Potpourri 11/27/18

1

An obese man wants to lose weight. He hires a personal trainer and a nutritionist and informs them he wants to go from 300 pounds to 200. “I am willing to diet and exercise,” he tells them earnestly. The obese man purchases an expensive program with the personal trainer, whom he sees five days a week. The nutritionist advises the obese man on meal plans, and he begins eating grains for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and lean white meat and vegetables for dinner. He jogs a mile every morning, then works with his trainer at the gym for ninety minutes.

Three months pass and the man has lost no weight. The nutritionist inquires about his eating habits, and the man says he has eaten exactly what she told him to eat.

“Are you eating anything besides what I told you to eat?”

The man replies, “Before bed, I’ll have pizza, cake and ice cream, and a few Russian imperial stouts.”

The nutritionist asks, “Is that the only time you eat that kind of food?”

The man replies, “It’s typically what I eat on weekends. Monday through Friday, though, from breakfast till dinner, I keep the diet and do the exercise.”

Of course, merely keeping a diet for eight hours a day, five days a week, will not be sufficient to improve a man’s health. Neither will a classical education do much good if it is only kept on weekdays during business hours. It is possible for a man to undo his daily diet every night before bed, and it is likewise possible for everything that happens between 8am and 3pm at school to be erased at home between 3pm and bedtime.

If classical education were mainly concerned with students knowing what is right, then whatever took place in the life of the student between 3pm and bedtime would not matter so much. For all their faults, video games, pop music, and social media are not likely to scrub the memory. However, a classical education is more concerned with loving what is right than merely knowing it ….

Joshua Gibbs, A Classical Education Demands A Classical Home.

2

In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether. I don’t know whether Stephen Spender is right in asserting that “prayer corresponded to his deepest need”—I suspect that his deepest need was simply to write verses—but I am reasonably sure that his sanity, the great good sense that illuminated all his prose writings (his essays and book reviews), was due in no small measure to the protective shield of orthodoxy.

Hannah Arendt, writing about W.H. Auden.

3

I texted over the weekend with a European friend with whom I had not been in touch for a couple of decades. Over the course of our conversation, I revealed to him that since we had last been in touch, I had left Catholicism. He said he had too. It turns out that a kid he had once been an altar boy with told him that Father had molested him back then. My friend said it was “just dumb luck” that he wasn’t attacked also. He has learned, as have we all, that rapey Father was not unusual, and that bishops have known about dirty priests like him for a long time, and done little or nothing about it. My friend couldn’t take any of it seriously after that. He told me that he misses certain things, but that he is not going to take his young sons into the Church, as he regards the Catholic priesthood as “a refuge for homosexuals and child molesters.”

…

Now, you can regard that European man as a fool if you like, but the fact is that the Catholic faith, which has been faithfully handed down in his family from time immemorial, stops with his generation, and may never again be known among his line ….

Rod Dreher.

4

I’ve never been one for name-dropping, but … Wess Stafford.

It seemed at one point as if everybody in my former Evangelical circles knew who he was, but the irony is that I didn’t — though I’d gone to school with him, graduating with him, in a very small school (i.e., graduating class of about 60).

Wess Stafford arrived at Wheaton Academy during the blizzard of ’67 hopeless, alone, and angry. The way he saw it, he had two choices – run away or end it all. Today, when asked, Dr. Stafford would tell you that what followed was a transformation so powerful that he now refers to his life as “before Wheaton Academy and after Wheaton Academy!”

(Wheaton Academy Giving Tuesday email)

That’s all true. I know Wess now and we’re on first-name basis. But I didn’t know him then because his arrival was the beginning of our last semester, and he quickly learned that his education (beginning on the African mission field) to that point had been woefully inadequate. (Things that had happened to him — hint: see item 3 — didn’t help matters any.) He was going to have to study like mad to begin to catch up, and though he had hoped to outrun our track coach, Gil Dodds, athletics weren’t going to fit into his schedule, which left little time for anything but intense study.

He did what he had to do and went on to become famous for his charity work.

So, his slipping into our stream at the last minute and then having to bury himself in his room and in the library is my excuse for not remembering him.

The world is full of interesting stories. I hope this was one.

5

For what it’s worth, I have zero indignation about the woman in Mississippi, running for public office, who said “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be right there in the front row.” (Or something like that.)

The reporting has been free of all context except that she’s white, her opponent is black, she attended a private school that was segregated, and it is, above all, Mississippi (wink, wink, home of deplorables).

I have no sympathy with racism, but the remark, without context, is susceptible of non-racist interpretations, and I’m sick of the game of “Gotcha!,” where the press helps gin up the “controversy.” The press failure to provide more context leaves me very, very suspicious that they’re just trying to keep our rapt attention.

6

It’s so great that we have a very stable genius businessman for President!

When GM announced that it was cutting 15,000 jobs, our very stable genius businessman/President said he wasn’t happy about it (his happiness is the measure of all things) and they should try making something that people will buy.

Why didn’t GM think of that? Duh!

MAGA!

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Jonathan Chau

There’s a fair amount of buzz about the death of American Jonathan Chau at the hands of Sentinelese islanders near India. Here’s the New York Times, for instance.

A secularist blogger at Patheos seized the opportunity to mock and vilify Christians, some (perhaps many) of whom are calling Chau a “martyr.” One group even wants the Sentinelese killers prosecuted. (That group is laser-focused on persecution of Christian around the world, so it has an incentive to see every Christian’s violent death as a persecution.)

Here’s my own initial and limited take.

There is no inconsistency between (1) recognizing the illegality and foolhardiness of Chau’s effort and (2) acknowledging him as a martyr because he was trying to preach the Gospel.

