St. Patrick’s Day 2023

I have nothing to say about St. Patrick beyond (a) he lived and ministered before Rome went into schism, and is therefore recognized by the Orthodox; (b) though Ireland is rich with spirituality that echoes the pre-schism church, we Orthodox don’t view him as a very major Saint, nor do we get drunk and rowdy on green beer to honor him.

Prissy Dissenter

I have long known that it’s important to guard my imagination. I have, for slightly less long, actually guarded my imagination — most of the time and more or less.

It’s not my place to boss others around, but some of the recommendations I get from fellow Christians for movies or (more importantly) TV shows and streaming clearly have not been run through a very fine “guard your imagination” filter.

For instance, David French raved about Ted Lasso, but I didn’t finish the first season because of all the f-bombs and sexual themes. I’m not opposed to sexual themes — or any other themes I can think of — in the abstract. That’s why I was never even tempted, let alone persuaded, by the earlyish evangelical and fundamentalist objections that Harry Potter books were “about witchcraft.”

But when non-marital sex is portrayed as perfectly wholesome, and when f-bombs are so ordinary that a major character keeps dropping them as a sports commentator, my prissy conscience says “no!” I could give more detailed examples of what was objectionable in Ted Lasso, but it wouldn’t be good for either of us.

I’m even beginning to wonder about British Mysteries. We subscribe to BritBox and watch on average nearly one British mystery per day. But I’ve noticed that not a single admirable character (other than Brother Cadfael) professes any form of Christian faith (and Cadfael is, probably realistically, surrounded by monastic brothers who fall far short of exemplary). Indeed, when religion comes up, the good guys basically say “Well, I was raised religious but I don’t believe it any more.”

The Overton Window, to put it differently, is open only from indifference to hostility.

I don’t think I’m in any danger of losing my faith over British Mysteries, but there may be subtler effects. I’m on guard.

UPDATE: I failed to mention Father Brown — probably because, as portrayed in the longest-running series of Father Brown mysteries — he was basically a detective who told the guilty party that they should repent — only this and nothing more.

Culture

Wandering as the birds of the air, then snared

[T]he key driver of Machine modernity, and the chief enemy of human freedom, has always been the state. It follows from this that escaping the reach of the state, and attempting to rebuild a moral economy, is the work – or the beginning of the work – of the reactionary radical.

…

British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, which is also the mind of the Machine, when he wrote:**

Here [Sumatra] I am the advocate of despotism. The strong arm of power is necessary to bring men together, and to concentrate them into societies … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.

To read [James C.] Scott’s book is to be made to think hard about the conditions that a state needs to thrive, and thus the conditions that its cultural refuseniks might need to create in return. Based on Scott’s studies of Southeast Asia, we can begin to compile a basic list of necessities for state flourishing:

A reliable staple crop (in Asia, wet rice; in Europe, wheat; in South America, maize, etc)
An effective transportation system for people and goods
A settled population
Enforcement of law and order
An effective central government
A system of taxation and classification of population
A system of communication/propaganda
Slavery or forced labour

All of this applies today to the state in which I live, including the last one. The slavery and forced labour now takes place far from the core of modern Western states, in places like central Africa or China, where the poor mine our smartphone components or sew our cheap clothes in regimented workhouses, but that doesn’t make them any less necessary for the system to function.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Jellyfish Tribe, another of his essays that I’ve marked to revisit. It’s excellent. He’s a Substacker I’ll unequivocally recommend.

Kingsnorth’s very valuable essay also has a list of attributes that help make a people ungovernable. They’ll probably appear another day because I can’t get this essay off my mind.

Not the usual bllsht about wokeness

Nick Cattogio almost instantly became a favorite pundit after he moved to the Dispatch and I began reaing him. He recently turned his critical eye on “wokeness”:

Trying to define “wokeness” is like trying to define “hardcore pornography.” You can do it, more or less, but you’re mostly just trying to articulate a gut feeling of transgression.

…

Damon Linker, a centrist, has written often lately about “wokeness” and offers another definition.

…

This is what I mean when I use the term “woke”: the effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook (and accompanying empirical claims about race, American history, and human sexuality and gender) be adopted throughout the broader culture.

That’s how I think of “wokeness.” It’s not just a belief system, it’s a tactic.

Progressives have some very particular and controversial ideas about race, gender, oppression, and victimization that aren’t shared by much of the country, including members of the Democratic Party. But rather than concede that those subjects are matters of public controversy, in some cases they resort to social and professional sanctions to try to compel dissenters to accept their orthodoxy. (Adult dissenters, I mean. Schoolchildren can and will be indoctrinated into that orthodoxy.) Thomas Chatterton Williams cut to the heart of it when he made this point recently about the enforcement arm of “wokeness”: “Cancel culture is really about when someone is called out by a mob for transgressing a not-yet-agreed upon norm.”

