Rod Dreher's Blog, page 25

Yesterday I listened to Jordan Peterson’s podcast interview with Chloé Valdary, the antiracism educator whose program is called “Theory of Enchantment.” I have been following her for some time on Twitter, because she always seems humane, compassionate, and wise. After listening to her explain her worldview and program on JBP’s podcast, I realized that as much as I hate everything about DEI, I would actually like to take Valdary’s course. Why? Because from what I can tell, Valdary builds her antiracism approach not on resentment and power dynamics, but on encouraging people to find ways to love each other. Her approach also confronts people with the fact that no matter what their race, sex, or whatever, they too have the capacity for evil. She goes at this by looking at people not as bearers of group identity, but as individuals. It is through individual hearts, not between groups, that the line between good and evil passes. I hate standard DEI because it is moralistic politicized hatred. That’s not what Valdary does. When she tells JBP that some companies call in her consultancy to repair the damage done by standard Kendi/DiAngelo-style DEI, I believe her.

Another reason I listened to the podcast episode is to find out what Valdary means by “enchantment.” As you may recall, I have just begun working on a book about re-enchantment. I wanted to discover where our insights overlap. Some of what she has to say reminded me of a book I read last weekend by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa: The Uncontrollability of the World. Carl Trueman recommended it to me, and I put off reading it for a while, because the idea of reading German sociology did not really appeal. I finally got around to it last weekend, and boy, was I ever wrong to put it off. Rosa writes beautifully, and the book is short and easy to digest. And it lands perfectly with the work I’m doing now.

Because listening to the Valdary podcast has me thinking hard about the idea of enchantment, and why it’s so important today, I’m going to repost for you here most of a Substack post I wrote the other day about Rosa’s work. Normally I don’t reproduce my Substack writing here, but I think this one makes a good crossover. Here goes:

Here is Rosa’s diagnosis of our disenchantment. I marked out these quotes on my Kindle, which doesn’t allow you to see where the breaks are. I’m just guessing. Rosa writes:

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.

More:

The first guiding thesis that I would like to develop in this essay is that, for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression. Everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.

A modern society, as I define it, is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.

This game of escalation is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but by the fear of having less and less. It is never enough not because we are insatiable, but because we are, always and everywhere, moving down the escalator.

Our life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach: this is the mantra of modern life, unspoken but relentlessly reiterated and reified in our actions and behavior. As I would like to demonstrate in this essay, the categorical imperative of late modernity—Always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased—has become the dominant principle behind our decision-making in all areas of life and across all ages, from toddlers to the elderly.

This really resonates (no pun intended) with McGilchrist’s writing about how we in the modern West have become slaves to the left-hemisphere view of reality. As you will recall from my past writing about McGilchrist, the left brain is where our capacity for analyzing our experience of the world and construing it for the sake of control is located. To refresh your memory, McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, believes that this faculty is necessary for a full human life, but if we give it dominance — as we have, on a culture-wide scale — we will live in unreality, and lose our capacity for a healthy, reasonable life. We only thrive when the insights of the left hemisphere are returned to the right hemisphere — which is the part of our brains where our intuitive, noetic faculties are located — for integration into the broader picture.

As you will see, what McGilchrist holds as the ideal state is pretty much what Rosa means by resonance.

What does Rosa mean by expanding our share of the world? He’s talking about processing experience in such a way that brings it as a phenomenon under our control, or at least potentially so. He says that the experience of being able to communicate with many people globally, instantly, via smartphones is an example of this. More:

Not only are all our friends and acquaintances, our loved ones and our not so loved ones, now always just a “click” away, we also have all the knowledge in the world—every song, every film, every image, every bit of data that has been digitized—in close proximity at all times. We literally carry it on our person. The world is now at our fingertips in a historically unprecedented way. The idea, or rather the conviction correlated with these processes —that life comes down to bringing the world within reach—is inscribed in our bodies and in our psychological and emotional dispositions.

