who cares about the West’s tradition of humanitarianism, which emerges—and it would be wonderful if we could all agree on this—out of the original Judaic notion of imago Dei and later from Christian humanism. Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.

Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here; I just happen to have the intellectual conviction that the analysis of human society begins with religion. If you incline toward Marxian thinking, which looks at things in the diametrically opposed way, you’re going to hate what I’m saying. But that’s how I see it.

We are looking for political solutions to religious problems. Today after the divine liturgy at a local Orthodox church, I found myself walking up Szerb utca (Serb Street) talking to an older man, Nektarios, I had met in the courtyard following services. I told him how much I enjoyed being in Europe.

“Europe is finished,” he sighed. And he went through a short litany of the same problems we’re facing in America, adding a couple particular to here, but all of them adding up to the crisis of a civilization that has lost faith in God and in itself.

(Nektarios also said, “I have a friend in America, from here. He lives in Boston. He is quite old now. He is telling me that the things we all suffered under Communism are now starting to appear in America. Can you believe it?” I assured my new friend that I could indeed believe it.)

Look, by the way, at this slide from a presentation at the Brearley School. A reader of this blog’s daughter attends there. She has been shocked to see how the new woke curriculum has turned the girls in the school on each other. She said they are now viciously attacking each other for being racist, on no grounds at all, and accusing each other of things like having musical taste that’s “too white.” Said the reader, “We all knew they were playing with fire, making 12 and 13-year olds obsessed with race and identity… and now it is bearing bitter fruit.”

From the slide presentation to the Brearley students:

There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of these topics, but taken together, and realizing they are being taught to middle schoolers, these children of the tippy-top elites are being taught to despise their civilization (and themselves) before they’ve learned to love it. Why should they “decenter Europe” in middle school and high school? Everything, or nearly everything, about them, whatever their color, is the result of a culture that began in Europe and the Near East. And yet they are learning from their teachers to hate it. No civilization can survive this. And if you think this is going to stop at the borders of Brearley, or the institutions of the high elites, you are completely ignorant of the power of social media and the Internet, as well as the power of the gatekeepers to professional success.

We cannot keep a liberal democratic society together without belief in values rooted in Christian conviction. It is no accident that liberal democracy arose out of advanced Christian society; read historian Tom Holland’s Dominion for more on this, or this very short 2016 piece he wrote for New Statesman, saying how startled he was to discover that the things he values as a liberal are rooted not in classical culture (which is his area of academic speciality), but in Christianity. What is emerging quite quickly in America is an illiberal left-wing democracy.

The term “illiberal democracy” is often associated with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, who said in a 2014 speech that he is trying to build an “illiberal democracy” (and note well, he has been democratically elected several times). This passage from that speech gives you a sense of what he’s talking about. When he says “liberal,” he means “classical liberal,” not “the political philosophy of the Democratic Party.” I have highlighted certain lines:

As the matter stands, if we look at the surrounding events from here, we can consider three ways to organize a state that we so far knew, as a starting point: the nation state, the liberal state and then the welfare state, and the question is, what is coming up next? The Hungarian answer is that the era of a workfare state could be next, we want to organize a workfare state, that – as I previously mentioned – will undertake the odium of expressing that in character it is not of a liberal nature. What all this exactly means, Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen, is that we have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world.

I will only mention two dimensions of this — I do not want to get into a longer lecture here — and I only want to touch on them, so that the importance of the matter could be sensed. When it comes to a relationship between two human beings, the fundamental view of the liberal way of organizing a society holds that we are free to do anything that does not violate another person’s freedom. The twenty years of Hungarian environment preceding 2010 was founded on this theoretical, conceptual starting point. It accepted a principle that is otherwise a general principle in Western Europe. In Hungary however, it took us twenty years to be able to articulate the problem, that this idea, besides being very attractive on an intellectual level, yet it is not clear, who is going to say at what point my freedom is violated. And as this does not come without understanding, then it has to be fixed and determined by someone. And as nobody was appointed to decide this, therefore everyday life experience suggested to us that it was the stronger party who decided this.

