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The last post
[Rod Dreher 03/31 04:20 PM]
I’ll be busy with other projects for the rest of the afternoon, so this is going to be my last post on this blog. I want to thank Kathryn for suggesting it and hosting it. I want to thank Bruce, Caleb, Angelo, Frederica and all the others, including critics and readers of all opinions, who were kind enough to contribute to this project. It’s been a real pleasure to talk about these ideas and issues with all of you, and especially to learn from all the e-mails that there are a lot of crunchy cons in America, and that you found inspiration in the pages of my book. I should again thank all the NRO readers who wrote to me initially several years ago, and who showed up in the pages of “Crunchy Cons.” When people say that this idea is not real, you know from the facts of your own lives how false that is. Incidentally, sales of the book have been good – it’s just gone into its third printing – which tells me that there’s a real audience for these ideas. I’m especially gratified to hear from religious folks who say they’ve started to think in new ways about their faith and the way they live it out in community. I hope those of you who are excited about the neotraditionalism that we call “crunchy conservatism” will stay in touch; I’m going to be blogging regularly at Beliefnet.com starting in a few days, and we can continue the crunchy-con conversation over there.
Anyway, so long, and thanks for all the granola. Stagger onward rejoicing!
Re: Reading list
[Rod Dreher 03/31 04:19 PM]
Clark Stooksbury suggests Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette by Bill Kauffman, which Clark reviews here. I’m currently reading a review copy of Kauffman’s forthcoming Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals, which is a real treat.
Just before closing
[Rod Dreher 03/31 04:17 PM]
Max Goss over at Right Reason has a mixed review of “Crunchy Cons.” It’s a fair review, certainly, and I’m grateful for his attention to the book. It does sound like the reviewer wanted the book to be more intellectual – a criticism I’ve heard a few times. I see the point, but as my then-editor at Crown told me when she bought the book, she wanted “Crunchy Cons” to be not a book of theory, but mostly a book of stories from real people about how they live their lives. I think this was the right call, though I did end up chucking a chapter I’d halfway completed focusing on the intellectual roots of traditionalist conservatism. I have been gratified to have reached a popular audience of cultural conservatives who don’t normally read political books, but who have written to me to tell me how much they relate to the kind of things the crunchy-cons interviewed in the book talk about. And if “Crunchy Cons” drives them to read Weaver, Kirk, Berry, or any of the other writers we’ve been talking about here for the last five weeks, I couldn’t be happier.
Re: Reading list
[Rod Dreher 03/31 12:30 PM]
Mike, the CC fellow traveler who thinks CC-ism lacks communitas, adds to the reading list: Aristotle, Politics
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
William F. Lynch, Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination
Allen Tate, "What is a Traditional Society?" (essay), found in Essays on Four Decades
Thanks Pete Vere
[Rod Dreher 03/31 11:56 AM]
The canon lawyer Pete Vere has written a kind consideration of Crunchy Cons for Catholic Exchange. Read it here. I especially appreciated this part: Dreher chronicles how many families are living out their crunchy con convictions. From homeschooling to organic and family farming, from turning off the television to turning on the oven and enjoying a good home-cooked meal, crunchy cons are doing little things to restore a more natural pace within the family. For at its essence the crunchy con philosophy is about living in harmony with the natural world as wise stewards entrusted by God with the care of His creation.
This last point has escaped Dreher’s critics in my opinion. Their most common complaint is that Dreher never gets around to presenting a plan for moving the crunchy con ideology forward. He does not have to present some grand plan; rather it is the little things that move crunchy conservatism forward. As Dreher repeatedly points out in his book, big things happen when enough people look after the little things.
“Maybe I’m too optimistic,” Dreher writes, “but I think there’s a growing army of crunchy-con homeschooled kids, not only learning academics at a higher level than most of their conventionally schooled generational peers, but also learning how to think — and, moreover, learning how to think independently and counter-culturally. This is especially true if their primary teachers — their mothers and fathers — make certain that the core convictions of their faith are the sun around which all the academic learning orbits. When these kids enter mainstream society in large numbers, we could see the beginning of a quiet cultural revolution.” And since many of these children come from Republican families, as Dreher painstakingly chronicles throughout his book, the GOP is more likely to be the political vehicle used by these young crunchy cons to bring about this quiet counter-cultural revolution. But if so, it won’t be the Republican party of today, it will be the one they rebuild.
Re: Reading list
[Rod Dreher 03/31 11:09 AM]
Sarah Butler Nardo, erstwhile crunchy blogger, writes: I like the reading list idea very much - my recommendations would be "At the End of an Age" by John Lukacs and some Nisbet, probably "The Quest for Community," which any conservative, crunchy or no, should have read anyway. I aspire to be a historian, so I'm biased, but I do think conservatives have a poor grasp of our own cultural/social history, especially prior to the 1950s. Allan Carlson has some great stuff that would start to address this deficiency, particularly his book "The 'American Way': Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity." And my husband suggested "Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life," by Bernard Iddings Bell, but I haven't actually read that one myself.
Life is a Miracle
[Caleb Stegall 03/31 10:56 AM]
We are a nation of Prufrocks. In our rush to chase the latest thing, to have the shiniest gadget, to think the newest idea, to be first in the lock-step march of progress, we grow old … we grow old. And having heard the snicker of the Eternal Footman, I think we, as a society, as a people, have settled into a deep sense of Prufrockian unease. Paradoxically, the revitalization of our common culture will come, if at all, not through progress which makes us weary and worn, but through making new the oldest things, the permanent things.
The conversation here has covered a lot of ground, and I think it has been a good and needed one. So for myself, thanks to NRO and K-Lo for hosting, to the many who contributed to the spirited exchange, and especially to Rod for getting it started and putting up with the inevitable slings and arrows. As I trudge back to my log cabin, I thought the following passage appropriate to sign off with: The hard and binding requirement that freedom must answer, if it is to last, or if any meaningful sense it is to exist, is that of responsibility. For a long time the originators and innovators … have made extravagant use of freedom, and in the process have built up a large debt to responsibility, little of which has been paid, and for most of which there is not even a promissory note.
The debt can be paid only by thought, work, deference, and affection given to the integrity of our ecological and cultural life. The condition which that integrity (or that one-time integrity) imposes on human work and human freedom is that everything we do has an effect or an influence. But it is generally true to say that among the originators of the modern era there has been no flinching before effects …. And thus we have assumed that all problems merely lead to solutions, an article of pathological faith.
All along, the enterprise of [progress] has been accompanied by a tradition of objection. Blake’s revulsion at the “dark Satanic mills” and Wordsworth’s perception that “we murder to dissect” have been handed down through a succession of lives and words, and among the inheritors have been scientists as well as artists. The worry, I think, has always been that in our ever-accelerating effort to explain, control, use, and sell the world we would destroy the wholeness and the sanctity of all that which it is our highest obligation to “make new.” Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle
Crunchy Cons reading list
[Rod Dreher 03/31 10:23 AM]
An excellent suggestion from a reader, echoing similar requests: I understand that this blog site will wrap up soon. Perhaps a good way to wrap things up would be for you and some of the other regular bloggers to suggest a "crunchy con" reading list for those interested in pursuing this topic in greater depth. In reading your book and following the posts, I've seen references to some works and authors that I've read but also some I've heard about and not read and some I'd never heard of before. I am sure there are others like me who are interested in doing further reading and a suggested reading list might be useful and a good way to bring things to a close. Yes, today’s the last day of this blog. That’s a good way to end it. I’ll weigh in throughout the day with my suggestions. I’ll start with a few. Mind you, it’s not that I agree with everything in any of these books, only that I recommend them to readers interested in exploring this sensibility. I invite readers to send in more suggestions.
T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (anything by Kirk is essential, but this is the big one).
Matthew Scully, Dominion.
James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue.
E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful.
Wendell Berry, various essay collections, including What Are People For? and Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation.
Rules of Engagement II
[Bruce Frohnen 03/30 06:16 PM]
This is probably my last post to the CC blog (I'm traveling tomorrow). So, for whatever it's worth, here's my take on why Crunchy Cons is important from a political standpoint, and where we should go from here: conservatism isn't primarily about politics, it's about culture. The left is always coming up with all kinds of schemes for the perfect government, which then will organize the perfect society. When it comes to the federal government, most Americans (who are conservative) in principle at least, mostly want to be left alone. But there are some catches:
First, the need for order. Kirk called this the first need of all. Unless we feel relatively safe, we won't be able to participate in public life, won't care very much about politics beyond law and order, and won't be keeping a lookout for our freedoms. Frightened people move to the suburbs, understandably. Frightened people also tend to vote for more and more centralized government (e.g. federalizing more and more crimes) to keep their streets safe, even though safety only comes from local, community control. Divorce rates over 50%, rampant drug use, rampant violence and increasingly random violence from suburban youths, do not make order. They make chaos, and if people don't give up the practices that lead to this, the result will be increasing calls for government programs to deal with the problems — mostly to drug, support, and eventually incarcerate our kids.