…

The further you go toward the right-wing fringe, the more likely you are to find people who’ll insist … that lots of norms most of us take for granted haven’t truly been “agreed upon.”

I don’t think that’s fundamentally the game being played here, though. (Maybe a few people are playing it.) New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is closer to the mark in believing that anti-wokeness has simply become a placeholder ideology for a party that can’t agree on what it believes.

Not only is Michelle Goldberg close to the truth, but such manias as anti-CRT and anti-Woke are consciously manufactured placeholder ideologies for a party that has, literally, no platform:

It should elicit some sighs that I’m even bringing this up. [Christopher] Rufo has been open about his plan to play intentionally fast and loose with this term. Last year he gloated to James Lindsay: “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” It seems pretty clear that Rufo doesn’t care what is and isn’t critical race theory. He sees it as a usefully “toxic” brand under which he can lump “various cultural insanities,” whether or not they have anything to do with CRT per se.

Jesse Singal

Counter-anticulture

The building up of practices of care, patience, humility, reverence, respect, and modesty is also evident among people of no particular religious belief, homesteaders and “radical homemakers” who—like their religious counterparts—are seeking within households and local communities and marketplaces to rediscover old practices, and create new ones, that foster new forms of culture that liberalism otherwise seeks to eviscerate. Often called a counterculture, such efforts should better understand themselves as a counter-anticulture.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

Prescient

Close but more tenuous relations exist between Russia and Georgia (overwhelmingly Orthodox) and Ukraine (in large part Orthodox); but both of which also have strong senses of national identity and past independence.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Politics

New class war

The influence of big donors in both parties further skews politics from the pragmatic concerns of America’s working-class majority. Wealthy donors, like primary voters, tend to be socially liberal and support free trade, immigration and cuts in government social spending more than the average voter. It’s not hyperbole to conclude that the United States is a nation of communitarians ruled by an oligarchy of libertarians.

Michael Lind, America’s new class war

Poor Mike Pence

Mike Pence has really been letting loose on Trump and January 6. Here’s Pence speaking to the white-tie Gridiron Dinner attendees this week: “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Poor Mike Pence. He’s really in a bind. All he wanted was to be a good, happy evangelical conservative, closing down drag brunches and getting upset about Disney princesses showing their shoulders. But he had to ride to power on Trump, who never saw a Disney princess he didn’t want to see a little more shoulder from. So maybe Pence could find comfort on the left, along with the other Trump defectors? Maybe he can please the Gridiron Club folks? The trouble is, Mike Pence is a true believer. He can never pretend that, actually, he wants transgender turtles in the next Pixar movie. Now he’s teasing a presidential run, and we must all watch him suffer more. God, can you just take him to wherever you are storing Tim Kaine?

Nellie Bowles

Viva la difference!

The French battle against transgender activism has created some strange bedfellows:

Such is the extremity of transactivism, however, almost everyone who isn’t chronically underinformed or under 25 ends up on the other side of it eventually.

Kathleen Stock, Is France too sexy for the trans wars?

Cant

Diversity

“My kingdom for a moratorium on describing single individuals as ‘diverse,’” – Jill Filipovic, via Andrew Sullivan

Thinking outside the box

Sometimes I just love the irony that “think outside the box” has become a cliche.

ChrisJWilson on micro.blog

Silence

“Silence is golden.” (Tradition)
“Silence is violence.” (Today’s progressives)

Other wordplay

The secret of life

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well. (Hugh Walpole)

Via The Economist, The world in brief, 3/13/23

The Past

Except in the area of dental care, the Past is almost always better.

Terry Cowan, Spare Me

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Smashing the Overton Window

I had a dream.

Sohrab Amari and Caitlin Johnstone were stripped down to skimpy little outfits and they were fighting like hell to shift the Overton Window, she left, he right. Finally, exhausted, they collapsed against the wall and it fell over, Overton Window and all.

When I woke up, and after my morning ablutions, I went down to the county jail to see if my friend Joe could tell me what it meant.

“Sure,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Amari and Johnstone are both illiberal, albeit in different ways. Amari is furious that conservative fusionism not only didn’t get the cultural conservatives what they wanted (he says “we,” but he’s late to the game at least as a Christian conservative), but they’ve lost the culture, too. He has declared all-out war to immanentize the eschaton, a damnfool utopian delusion, not least because, well, his side has lost the culture.”