But I personally do not call Chau a Christian martyr because he is in almost every way not worthy of emulation:

He was not in communion with the Orthodox Church, but rather with a group multiple schisms removed from it — a group I might even think heretical if I knew more about it than the debased label “Christian.” That he graduated from Oral Roberts University is no reassurance.
He was deliberately violating a reasonable law that was not enacted to prevent evangelization of the Sentinelese. (That’s setting aside any question about what it was intended to do.)
He was, from what I’ve read, totally unprepared actually to evangelize the Sentinelese; he didn’t know their language and he had no training to master languages from scratch. I’m not even sure that he was any kind of commissioned missionary (versus an enthusiastic world traveler).
He was, frankly, grandstanding. Whatever else he was doing, he was doing that. (I might be dissuaded on this point.)
The Sentinelese killed him for his invasion of their island, not for his faith.

In short, I see his letters home as a sort of “hold my beer (and don’t call the Coast Guard) while I go through the motions of declaring Jesus to these folks who won’t understand me and who I can’t understand. And tell Mom I love her.”

God is merciful and loves mankind, so I still can hope for a blessed repose for this foolish and willful young man.

UPDATE 11/29/18: I have just learned that Chau did have some preparation, including linguistic training, vaccinations and quarantine, and was commissioned as a missionary. I need to acknowledge that in light of my third and fourth points and my snarky summary—all based on what I knew or had reason to know at the time I wrote them.

If you want to understand what might motivate a young man to take a very high risk with his life (and his freedom if caught by legal authorities), Ed Stetzer’s “Acts of Faith” item in the Washington Post would be good to read.

UPDATE 2 (reaching this group was a long obsession of Chao, and the missionary agency boot camp was oriented to that, making the mission agency complicit in the illegality).

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More clippings, 11/24/18

1

“I can virtually guarantee you that if Hillary Clinton had won the White House, you would not see these same law firms filing numerous lawsuits against her administration in the name of the rule of law,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation ….

Annie Coreal, New York Times. Yes, Big Law’s motives in challenging Trump on immigration are mixed, but “defending the rule of law” is part of the mix.

2

Alan Jacobs is going to write a book about the importance of reading old books, but Ben Sasse probably won’t read it. I may.

3

[F]or all the people who are exasperated by Friston’s impenetrability, there are nearly as many who feel he has unlocked something huge, an idea every bit as expansive as Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Shaun Raviv, The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI (Wired)

Does this mean “circular, but evocative”?

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Clippings, 11/24/18

1

This first item is more than just a clipping. So sue me.

The U.S. Government’s own list of terrorist attacks since 2001 shows a dramatic drop in the violence carried out by Iran and an accompanying surge in horrific acts by radical Sunni Muslims who are not aligned with Iran.
The last major terrorist attack causing casualties that is linked to Iran was the July 2012 bombing of a bus with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, retaliation for what Iran perceived to be Israel’s role in assassinating five Iranian scientists involved with Iran’s Nuclear program, between January 2010 and January 2012.
The U.S.-led 2003 war in Iraq played a critical role in Iran’s resurgence as a regional power.

Intel Vets Tell Trump Iran Is Not Top Terror Sponsor.

[A]s I have observed before, the red hazard light that continues to be blinking most brightly relates to Washington’s relationship with Iran, which has unnecessarily deteriorated dramatically over the past year and which brings with it collateral problems with Russia and Turkey that could trigger a much wider conflict. I say unnecessarily because all the steps taken to poison the relationship have come out of Washington, not Tehran. The Trump administration refused to certify that the Iranians had been in compliance with the nuclear agreement negotiated in 2015 and has since escalated its verbal attacks, mostly at the United Nations, claiming that the regime in Tehran is the major source of terrorism in the world and that it is seeking hegemony over a broad arc of countries running westward from its borders to the Mediterranean Sea.

Philip Giraldi, Who Are the Leading State Sponsors of Terrorism?

John Bolton is bound and determined to wage war on Iran. I’d bet a bundle on it happening.

2

To secular and leftist Europeans, Hungary’s Fundamental Law came as a shock. The preamble set the tone—it is the opening line of the Hungarian National Hymn (anthem): “God, bless the Hungarians.” That was already too much for The Guardian. A writer for that left-wing British newspaper noted that the new constitution’s “preamble is heavily influenced by the Christian faith and commits Hungary to a whole new set of values, such as family, nation, fidelity, faith, love and labour.” It was enough to point this out: further criticism would apparently have been superfluous.

…

Equally against the European grain were provisions of the Fundamental Law such as these: “We avow that the family and the nation constitute the most important framework of our coexistence”; “The life of the offspring shall be protected from the moment of conception”; “Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.” This last, in particular, was subjected to almost universal condemnation, expressed in the language of hatred and rage.

Lee Congdon, Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian Resistance (Modern Age, Fall 2018)

I am mindful of this every time I read the New York Times writing of Orban being “far-right.”

3

[W]riting off an ocean of rural and Rust Belt red is a terrible strategy in the long term. If the Democrats want to win and keep winning, with a mandate to put their policies into effect, they need to face four hard truths.

1 Demography Is Not Destiny
“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”

Joan C. Williams, The Democrats’ White-People Problem (Atlantic, December 2018) (Italics added).

4

We may be witnessing another voter realignment. When I was young, the Republicans were the party of the elite, and the Democrats were the party of the working class. It seems that now the Republicans are the party of the white working class, and the Democrats are the party of the wealthy and educated. Democrats have decided to go after those elite voters and have done so in ways that have made them less attractive to working class whites. It remains to be seen if this realignment is temporary, or whether we are at the beginning of a larger migration of elite whites to the Democrats and working class whites to the Republicans. But the recent midterm elections seem to have strengthened this switch.