Second, the need for order in the soul if there is to be order in the commonwealth. If our lives don't make some kind of sense, don't fit together to make a coherent whole, we are going to find ourselves, and especially those who depend on us, falling into destructive habits. At the lowest level, we are going to find that we can't trust one another any longer. We no longer can count on people's promises — even if we get them in writing. Believe it or not, people used to look to lawyers as people who told the truth. Now that sounds like a joke in search of a punchline. As we become increasingly isolated and mistrustful, those of us with money can still lead relatively comfortable lives, filled with all kinds of diversions, but an awful lot of our kids are turning to destructive lives of alienation and/or sheer dishonest selfishness — viz. the stats on the prevalence of cheating in our schools. Again, disorder brings the need for more government, which we are getting, in part through an explosion in litigation, with all its related costs.
Third, in a lot of ways people don't think of local politics as politics — and in a way they are right. Libertarian dreams to the side, towns have always been things in themselves; the people in them always have seen them as entities that need protection and nurture. To the extent that towns are disenfranchised (and they have been, almost completely, in
America) people will simply go up the latter to more distant governments to get what they want.
All these factors make good, solid, conservative people willing to vote for more and more centralized government. Add to this the very real problems of corporations that have forgotten the value of employee and customer loyalty, and you have a recipe for increasing regulation.
The "crunchy" view (which to me is just traditional conservatism with enough of a funky twist to get a hearing in the mass markets) says "let's put the focus where it belongs: on how we want to live our lives, and what we need to change to be able to do that better."
This isn't a call for more government intervention, it's a call for LESS government intervention. The more we organize our own lives in ways that make sense, that help us treat one another in a decent fashion, and that keep control in the hands of a lot of local people rather than a few people in Washington, the more free AND decent and morally ordered our lives will be.
People in general will not long accept a system in which their lives don't make sense. They will look somewhere for order. The people about whom Rod writes (most of them far funkier than I) are looking to their local communities to forge meaningful ties. Better this than look to the government, no? And better this than live with no ties, such that we raise another Lord of the Flies generation.
I am at best slightly crunchy. But I'm very happy that Crunchy Cons was written, and I hope it gets a fair hearing.
Rules of Engagement
[Bruce Frohnen 03/30 02:04 PM]
Agreeing in general with Caleb's view that we must see politics as an arena in which we must take evil along with good, I'd like to point out the danger the Republican Party faces from a possible reversion to pre-Reagan alignments. The evangelical movement in politics is of very recent origin, and intimately tied with the social issues. Thus, the argument seems to be, so long as the party gives them the "right" position on social issues, they are and will remain Republican. And that, the argument goes, will be enough to forge and maintain a ruling coalition for decades to come.
What this overlooks is the fact that Reagan Democrats — currently mostly Republican — were a big part of this coalition, and were by and large middle and lower-middle class ethnic/relgious (Catholic) voters, brought over by decreasing economic opportunity as well as the social issues. And these voters may soon revert, even as many evangelicals retreat. The mainstream may be happy with the way things are going in our culture these days, but an awful lot of religious parents are not. Why else would the poll numbers look so dismal? People are worried about their kids — what opportunities they will have to "get ahead" — but also about what opportunities they will have to lead decent, settled lives. And, however much people may like Big Box America, it ain't good for the kids; and an increasing number of Americans know this, though they have little clue what to do about it.
For too long the Republican Party has been dependent on the Democratic establishment's status as hostages to the abortion lobby for its victories.
If that cracks, as it may well, issues like war in the Middle East, increases in government spending on confusing entitlements of limited value (prescription drugs) and the whole host of issues brought out by Bruce Bartlett in his recent book — whether we want to argue with his specifics or not — will create enough of a perception of Republicans as "for the rich guy" that there will be a series of big, big losses. This is highly unfortunate as it will bring in ever more centralization of power — more socialism, to be frank.
The vast majority of Americans are not libertarians. They fear government (as they should), but they also fear social anarchy. They like freedom, thank goodness, but demand order. So, whatever one may think is smart and savvy, it's small town values — integrity, thrift, industry, but also faith, stability, and safety — that sell in the bulk of the country. And this is where Rod's very cultural book has explicitly political salience. It makes a case for appealing to people who may well head left if we don't give them a reason to stay right.
I'll save my argument on why this is so, and is important, for a later post.
In the meantime, do please feel free to call me nuts.
battle lines
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/30 01:39 PM]
I had to get into something controversial that’s difficult to talk about and which … well, I didn’t hold back, I told all. You admitted that your nickname is "Poochy"? Man, this is going to be bad.
One of my favorite older movies is Robert Altman's 1976 Nashville. (I read the "making of" book, and was surprised to learn that the intentions of the film were a lot stupider than the final product.) Anyway, this complex film gives a good glimpse of how much more polarized battle lines were 30 years ago. Back then, you could tell a person's political opinions simply by the way they dressed. And it was largely a generation gap, something we don't have today (probably because now all ages partake of a common entertainment culture; we didn't then). At the time of the Bicentennial, it really did seem like the country could fly to pieces. Rioting on college campuses, "Four dead in Ohio," all of that.
The last thing we Boomers ever expected was that all this entrenched hostility would just sort of drift away. The current climate is, in comparison, pretty mild. Boundaries keep shifting, as with "Crunchy Cons" and "Lifey Liberals," more so as folks get younger: In my limited observation, the rising generation is more opposed to abortion than the Boomers, but that doesn't mean uniformly conservative (eg, laissez-faire about gay marriage).
The main thing that puts me off party politics, though, is a sense of thoroughgoing phoniness. Everything is rigged, anxious, artificial, prechewed. In Nashville, a kook candidate rolls around town all day in a van with speakers on top, blasting out his cranky ideas. I kinda miss those days; I miss that kind of authentic, if nutty, encounter with real people and real ideas.
Here in Maryland, the state legislature just passed a law to fund embryonic stem cell research. The newspapers reported that some surgery was required on the bill's name: supporters eliminated the adjective "embryonic." The bill still would *fund* embryonic research, but it was necessary to mute the point, to enable Roman Catholic legislators to vote for it without fear of reprisals. That's what I mean. Bring back the kook in the truck.
Correction
[Rod Dreher 03/30 12:59 PM]
Alas, I read too much into Kim’s lonely crunchy con post. She writes back: Actually, I did not state why I am joining a convent. I am joining one because that is where God is calling me, not because I can't meet people or that it is too hard to do so. I have plenty of friends and know many people. Please make the correction on the blog….it sounds like I'm nothing but a shy, lonesome, wallflower…..my poker night crew would very likely disagree with that assessment! If you ask me, the world needs more poker-playing nuns.
Re: Battle lines
[Rod Dreher 03/30 12:06 PM]
Kim in NYC: You ask the question in your latest post: "What should I have told him?" I know it sounds cliché, but I think the only thing that works is a bit of political "ecumenism": let’s start working on what each side has in common with the other. It just seems to me that human nature is always looking for something that is familiar, or like it. I've seen it happen before,both in my personal experience and in politics (think feminists and fundamentalists coming together over the issue of pornography). I think once we start seeing what it is we have in common with the "other side", we become less apt to dehumanize them and more willing to work with them without compromising those Permanent Things we care for so deeply. (Kim also sent in a note saying she’s 41, single with no kids, active in her Catholic parish and community … and considering a vocation to the nunnery because it’s too hard to meet people. “What’s a single crunchy con to do?” she asks.)
Re: Battle Lines
[Caleb Stegall 03/30 12:05 PM]
Rod, whenever I hear talk from those who want to “break out of” the stale left-right debates I am always immediately skeptical and want to know what game they are playing at. This may sound odd coming from one who has often complained that the GOP is just the rightward edge of our liberal majority (which it is), but there remain real differences between the two major parties that cannot be dismissed so easily. The fact is that breaking out of politics as trench warfare almost always means breaking left in reality. Consider Jim Wallis as exhibit A.
Just before the 2004 election, the Christian media (especially the evangelical media) was awash with instructions to the Christian voter to think outside of their political boxes, to exercise “discernment,” to resist being a “one issue voter,” and even to abstain from voting altogether because of the allegedly inadequate choices.
Despite our own position at The New Pantagruel that unchecked liberalism “has become endemically exploitative in both the political right and left today, though for a time the areas of exploitation have remained distinct,” we editorialized strongly against the foolishness of pining for an ideologically acceptable politics in which a Christian can comfortably rest, knowing that no evil is being done on his behalf. To the contrary, history is replete with the tragic lesson that political power is inherently corrupting of principle, yet the truth of principles cannot get any traction in the world without being in and of it. A moral man may choose sectarian withdrawal, itself a kind of politics by other means, or the tragedy of engagement on the edge of risk and ever-compromised necessities. But it is the immaturity of double-mindedness to choose one and pine for the other, and such a divided mind produces only instability where order is required.
The double-mindedness which produces electoral withdrawal as a kind of fortification against compromised engagement in the rest of one’s life is a symptom of the troubling trend among Christians to cocoon themselves in the “misunderstood minority” identity and abdicate any responsibility for power while simultaneously refusing to give up what power they have. We have become exemplars of the tendency to develop a mind so principled that it succumbs to either ideologism or an idealistic paralysis that comes from seeing through all the false choices.
Institutional power is what it is—always. If a system passes through revolution to the establishment of a new regime, it will merely play its own variation on the same old problems. Or as Pete Townsend put it, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The best of our Christian political tradition teaches us, therefore, to align ourselves radically with the particular and the individual without actually believing that the institutional regime must be overthrown. One can thus work to mitigate and contain institutional power; living in love with the frail limits of existence—family, friends, community, and place—in service of truth, goodness, and beauty, yet knowing that even if good can be done, evil will be done too.