Reading this, I recalled how when I was a young teenager, I wrote off to a penpal agency asking for a penpal in Europe. They connected me to a teenage girl in the Netherlands. We struck up a wonderful epistolary friendship. At one point, we decided to connect by telephone (this was the early 1980s). I can still recite from memory her family’s phone number, because I pondered it anxiously for a long time before I mustered the courage to call it. Talking on the phone with Europe back then was such an exciting thing! It wasn’t cheap, and I paid my parents back for the cost of those calls. But it was glorious, at least to me. It was entering into a mystery.

Today, my kids can FaceTime or WhatsApp the kids of my Dutch friends, like it’s no big deal, not only speaking, but communicating with visuals too! All the mysterious pleasures of those friendships with faraway people no longer exist. Do I wish we didn’t have the technology to make that ease of communication possible? No, I am grateful for these technological developments. But it has come at a cost, as Rosa helps me to understand. It is no longer a special thing. Europe — and really, anywhere in the world — is not as much the mysterious Other, not like it was. And therefore, it is, and cannot help being, less enchanting.

More Rosa:

The sociocultural formation of modernity thus turns out to be, in a way, doubly calibrated for the strategy of making the world controllable. We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things—segments of world—within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controllable.

Making the world controllable means, first, making it visible, that is, making it knowable, expanding our knowledge of what is there. Making the world controllable means, furthermore, making it physically reachable or accessible.

Inextricably linked with this is the third dimension of bringing the world under control, namely by making it manageable.

… Distinct from this mode of conquering the world technologically and politically, at least in analytical terms, is a fourth dimension of making the world controllable, namely by making it useful, pressing it into service. Here the point is not simply to bring the world under our control, but to make it into an instrument for our own purposes.

So, the four parts of this process:

Make the world visible. Make the visible world accessible. Make the visible, accessible world manageable — meaning, increasing our control over it. Make the visible, accessible, manageable world do what we want it to do.

Reading this, I thought, “He’s talking about how we disenchant the world.” And then, lo:

Max Weber, the other great “founding father” of modern sociology, likewise finds it highly irrational that human beings do not work in order to live, but live in order to work and accumulate (in my terminology, to grow, accelerate, and innovate). Yet he understands this relation to the world as part and parcel and the result of a great “western process of rationalization” that unfolds over the centuries and the core of which consists in making life and the world calculable, manageable, and predictable—scientifically, technologically, economically, legally, politically, and finally also in everyday life. This means nothing less than making the world controllable… .

Weber identifies this as the flipside of rationalization as a process of progressive alienation, of the world’s falling mute, which he describes as a “disenchantment.” Weber’s at times deeply pessimistic diagnosis is that the world made manageable and predictable has lost not only its color and its magic, but also its voice, its meaning. It has “cooled” into a dull “steel-hard shell,” within which economic and bureaucratic reason blindly and soullessly advance escalatory processes to the point where human beings have become “nonentities” who “imagine they have attained a stage of humankind never before reached.”

Yes! McGilchrist says the same thing. The left brain is performing its natural function when it engages in this process — and this is not necessarily a bad thing. It turns bad, though, when we allow the left brain to triumph over the right, and convince ourselves that the left brain has figured out the truth of the world, and that “this is all there is.” Our right brains know that this is not all there is, that there is in the phenomena of the world more than we can every fully grasp. Modern Western culture has taught us, however, to downplay our noetic intuitions, and to dismiss them as “subjective,” meaning mere opinion.

In truth, as Kierkegaard said, “truth is subjectivity.” He did not mean that there is no such thing as objective truth. He meant rather that all the truths for which one would live or die can only be known subjectively. For example, you cannot objectively prove that God exists — but God’s existence does not depend on our being able to prove it objectively. The nature of the phenomenon we call “God” is such that He can only be known subjectively. Similarly with love. You cannot prove objectively that you love your spouse. Even if you made a long list of all the things you have done that demonstrate your love, it will always be possible to say that you use the word “love” to refer to selfish acts.