“Johnstone is an über-progressive atheist or agnostic, but that doesn’t mean she’s without her ideals. Her ideal is perfect social justice, a damnfool utopian delusion, too, and she villifies anyone like, say, Nancy Pelosi who doesn’t think that’s quite exactly politically realistic, since there’s a slightly more conservative party that has a different idea of what politics should do. Further, the conscience-smitten cowards (that’s how Johnstone views realists) think that bravado of Johnstone’s sort, and that of The Squad, just might blow the election prospects for the side that is at least moving toward Johnstone’s perfection.”

“Everyone seems to assume that the Overton Window is what it is and is as big as it has always been and always will be. But knocking down the wall is the ultimate enlargement of the Overton Window, so instead of enjoying a modest window that favors your side, you get no window, just the wild, wild, polarized West, ranging from Stormfront on the Right to Antifa or worse on the Left.”

“But Joe,” I ask. “What’s wrong with seeking to immanentize the eschaton or to achieve metaphysically perfect social justice?”

“Have you ever heard the expression that ‘politics is the art of the possible’? It can be a bitter pill to swallow that the eschaton and perfect justice aren’t possible, but that’s the way it is. You can make yourself crazy acting otherwise.”

“Yeah, I’ve been feeling a bit deranged sometimes.”

“I know that feeling,” Joe sighed, “but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it in here. Sometimes, it’s not just the political perversity of your adversary, either. Sometimes, it’s the ineradicable passions of your fellow-humans — and you, too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“F’rinstance, by all means punish the Harvey Weinsteins and Jeffrey Epsteins (if you can), but don’t kid yourself that you’ll ever put an end to sexual predation, and don’t allow the government to destroy everything else in pursuit of that impossible dream.”

“Thinking you can stop scary changes, not just manage and ameliorate them, is another instance. That was my big delusion.”

“Are you getting this?”

“I hope so, Joe. I get it at the moment, and it does seem kind of obvious, actually. And I don’t like this polarization. I think my project will be rebuilding the Overton Window just big enough to fit center-left to center-right. (Or maybe I’ll just give to GoFundMe for that.)”

“I’m not sure that’s possible, pal. But if you think so after sleeping on it a couple of nights, good luck. Or better luck than I had anyway.”

“Yeah. joe. I read your manifesto. See you next Visitor’s Day.”

* * * * *

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Monday Meanderings and an Announcement, 7/30/12

Why Capitalism Has An Image Problem.
Your tax dollars at work.
Best thing said about Mitt last week.
Putting off parenthood for pleasure.
Will the Barbarian Politicians shift the Overton Window?
MYOB, Moreno.
Tipsy is evolving.

Charles Murry, who has made a career of being a lightening rod (The Bell Curve and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010), steps into the Overton Window with a Friday Wall Street Journal column, Why Capitalism Has An Image Problem.

“One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on “golden parachutes”). But the problem of crony capitalism is trivial compared with the collusion engendered by government.”
“Another change in objective conditions has been the emergence of great fortunes made quickly in the financial markets.”

That list may not be exhaustive, but it’s an awfully good start, don’t you think?

Your tax dollars at work. Do you feel safer because the feds are swarming Nancy Black? Or do you feel fresh sympathy with the only Ayn Rand quote in my repertoire?

Nicest thing I’ve heard about Romney in weeks: “Abortion-Rights Activists: Romney’s VP Choices Don’t Favor Choice.”

Nona Willis Aronowitz notes “more people are putting off parenthood,” and asks “what will that mean for their kids?” It’s a real phenomenon that drew me to read her story, but I’d urge you to read with a critical eye if you do read, and to ask what her unstated premises are.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” Friday suggested that those politicians who threatened unconstitutionally to ban Chick-fil-A from their turf (Boston and San Francisco Mayors, Chicago Alderman with backing of Mayor Rahm Emanuel) may actually advance rather than retard the cause of same-sex marriage.

If the previous paragraph is indecipherable to you, perhaps you grew up in a world where corporations weren’t overt political players (some are today; Chick-fil-A isn’t), and nobody woud have thought of boycotting a corporation because of a political opinion held by shareholder or officers. I don’t appreciate Jeff Bezos throwing $2.5 million of his weight to the wrong side in Washington state, but if I “boycott” Amazon, it will be because I prefer local business when possible, not because Amazon appeared on somebody’s hit list.

Anyway, Taranto thought these guys might, with their extremism, move the Overton Window, a political science concept with which I was not familiar, by redefining the sexual liberationist extreme (unconstitutional and anti-American political persecution of businesses whose officers express any doubt about sexual liberationism) and thus maving SSM closer to mainstream.

Having now looked at the Wikipedia article on the Overton Window, I think maybe these politicians are using the Door in the Face technique (with which I also was not familiar). It sure isn’t the more familiar Foot in the Door, though that’s also been used plenty over the past 50 years to advance the Sexual Revolution.