… Our broader hope [is for a political] discourse that does not minimize differences to “spare feelings” because ultimately we believe life is tragicomic and eucatastrophic. While we are engaged with the crises and catastrophes, a serious, taxing and often debilitating business, we can always look at ourselves and our situation from an imagined eternity where it is, if not farcical, a tragic agon tempered by the comic finish of the marriage feast. What I do think is stupid nearly beyond belief, however, is the GOP’s failure to sense and grasp the opportunities for coalition building with groups typically written off as Democrat strongholds. Reagan Democrats, Hispanic immigrants, Catholic union members, inner city minorities — all ought to be natural constituencies of the traditional conservative argument.
On the flip side, large numbers of GOP moderates have far more in common with liberal Democrats than they do with anything resembling conservatism. So yes, I think there is a serious political realignment afoot. But if (when) it occurs, politics will still be warfare by other means — we won’t ever escape that.
Battle lines
[Rod Dreher 03/30 11:05 AM]
Things went pretty well with the Washington Post reporter, Hank Stuever, who turned out to be a really nice guy. At one point asked a perfectly reasonable question that I had hoped he might not, because I had to get into something controversial that’s difficult to talk about and which … well, I didn’t hold back, I told all, and I guess everybody will find out when the Style section hits the stands in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, at one point we talked a bit about the hardened battle lines between Left and Right in this country, which is something I decry in the final chapter of Crunchy Cons. I talk (in the book) about trying to think past the stale left-vs-right dynamic that has our political imagination so paralyzed right now, but how hearing some smug liberals in a local bar talk about how satisfying it would be if an Islamic militant drove a truck bomb into a conservative Baptist church in town made me so angry I was ready in that moment to vote Republican until kingdom come.
This, I wrote, is how it happens. How both parties and their partisan machines keep us all stuck on stupid when it comes to voting: they gin up such fear and hatred of the Other that they get us to be loyal to them no matter how badly they’re failing, or lousy their agendas. I told Hank that to look at the mainstream left and right today, one is reminded of trench warfare in World War I, in which two armies expend tremendous firepower and destructive effort to advance 50 yards. It’s dispiriting. “So, how do we break out of it?” the reporter asked. I didn’t know what to tell him. What should I have told him?
More Parody
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 05:03 PM]
Someone just sent this to me. Very nicely done. I especially liked the time/date stamps the guy made up for me. And the yurt yurt yurt bit was hilarious as well.
I do, of course, take issue with the caricature that I think everyone sucks. Poor people obviously don’t suck. And neither do farmers. Or yurt dwellers.
Re: Civil Society
[Bruce Frohnen 03/29 03:52 PM]
Bravo Rebecca! This is how real change comes about. Hearts and minds aren't won through ideology, but through the concrete activities of living together, which can only be done in small, "marginal" communities, not in a vast, naked public square.
Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/29 03:31 PM]
Rebecca writes: I wanted to respond quickly to your friend Mike regarding being active in the community. I think that a huge part of what is simultaneously driving much of the "doom and gloom" and the small scale community involvement which comes with being a "crunchy con" is that we have lost faith in much of what has been thought of as civil society. Our schools, our political parties, county boards, chambers of commerce and many of the other avenues by which we've often been encouraged to "get out there" are so corrupted that fighting them or even expecting anything good out of them seems to be a lost cause. So yes, we're active, but we're not doing it within organizations which are often looked upon as being essential to a civil society. I think it's the reality of the failure of the basic structures of our civil society on top of the disintegration of our cultural/moral framework which is driving many people to simply withdraw and seek out places where we really can influence our worlds. So we homeschool because we cannot change the school system, we support crisis pregnancy centers because we can't influence the laws or change the larger culture which is driving the problem, we join garden clubs because we can't stop the county board from paving everything over and so-on and so-forth. I think part of what makes a crunchy con a crunchy con is that we don't buy into the idea that we can do much in the larger world of politics, education and culture. So we are retreating into smaller worlds where we can influence things for the better. Hopefully, in time, we can gain enough influence in these small areas that we'll start being able to influence some of the larger structures of society. In the meantime, I'm not holding my breath. That sounds a lot like what Donna Steichen told me about why she got involved in homeschooling. I quote her in the book as saying: “Back when I was raising my own children, homeschooling was considered an exotic necessity for diplomatic families on jungle postings. So I took the first route: I met teachers, baked brownies, judged speech contests, served as a classroom, lunchroom, playground, and library volunteer, held offices in home and school associations, etc., etc., etc. Later, as difficulties arose, I argued with teachers, confronted pastors, principals, and department heads – especially but not exclusively Religion Department heads – served on advisory committees, and eventually, more than once, engaged school boards in public combat. It was a strenuous and emotionally exhausting way of life. It was also futile.”
Re: Four Horsemen
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 02:28 PM]
You never know what will set off all the emailers with itchy send-fingers. Some are objecting to what they conclude is my injection of a bizarre Revelation-styled Christian Armageddon into the discussion through my link to the Four Horsemen. To which I say: settle down people. I was simply referring to the historical realities of war, pestilence, famine (scarcity), and death — all nicely imagined as Four Horsemen in apocalyptic literature. Some quick googling shows that I am not the first to make this suggestion.
"do some good"
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/29 01:33 PM]
Mike exhorts us to "get out there in the community and do some good." This is probably one of those things that we assume and leave unsaid, but for many crunchies, doing good comes under the heading of participating in their faith community. Churches coordinate lots of do-gooder activities, and nudge members to participate. My own parish is pretty small, but we still take part in soup kitchens, pregnancy care center work, making food bags for the homeless, and so forth. Other church members help in areas that interest them personally, such as street preaching in the red-light district, or building homes in Haiti. I record books for our state-wide Radio Reading Network for the Blind. I guess if we haven't made much of this, it's because we presumed it was covered in the "Religion" section.
Re: fear mongering
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 12:52 PM]
Rod said: The point is, since 9/11 I have become in many ways preoccupied with the idea that some rough history is headed our way, as Peggy Noonan put it, that we are unprepared for it, and are in fact living in ways that make it difficult even to think about preparing for what could happen. I agree. But I arrive at that conclusion from what I take to be the perfectly natural and obvious truth that 99% of history has been rough and we have no reason to expect a lifelong exemption from that truth. I don’t put a lot of stock in the prophets of any particular and specific disaster because they strike me not only as indulging in fantastic speculations, but also as buttressing, in a perverse kind of way, the alternative fantastic speculation that peace and prosperity and health and wealth are the natural state of affairs. Both sides completely miss the tragicomic outlook that properly ought to define our tenuous and fragile creaturely existence.
I expect history will intrude on our fantasies in much more natural and obvious — and less conspiratorial and catastrophic — ways. Preparation and expectation, yes. Panic and gloom, no.
Re: Fear mongering
[Rod Dreher 03/29 12:16 PM]
I should probably say something personal about my tendency toward alarmism. While it is true that I’m very much a “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” kind of guy, I can see that I was strongly affected by September 11. For me personally, the biggest lesson of that day was that everything you think is solid and safe can disappear in a single morning. I’ve told the story before, so I won’t go into it in detail again, but I will never forget as long as I live the experience of that morning. When I walked out my front door on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the towers burning, I ran for the Brooklyn Bridge, to get over to the site to cover the story. Within the hour, I stood on the far side of the bridge watching the south tower collapse. Seconds before it came down, a NYPost colleague told me not to go down there, that those things were going to fall. I looked at her with total sincerity and conviction, and said, “Come on, that’s the World Trade Center, they’re not going to fall.”
Nothing that ever happened to me was as traumatic as what followed, and I’ve spent a long time since then thinking about the hour’s walk from my house to the other side of the bridge, and how my mind could not accept the full meaning of what my eyes were actually seeing. Of course, as we now know we all had ample warning that this kind of thing was being planned, and was possible. We collectively refused to take Islamic terrorism and extremism with appropriate seriousness, and in my opinion, we have not changed. I am fascinated by willful blindness — including my own; I have reproached myself many times for being unwilling to take seriously the warnings prior to the Iraq War that the US would inherit a fractured country that would tend to a civil war we couldn’t control. I didn’t want to see that, because I was so eager to see someone, anyone, pay for 9/11. But that’s another story. The point is, since 9/11 I have become in many ways preoccupied with the idea that some rough history is headed our way, as Peggy Noonan put it, that we are unprepared for it, and are in fact living in ways that make it difficult even to think about preparing for what could happen. I know, I know, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about what might happen, but that’s no reason to prudently prepare, and to think about ways of addressing social and individual weaknesses now, while there is time, instead of waiting for the crisis moment to be upon us.
I will never forget how clear and blue the sky over New York harbor was on the morning of September 11.
(Now for something completely different: today’s anxiety is over the fact that this afternoon, a Washington Post Style section reporter is coming over to the house to hang out and cook dinner with us. We’re going to make a field trip to Whole Foods, in fact. What if he discovers my secret stash of Cheetos?)