See what I mean? God may or may not exist, and your love for your spouse may or may not be real, but the point is that you will not be able to demonstrate that in the same sense that you can demonstrate a mathematical proof, or a physical law. You can only demonstrate the truth of these claims by being willing to live by them, and even die by them. McGilchrist points out several times in his book that this can be a difficult thing for English speakers to grasp because we have only one verb for “to know,” whereas other languages — like French and German — have different verbs to describe knowing as possessing knowledge of things, and knowing as a relationship. To know about a man is not the same thing as knowing a man personally.

Rosa says that gaining mastery over the world — conquering it — can lead us to despair:

None of this means anything to me. It doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t affect me, and I’m not having any effect on the outside world. This experience is characteristic of a depressive condition, when all axes of resonance have fallen mute and “nothing speaks to us anymore.” This feeling of a loss of world exists independently of the question of how expansive one’s share of the world is. It can arise, individually and collectively, even where—in fact especially where – we have the world technologically, economically, and socially largely in our grasp. Everything out there is dead, gray, empty, and cold, and everything within me is mute and numb, too.

Taking all the above reflections and observations into account, we can note that the individual and institutional efforts of modernity to make the world controllable, in all four dimensions and with an ever wider reach, have yielded paradoxical side effects, which can be described as disenchantment as opposed to ensoulment (Weber). Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself. This is the conclusion of my sociology of our relationship to the world. Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached.

Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached. What a powerful line, reflecting a profound insight. And it goes right to the heart of my new book project, which is about restoring to us the ability to be called, and reached — by God.

Do y’all remember me banging on and on last year about that dream scene in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia in which the protagonist, Andrei, is stalking through a ruined church, and the voice of the Virgin asks God to speak to him, because he’s so lost, or to show Himself to Andrei … but God replies that Andrei is not receptive to Him. Here it is:

Andrei is modern Western man. If his way of life is really a way of death, then what is the way out of the dark wood? Rosa:

What does a successful relationship to the world look like? If the culturally and structurally enforced attitude of conceiving of the world as a point of scientific, technological, economic, and political aggression, as something to be brought within our individual reach, turns out to be the cause of our ever increasing alienation from the world, then the question becomes: What other attitude toward the world is even possible or conceivable?

The answer, says Rosa, is resonance.

The basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn.

My argument is that resonance is not just a metaphor for a certain experience, or a subjective emotional state, but is a mode of relation that can be precisely defined by four exemplary characteristics:

1. Being affected. Resonating with another person, or even with a landscape, a melody, or an idea, means being “inwardly” reached, touched, or moved by them.

2. Self-efficacy. At the same time, we can speak of true resonance only when this call is followed by our own active response. This always manifests itself in a physical reaction that we might describe in everyday language as “getting goosebumps,” “the hair on the back our neck standing on end,” or “a shiver running down our spine” and that, in medical terms, may be measured as a change in our skin resistance, breathing rate, heart rate, or blood pressure. Resonance also involves our reacting to the impulse that calls us by reaching out toward that which moves…

3. Adaptive transformation. Whenever we resonate with another human being, a book, a song, a landscape, an idea, a piece of wood, we are transformed by the encounter, although of course in very different ways. There are encounters that leave us “a different person” in their wake, and there are adaptive transformations that produce barely noticeable, often only temporary changes, for example in our voice. In every instance, however, a change in how we relate to the world is constitutive of resonant experience. When we resonate with the world, we are no longer the same afterwards.

It is symptomatic of depression, a state in which all our axes of resonance have fallen mute and grown numb, that nothing touches or moves us anymore. At the same time, we also feel that we ourselves cannot reach anyone, that we are “frozen” and thus incapable of change.

Even if we wish to leave aside the argument, put forth by authors such as Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, that attributing a capacity for resonance to human beings alone and holding everything else in the universe to be mute and “dead” is a highly dubious, one-sided approach peculiar to the modern rationalistic–scientific worldview (along with its corresponding mode of aggression), it is nevertheless evident that resonant experiences also significantly change inanimate objects (if only for us).