… [M]oney is not everything. After all how would you feel about a political party that offers you higher wages but talks about you as a “deplorable?” You probably would not see that party as looking out for your best interest. But this sort of attitude plays well among the educated elite. So to become palatable to white elites Democrats have acted in ways that have made their party more alienating to the white middle class.

… I remember watching a Beto/Cruz debate a few weeks ago. The debate moved to the topic of gun control. And right on cue, Beto whipped out one of the favorite talking points of highly educated whites that we need to do more than give gun victims “thoughts and prayers.” At that point I knew that Beto did not have what it took to cut into the hold Cruz had on the lower class white voter and in a state with a lot of small towns filled with such voters that Cruz was likely to win.

… The real irony of that was Beto was trying to run a campaign of inclusiveness across racial, economic and even political lines. Yet, he could not quite leave out this little bit of snark.

George Yancey

5

Washington think tanks are undergoing a fundamental evolution. A lot of them, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, were built to advise parties that no longer exist. They were built for a style of public debate — based on social science evidence and congressional hearings that are more than just show trials — that no longer exists. Many people at these places have discovered that they have more in common with one another than they do with the extremists on their own sides.

So suddenly there is a flurry of working together across ideological lines. Next week, for example, the group Opportunity America, with Brookings and A.E.I., will release a bipartisan agenda called “Work, Skills, Community: Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

…

One of the core questions before us is this: Who is going to lead this country? Is it perpetual outsiders like Trump, with no governing or policy competence, who say the establishments have forfeited all credibility? Or are there enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways?

I don’t know about you, I’ll take a chastened establishment any day.

David Brooks, The Return of the Chastened Establishment (The Opportunity America link is a 136-page PDF download.)

6

But politics isn’t just a seething cauldron of unmanageable and frightening shifts and realignments. There’s also the tacit requirement that politicians prattle on demand about anything and everything. F’rinstance:

“He shot from the hip with a sledgehammer instead of using a scalpel.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, on … oh, what does it matter anyway? She was prattling about something. (via George Will).

7

My periodic reminder that “more conservative than other major newspapers” does not mean that it gets religion:

Deep down, however, beneath the trappings of food, family and often-forgettable football games, Thanksgiving is really a management story. It’s a case study in how extraordinary leaders build happy, productive teams.

Sam Walker, Wall Street Journal

8

Wealth, she said in a 1983 interview with Parade magazine, was “sort of like having good looks: It’s not something you’ve earned, but you don’t go out and scar your face, either.”

Carolyn Rose Hunt via the Wall Street Journal (which does more or less “get” money).

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Wisdom from (or via) R.R. Reno

The December First Things has arrived, and R.R. Reno is worth the cost again after a few months left me wondering if I would renew.

Back in the day, we had race hucksters like Jesse Jackson, monetizing their internships as activists or community organizers.

Nowadays, we have rage hucksters, from Steve Bannon on the fairly far right to Sarah Jeong and one Alexis Grenell on the fairly far left:

In the aftermath of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, the New York Times published an opinion essay that was strangely crude and sophisticated at the same time: “White Women, Come Get Your People.” On the surface it runs on raw invective. The author, Alexis Grenell, denounces the female Republican senators who voted to confirm Kavanaugh as gender traitors …

Alexis Grenell is a white woman who received her BA from the University of Chicago and her master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She worked on progressive campaigns and recently established a public relations firm, Pythia Public. This is the standard path for political activists, campaign operatives, and media personalities, on both the left and the right. They throw themselves into politics, and then, after gaining experience, they “monetize” their influence and contacts by working for a public relations or lobbying firm. Grenell shows herself a real go-getter, having founded a firm of her own.

…

As Andrew Breitbart demonstrated, the rage trade is where real money can be made these days …

Rage on the right tends to be satisfied with attacks on liberals as inconsistent, stupid, or hypocritical. It often seems sated when ostentatious violations of political correctness arouse liberal responses. The tone of right-leaning flamethrowers turns more toward mockery than indignation. Progressive rage is more earnest, more serious. Attacking others as racists and “gender traitors” amounts to an assassination attempt—not in a literal sense of trying to kill them, but of killing their social standing and ruining their careers. Accusations of this sort are meant to disqualify someone from public life. A racist is not to be argued with. He needs to be cleansed from our body politic.

…

A thirty-something progressive activist like Alexis Grenell is climbing the ladder in the political-media-corporate complex. As she does so, she can be confident that her rhetorical extremism will not cost her anything among the elite-educated people who call the shots, which is why the New York Times could publish her furious invective without worrying that a line was being crossed …

Alexis Grenell has incentives that will draw her into the progressive political-corporate establishment, neutering anything genuinely radical about her projects. Her rage will be marketed and consumed. She’ll play a scripted role as a “progressive voice” who gives legitimacy to the rich and powerful who “listen.”

R.R. Reno

From the beginning I adopted a skeptical attitude toward the elite outrage over our crude and demotic president. The Great and the Good deride him as beneath the office and unworthy of the role for which they imagine one of their rank better suited. The warm embrace [the American Enterprise Institute] has given to the newly born Giselle Donnelly, transgender exhibitionist with a taste for BDSM sex, shows how ridiculous that line has always been. Our leadership class accommodates itself to mental illness and allows itself to be conscripted into private fantasies. They’re the ones unfit to rule.

R.R. Reno.

He has a point.

Robert Mariani makes an astute observation about political correctness as a marker of social class. “We learn at college that ‘people of color’ is the proper designation for non-whites and that ‘LGBTQA+’ is the proper acronym for the broader gay community. This is the twenty-first-century version of knowing which fork to use when navigating a multi-course meal.” He continues, “Pride Month, which comes every June, is a new sort of Eastertide, complete with passion-plays about LGBT history. Trillion-dollar corporations trip over each other to indicate adherence to the queer, borderless creed. Their otherwise shameful power is sanitized.”