How Culture Happens
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 11:55 AM]
Maggie Gallagher has some good and interesting thoughts on “how culture happens” in the context of the marriage debate. She says that the “language and rhetoric” of choice creates a cultural shift that is not necessarily anticipated or even wanted by those using that language. So, for example, the language of personal liberation and of equal rights which was used by feminists and civil rights leaders creates new categories of public thought which must then be reckoned with publicly during any future debate. So, in Gallagher’s telling, the language and rhetoric of personal liberation open the door for a public argument over gay marriage which in turn opens the door for a public argument over polygamy. Just as the language and rhetoric of the Supreme Court’s birth control decisions opened up the possibility of constitutionalizing the right to abort and probably the right to homosexual marriage. Gallagher says that “[polygamists’] arguments now strike many cultural elites (such as the editors of the New York Times Arts page) as plausible, worthy of being entertained, because of the way they echo the gay marriage arguments. This in itself marks a cultural shift. … I don’t believe polygamy is an inevitable result of the gay marriage debate. But I think the push for gay marriage has already visibly altered our public culture of marriage. Things that were taken for granted, now must be discussed and defended. … [C]ulture consists largely of the things that don’t have to be discussed that much, because they are presumed. Culture consists of shared premises. Institutions shape human behavior by shaping categories of human thought, especially by marking off a huge category of possibilities as ‘not necessary to think about.’” This is an important insight into culture and how it develops and impacts our common life together. And I think that a central aspect of the concerns Rod has raised is to apply this same insight to some of the less obvious cultural arenas and artifacts. The advent of technological advances, for example, marks a serious cultural shift primarily because it opens up huge categories of thought and possibility which were not necessary to think about previously. Technological artifacts carry within them an inherent “cultural logic.” Globalizing markets buttressed by centralized governments likewise open up huge possibilities previously unthinkable. Immigration is a hot issue just now: does the global marketplace’s demand for cheap labor trump sovereign national boundaries (not to mention cultural and legal boundaries)? Not a question which would even have been asked in a culture devoid of the rhetoric of globalization.
The questions being probed on this blog mostly fit into the category Gallagher describes: what cultural logic is stowed away in the baggage holds of the various ways and means we are encouraged to — and largely do — live today? And what possibilities previously unthinkable does that logic open up.
Re: Civil society
[Bruce Frohnen 03/29 11:10 AM]
I'm not sure I actually disagree with Mike's point — that it is necessary to get out there and join, or form, real, concrete communities through which we can improve our public life. But Mike seems to share the anti-crunchy view that there is something too "weird" or "countercultural" or perhaps simply too apolitical about the kinds of groups traditional conservatives join, form, and participate in. Homeschoolers are too weird for Mike? But aren't they forming a community that is influencing public policy, educating their kids, and bringing together people who share important values, thought often not the same backgrounds? Okay, you don't like that. . . how about involvement in the parochial school? Or does it HAVE to be the PTA? I quit the homeowners' association board on which I once sat because it became clear that mine was a loan voice for a kind of life different from the search for hermetically sealed houses (with increasing property values, to be sure). Then I moved to a neighborhood in which participation is neither meaningless nor value-less. Or are neighborhood associations too "private" and "self-centered" as well?
I mean this as a real question. What counts? As a cultural conservative I certainly don't think that only political participation counts; indeed, I think it's the LEAST important form of participation — voting being today little more than a statement of abstract support for one interest coalition or another. But perhaps people genuinely think that re-building our towns, rebuilding our churches and educational institutions, and simply following the central vocations of life in work, in daily life, in family, church, and local association aren't that important? I think they are.
RE: civil society
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 09:37 AM]
I don’t really disagree much with Mike other than with his unjustified assumption that I disagree with him. Of course we must “actually do things” instead of merely pontificating. That is what I have been saying all along.
Invincible Sluggishness
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 08:54 AM]
I don’t know about the various doomsday scenarios. Too much fear mongering. But if history teaches us anything, it is that things do not remain static. It would be foolish to presume that the conditions that prevail now will continue indefinitely. The following from T.S. Eliot comes to mind: The fact that a problem will certainly take a long time to solve, and that it will demand the attention of many minds for several generations, is no justification for postponing the study. And, in times of emergency, it may prove in the long run that the problems we have postponed or ignored, rather than those we have failed to attack successfully, will return to plague us. Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow: but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment. ... There is one class of persons to which one speaks with difficulty, and another to which one speaks in vain. The second, more numerous and obstinate than may first appear, because it represents a state of mind into which we are all prone through natural sloth to relapse, consists of those people who cannot believe that things will ever be very different from what they are at the moment. From time to time, under the influence perhaps of some persuasive writer or speaker, they may have an instant of disquiet or hope; but an invincible sluggishness of imagination makes them go on behaving as if nothing would ever change. Those to whom one speaks with difficulty, but not perhaps in vain, are the persons who believe that great changes must come, but are not sure either of what is inevitable, or of what is probable, or of what is desirable. The important thing is to keep at bay our natural inclination towards acedia — sloth of the spirit — and to resist giving in to an “invincible sluggishness of imagination” which would prevent us from taking a true reckoning of history and of the place our age has within its ebb and flow.
The liturgical city
[Rod Dreher 03/29 08:52 AM]
I know we left architecture and urban planning behind weeks ago, but Angelo’s website Godspy has just published a remarkable essay by Paul Grenier and Tim Patitsas about what makes a city beautiful: its liturgical character. A reader sent this to me and said that reading it, he finally understood what motivates Crunchy Cons. I’d say he nails it. What a great piece that is, Angelo!
Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/29 08:51 AM]
Mike, the guy in the book who confronted the developer in a story mentioned in Crunchy Cons, says I lose him with my Derbish gloom: Get out there in the community and do some good. There are good folks out there, doing good things. But they need all the good people they can get to help. And by "community" I don't mean forming little enclaves of counter-cultural "communities." Seems to me it's possible to do all the things like turn off the TV and avoid fast food, etc., and still find the redeemable and rewarding aspects of civil society right outside your front door. I just wonder if you'd be cheerier, and the rest of your Crunchy-Con cohorts would be cheerier, if the "sacramental sensibility" y'all espouse consisted more of engaging in actual activity, in actually doing things — as in the "active love" that Zosima tells Alyosha Karamazov we all must do in our community when the former sends the young novice out of the monastery and into the world — instead of pondering one's own virtuous navel while consigning the world to hell in a handbasket.
Since your book is a very personal treatise about the rewarding and sacramental experiences in the lifestyle choices you and your wife have made, I hope you don't mind a rather personal — but in no way negatively intended observation: I see a very similar lack of civic-mindedness displayed by the Crunchy Cons as I see in the Bowling Alone mindset, a (dare-I-say equally self-centered) escape and retreat from the public square and from community life, the major difference being merely the type of house and subdivision. Sure, you might justifiably claim that within your cloister you're engaged in more virtuous pursuits than the Bobo and the Patio Man — like making your family your highest priority. But there are other virtues besides making the best life for your family, and it indeed seems possible to turn family into a defensive fortress as opposed to getting out there into the community more, which at the same time will help one's younguns to learn love for/commitment to community as well.
I tell you this: mainstream society on the tube or in the mass culture at large, which seems to be the basis of your description of it, is nothing like what I experience in countless little Kirk-ian platoons in the community (the kind CCers profess to admire but I see no evidence in the book of participating in). In short, since I view Crunchy Conservatism not as an effort make "lifestyle" into a politics but as a challenge to conservatives to let their politics more greatly inform their lifestyles, I offer a challenge back to the Crunchy Cons:
Get a babysitter more often. (Your children will not be ruined by this). Get out there and be with more people, and do things. Make the world better in ways both small and big. Crunchy Con-ness seriously lacks communitas. You can engage in it and still be a Crunchy Con — maybe even a more truly "sacramental" one at that, for I know of few sacraments done in solitude and outside the community. You will also be happier for it. That’s a serious challenge. I’ll try to answer it tomorrow, because I’ve got to finish some projects before I leave today. I would just point out that one shouldn’t necessarily assume that the people I talked to in my book aren’t engaged in communitas. They might not be, but when I interviewed people for the Home chapter, for example, I just talked to them about their houses, not their community activism. I also don’t see why it doesn’t count as community activism to be involved in building up one’s own “little enclaves.” But I imagine Bruce and Caleb might have something to say about that. N.B., I said to Julie one night, not long after I had to quit taking a night class because I worked so many long hours that I didn’t have time to devote to it, that I don’t understand how my dad was able as a younger man to devote so much time to community service activities. Then it occurred to me: when five o’clock came around, he was off the clock. Period. The end. Me, I come in at 8:20, and don’t usually get out of here until 7:30pm, which gives me about an hour or so with the boys until their bedtime. Five days a week. Believe me, if I could work shorter hours, I would. But I can’t. I know other dads in the same position.
Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/28 06:03 PM]
Frederica, it’s true that we can’t prepare adequately for a disaster as total as something like Katrina. But what concerns me is how civil society would enable people to live with a relatively severe level of hardship. I am amazed at the stories my father tells about being a kid during the Great Depression, and how poor everybody was. In his telling, the kind of suffering Americans endured back then was unlike anything most of us can even imagine today. But he says people took care of each other, and most people had a strong internal sense of order and discipline that kept society from going off the tracks. You had to know your neighbor, because no man could afford to be an island under those conditions. That’s the kind of thing that concerns me – how we’ve allowed our civic character to atrophy because we haven’t had to know our neighbors for a long time.