Take my musings with a grain of salt since I just encountered two of the three political science concepts and have never had even one course in political science. I just wish sane traditionalists could move the Overton Window by contrasting themselves to Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist bunch, or even to the folks who insist that you can “pray away the gay“* (because surely God wouldn’t allow anyone to suffer a thorn in the flesh for very long if they’d just pray hard enough about it).

But traditionalists can’t seem to move the window. There’s something bigger than conscious manipulation going on. I see it as a sort of mass insanity the etiology of which ought not to be a mystery. Not all social evolution is in a good direction — think of Germany in the 1920s, for an extreme proof.

[* Note: The linked video, starting at 4:11, has a very interesting and sober distinction from an mainstream member of the American Psychological Association: there’s no good evidence that any therapy or prayer can change sexual orientation, but (he quickly adds) that’s not to say one can’t change behavior or even “identity.” If that’s all that’s meant by the APA criticism of the “pray away the gay” folks, and if mainstream APA members will help an unhappy gay or lesbian change behavior or identity, then I take back all the snarky things I’ve said about the APA.]

On Friday, Mr. Moreno conceded that free-speech rights trump his authority on the issue, and shifted his focus from Mr. Cathy’s remarks to potential discriminatory policies at the fast-food chain. He said he would reopen talks with Chick-fil-A, but pledged to fight the company until it amends or clarifies its anti-discrimination policy.

MYOB, Mr. Moreno. If they violate Chicago’s anti-discrimination laws, that’s one thing, but you have no license to bully them into changing their policy because it isn’t sufficiently servile to the Zeitgeist.

All but the first item of today’s blog were substantially written Saturday. Then came news that prompted yesterday’s somber blog. That news, of which I still may not speak, reminds me how broken things are on my side of the culture war divide.

In many ways, “blue state” citizens are living, better than those who propound them, the values propounded by “red state” citizens.

But I didn’t want entirely to waste a few hours’ work.

When I (re)named this blog early in its life (“Intellectualoid,” which persists in the URL, was the original name), I self-mockingly was alluding to a G.K. Chesterton quote:

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.

I’m a third- or fourth-rate polymath, interested in many things, intellectually facile (at least in my youth; I know I’m not as quick now). My late, sainted father used to talk of a “jack of all trades, master of none.” I’ll leave “none” for others to judge; I’d like to think I’ve mastered one or two.

But I’ve been inconstant. I’ve fallen off the wagon. I declared in March of 2010 that I was a conscientious objector to the culture wars. Last September, I was explicitly ready to re-enlist, and I’ve been waging Guerilla War on the “conservative” pretensions of the GOP ever since the scales fell from my eyes.

But yesterday’s somber blog included a quote from Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image:

Somewhere in our history we passed a divide where politics began to be more highly valued than culture … Whereas I once believed that the decadence of the West could only be turned around through politics and intellectual dialectics, I am now convinced that authentic renewal can only emerge out of the imaginative visions of the artist and the mystic.

Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (quoted in a review in The American Conservative).

Here are a few more excerpts from that same book review:

[T]he very phrase “culture wars” is an oxymoron: “culture is about nourishment and cultivation, whereas war inevitably involves destruction and the abandonment of the creative impulse.”

…

[T]he Eucharist, the preeminent Christian sacrament, consistes of bread and wine, not wheat and grapes. “In other words, the gifts offered to God at the altar are not the untouched products of the earth, but artifacts, transformed though human hands through an art.”

I intend to drop out of the culture wars again, and to do what I said in March of 2010:

So who am I hangin’ out with these days if not with the Alliance Defense Fund and the acolytes of R.J. Rushdoony? Check the bloglinks to the right – Especially Front Porch Republic (“Place. Limits. Liberty.”), Distributist Review (guardedly). Small Is Beautiful has taken on new meaning for me. (My benighted generation got a few things right before we sold out or got complacent – and appreciating E.F. Schumaker was one of them).

I can’t even rule out Father Stephen. Nothing he writes is “about politics,” but everything he writes is about sane, human and humane living, which surely connects up somehow.

Basically, I’m going back and rethinking all things political and cultural. I’m wisdom-hunting. I read Wendell Berry essays and poetry, Bill Kauffman books, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Scott Cairns’ Poetry, W.H. Auden (“For the Time Being” is now on my list for every Advent).

My conversion to Orthodox Christianity started it in a way. I soon realized that the Church has not always prevailed, and has produced martyrs in every century. And that’s okay. Better we should lose honorably than win by selling our souls.

I’m Tipsy, though, and I may have lapses. But if you’ve been reading to blog for the lapses, I intend henceforth to disappoint you far more often than not.

I’ll be blogging less frequently since cultural tidbits come harder than political.