R.R. Reno.

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Potpourri, 11/20/18

Wherever there is trauma, there has been betrayal, an abuse of authority, a moral injury.

… People who have suffered a trauma — whether it’s a sexual assault at work or repeated beatings at home — find that their identity formation has been interrupted and fragmented. Time doesn’t flow from one day to the next but circles backward to the bad event.

…

As a culture we’re pretty bad at dealing with moral injury. Sometimes I look at the rising suicide and depression rates, the rising fragility and distrust, and I think it all flows from the fact that we’ve made our culture a spiritual void. When you privatize morality and denude the public square of spiritual content, you’ve robbed people of the community resources they need to process moral pain together.

David Brooks

Like any other news and information site, Church Militant and LifeSite News are rightly subject to fair criticism when they overstep morally and journalistically responsible bounds. But I’ll tell you this: the reason these outlets have such a readership is that they are doing what the mainstream media has for many years refused to do: report on a key aspect of the abuse scandal that offends liberal prior commitments.

Rod Dreher, commenting on an NBC online hit piece:

Corky Siemaszko approaches the Catholic gay conflict issue as a cause, not a news subject. Do his editors at NBC News even care? Are they even capable of seeing that there is a problem of news judgment here?

An instructive pattern emerges:

When Gospel Coalition people opine on LGBT issues and celibate Evangelicals respond, the latter almost always strike me as more deeply Christian than the former. Here and here, for instance. Ditto when the celibate Evangelicals start it.

“Sovereign Citizens” may be the tin-hattiest of the tin-hatters.

Companies are forever wanting to do “team-building,” but everything about the woke workplace compels those with any common sense to consider everyone around them a potential threat.

Rod Dreher.

Corporatizing the revolution has been rapid and consequential. Dreher is starting a “Woke Workplace” series with reader input.

Ingenious: Divide States to Democratize the Senate:

Article IV providesthat “new States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union”—including from the territory of an existing state, if
its legislature consents. Five states were created in this manner: Vermont from New York (1791), Kentucky from Virginia (1792), Tennessee from North Carolina (1796), Maine from Massachusetts (1820) and West Virginia from Virginia (1863).

Drawing on that tradition, a Democracy Restoration Act could grant blanket consent to populous but underrepresented states to go forth and multiply to restore the Senate’s democratic legitimacy.

It responds to a plausible concern about a founding decision that threatens to become unsustainable.

But is the response a plan, or a taunt?

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Mélange 11/17/18

1

To maintain its large membership base, the ACLU recruited new members by directing mass mailings to mailing lists rented from a broad range of liberal groups. The result of the shift of the ACLU to a mass membership organization was that it gradually transformed itself from a civil libertarian organization into a liberal organization with an interest in civil liberties …

… With the election of Donald Trump, its membership rolls have grown to almost two million, almost all of them liberal politically, few of whom are devoted to civil liberties as such. Meanwhile, the left in general has become less interested in, and in some cases opposed to, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the rights of the accused.

Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.

First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association …

Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due proess protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”

The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.

David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy blog

I’m glad he said it since I lack the high status to command respect. And I’m glad he cited specific proof.

ACLU no longer cares about civil liberties and SPLC primarily cares about labeling its adversaries “haters.” We’re in a fine mess.

2

Insider sources have reportedly confirmed to the Washington Post that Assange has been charged. Because those charges are sealed, it’s impossible to know what they are or how they’re being justified. If you ask #Resistance Twitter, it’s because it’s #MuellerTime and Assange is about to be arrested under some mysterious charges involving WikiLeaks’ publication of non-government, non-classified emails in 2016. If you ask QAnon cultists, it’s because Donald Trump is planning to extradite Assange so as to rescue him and deal a fatal blow to the Deep State. If you ask people who actually know what they’re talking about, however, it’s most likely for WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and/or last year’s CIA leak publications, and most likely using the Espionage Act. This would constitute a deadly blow to press freedoms, and arguably a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act.

It also proves once again that Julian Assange was completely right.

Caitlin Johnstone

3

In ancient Egypt there lived a wise king named Thamus. One day he was visited by a clever god called Theuth.

Theuth was an inventor of many useful things: arithmetic and geometry; astronomy and dice. But his greatest discovery, so he believed, “was the use of letters.” And it was this invention that Theuth was most eager to share with King Thamus.

The art of writing, Theuth said, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”

But Thamus rebuffed him. “O most ingenious Theuth,” he said, “the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.”

The king continued: “For this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves.”

Written words, Thamus concluded, “give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things but will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Welcome to Facebook ….

Bret Stephens

4

They changed the world to sand, and now find it slipping through their fingers.

Jonathan Pageau, who spoke for a whole half hour as Jordan Peterson sat listening. Those two have made some kind of intuitive connection over cognate insights about “logos.”

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The Very Structure of Reality©

Rod Dreher blogged Friday about a young, mentally ill woman down under who is interrupting her “transition” to “male” (breasts gone, but they didn’t get the uterus soon enough I guess) with a pregnancy. I wouldn’t comment on it except for this:

Why should this matter so much to Christians? Because our religion is incarnational. Traditional Christian teachings says that matter matters. Matter has implicit meaning. The divine logos is embedded in Creation, and finds its most complete expression in the Incarnation of God Himself in the form of a man, Jesus Christ. Because of the Incarnation, we cannot separate the body from God. The human body is part of the meaningful cosmos …

This is why the battle against the body is a cosmological war. Most Christians in the West today, having fully absorbed nominalism, don’t understand that. Once, in a conversation with a group of Christians about LGBT issues, one frustrated participant said, “When can we stop talking about this and get back to talking about the Gospel?!” As if the Gospel were somehow separate from the body, and from creation itself! For her, no doubt, the whole of Christianity was about assenting to a proposition (“accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior”) and rearranging one’s emotions. But that’s a counterfeit Christianity. You sever the connection between the Bible and the body, the metaphysical link between God and Creation ….