I mention in the book the examples of Katrina and Rita. We know how bad civil society broke down in New Orleans after Katrina, though happily many of the initial claims proved to have been exaggerated. What made an impression on me was three weeks later, when Hurricane Rita hit the Cajun country. I was down in south Louisiana that weekend, and it was instructive to watch the TV coverage of the aftermath on a Lafayette TV channel. Those rural and small-town Cajuns took care of each other. They got into their boats and went out to help. The NYTimes a few years ago wrote a story about how sociologists have discovered that there’s no place in America where people stick around to the degree that they do in Acadiana. Folks just don’t leave. They’ve got their problems, but as Caleb has pointed out throughout the run of this blog, there’s value to sticking around. You know your neighbors and develop a sense of loyalty that you really count on when the chips are down.
I have concern, maybe even fear, that the radical individualism and materialism that we’ve been cultivating for so long in the USA will be the downfall of us if we ever have to face a critical and sustained crisis. When I think about my dad’s stories of the Depression, and try to imagine people today, soft as we are, trying to hold ourselves together in that kind of trial, it’s hard to be optimistic. That’s why I believe that we have a responsibility to do what we can to build and strengthen the little platoons today.
re: Civil Society
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/28 05:35 PM]
I remember thinking through some of these issues when we were looking toward a Y2K breakdown (yes, I was one of the nervous nellies then). The conclusion I came to was, if you're talking about the kind of societal breakdown where we are in physical danger (for example, from starving and rioting folks a few neighborhoods away), then there is no place you can go where you can be sure of safety. Instead of the desperate folks finding your hideout in weeks, they would find you in years.
There was a quote you had back then, Rod, something like "Totalizing a disaster has the effect of annihilating the disaster." I don't remember who said it. But it meant that if you believe that ultimately no amount of preparation will be effective, then it's pointless to prepare. So, unlike friends who dug wells and converted their savings to gold, we just bought bottled water and canned food and prepared spiritually for whatever awaited. We were never so happy to face an anticlimax in our lives.
But isn't it worth noting that, in such a case, you're talking about a different kind of societal disruption? We'd been deploring the general spread of incivility, crudity, aggressive pornification, and so forth. I'd say, sadly, that while that makes for a miserable society, it does not directly cause things to grind to a halt. We can "withdraw in disgust," cultivate an alternative life, and as writers make loving forays to bring health and hope to our neighbors — while still relying on the same systems they do for police, clean water, groceries, and so forth.
A natural or man-made disaster is independent of cultural disease, and might occur even if we were eminently virtuous. The problems it poses are also quite different. A well-placed disaster could disrupt access to the things we require to stay alive, like water and medication. Similarly disrupted neighbors might become violent. I don't have any recommendation about how to navigate such a disaster except by prayerful following of those who gracefully preceded us.
Just wanted to point out that it's two different kinds of "Civil Society" collapse. We can withdraw from the former, but it won't be a complete withdrawal. The latter, there's not much you *can* do.
Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/28 05:02 PM]
One thing I write about in the final chapter of “Crunchy Cons” is the sense of anxiety I think a lot of us share that, as Peggy Noonan put it in a column a few months ago, “the wheels are coming off,” that “a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.” In Peggy’s telling, the elites are pretty much just trying to take care of their own before it all comes down. She sees this, rightly, as disreputable, but I wonder: am I not arguing for a similar thing? Am I not suggesting that in some fundamental way, that what ails us can’t be fixed, at least not through usual means, and that because tough history is coming, people would be well advised to do things that amount to taking care of their own?
I think that yes, I am saying that, at some level. I don’t want to draw that conclusion. I resist it. But I can’t shake the pessimism I have over the big picture. The Katrina debacle was so unnerving to me because it showed how fragile civil society was. I wonder what would happen if, God forbid, terrorists set off a suitcase nuke in an American port city? Stephen Flynn, the port security guru, told me that if that were to happen, the US Government would have no choice but to shut down all US ports until they could install radiation detection devices. To stop all port activity for two weeks or longer would probably destroy the US economy – and with it the world’s. It could happen that quickly. Frank Gaffney came to the Dallas Morning News last year to tell us about a little-noticed 2004 blue-ribbon panel report on the danger facing America from an electromagnetic impulse (EMP) weapon. A conventional nuclear bomb atop a Scud and detonated high in the atmosphere above the US could, says Gaffney, “take the United States from a 21st-century society to an 18th-century society instantaneously.”
These are not Chicken Little scenarios. Either case would put this country in tremendous hardship, and would severely test the bonds of civil society. If such hard times were to come upon us, those who knew how to do for themselves, and who had neighbors and family close by that they could rely on, would stand a much better chance of making it. Those who have just been going through life taking it easy and assuming that it’s always going to be like it is – they’re going to be in trouble. I think I’m far too much like the latter than the former, and I want to change that while there’s time. I think that we always have to be working towards bettering the common conditions for us all, but I find it increasingly difficult to have much hope in the power of collective effort under today’s conditions. But regular readers know I tend to Derbish levels of gloom sometimes. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise.
More on the borderlands
[Bruce Frohnen 03/28 01:23 PM]
Picking up on Rod's point, I think what most critics of homeschooling fail to note is that these people themselves are forming communities. As I've mentioned before, we don't homeschool, but the people we know who do are not sticking their kids in the closet with McGuffy readers, telling them not to talk to the "evil strangers." Far from it. Homeschoolers congregate; they are always getting together for common classes, social outings and so on.
Which is why, while we send our kids to local parochial schools (we were lucky enough to find a good one) it seems to me that homeschooling communities are important to the revival of any decent common culture. They offer a means to break the bureaucracy's hold on schooling that other reforms (e.g. vouchers, which encourage consumerism and further break up neighborhood life) can't.
Re: Borderlands
[Rod Dreher 03/28 12:38 PM]
To be clear, I was talking about “defensible borders” in a metaphorical sense. I think history and an understanding of human nature shows what happens to utopias. A few years ago, Julie and I were thinking of leaving NYC and moving to a small town known for being home to a large-ish community of orthodox Catholics. A friend of ours who lives there and who shares our commitment to orthodox faith and life said she’d be pleased if we’d make that move, but that we should know that there was a definite cultishness afoot in the town. Julie asked, “Are you saying something like there would be Catholic mothers who wouldn’t let their kids play with my kid because I wear blue jeans, not dresses?” Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, said our friend. Thus ended the lesson.
Still, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to be in a geographical location where the community still respects traditional virtues. I also find it hard to fault people who have lost faith in the ability of the common culture to do this, and who, in response, have decided that the best thing they can do is to quit worrying about fixing what is, for whatever reason, unfixable, and instead to focus on building new forms of community where the moral life is still possible. As the guy in “Slacker” says, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”
Look at the homeschooling movement. In effect, homeschoolers are saying that they no longer have faith in the public schools to educate their children, morally or otherwise. I have found in talking with various people who oppose homeschooling in theory that they don’t necessarily disagree with the gist of the homeschoolers’ critique of public schooling, but they (the homeschooling opponents) are bothered — to the point of being unnerved — by what the withdrawal of homeschoolers’ children from the public school system means. I’ve had it said to me time and time again, “Homeschooling parents are usually those who care most passionately about their childrens’ education; don’t you think it’s a catastrophe for the whole if those parents and their kids withdraw from the system?” Answer: yes, it’s bad for the whole, but why is it that the kind of people who expect their children to be self-disciplined, to work hard, to be conventionally good kids — why is it that nobody worries about people like that, and their needs? Why are we not trying to make schools a better place for those who have high academic standards, and standards of personal conduct. For those who believe in order (and not just rule-following)?
A relatively minor example, but one that resonates right at this moment: Within the past hour, I stood on the fourth-floor terrace here outside my office in downtown Dallas and watched hundreds of Latino students pour out of the trains and take over a downtown street, waving Mexican flags and acting with indifference to the traffic laws, and the rules — internal self-discipline, to say nothing of school rules — that say they should be in school getting a good education. For the second day, Latino students from all over Dallas public schools are walking out in protest of proposed immigration legislation. You watch: nothing is going to happen to them. There will be no consequences. The establishment will fall all over itself to accommodate their demands. And people like me will sit back and watch this admittedly small thing, but see it as another example of a collapsing common culture with the ability and confidence to defend itself. Like I said, withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. I care about my children’s character and education, but I don’t believe the common culture, such as it is, does.
borderlands
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/28 12:20 PM]
I find that Evangelicals are very receptive to this, actually. Christianity Today published a longish essay I wrote in February , and my mail since has been enthusiastic. (And my books rather hammer on this theme. Hope it's not obnoxious to self-promote.)
A Short Post
[Caleb Stegall 03/28 11:19 AM]
And I think the best way to change a culture is to seed it with holy people. I think what's made Evangelicalism less effective than it might be is a tendency to dream of big cultural-impact projects, rather than the humbler route of turning out millions of transformed, humble, holy people. Nicely put. I think we are all on the same basic page. And I would add that along with Gnostic tendencies, evangelicals have been hurt by “salvation inflation” — a temptation to define “transformed, humble, holy people” in the most “nice” and inclusive way possible to mean, essentially, well intentioned but virtually indistinguishable (and certainly manageable) citizens of late liberal modernity.
borderlands
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/28 10:20 AM]
Like Bruce said. I think we're in the same ballpark. And I don't think I really disagree with Caleb here either, though such lonnnnnngggg posts are a temptation to skim. However, here I think he misread me: I wonder if you don’t give the game away with unnecessary talk of burned out utopians and despair that striving towards any kind of demanding standard has been rendered utterly impossible by the combination of disorder and affluence? I'll clarify. By "burned out utopians" I meant specifically to counter the possible notion that all Crunchy Cons should move to a single *geographic* location. I don't think that's what Rod meant by "defensible borders," but I wanted to touch on it, since historically others thought that was a good idea. As you, Caleb, would agree, one drawback to an earthly utopian community is that it would take you away from your homeland and relatives.