Without the trifecta of af←fect (in the sense of being affected by an other), e→motion (as a self-efficacious response that creates a connection), and adaptive transformation, appropriation remains a relation of relationlessness.

4. Uncontrollability. The fourth (and, for this book, critical) aspect of resonant relationships consists in the fact that the “pathological” (or simply unfortunate) conditions described above cannot be changed merely through an act of will, that resonance cannot be manufactured or engineered. I describe this as the uncontrollability of resonance, which means, first, that there is no method, no seven- or nine-step guide that can guarantee that we will be able to resonate with people or things.

This sends me back to the advent of nominalism, which defeated metaphysical realism in the High Middle Ages. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the metaphysical realist position holds that God is, in some sense, intrinsically present in the material world. How this works is controversial; the Latin church and the Byzantine church have different explanations, because in no case can we say that the material world is God. That would be idolatry. It suffices to say that before nominalism, the divine participates in the material world intrinsically. The nominalist view places God outside of the material world (which He created, as they acknowledge).

In my view — and it’s not original to me — disenchantment began with nominalism. I won’t go there right now, because I want to stick to Rosa. Keep in mind, though, as you read on, that there is a metaphysical and religious dimension to what he’s saying, though he writes as a sociologist.

Rosa contends that we cannot hope to find resonance with the world if we insist on controlling everything, and having an “attitude of constantly perceiving the world as a point of aggression” — that is, as something to be consumed and mastered. But it is not the case that resonance and uncontrollability are the same thing!

Rosa:

In fact we are able to resonate with other people or things only when they are in a way “semicontrollable,” when they move between complete controllability and total uncontrollability.

Rather, we must establish a relationship to the world. He explains:

It is not enough that I have access to and can take hold of the world. Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from the outside.

In other words, we must in some sense seek to “know” the world in the subjective sense. Obviously objects don’t have personalities; what he means is that we should focus on how interacting with things in the world can change us. This can only happen if we recognize that for these phenomena to change us, we have to accept that we can never fully control them, which is to say, never completely possess them. More:

My argument is that, if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experience being called by the falling snow.

If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.

In another sense, this also applies, say, to a poem that I feel has something to say to me. A poem can resonate with me only as long as I have not yet fully grasped, understood, and processed it (dimension 3) [making the visible world accessible and manageable — RD], only as long as it continues to occupy me and still seems to be hiding something from me.

To restate for the sake of clarity, “Things we can completely control in all four dimensions lose their resonant quality.”

We can only resonate with a counterpart that in a way “speaks with its own voice,” that has something like its own will or character, or at least its own inner logic that, as such, remains beyond our control. What is more, we must be able to understand this voice as speaking to us, and thus as being in some sense responsive.

Rosa goes on:

Resonance demands a form of uncontrollability that “speaks,” that is more than just contingency.

Indeed, in everyday language we say things like “This book (or song) appeals to me” to describe even the most banal forms of this sensation. By this we do not mean that the book or song in question actually speaks to us in any concrete or metaphysical sense, but rather that we are in some way called by it, and that at the same time we, or something inside us, react and respond to it. Such experiences, however—regardless of whether our counterpart is another person, a piece of music, a mountain, or the falling snow—also involve, first, a feeling of inner change or transformation and, second and foremost, the assumption or hope that it might be worth engaging more closely with that which appeals to us, precisely because we do not fully understand it or have not yet exhausted it.

This is not simply saying that we like this or that thing. It’s much deeper. This is what Rilke means by his poem “Archaic Torso Of Apollo”:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The meaning of a poem, a song, a tree, a building, etc., depends on how we respond to it. In a resonant relationship, both sides are transformed by their relationship.

Charles Taylor, the fundamental achievement of the philosophy and poetry of German romanticism, as encountered in the work of Hölderlin, Friedrich and August Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling, was making it possible to conceive of reality as being co-constituted in this way, in a mutual movement between subject and world.