That brought back to mind two perennial errors or heresies that seem to me to be related: gnosticism and nominalism.

Gnostic because the body doesn’t really matter. Nominalist because the body-that-doesn’t matter is sexed arbitrarily. I regret that my auto-didacticism hasn’t carried me far enough to permit elaboration on the connection.

Rod continues to have some of the smartest comments on the internet, partly because this tireless man moderates them carefully. Comments to this particular blog ranged fairly far afield, but I found these particularly perceptive or informative:

Really, do what you like to yourself; and if you want to chop your breasts off then somehow still “chest feed” your kid… good luck to you. And especially the kid. And all the therapy both will require down the line.

But don’t include me in this. Don’t require me to support your personal beliefs or delusions. I’m not religious, but if I was, this would be like me saying, “You not only have to respect my belief in God, you must also believe in God as I define him because you need to affirm my reality.”

I am not interested in affirming anyone’s reality. Affirm your own damned reality. And if that sends the LGBQWERTY crowd to the fainting couch or worse, it isn’t my problem. I do not exist to validate anyone’s view of him, her or “them”self.

(kgasmart) That one got a lot of endorsements.

The “Experts” (and boy do I use that term loosely) merely do what “Experts” have done through the ages, and that’s make sure the evidence fits the desires of those who get invited to all the best palace parties.

(Dave Griffey) Much truth, distilled. See these experts, for instance.

McCormick47 says:

November 16, 2018 at 11:17 am

Just a question, when you say “our radically individualist society…is allowing her to bring a baby into the world” how do propose stopping her? Mandatory abortion, forced sterilization for the mentally ill?

As civilized people, we don’t take children away from their parents without some substantial evidence that the children are being abused (unless they’re brown children who can’t prove their citizenship). Is the state supposed to assume the child is being abused because of her illness, or because she’s transgender?

How then does society disallow her?

Others commented later that society should forbid surgeons to mutilate bodies in the way they’re mutilated in surgical “transitions.”

Hmmm says:

November 16, 2018 at 11:59 am

We (traditionalist Christians included) need to find a way of opposing the celebration of these things in ways that are not explicitly religious. Otherwise the entire opposition will simply be branded as retrograde Bible-thumpers. I understand the need to bear witness and be honest and open about one’s faith. But outside of intra-Christian discussions, I think calling upon St. Paul and Biblical anthropology and so on as the basis for “gender” sanity will only be counter-productive.

Fair enough, but a starting point, surely, is getting Christian heads on straighter. Rod does preface the comment I found important with “Why should this matter so much to Christians?” as he throws down the gauntlet about counterfeit Christianity.

Rusty Shackleford says:

November 16, 2018 at 12:00 pm

I used to be a seventh grade teacher. I’ve observed what your Baltimore interviewee has experienced.

We’ve built a society that is pushing all of those kids mentioned (I’ll bet it’s at least 80% girls) to classify themselves as bi.

Children have been told that they are sexual beings – that sexual exploration is a wonderful thing and that it is how they find their true selves. Their music and Netflix shows and snapchat celebs celebrate it. But what these kids see in the media about how freeing sex is doesn’t conform to their daily life. What do 13 year old girls see when they look around? 13 year old boys.

We know know that girls mature faster than boys physically, mentally, and emotionally. A 13 year old girl (let’s call her Anna) sees her male peers and is repulsed – they stink, they’re hooked on video games and cartoons (and probably porn), and show no interest in anything of meaning. However, Anna has been told that she is a sexual being (at 13) and should be exploring her sexuality. The problem must not be with the boys (she thinks) – it must be with her. She must be either bi or a lesbian. (In the past 3 years, transgender has also become an option for her if she isn’t a stereotypical “girly-girl”.) All of this because she finds 13 year old boys repulsive – which she should!

Meanwhile, we’ve pathologized same sex friendships to the extent that if Anna has a deep connection with another girl, the only vocabulary she has to express it is either romantic or sexual.

Middle Schools in deep, deep red areas have Gay-Straight Alliance groups (though they’re only publicly referred to as GSA when parents peruse the school website). Parents complain about normalizing homosexuality when the biggest issue is that we’ve sexualized middle school. Anna ought to be learning the clarinet and reading about the Battle of Shiloh and playing volleyball. Instead, she’s on Snapchat all day, receiving harassing messages from her male classmates to “send nudes”, and is preoccupied with who she is or isn’t attracted to.

(Emphasis added) What would we do without perceptive teachers?

Lori [expanding on Randy Shackleford] says:

November 16, 2018 at 12:57 pm

“We know know that girls mature faster than boys physically, mentally, and emotionally. A 13 year old girl (let’s call her Anna) sees her male peers and is repulsed – they stink, they’re hooked on video games and cartoons (and probably porn), and show no interest in anything of meaning. However, Anna has been told that she is a sexual being (at 13) and should be exploring her sexuality. The problem must not be with the boys (she thinks) – it must be with her. She must be either bi or a lesbian.”

I think it’s worse than that. I have seen numerous accounts by young women who “realized” they were either lesbian/bi or asexual when they watched porn or received an unsolicited picture of male genitalia and felt repulsed. They truly believe their revulsion at what not only does but should cause revulsion in most women means they are not heterosexual, because they think that women should be turned on by porn or by looking at some guy’s junk. We have made porn the norm and what used to be the norm (women being repulsed by porn, women refusing sex outside of a committed relationship) into something weird and other.