I don't "despair" of striving toward a demanding standard; as I said, we can live holy lives. As an Orthodox Christian, I would say that the whole point of earthly life is transformation in Christ (and as far as I know, the Orthodox Church is the Christian body in the US that most diligently continues first-millennium patterns of fasting, confession, and personal spiritual direction. Not that you don't find lots of nominalism as well, but at least the standards haven't been "updated".)
And I think the best way to change a culture is to seed it with holy people. I think what's made Evangelicalism less effective than it might be is a tendency to dream of big cultural-impact projects, rather than the humbler route of turning out millions of transformed, humble, holy people.
Hard times prompt self-discipline, and make the practical value of such virtues obvious. But in a comfortable age like ours self-indulgence is the rule, shopping is a patriotic duty, and serious spiritual discipline looks like a quirky hobby. It would be easier for us if the culture really were collapsing, as it was for St Benedict, but it's capable of spending many more decades in the Barcalounger.
And I should add that I approve of "going back into the culture" as journalists, screenwriters, etc. That's what I'm doing with my life, as is Rod and others of us; we'd be glad to have our children follow in our footsteps. But if we're not diligently praying and fasting and listening to our spiritual fathers' guidance, we'll be a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal. Without humility and repentance, and genuine love for our neighbors, we're just self-righteous blowhards.
Re: Borders
[Caleb Stegall 03/28 09:59 AM]
Bruce, I don’t disagree with you. Can I be a moderate too?
I am not advocating a “withdrawal” from society. Never have. And I doubt anyone can find anything in what I’ve said to that effect. I have advocated, as you put it, working with what we have where we are to rebuild “communities that rely as little as possible on faceless ‘mechanisms’ and as much as possible on actual people.”
It looks like we posted at the same time, but as I hope is apparent below, my concern with the false dichotomy between “withdrawal” and “engagement” is that it leads to all kinds of mistakes made by those who would accept the dichotomy and who do not wish to be known as evil world renouncers. The point is to think more carefully through the problems facing us and shift, reimagine, and reconsolidate the ground of our engagement.
On Borders
[Bruce Frohnen 03/28 09:29 AM]
I'm always uncomfortable when I find myself the "moderate" in any discussion. Being at one end or the other of a debate is, if nothing else, more fun. But I genuinely feel that the path we need to take lies somewhere in between those espoused by Frederica and Caleb.
On the one hand, Caleb certainly is right that we need to rebuild the local ties torn asunder over the last 50-60 years as our culture has dived headlong into various schemes of centralization, hypermobility, and fungibility. Products, suppliers, and employees all seem to be just cogs in various machines, now, and too many people think this is a good thing because it makes things cheaper and frees them from recognizing their responsibilities.
On the other hand, Frederica certainly is right to say that we cannot withdraw from society. It would be good for society if more would choose the cloistered life, if more would pray for the rest of us as a vocation.
But those of us with families in important ways must live in the world.
Pastoral innocence is a good reserved for the few — those who need not live in town, who can make a living in isolation. Again, it would be better if we had more such communities, but I'll not be joining one. I value my vocation, my interaction with others who are connected with my vocation, and my intellectual curiosity about how things work (or don't work) and can, or cannot, be improved too much to give up on active engagement.
And this, to my mind, brings us to the real dilemma: how do you rebuild something you know (and I think all of us at some level, in our very natures, know) is right, but which is frayed to the point of being almost invisible? How does one rebuild character-forming communities of ordered liberty? After the destructive generation has come what I think of as the Lord of the Flies generation — abandoned to a desolate wasteland of television and authority-less mob schooling by parents too concerned with "bringing down the power" to spend time building up their children's character. All of our institutions are deeply wounded, and few over the age of 30 can even remember what a healthy society is like.
But the answer cannot be to fly into the wilderness. It is highly unfortunate but nonetheless true that ours is a national economy, with national laws and rules concerning how everything is set up. You cannot escape them through mere distance. What you must do is live at their margins, building communities that rely as little as possible on faceless "mechanisms" and as much as possible on actual people — preferably people you know, with whom you can forge friendships.
The utopians failed because they didn't recognize that our society, like every society and like every meaningful institution, big and small, is a community of communities. This connects us with both good and bad things in a society as nationalized as ours has become. We all are by nature part of the lives, not just of our neighbors, not just of our fellow parishioners, but of those who make up and order the institutions of our economic and political as well as social and religious lives. But we must encourage, as much as we can, the actual multiplication of authorities, creating "niche markets" sub-communities, associations of all kinds within which we can build decent lives. It is in the multiplicity of authorities alone that we can find any real, ordered liberty, any chance for a life of virtue. The drive to separate leads too easily into the drive to place one person or a small group permanently at the head, with all the authority and all the power. The result always has been and always will be disaster for the real people (and their families) who are told to sacrifice for a greater good only the leaders "know." The result is the gnostic fallacy Voegelin warned against. Better, then, to work with what we have where we are; to build, not walls, but communities.
To build community in a culture that has become hostile to the very idea of community will not be easy. It certainly means being called all sorts of names and accused of wanting to run other people's lives because you dare to suggest there may be something better than mindless self-indulgence. But this task of a hundred years is necessary, and surely not too hard for people who recognize that they will never be fully at home in this world.
Re: Defensible Borders
[Caleb Stegall 03/28 09:28 AM]
Frederica,
I wonder if you don’t give the game away with unnecessary talk of burned out utopians and despair that striving towards any kind of demanding standard has been rendered utterly impossible by the combination of disorder and affluence?
The evangelicals are currently experiencing a deep crisis that flows directly from their naïve “wanting to go back into the common culture and be an influence for good” armed with little more than good intentions and “discernment.” Evangelical literature at places like Christianity Today is replete with “self-help” styled advice for living in the swamp that concede too much to a crass kind of determinism: “You don’t really have to change your life in a material way — and you couldn't even if you wanted to, because the alternative is too hard, and really we’d lose lots of readers if we introduced anything strenuous into the conversation. Besides, the common culture is strong and won’t fail us, we just need to recognize the need to take time out to ‘be holy’ and learn to ‘be discerning.’” This is an extremely weak appology for faith and holiness and has led to all kinds of problems in the evangelical church.
Holiness requires concrete and particular regimines, routines, and comitments — not just the vagaries of good intentions and discernment. There are some rings that cannot be worn — to be Tolkeinian about it — even by those who wish to steward the permanent things. The life that is called for and needed now is a life of struggle.
We published a long rumination on these questions, specifically on the interpretations of MacIntyre on offer in the Christian press, which may be helpful for this discussion. I’ve excerpted it liberally below: [Consider] Books & Culture editor John Wilson as he gushes over Robert Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, and Don Cohen’s book, Better Together. Writing in Christianity Today, Wilson claims that Better Together’s study of Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch indicates “[t]he unmistakable conclusion … that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table.” They’re generating social capital, and what’s more, they’re still maintaining evangelistic agendas. This is supposed to silence the cautionary critics, “notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas,” who hold that Evangelicals “have been co-opted by the imperial state.” In a complete non-sequitur which does violence to the real arguments offered by Hauerwas and others, Wilson closes his article by posing Jesus—“a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraff”—as a “precedent” over against those who don’t “believe that [Christians] should strive to have a place at the civic table.” I suspect that the civic tables Wilson, Warren, Neuhaus and other Christian culture elites sit at are not populated by riffraff. More appropriate would have been a response to [Alan] Wolfe’s sense that Evangelicals are selling out their patrimony.
I am under no illusions concerning Wolfe’s place in this debate. He is clearly of the mind that the civic table is a good and necessary thing; a “civilizing” influence on the fervent passions that are prone to grip sectarians such as Hauerwas. Thus, like Neuhaus and Wilson, Wolfe dislikes Hauerwas’s adversarial rancor. Wolfe much prefers what he calls the phenomena of Evangelical “Salvation Inflation.” In an interview with Michael Cromartie for the March/April 2004 issue of Books & Culture, Wolfe says that in the Rick Warren mode of post-traditional Protestantism, “more Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem.” “People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.” This, to Wolfe, represents a positive development within Christianity, making its adherents better civil citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Wolfe’s manner is strikingly reminiscent of a colonial governor writing home with condescending delight to describe the natives’ halting embrace of the modern world.
Accompanying the Books & Culture interview, Wolfe received an appreciative but anxious review of The Transformation of American Religion from R. Stephen Warner. Warner prompts readers to avoid Neuhaus’s histrionics and give Wolfe a charitable reading in the I’m OK-You’re OK Evangelical way where every critic is ultimately an okely-dokely heckuva nice guy. (Translation: we ignore whatever he says that rubs us the wrong way or try to put a positive spin on it.) For in Warner’s review, truth and accuracy in analysis take a back seat to pop psychology’s language of diplomacy: Wolfe is “well-intentioned,” he has “new evangelical friends,” and he does a fair job of understanding them. Wolfe is “sensitive to [Evangelicals’] vulnerability to his scorn.” Hence, when Wolfe uses negative terms to describe Evangelicals, it is because he “respects” them “too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture.” On the other hand, Warner wishes that Wolfe had talked about other, more progressive Evangelicals, such as those who took in Central American refugees in the 80s and helped “delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies.”
