Heretics
[Rod Dreher  03/22 01:10 PM]

Reader Graeme, who thinks our Calvinist friend Caleb is Catholic, is just about ready to see NR give us the Gadarene swine treatment:

Lovely to see Caleb's obscurantism and disgust with the city of man asserting itself again.

As to the tragedy of what we lose with these farmers being dispossessed: what was lost was the power of entrenched providers to extract rents for inferior products from captive victims. To actually see improved nutrition as a negative goes further to show the bankruptcy and deep unattractiveness of this whole Crunchy experiment. The near total ignorance with respects to economics, economic history, the idea of of the corporation, etc is astonishing and tremendously disappointing.

You and yours are following the path of the Left. Complete ignorance of economics and a rejection of how people interact with each other to make each others lives better (otherwise known as markets), combined with a love for finding the heretic. Caleb is saying that anyone that supports or profits from development is unconservative. Excuse me while I proceed to have a heart attack. Your fellows are outing your movement as nothing more but a delusional neo-luddite cult committed to deindustrialization, the abandonment of any concern for material well being, and an inward turn towards only the spiritual. May you so ever pleasantly shove off and never be heard from again.

The absolute ignorance and disrespect for anyone who is not an orthodox catholic coming from Caleb, and the slightly less restrictive vision of Crunchiness as restricted to certain catholic and protestant sects expressed by the rest is exceptionally disgusting. Your intense parochialism and isolation from people of other religions is astounding. You make no attempts to at least acknowledge the (deeply misguided and misanthropic) people of Hindu backgrounds who support your policies in India (keeping the low castes poor, in the village, and subservient to their hereditary masters, all in the name of tradition!). Or, in better cases, to try and not make arguments that exclude anyone who is not a Christian. Quoting people that are arguing for a society with much stronger links to religion, and using people who only discuss it in terms of accepting Christ, is an exceptionally bad idea if one does not want to be called a theocrat. If Caleb and yourself were serious about simply encouraging a stronger turn to the spiritual, it would be the work of but seconds to find appropriate quotes in Judaic, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu, Bahai and other traditions. It is not your comfort zone, but when arguing for an idea that appears to be prima facie theocratic, one is required to demonstrate how their ideas can be open and attractive to all, rather than prescriptive.

You need to vigorously deal with Caleb and to really consider how the rest of the group's arguments (including your own) would appear to others who do not share your tradition. Caleb is a completely lost cause pursuing his crusade against everything that is not his own specific sect that has him living in Kansas and making a living off the back of progress, but you really need to consider how this entire thing looks to other people. I'm Lutheran, but my friends include serious Jews, Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Catholics, Anglicans, Buddhists, etc. Most of the above are conservative in their politics, their parents definitely being so, and to see a group of people arguing about how so many of these Christian sects are unconservative and how you need to understand Christ in a certain way to be conservative, well, it just screams BAD IDEA!

I seriously hope that you deal with the problems of your bog, before it becomes imperative on others to have NR take care of it and of you. I'm not one for calling for a witch-hunt and casting out heretics, but if the blog continues like this, well...