Along with the crazy-high numbers of teens identifying as bi (especially, as you note, among girls–not being bi is in and of itself evidence of being a bigot in some circles of girls at this point), we also have huge and growing numbers of teens identifying as asexual. Because we are telling them that normal sexuality means that you desire sex with any hot person you see. We are telling them that if you actually only want sex within a committed, loving relationship, you are a “demisexual” (it’s an actual word and they actually believe this, that only desiring sex within a relationship makes you only kinda sexual). “Demisexual” bothers me more than maybe any other label, because it’s taking what is for many if not most women the norm–only wanting sex with somebody you care about who cares about you–and making it some sort of minority sexuality.

It’s all madness. What we are doing to this generation of young people is cruel and exploitative and disgusting. We are feeding them lies not just about the world but about who they are fundamentally.

(Emphasis added) Sigh.Kids watching porn and sharing crotch shots.

“Demisexual” is a term I’d not heard before, and its meaning, sadly, is congruent with Lori’s description.

Anne B says: November 16, 2018 at 1:07 pm

My 13 year old daughter tells me that, while it used to be that coming out as bi was a sign of being progressive and open minded, as of this month, bis are getting the stink eye. You see the prefix “bi” means two, implying that there are only two genders, which the kids have now noticed is transphobic. So now there is pressure on the bis to relabel themselves as pansexual. Or to admit to being bigots who only like cisfemales and cismales and not the other genders.

You probably think I’m joking, but no. Apparently it’s all over YouTube.

Kent says:

November 16, 2018 at 2:00 pm

“Three months after our conversation, that woman’s daughter came home from high school with the news that she is really a boy, and demanding that her family treat her as such.”

In my household, I’d immediately send little Susie out to mow the yard. Then she’d be helping my rotate my tires, followed by dirt bike racing.

By the next morning, she’d be little Susie again.

Lori says:

November 16, 2018 at 2:27 pm

This woman is 22 years old.

I guarantee you that if she were a young Christian woman still in school (as this woman is) married to a young Christian man who was expecting her first baby with excitement, many of the same outlets and people cheering this as amazing would be talking about how the Christian woman was ruining her life and wasting her potential and stupid for not waiting another 10 years or so. That is how crazy things have become. What would have been commonplace 40 or 50 years ago (a married 22 year old having a baby) is seen as something shameful while something unthinkable even 10 years ago is celebrated.

Sad, but I fear it’s true.

Turmarion says:

November 16, 2018 at 4:21 pm

…

A lot of socons want to use the Very Structure of Reality© argument against various LGBT issues, which is fine, if they want to go there. However, I assert that the underlying logic of those arguments doesn’t stop with LGBT issues, but also has logical implications for straight gender relations–e.g. discouraging women from higher education or working outside the house, restricting the areas of society in which women’s participation is considered appropriate, etc. I contend that these socans are reluctant–or outright refuse–to follow the logic of their own professed arguments. Matt says that gay male sexuality is a mess, and it ought to be cleaned up; and he’s honest enough to say that the only way to do so might logically imply things that would mess up his own life; and that therefore he’s not willing actually to do that. Which I can respect–my favorite Whitman quote is, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then; I contradict myself.”

Some commenters here in the past actually have argued for the logic of women staying out of the workforce, prioritizing children over careers, etc., and while I wouldn’t agree with them on much, I can respect the integrity of the argument, and if they and their wives follow such a plan, I can respect that they walk the walk, even if it’s not something I’d like to walk.

So it would be nice if every once in awhile Rod or some of the others would say, “You know, the model of gender roles I support would, if I were totally consistent, imply things for my wife and daughter that I actually wouldn’t want for them; and that’s inconsistent; and thus I either need to change what I want for them, or I have to admit that I’m inconsistent, own that, and live with it.”

….

Turmarion says:

November 16, 2018 at 4:30 pm

At the risk of running my mouth too much, this is another problem, which I haven’t discussed before, of the cosmic, Very Structure of Reality© arguments that socons make. In the past, I’ve argued that such arguments are way over-intellectual, unlikely to be understood by almost anyone, and not obviously true even to those who do understand them, but who think they are in error. I still maintain this.

However, let’s say, arguendo, that such arguments are actually right. They still fail, because they don’t give consistent results. In short, the exponents of such arguments disagree as to the actual concrete actions that should follow from such arguments.

For example, let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that it is correct that, on the basis of cosmic metaphysical principles, that gay sex is morally wrong by its very nature. Fine. The problem comes when you ask several people that agree on that what comes next. A says, “This is why we need to revive anti-sodomy law, chase gays out of the public square, and bring back the closet”. B says, “No, that’s cruel. What we need to do is emphasize gay conversion therapy.” C says, “No, no, that doesn’t work. What we need to do is convince gays to lead chase lives.” None of them, of course, ever says anything about the corollaries of the Very Structure of Reality© arguments for straight people.

So if metaphysical arguments can’t give us any idea as to what we should actually, you know, do, then what the heck good are they, anyway?

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Social collapse (and more)

1

This reminded me of something a professor, himself a conservative Christian, I spoke with at Notre Dame said to me about The Benedict Option. He asked how it had sold, and I said pretty well, but probably not as well as he thinks, given the hype. He said that he believes the book has only gotten started. How come? I asked.

“Most conservative Christians don’t understand what’s going on in the culture,” he said. “It’s going to take Trump losing, and the Democrats taking over in Washington, for them to feel the full force of the post-Christian culture on their necks. Right now, they don’t grasp how precarious things are for us — but they will.”