Warner’s review works the way he thinks Wolfe’s book works—not primarily as a real analysis but rather as a negotiation between secularists and Christians. Warner’s main anxiety about Wolfe’s book is not that its analysis of Western Christianity is badly mistaken but that it is inconvenient for the cultural-political agendas of Christian “movement” literature like Books & Culture: “Wolfe’s well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.”
Again, perhaps the point is capitulation, and perhaps it is an accurate point. …
In 1981, Roger Fisher’s international best-selling negotiation handbook Getting to Yes was published. The book was, and continues to be, such a success because it concisely distills the conflict resolution techniques and procedures which must be used by good citizens of a liberal order. The primary methodology taught by Fisher requires a shift in focus from the positions of disputing parties to the interests of the parties, and from there to work towards creative solutions that approximately satisfy all represented interests.
This method for binding disparate individuals or elements of society together in a common scheme of interest preservation is not original with Fisher. It is in fact the quintessential rule of modern liberal society with its required autonomy of individual interest and resistance to the notion of sacrifice for the commonwealth. Karl Marx recognized this structure and aptly named its central point of reference the “cash nexus”: the point at which all disparate interests congregate to achieve satisfaction and the point which must therefore be defended at any and all cost. Marx was famously skeptical about the ability of a society built within the gravitational field of the cash nexus to hang together.
In any thoughtful consideration of the questions raised above, it would be difficult to underestimate the extent to which conservative Christians have absorbed the Getting to Yes philosophy as it relates to the Church and its relationship to the world. An analysis of the pertinent movement literature reveals the overriding goal of most Christian cultural engagement is to find the cultural nirvana where Christians and secularists can finally get to “Yes!”—the culture nexus. Thus, prime importance is attributed to “the conversation”—to the long slow dance towards “yes!” wherein Christian interests are elucidated and differentiated in increasingly abstract and sophisticated ways.
Those committed to this process cannot help but suffer a corrupted view of the Church. The individual Christian is defined primarily by his interests rather than by older notions of membership, and consequently the Church becomes a community of shared interests rather than a community of practice. It is not surprising that in this context “discernment” rather than obedience becomes the most important virtue. And the peddlers of cultural discernment … naturally have an ongoing interest in maintaining the illusion that the process of getting to “yes!” with the world is a “perennial tightrope” walk which requires careful balance. Loud shouts at those on the tightrope are not merely an annoyance, but a disloyal attempt to upset the balance along the path to the culture nexus.
… Given this unfortunate reality, one could conclude that designated Christian intellectuals … may theorize all they want—it is a community of practice that counts in the end. … Many people—Evangelicals in particular—seem to have difficulty grasping that this is the point of MacIntyre’s oft-quoted passage from After Virtue in which he concludes that a new St. Benedict is needed to build a community of traditional moral discourse grounded in practice, discipline, and ritual. So strong is the Christian intellectuals’ taste for brilliant abstract formulations, helpfully prescriptive manifestoes (have you seen ours?), and a perpetual outpouring of books from InterVarsity Press, Baker, and Eerdmans (all summarily reviewed in First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture) that they fail to note what is the single most significant difference between, say, real oddities like Thomas More College (in Merrimack, NH) and the relatively mainstream Baylor and Wheaton. At Thomas More, like at a Benedictine monastery, students and faculty live, work, prepare meals, and eat together. Thomas More students are also responsible for housekeeping. This strikes me as a radical idea, a truly countercultural strategy that unfortunately stands little chance for enthusiastic approval in CCCU institutions. It is badly needed. At a certain Calvinist college proud of its commitment to Christian identity and cultural engagement, I have been told that the student dorms once became too filthy by the end of the term for staff to handle. The problem was resolved in the typically modern way: hire the Merry Maids! Is cleanliness next to godliness if you outsource for it?
… Unfortunately, there are numerous examples in the movement literature of a stubborn adherence to the Fisher/Stout method of cultural engagement. John Owen … takes up MacIntyre in the April issue of First Things. … Owen is … daunted by the image of ascesis that the “St. Benedict Option” conjures up. Fortunately for Owen and for the dual loyalty he imagines, his solution does not require us to follow the saint “all the way into the cloisters.”
… Given the spiritual weakness of a church within this trajectory, [Roger] Wilken argues that it is now “less urgent to convince the … culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.” In other words, the Church must relearn how to be a community of practice rather than an interest group marketing its wares along the road to “Yes!” Wilken concludes: “If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.”
I know nothing about either Wilken or Owen, but my guess is that Wilken is a Catholic who thinks orthopraxically and through the Mass whereas Owen is an Evangelical whose primary source of order and reflection—his tradition—is the mass of literature he cites. Owen’s primary commitment to the “conversation” leads him into all kinds of errors, including a strong tendency towards reductive (and erroneous) pigeonholing: Wendell Berry and Stanley Hauerwas become “left-wing” and are thus safely defined and dealt with exclusively in terms of “their place” in the conversation.
Wilken, by contrast, embraces a carnivalesque humanism. Putting it pointedly: Christian renewal means virtue and the cakes and ale. This truth about the Church is central to its transforming power and the one without which, no matter how many concessions are obtained at the negotiation table by self appointed Christian representatives, it will surely fail.
defensible borders
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/27 06:01 PM]
Would doing so amount to giving up on the culture in despair … or would it mean retreating behind defensible borders?
See, this is where I think we run into trouble, Rod. I expect you meant "retreating behind defensible borders" metaphorically (though we have joked about decamping to Lost Cove, TN), but just for the record, we should recognize a geographic retreat like that would be futile. Too many burned-out utopians precede us. And, if push came literally to shove, we certainly could not physically defend our borders.
The alternative is the kind of thing Evangelicals have been doing for a few decades, building a separate, parallel culture that offers an equivalent for every content-carrying product the diseased general culture provides (rock music, romance novels, news magazines, you name it). But most Christian households are porous, and their members use these "pure" sources in addition to, not instead of, the mainstream's offerings. Among Evangelicals there is a renewed sense that they need to quit the biodome and go back *into* the mainstream culture, and train to be responsible journalists, screenwriters, etc.
St. Benedict had the advantage of being a monk, and the kind of life he was able to build was founded on some very exacting principles that ordinary Crunchies are not likely to emulate. He *did* start with a geographic center. He attracted people who were willing to hold all things in common, and to be celibate. Well, already you've lost most readers of this list.
It would be different if the culture and its institutions were falling apart physically and economically, and the only safe place to live was behind monastery walls. Instead we're living in a culture that is debased and sordid, but quite strong, and able to provide a very high level of comfort to most members. The more comfort, the less self-discipline necessary to survival. Paradoxically, one thing St. Benedict had on his side was that the physical state of affairs was much more bleak.
Can we approximate his work while living as individuals, geographically scattered, holding property, and consuming mainstream content? I'm doubtful that you can build an alternative culture under such diffuse circumstances.
I think you can live a holy life, however. And in a local religious community (church, temple or synagogue) you can find and give support. And, guided by the lamp of the Permanent Things, become competent to discern how to safely navigate the common culture we must continue to inhabit. And hopefully children raised in such dedicated households will likewise be stable and discerning, though we cannot prevent heartbreaking contrary choices. Eventually we'll reach the point where Evangelicals now stand, of wanting to go back into the common culture and be an influence for good.
Faith must be reasonable
[Angelo Matera 03/27 05:46 PM]
Rod, in a time of “apostasy” it’s tempting to see sincerity and fervor, without thought or nuance, as the answer to weakness and relativism, but it’s not. Look at the Iraq war — lots of very sincere people trusted their patriotic instincts, and followed the president — a perfect example of unthinking sincerity — into a disaster.
A retreat to fundamentalism of any kind, whether Moslem or Christian, will not solve the crisis of faith. (Pope John Paul II addressed this issue in his encyclical Faith & Reason.)
That crisis can only be addressed by Christians (and others who believe in transcendent values) demonstrating, through their lives (and relying on grace) that genuine faith and real life are not only compatible, but each requires the other.
Christians cannot answer The Da Vinci Code by resorting to Left Behind, the two polarities we are often faced with in this country,
In a panel discussion on the one year anniversary of 9/11, Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, who directs the Catholic lay movement Communion & Liberation in the US, together with Salman Rushdie, diagnosed the “clash of civilizations” exemplified by 9/11 this way: Albacete: “The human vocation to the Infinite had been effectively suppressed by modern criticism and, instead of disappearing, it had struck back with a deadly force. The proper response, I suggested, was not further suppression of the religious instinct, but its adequate education by insistence on the requirements of reason and a humble respect for a non-syncretistic pluralism based on true religious liberty.”
Rushdie: "…In the end, our future depends on the encounter between religion, critical reasoning, and humility."
The situation is very good
[Caleb Stegall 03/27 05:29 PM]
Where do we go from here? That is really the question isn’t it. I spent some time talking about that and related questions in this interview from last year which I will crib from substantially below. Maybe some of the points raised will give some direction for our discussion this last week.
