Writing from Czechia, after an evening with the family of Vaclav Benda:
At one point, we were talking about the atmosphere of militant progressivism in the West, and how hard it is for Czechs to understand what’s happening in American universities. One of the Benda family friends, an academic, asked me if I had heard of Jordan B. Peterson. Yes, of course, I said.
“He is a miracle!” said this man.
Someone present explained that under communism, underground Christians looked with admiration to the West. But now they see so much decadence in the West, and don’t want it ….
UPDATE:
More:
I keep having a slightly unnerving experience here, both in Hungary and the Czech Republic. People cannot understand the insanity coming from America, the UK, and the EU on LGBT and gender theory. It is literally incomprehensible to them. Just this morning I was talking to a seminary professor of moral theology who said that his thesis on alternative sexualities was laughed at; his colleagues could not believe that anyone would take this stuff seriously. This professor is no advocate for alternative sexualities, but he had lived and taught in the West, and he knows they are going to have to be dealing with this stuff here sooner or later.
I keep telling the people I talk to about this that they should not simply laugh this stuff off as incomprehensible. Several agreed with me that 40 years of communism served as a vaccination against susceptibility to ideological extremism, and that this might be why even atheists (most Czechs are atheists) find the gender theory types to be crackpots. But then, if you had told a lot of Americans in 1998 what would be mainstream in our country on this front in 2018, they would have laughed like the Czechs and the Hungarians laughed. But now look.
(Another Dreher blog installment)
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It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.
A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.
(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 