It’s odd to have one’s professional success tied to the decline of one’s culture. I would rather sell no more books and be wrong about the future! But I don’t think I am wrong about the future.

… Some years ago, I interviewed Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins about his book The Fall Of Rome. Ward-Perkins draws on archaeological data to understand late antiquity, and the period after the collapse of Rome in the West. In his book (and in our interview), he emphasized how massive the collapse of technical knowledge and skill was in the West. For example, he said that it took something like six centuries for Europeans to learn how to build roofs as well as the Romans could. It wasn’t only architecture. People forgot how to do a lot of things — the kind of things you assume are unforgettable.

I found this hard to wrap my mind around. How could such basic knowledge be just … lost? Not having books and mass literacy certainly creates an environment conducive to mass forgetting. But you’d think that basic life skills like how to cultivate crops, rudimentary metallurgy, and so forth, would not be so easily forgotten. It happened. Could that happen to us? Hard to see how, given that we do have mass literacy, and books.

Think about it, though: we have forgotten as a culture and civilization what marriage is for, and are well on the way to forgetting what men are, and are for, and women too. This is not a matter of knowledge being denied to us. This is a matter of will.

Rod Dreher.

2

Over the past few days, there’s been a lot of gossip over whether Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will keep his job. But it almost doesn’t matter, because from here on out, it’s Whitakers all the way down.

If conservatism is ever to recover it has to achieve two large tasks. First, it has to find a moral purpose large enough to displace the lure of blood-and-soil nationalism. Second, it has to restore standards of professional competence and reassert the importance of experience, integrity and political craftsmanship. When you take away excellence and integrity, loyalty to the great leader is the only currency that remains.

David Brooks. Call that “point.” Call this (“What Republican ‘Excellence’?”) from Rod Dreher “counterpoint”:

It is hard to imagine a Republican A-team more stellar than President George W. Bush’s national security inner circle. These are the best and brightest who led the nation into the disastrous Iraq War. President Bush’s economic team presided over the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, a crash brought about in part because of the president’s own policies. …

3

The main Republican argument against Trump is this: He is a person of horrible character who corrupts everyone around him, undermines essential social standards and is branding his party with an image of bigotry that will last a generation.

Michael Gerson, Will a Republican candidate stand up against Trump in 2020?

4

I finally finished Leon Podles’ book “Sacrilege”, and I challenge anyone to read that book and then assert that the ruling powers ought to somehow be under or subservient to the Church.

Rod Dreher’s Reader Elijah

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Potpourri, 11/15/18

1

I never really kissed dating goodbye as a teenager in the mid-2000s — to be honest, I was pretty late in kissing it hello. But like many who were brought up in contact with evangelical culture, I absorbed its tenets almost by osmosis even though I never even read the whole book. Falling in love means sharing a piece of your heart that you’ll never get back. Sex is a slippery slope, generally with disaster at the bottom. Hard decisions could be boiled down to one rule: Keep it chaste. Do things right, though, and you’ll get the reward you deserve. Follow the instructions: results guaranteed.

Christine Emba.

It’s the promise of a fairy tale ending that offends me. Evangelicals lack any tragic sense of life. (Just “pray away the gay,” for instance.)

Or maybe that absence of tragic sense is a besetting American sin. More Emba:

In essence, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and its (inevitable, if you think about it) fall represent a mind-set prominent in evangelical culture, but also in American society more broadly.

We insist that meritocracy works and combine it with a valorization of hard work (which itself stems from our country’s majority-Protestant roots). To maintain the story that success is accessible to all, we’ve developed a tendency to seek out and elevate simplistic formulas that we hope come with guarantees. Stay pure until marriage, and your marriage will flourish. Follow the “success sequence,” and you’ll never be poor. Go to the right school, and all career doors will open. Elect the right candidate, and America will be great once more.

But the dark side of all this is that when the formulas fail — as they so often do — it’s you who must have done something wrong. And then it’s up to you to fix it on your own. Bad marriage? You must have screwed around as a teen. Still in public housing? Should have gotten a better job. The if/then mind-set doesn’t take into account how much is actually out of our personal control, or the systemic forces — race, class, family history — that might hold someone back.

It is difficult to counter such an ingrained — and easy — habit of thought. But give him credit: In reevaluating “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” Harris is modeling one way of doing so — he’s admitting to complexity and engaging directly with others, rather than sending down recommendations from above. Alas, even this admirable attempt won’t undo the harms that his formula caused in the first place.

But let the implosion of a cultural touchstone like “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” serve as a lesson, or at least a warning. The next time we’re tempted toward too-formulaic thinking, we’ll know to take it with a grain of salt. After all, life is rarely so pure.

2

Once upon a time, Protestant congregations had pulpits. This was a form of church furniture, a glorified lectern as it where, behind which pastors read the text for their sermon and preached it to boot. Today, contemporary design of church buildings makes little of fixed places for anyone participating in worship, except for the drummer who may be quarantined in a drum shield.

… as ministers of God’s word, pastors’ actions, including their feet, while communicating a message of such great moment should encourage the idea of permanence. That is one reason for having a pulpit with serious heft. It symbolizes that what goes on in this space is of great significance and enduring value (though some look so permanent that even the coming of the New Heavens and the New Earth will not unsettle them).

The permanence of the word preached is also a reason for ministers to stay in the pocket behind the pulpit and not move around. At best, happy feet is a distraction that calls more attention to the man than his message. At worst, they invite liturgical dance. So if the argument from permanence does not help, maybe the thought of overweight men and women in leotards will assist pastors (some on the rotund side themselves) keep both feet firmly planted behind their congregation’s ample pulpit.

D.G. Hart

3

[S]cientists are … making declarations ex cathedra — as a direct result of intellectual movements that began in humanities scholarship twenty-five years ago.