We constantly felt that the weaker were stepped upon. It was not some kind of an abstract principle of fairness that decided upon conflicts originating from a recognition of mutual freedoms, but what happened is that the stronger party was always right: the stronger neighbor told you where your car entrance is.  It was always the stronger party, the bank, that dictated how much interest you pay on your mortgage, changing it as they liked over time. I could enumerate the examples that was the continuous life experience of vulnerable, weak families that had smaller economic protection than others during the last twenty years.

Our suggestion for that, and we will try to build the Hungarian state on this, is that it should not be the organizing principle of Hungarian society. We can’t pass a law for this. These are principles that you are free to do anything that does not violate another’s freedom. Instead the principle should be do not do to others what you would not do to yourself. And we will attempt to found the world we can call the Hungarian society on this theoretical principle, in political thinking, education, in the way we ourselves behave, in our own examples.

If we put this idea in the dimension of the relationship of the individual and the community, so far we were talking about the relationship between two individuals, then we will see that in the past twenty years the established Hungarian liberal democracy could not achieve a number of objectives. I made a short list of what it was not capable of.

You can read the whole thing to get an idea of what he’s talking about. I recall my first visit to Hungary, talking to a working-class Hungarian I’d just met who was explaining the basis of Orban’s appeal. She told me that he had recognized that so much of Hungary’s industry had, in the immediate post-communist period, been sold off to rich foreigners at fire sale prices. This meant that Hungarians themselves did not have control over their nation’s economic destiny. In his first term, Orban made repatriating industry a priority, my interlocutor said.

I pointed out that he has been criticized for putting cronies in charge of those industries. The Hungarian said that maybe there’s truth in that, but that is a second-order problem, one that can be solved here. The important thing is to make sure that a small state like Hungary has as much de facto sovereignty as possible, she said.

Look, I don’t want to get into an argument here about Viktor Orban’s governance. I’m going to be in Budapest for months, so I’m sure that will happen here on this blog. I don’t know enough about his conduct in office to give an overall thumbs-up, or thumbs-down, to the way he has governed. Maybe he has done good things, maybe not good things, or (likely) both. Who am I to say? My point here is to say that Orban realized earlier than most that the liberal democratic model could not conserve some basic things that in his view needed conserving; that it could not protect certain people and institutions that needed to be protected from powerful cultural and economic forces. Whether he has succeeded in his goals is a fair question. I praise him in this column in a narrow sense: to say that Orban asks a variation of Douthat’s question. Douthat says the Right in the US is faced with this question: What are we actually conserving anymore?

Orban’s take at framing the problem might be understood like this:  How should we act politically when the structures of liberal democracy end up leaving our people disempowered and vulnerable, and are causing us to lose important virtues?

In America now, liberal democracy is not able to stop the spread through every institution an extremely illiberal ideology that racializes everything, and trains Americans to see each other primarily in racial terms. The vulgar cultural Marxism of Ibram X. Kendi is now spreading into the military, thanks to a senior officer class that has become enamored of it. and into corporate America. There is nothing classically liberal about it — but we are told that the threat to liberal democracy comes from the Right.

We have seen in recent weeks US states considering legislation to bar biological males presenting as females from competing in female sports, which would obviously put biological females at a great disadvantage in competition. States considering this legislation have faced serious threats from major corporations, and the NCAA, all of whom have promised to punish the states if they passed these laws — laws that are simply common sense. Tell me, when a state is not permitted to protect its women athletes and the integrity of fair competition from this trans madness, because of the wrath of Big Business and the NCAA, is liberal democratic society working for them?