… Fatally, it is precisely our sense that we are not yet finished with something, that there is still something there, that tempts us into trying to “take hold” of it in order to bring it under our control, to be able to access and engage with it at will. Our efforts to secure “resonant” encounters medially, especially by photographing or filming them, are a particularly revealing example of this. Such media make it possible for us to take naturally ephemeral phenomena such as snowfalls and sunsets “out of time,” making them accessible and controllable for the future. Unfortunately, however, attempting to take hold of the dynamic of resonance generally means paralyzing it. When we approach a landscape, an event, or an object with the eye of a photographer, these things stop speaking to us. We may well be able to sense that a landscape would have something to say to us, which is why we want to take hold of it in the first place, but it does not speak to us when we fix our photographic gaze on it or capture it on film. This observation is difficult to prove empirically, but anyone can experience it for themselves at any time.

Establishing a resonant relationship with the world requires us to renounce the impulse to make a phenomenon controllable. “Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism,” Rosa writes.

As we have already seen, uncontrollability on the side of the subject means that we must be willing to allow ourselves to be touched and changed in unpredictable ways.

Resonance implies vulnerability and a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable. On the object side, uncontrollability means that what we encounter must resist us in at least one of the four dimensions of calculation and control. There must be at least one “obstinate remainder” that has something to say to us, that is meaningful to us in the sense of a strong evaluation.

… When we engage in activities in which we are certain of the outcome, we may well experience success, but never resonance.

“Strong evaluation” is a term from Charles Taylor, referencing things we decide are fundamental truths around which we must orient ourselves. Something that we evaluate in a “strong” way is a thing or value that we cannot render inert by absorbing it fully into our own subjectivity.

More:

For the subject, being reachable means being fundamentally capable of being touched, of being called, such that resonance may occur. As we have seen, however, subjects cannot control their capacity for resonance. Today I will allow myself to be touched! I intend to be moved by my date tonight!

At the same time, reachability is not a matter of pure contingency. We can of course try to create the dispositional and situational conditions necessary for us to be capable of being moved. A museum, for instance, is a place where we generally do not pursue any instrumental aims, where we want instead to come into contact with things in a way that is geared not toward escalation or control, but toward unexpected or unpredictable, resonant encounters, where we are inwardly open and ready to be called.

As we have seen, the same applies to the objects we encounter. Resonance is impossible if we cannot reach or access them in some form (we must able to read the Bible or Marx’s Capital, or hear a piece of music, in order to resonate with it), but equally impossible if they are completely controllable in all four dimensions. Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able—and trusting in our ability—to reach out to this other side and establish responsive contact with it.

Reminds of me of Elaine Scarry’s line about education: it involves training students to be looking in the right corner of the sky when the comet passes.

Rosa says that modernity’s basic conflict is to confuse reachability for controllability. This is built into the logic of modernity, which tells us that we can only be our fullest selves if we use technology to bring more and more of the world under our control, to produce desired outcomes. But you cannot find resonance with the world if you seek to impose total control over it.

Here is Rosa’s understanding of how this applies to faith:

In my layman’s understanding, the essence of the Judeo-Christian conception of God consists in an idea entirely in keeping with resonance theory. Even if—and especially if—God is conceived of in generally negative theological terms, as fundamentally inaccessible or beyond control, the relationship between God and the human being is understood to be one of mutual relatedness and reachability. Humans are supposed to listen to God or hear God’s word, and God in turn can be reached through prayer—although this precisely does not mean that he can in any way be controlled. Leaving aside any and all endless theological debates, responsivity here signifies an ultimate, potentially transformative relationship of mutual listening that also allows each side its “own voice” and freedom to respond. Whether resonance occurs or what its result might be remains uncontrollably open.

In my view, this kind of relatedness forms the basis of the practice of prayer, which cannot be understood otherwise. In contrast to what happens in the practices of alchemy or magic, in prayer there is no attempt to manipulate the other side or to engineer a particular result. The aim is rather to feel or sense an accommodating response, the content of which is not predetermined.

Listening and responding constitute a different attitude from planning, doing, and calculating.

Rosa writes:

Thus falling in love is not compatible with a late modern culture geared toward making life controllable.