So for those of you who think that the humanities are marginal and irrelevant, put that in your mental pipe and contemplatively smoke it for a while.

Many years ago the great American poet Richard Wilbur wrote a poem called “Shame,” in which he imagined “a cramped little state with no foreign policy, / Save to be thought inoffensive.”

Sheep are the national product. The faint inscription
Over the city gates may perhaps be rendered,
“I’m afraid you won’t find much of interest here.”

The people of this nation could not be more overt in their humility, their irrelevance, their powerlessness. But …

Their complete negligence is reserved, however,
For the hoped-for invasion, at which time the happy people
(Sniggering, ruddily naked, and shamelessly drunk)
Will stun the foe by their overwhelming submission,
Corrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff,
Usurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods,
And bring about the collapse of the whole empire.

Alan Jacobs, the imminent collapse of an empire

4

[W]hen you are told endlessly that there is no meaning to existence, then guess what? You actually start to think that way. And then everything loses its flavor. Everything starts to taste like rice cakes.

… [Y]ou cannot have it both ways. You cannot bleach divinity and Transcendence out of the cosmos and tell everyone that the whole affair is just an aimless and pointless accident, and then turn around and talk to us about the “moral necessity” of this or that urgent social cause.

Larry Chapp via Rod Dreher.

5

From before the election, but when I was otherwise occupied:

Trumpism … is the new normal. It is not going away. And there is no going back. The challenge for the center-right and center-left across the West is to accommodate this new normal in ways that do not empower authoritarianism, provoke constitutional unraveling, or incite civil unrest. And it seems to me that the lesson of the last two years is that the Republican Party is unable and unwilling to perform that function. It has turned itself into a cult behind a figure hostile to liberal democratic norms, responsible government, and any notion of moderation. It is less a political party than a mass movement sustained by shame-free, mendacious propaganda around a man whose articulated values place him more in the company of Putin and Duterte than Merkel and Macron.

The GOP cannot be talked out of their surrender to this strongman. With each rhetorical or policy atrocity, they have attached themselves more firmly to him. The dissenters are leaving; the new members of Congress will be even Trumpier than the old. They have abandoned any serious oversight role. Their singular achievement has been supplying judicial ranks who will not stand in the way of executive power. That was the real issue in the Kavanaugh nomination, as Newt Gingrich blurted out last week. A subpoena for the president from the special counsel would be fought, he promised, all the way to the Supreme Court, which is when we would see “whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it.” This is a party bent on enabling authoritarianism, not restraining it.

That’s why I will vote Democrat next Tuesday. I have many issues with the Democrats, as regular readers well know. None of that matters compared with this emergency. I don’t care, in this instance, what their policies are. I am going to vote for them. I can’t stand most of their leaders and fear their radical fringe. I am going to vote for them anyway. Because it is the only responsible thing there is to do.

…

The Italian leftist, Antonio Gramsci, famously wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We live in such a time, and we have in front of us one of those morbid symptoms: the current Republican Party. You know what to do.

Andrew Sullivan.

Or as William Blake put it:

what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I’m not at all certain that “judicial ranks … will not stand in the way of executive power” or that such was the aim of confirming them, but Sullivan otherwise is right about the abasement of the GOP, and the House has indeed flipped to the Democrats.

I wrote last week that the midterms would finally tell us what this country now is. And with a remarkable turnout — a 50-year high for a non- presidential election, no less — we did indeed learn something solid and eye-opening. We learned that the American public as a whole has reacted to the first two years of an unfit, delusional, mendacious, malevolent, incompetent authoritarian as president … with relative equanimity. The net backlash is milder than it was against Clinton or Obama (and both of them went on to win reelection).

…

What I take from this is that Trump really does have a cultlike grip on a whole new population of voters, as well as the reliable Republican voters of the past. That’s not just 42 percent of the country (to use Trump’s approval rating); it’s a motivated 42 percent. And what Trump has successfully done, by corralling right-wing media, tweeting incessantly, dominating the discourse, tending so diligently to his base, and holding rally after rally, is keep that engagement going. Most presidents are interested in governing and sometimes take their eye off the ball politically. Trump is all politics and all salesmanship all the time. And it works. If he can demonstrate this in the midterms, imagine what his reelection campaign will be like.

…

I’ve been razzed a little for using the term “existential threat” to describe Trump two and a half years ago. But I used it in a specific context: He was and remains such a threat to liberal democracy. Not democracy as a whole. Strongmen can win election after election with big majorities without rigging the vote. A single political party can co-opt the judiciary, or capture the Senate, by democratic means, for illiberal ends. I mean by liberal democracy one in which pluralism is celebrated, power is widely distributed, justice is dispensed without regard to politics, the press is free and respected, minorities protected, and where an opposition has a chance to win real, governing power. The space for this in America has significantly shrunk these past two years and this election has only consolidated that new status quo.

Andrew Sullivan

I’ve detested the Republican party long enough now that my reflex to cringe at Democrat victories passes very quickly, replaced by a resigned feeling of “we are soooooo screwed!” — no matter which major party wins.

6

When you obsess about a problem, you have less energy and passion to pursue solutions. When you fret over every outrage, you elevate those outrages. Stories trend because consumers engage with them, clicking and sharing them, not because the news media dictates that they trend.

I think it would be a solid and beneficial step for us all to simply come to the realizations: Trump is going to Trump. He’s going to lie. He’s going to wink at the racists and Nazis. He’s going to demean women. He’s going to embarrass this country. It’s all going to happen.

Nevertheless, we can take this stand unequivocally: It is all unacceptable and we stand in opposition to it. It is not normal and must never be met as such.

But we must also focus on the future.

Charles Blow

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