Amazon.com has amassed incredible power over our economy. Publishing is one industry key to the success of liberal democracy. Amazon is now deciding not to sell titles critical of transgender ideology. The practical effect of this is that those books will not be published, because no publisher can afford to bring out a book that Amazon cannot sell. Amazon is well within its right to do this, but let’s not be naive here: this move violates the spirit of liberal thought and practice. It is what you would expect in an illiberal democracy of the Left, in which the perceived greater good of the whole society trumps individual rights.

The Left rages at Viktor Orban for his illiberalism (e.g., pulling accreditation and funding for master’s and PhD programs in state universities), but he is acting in what he believes is the public’s interest. (And he’s right about that too: look at how the US is destroying itself with gender ideology and Critical Race Theory, and you’ll see that this stuff is like a deadly virus of the mind.) The Orban government did not ban the subjects, or writing on the subjects. He just said that the state will not pay for it, nor will they permit students to get degrees in that field of Grievance Studies. It was an illiberal move, but a far, far less important one, overall, that Jeff Bezos’s decision “not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness” (which Anderson’s book does not do, incidentally). The world’s largest bookseller, and the one with the power to control what gets published in America, has unilaterally, and within its rights, decided that the public debate over transgenderism is over, and no dissenters need ever be heard from again. Amazon is helping to send any dissent down the memory hole. The major media are too; where are the many op-eds critical of gender ideology, Black Lives Matter, and Critical Race Theory? We used to have a media that was on the Left, generally, but still at least formally dedicated to fairness and broad discussion. No more.

Because we live in an increasingly illiberal left-wing democracy.

And don’t even get me started on the e-mails I have been getting for years from teachers and students in colleges and now high schools, telling me in detail how afraid they are to speak their minds in class, for fear of being denounced as bigots, and punished. Academia is a mainstay institution of liberal democracy. There are no laws forbidding the discussion of these things in academia in America’s liberal democracy. But you can’t do it, de facto, in many places, without risking your livelihood. And few power-holders, in political office or otherwise, will come to your aid. They can rail at Orban for interfering with academic freedom, and they will have a point (though his point is that gender studies are so toxic that suppressing it is in the greater good), but the academic Left in the US has done far, far more than this. They have abandoned liberal democracy, and are now upholding illiberal democracy — from the Left.

The veteran journalist David Rieff is a man of the Left, but he absolutely despises wokeness, because it is illiberal. In a post on  his new Substack newsletter, Desire And Fate, Rieff points out that wokeness is being imposed and defended by progressive autocrats. “In global terms, contra the expectations of the 1990s, it is autocracy not democracy that is becoming the rising norm rather than the fated to be eclipsed exception,” he writes. He goes on:

Autocracy and Woke. A marriage made in heaven as far as I’m concerned. And more likely to end in lifelong harmony than in eventual divorce. Wisecracks aside, the liberal democratic order was always going to end, as all political systems end, just as surely as individual human lives do. The only important question was when it would end. Everything I see around me, read, watch, suggests to me that the answer is that it will be sooner rather than later, that is, if it is not ending already.

He’s right. Me, I prefer liberal democracy, but the conditions in America for a healthy liberal democracy — chiefly, tolerance of difference within a stable order — are disappearing. The Left advocates for illiberal democracy, while gaslighting the rest of us into thinking that the Right is the real enemy of liberal democracy. It’s a lie, but a lie that they devoutly believe (Rieff said that liberalism is the only ideology in the history of the world that doesn’t think of itself as an ideology). The question is coming to be: what kind of illiberal order shall we have? Douthat’s line:

In the end, conservatives need to believe the things they love can flourish within the liberal order, and it isn’t irrational to turn reactionary if things you thought you were conserving fall away.

Yes, this exactly. The things I love are increasingly unable to flourish in the liberal order. This is why I want to build the Benedict Option: so that we can try to come through the chaos resiliently. What other choice is there? Again, this is not a political question; this is a religious question. In the liberal democratic order, what exactly are conservatives conserving? I could live with the right to be left alone, but that is no longer on offer.

 

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