This made me wonder if the increasing difficulty young people have today pairing off is because they are formatted from the beginning by this culture to expect that the world is controllable. This is one of the malign features of porn: it gives its user a sexual experience that is entirely controllable.

If you have followed me in my writing about Iain McGilchrist’s new book, you will know why this clip from Rosa is so, well, resonant. It’s what the left hemisphere does:

Identity thinking operates according to the opposite principle: it is always already finished with everything. This is easily and clearly illustrated through everyday situations. Let us imagine that we are captivated by the sight of the moon, turn to our companion, and say: Oh, look, the moon! To which they respond: What about it? It’s been there the whole time. It’s just a rocky orb, 385,000 kilometers away, littered with craters, without any life. It’s been like that for millions of years, it never changes. What are you talking about?

We wouldn’t know what to say. That is in fact what the moon is. But it is not only that. It is also an object of fear and desire and longing, and has been for millennia. It’s the moon of “Fly Me to the Moon,” Dark Side of the Moon, and thousands of other songs and fairy tales. Its biological significance as well as its psychological influence on us are still not entirely clear scientifically. It even has an important social meaning, as it structures and modifies our social rhythms and calendars. But, in going after all of these different meanings and trying to “nail them down,” we too are already in the realm of fixating, mortifying identity thinking, the very destroyer of things. It is impossible to enter into a responsive relationship with the moon in this way; nor can we explain in this way what we meant when we called out to our companion, “Look!”

So it is with God — and this, I think, is one great strength of the Eastern Orthodox approach to God via negative theology, which is describing who God is by saying what He is not.

Rosa says that our desire for the world — our eros directed towards it — is fundamentally human. All desire is first directed toward something uncontrollable, by “a longing to bring something unreachable into our reach.”

The problem is that when he have mastered it completely, we have hollowed it out, and we believe that there is no longer anything to discover about it.

If my arguments here are sound, then modern culture has committed a fundamental error in transforming our always open-ended longing to bring the world within reach into a demand to bring it reliably under control, a demand that has been systematized into a program of constant expansion of our share of the world, making it controllable in all four dimensions.

Where “everything is under control,” the world no longer has anything to say to us, and where it has become newly uncontrollable, we can no longer hear it, because we cannot reach it.

So this is why it is so much more difficult to believe in God in modern times: because we resist what we cannot control and explain, and because granting free reign to the impulse to dominate and control is what it means to be modern. Again, this is a different way of saying what Iain McGilchrist says in his work on culture and brain hemispheres.

There’s more to what I wrote, but this is most of it. If you want to read more regular commentary like that, please subscribe to Rod Dreher’s Diary, my Substack newsletter, which focuses on spirituality, culture, art, and reasons to hope. I hope the post above will inspire you to order Rosa’s wonderful short book, and to dive into the parallel work of Iain McGilchrist. Find out more about McGilchrist at his website, Channel McGilchrist. I’m reading now his massive new book, The Matter With Things, but a more manageable introduction to his work is his highly acclaimed 2009 book The Master And His Emissary. 

The post Control And Enchantment appeared first on The American Conservative.

A reader whose name and background I know sent me this story. I have changed names in it, and some minor identifying details to protect everyone’s privacy:

I thought you might be interested to hear this story which is about the daughter of one of my colleagues. As I have mentioned, I am a [profession], and I am very lucky to have two sweet, dedicated assistants. Rose has been with me for twenty years and the other, Annie, has been with me for fourteen years. My office is laid back and genial. It is really a nice work environment where the clients and staff are like an extended family.

In addition to working for me, Annie also drives a bus for the school district, and her husband works for a major regional employer in customer service. They have three daughters who are very smart, and they work hard to provide for them. The oldest graduated third in her class of thirteen hundred and was given a scholarship to attend an Ivy League university. The other two daughters—twins—attend a different university in a nearby city. As I mentioned, my relationship with these assistants is almost like family, and they will vent to me on occasion about some of their trials and tribulations.