Starting from the Voeglenian premise that no one is obliged to participate in the disorders of his age, and in fact is obliged to resist them, the overwhelming moral sense I have when surveying the modern world is one of loss. A sense that what we have left behind in our affluence and mobility is a certain kind of Good that flourishes in rootedness and struggle — a way of being human that was always understood as the good life; a kind of self-provisioning that took place within a small network of interconnected social obligations, each to the other and all to a particular place, and to the customs and rites that naturally complimented that place. The spiritual order — both personal and social — of this good life is nourished on a veneration of children, work, craft, a sense of honor in commitments, and a common responsibility.
In place of this, we have been given the atomized individual, armed with a plethora of rights, making his way in a system of "opportunity" that requires the spiritual symbolization of society as a ladder to be climbed, which leaves a wake of personal disorder, the destruction of exploited people, places, and traditional communities, and loss of meaning on a massive scale.
It is true that liberalism — which is really the engine of modernism — as an ordering principle is tremendously powerful, and now has the inertia of centuries driving it forward still, but it has some significant weaknesses, chief among them that it lies. It lies about the human condition and it lies about the reality of natural limits embedded in reality. Human freedom and consumption simply cannot expand infinitely. Eventually, the structures supporting such expansion will give way, and it remains to be seen what, if any, civilizing forces will be left to bring order out of that chaos.
In the mean time, I think like Rod that we look to the wisdom of people like McIntyre and Eliot who urged that we turn aside from the project of shoring up modern liberalism, and begin to construct new enclaves of civility and order within which a true intellectual and moral life — the Good life — can be sustained. In time, this fertile soil will likely be the only source of order to "save the world from suicide," to borrow Eliot's phrase. Of course the Church is and should be the ideal and supernatural guardian of these enclaves.
The danger in this project is one of retreat and ghettoization which can easily occur in the context of the search for a satisfactory response to political and cultural liberalism. To some extent we are caught between the difficulties of assimilating with the dominant order on the one hand and on the other, acquiescing to being shunted aside into a kind of nature preserve for rubes and hold-outs — a ghetto; a facsimile habitat mimicking liberal society but with a Christian or “conservative” spin.
Often these responses happen at the same time in a community caught in this dilemma; it's happened most obviously to Christian evangelicals. Its leaders seek access to and are granted nominal positions of "influence" in secular society in exchange for keeping the rowdies on the reservation. The problem with this is that it cuts out the church's heart and replaces it with what sociologist Christian Smith has dubbed "therapeutic deism". Christianity becomes just another lifestyle choice complete with its own marketing departments, commercial backers, support "systems," and political interest groups. In this sense, late modern liberalism ghettoizes all identity — you really are what you eat, what you wear, what you consume. The discussion on this blog has illustrated this concept well.
When I talk about new enclaves of civility and culture, borrowing from thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre and T. S. Eliot, I think the point is that communities of tradition and practice need to be rebuilt along different non-liberal lines in a way that allows a real culture to flourish again. The church can never accept life on a reservation, but neither should it position itself to run what is already a decultured and post-Christian deformity — which is largely what late liberalism has become.
Instead of syncretism or retreat, the idea ought to be to learn — and it is a learning process — to live in love within the limits of one's existence. To suffer one's place and one's people — their joys and sorrows and history which weave a network of memory to which we belong — in service of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is the true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. And really this is the heart of what Christ and the Church Fathers teach us about Christian holiness: master one's passions, deny oneself, and love others. This is the Christian answer to the spirit of death which dwells in the old man, and which, in the increasing absence of Christian holiness, becomes writ large as a Culture of Death. I talk to a lot of Christians who are flummoxed by their relative lack of political success in beating back the culture of death, even at a time of supposed conservative ascendancy and the power of the "values" vote. Of course there are multiple reasons for this, but foremost in my mind is that it does no good to vote an anti-abortion ticket if in one's life and community there is no drive and discipline towards holiness.
When one lives as a modern — and we almost all do to one degree or another — he is implicated by nearly all the habits of his heart in the same culture of choice he believes he is voting against. When we fail to resist the symbolization of the modern world as a giant machine in which each part relates to all the others in a purely mechanical way, we give in to thinking in the most utilitarian way possible: how can I fulfill my needs and desires most efficiently? And the political question becomes: how can we configure the machine so that each part has the maximum freedom to pursue its own end as efficiently as possible, without interfering with the ends pursued by the other parts.
Society and work and even family and church become ladders to be climbed, and the central spiritual motifs of our time become mobility and choice, and the fruits of this are pretty apparent — massive dislocation, family breakup, the end of meaningful small town and rural life, center-city rot, the end of functional education, economic ruin of small producers and landholders, the devolution of political life into identity and victimization games, and on and on. The end result of which is a profound existential alienation in the soul of modern man; he is without a home.
And the pernicious logic of choice (which has a kind of weedy genius) in turn capitalizes on its own discontented and confused search for home and meaning by churning out a-hundred-and-one cheap and easy anecdotes. So we are awash in this expansive sea of popular mass culture which offers everything from Martha Stewart to easy birth control to empty entertainment to mega-lo-mart churches and discount-store religion. All of which functions to shield people from ever even approaching anything real: real faith, real truth, real meaning and contentment.
Certainly in the life of our family we have tried to figure out what to do, but there is no doubt that it is tremendously difficult to resist the disorders of the age. I think for starters, we need to clear our lives of all the mass culture weeds that choke out authentic growth. Read the classics and the Church Fathers instead of junk fiction and self-help crap. And then go about the hard work of learning the discipline of place. Get married. Have kids, lots of them. Don't turn them over to others to raise. When I finished law school I had offers to work at several large east coast law firms for twice the money I could make at home. But home was more important, so we stayed. Shortly after law school, my wife Ann and I, with our three boys (now five boys), moved to 18 acres outside of town. We try to grow some of our own food, Ann has homeschooled, we have a commitment to this place and these people that trumps most of the other things we could spend our life pursuing. It isn't perfect or anywhere near that, but it is, we hope, a decent resistance.
There is risk in all of this — commitment by its nature portends disaster. Inevitably either we fail the place or person or idea we are committed to or it will fail us. The “real” that we all crave requires real risk though. And in that crucible I think the terrible beauty and transcendent hope of the uncertain journey of faith in Jesus becomes real, and our souls become attuned to that reality.
And in the end we must always remember the spiritual truth that, as the playwright Andras Visky puts it, the situation is very good, it is hopeless.
Spengler, again
[Rod Dreher 03/27 05:03 PM]
The estimable Spengler is at it again, taking up in today’s column the Rahman apostasy case. Why am I bringing it up on the CC blog? Because Spengler appears to believe that once a culture turns its back on faith, it begins to die. Read these excerpts: Death everywhere and always is the penalty for apostasy, in Islam and every other faith. It cannot be otherwise, for faith is life and its abandonment is death. Americans should remove the beam from their own eye as they contemplate the gallows in the eye of the Muslims. Philistine hypocrisy pervades Western denunciations of the Afghan courts, which were threatening to hang Christian convert Abdul Rahman until the case was dropped on Monday.
Afghanistan, to be sure, is a tribal society whose encounter with the modern world inevitably will be a train wreck. The trouble is that the West has apostatized, and is killing itself. There turned out to be hope for Rahman, but there is none for Latvia or Ukraine, and little enough for Germany or Spain. That said, I wish to make clear that I found the persecution of Rahman deplorable.
[snip]
"Where are the moderate Muslims?" sigh the self-appointed Sybils of the Western media. Faith is life. What does it mean to be moderately alive? Find the "moderate Christians" and the "moderate Jews", and you will have the answer. "Moderate Christians" such as Episcopalian priests or Anglican vicars are becoming redundant as their congregations migrate to red-blooded evangelical denominations or give up religion altogether. "Moderate Jews" are mainly secular and tend to intermarry. There really is no such thing as a "moderate" Christian; there simply are Christians, and soon-to-be-ex-Christians. The secular establishment has awoken with sheer panic to this fact at last. In response we have such diatribes such as Kevin Phillips' new book American Theocracy, an amalgam of misunderstandings, myths and calumnies about the so-called religious right. I don’t think Spengler is saying that a culture must either apply the hammer to all heretics, or sign its death warrant. None of us wants to live in a culture that punishes those of minority faiths, or no faith at all. Is he saying, though, that it’s a law of nature that once a culture grants permission to apostasize without (serious) consequence, it has already started down a path to self-destruction? Is it possible, as he seems to allow for in his admiring discussion of the United States, for a culture to be both seriously religious, genuinely pluralistic, and thriving, not declining? Perhaps Spengler will write in to elaborate on his remarks, in which case I’ll post them to the CC blog.
Not THAT Tyler
[Rod Dreher 03/27 04:22 PM]
A New Orleans lawyer who ought to be out there suing FEMA instead of writing e-mails to me, says that “Fight Club” has a secret crunchy con history: Tyler Durden: Crunchy Con. Think about it – forsakes consumerism, moves into a blighted inner-city neighborhood where he lives simply, starts a movement then denies that it exists and that he’s its leader, goes to meetings where guys hug each other, lives outside the mainstream, is a loving paterfamilias who goes to church regularly. Oops, strike that last one.
Among all the Hank and Homer bidness, someone else must have noticed this, huh?
Now that I think about it, I think Brad Pitt was Tyler Durden. Don’t know Ed Norton’s character’s name.
Re: The St. Benedict Option
[Rod Dreher 03/27 04:03 PM]
Reader Tyler writes: In response to your question, "What would the St. Benedict option look like today?", I would say that several examples, some of which ha | |