The other day, Annie told me that there was a family argument because the daughter was going to schedule an appointment at the gynecologist to get her tubes tied. She is twenty-two years old! Her rationale was that the world is too awful and that no more children should be brought into this hellhole.

I have known her daughter since she was eight years old, and for the past fourteen years her mother has told me about her increasingly radical, Leftist views. Starting in high school, the cause was environmentalism, and then being at that Ivy League university, especially during these last two years, the cause has also grown to include the usual diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and destroy-Western-Civilization bullshit.

Last year, the same daughter made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to have an IUD implanted. Her mother threw a fit, as they have good health insurance; she lamented to me that if she wanted an IUD she could go to any gynecologist in the suburbs for a more hygienic and safer procedure. And what’s even more troubling is that the daughter isn’t even sexually active according to her mother (knowing the mother and the daughter, I believe it). Therefore, it wasn’t even for preventing pregnancy but rather for making a statement of solidarity with her “Black” and “Brown” sisters.

Two years ago, none of the three daughters wished their mother a Happy Mother’s Day, as they considered it an antiquated custom. The list goes on and on with gender fluidity, pronoun usage and of course, all the silliness with COVID hibernation. Now, keep in mind that the mother and the father are working class Democrats who have sacrificed for their three daughters; they are thoroughly middle class in their commitment to their children, and their children hate it.

Yet, the mother, with whom I work, often yields to her daughters in these silly arguments—well, with the exception of the most recent argument of having her tubes tied. I hope that this last argument turns on a lightbulb for the parents. Neither parent graduated from college, but they are good people, and as a result, they second-guess their own judgement and common sense reactions to these radical philosophies being pushed at these universities. These kids are becoming evil. At least one consolation is that if the daughter gets her tubes tied, that’s the end of that bloodline. But with that said, I felt truly sorry for my assistant, knowing that one of the greatest gifts is children and grandchildren — and that the Left and its universities are destroying that gift.

Now on a more optimistic note, I have attached a Christmas photo from one of my neighbors. The father is the pastor of a local Mennonite church. They have eleven children (they had twelve, but one died shortly after childbirth). They have all been homeschooled, and they are all very sweet and pleasant. The younger ones look after many of the other children and the elderly in the neighborhood, and the older ones who are married with children work as nurses, plumbers, teachers and painters. They are certainly an anomaly in our town, but they have also been a treasure. The mother and the daughters still wear the bonnets and full-length dresses and the men and the boys are always in long pants. And in their small plot of land (the houses in our town are small and usually set on a fifth or quarter of an acre) they raise fruits and vegetables that are given out to many in the neighborhood. They even carol as a family in the neighborhood on Christmas Eve, which is a joy for me and my wife and daughters each year.

Why have I written this? After hearing that my assistant’s daughter wants to be barren through tubal ligation as opposed to taking the pill or even the IUD, [I see that she] is bitter, hostile and final; I feel awful and angry for this twenty-two year old, because she has been so manipulated by the Left and the Ivy League. And then I look at the photo of my Mennonite neighbors, who through their faith, are so hopeful for the future with all their children and grandchildren.

The post ‘These Kids Are Becoming Evil’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hi all, I have been away from the keys most of today out running errands to prepare for my return to Budapest next week. A priest friend sent me this while I was away, and man, it is something else. It’s been a long time since I invoked the Prytania Theater, where Ignatius J. Reilly used to go to see movies, but this Baby Boomer Catholic priest calls for it, and then some. Behold:

While the bishop of Venice (FL) bans ad orientem, he apparently has no problem with a priest in his diocese replacing the Penitential Rite with three “spiritual breaths”.

Source (warning: this is a full boomer Mass): https://t.co/pHIoLxYgcz pic.twitter.com/lANApa4AIs

— Eric Sammons (@EricRSammons) January 26, 2022

And this fuller version:

Highlights, remixed.

(source: Fr “Jerry” Kaywell, Sacred Heart, Punta Gorda, FL, USA: https://t.co/MyhGR7BMoc) pic.twitter.com/vPRPbiAwsb

— Matthew Hazell (@M_P_Hazell) January 26, 2022

Hey, at least he’s not speaking Latin and facing east!

You can hear more from this musically gifted showbiz cleric at the iTunes store:

Seriously, I bet Father Jerry is quite popular with his flock. It is very hard to grasp, though, how the Pope will let the Father Jerrys do these California dreamin’ liturgies, but finds the Tridentine mass intolerable.

The post Prayer At The Prytania appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here’s a very, very good analysis of the US-Russia standoff over Ukraine, by Richard Hanania. Hanania says that the anti-LGBT media law in Russia is what made the American elites think of Russia as the Great Satan (that they believed Russia engineered Trump’s presidential victory only sealed the deal). People who do not deal professionally with American elites often find it hard to understand why homosexuality and transgenderism mean so much to members of that class. Hanania writes:

I think most people are going to be inherently skeptical of the idea that LGBT and identity politics more generally play such a large role in international affairs. Yet people have less trouble accepting the fact that largely symbolic culture war issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation drive domestic politics. Foreign policy elites are from the same class that gave us the Great Awokening, and if your model of members of this class involves them being illogical and destructive fanatics on matters of identity (the correct model), you should assume that they take their attitudes with them when thinking about international affairs. Their assumptions, deepest convictions, and construction of reality shape the ways in which we discuss geopolitical issues, which most Americans have no firsthand experience with.

One may ask why Pussy Riot and the Russian gay propaganda law made such a big impression in the United States when other countries like Saudi Arabia have much worse records on human rights. There are some 71 countries right now that ban homosexual relations. Russia didn’t even do that, and there is apparently a gay scene in Moscow that looks a lot like it does anywhere else in Europe.

Russian opposition to LGBT triggers American elites more than anti-gay laws and practices elsewhere because Russia is a white nation that justifies its policies based on an appeal to Christian values. Unlike a country like Hungary, it actually matters for international politics. Remember, we’re talking about the same elite that can only get excited about random attacks on Asians if they can pretend it’s white people who are doing it, and can’t be bothered to care about black people shooting each other every day but will make excuses for those who burn cities down in response to a police officer shooting a criminal in the course of an arrest. Homophobic Muslims or Africans will never inspire all that much righteous fury in these people. The template of “white conservative Christians bad” is fundamental to their worldview, and this leads to not only hostility towards Putin, but also nations like Hungary and Poland, even if the latter are uneasily accepted as friends because they were grandfathered into NATO, the alliance that is of course aimed at Russia.

While populists like Tucker Carlson and Sohrab Ahmari are uninterested in antagonizing Russia, most Republicans in Congress and in the most influential think tanks are still stuck in the 1980s. Democrats will sometimes advocate for a less aggressive stance towards Iran and China, but it has become impossible for them to do so towards Russia, the homophobic white nation that gave us Trump and destroyed our democracy.

If you pay attention, and certainly if you have been reading this blog, you know that the American elites think Hungary is second only to Russia as the Source Of All Evil. But as Hanania points out, Hungary has a much higher rating on the Freedom House democracy scale (69) than does Ukraine (60), whose sovereignty the Blob tells us we must all be prepared to go to the mat to defend against the Satanic Russians.

More Hanania:

Once you understand that American politics is motivated by some combination of interest group lobbying and culture war resentments, the hostility towards Russia begins to make more sense. It really is about the “rules based international order,” but that doesn’t actually mean following the fundamentals of international law like “don’t invade other countries or interfere in their domestic politics.”

If that’s what it was about, one might effectively respond that the US has in recent decades tried to overthrow more countries than everyone else in the world put together. Foreign policy elites ignore anti-interventionists who point out this fact, just as how members of their class ignore those who point out that Hungary arrests fewer people for speech than France does, or that if you really care about “black lives” you should be more concerned about the recent historically unprecedented increase in murder than police shootings, which are statistically rare.

Read it all.

Hanania is right: the culture war is the key to all of this. Yesterday I was interviewed by a couple of journalists who are trying to understand why more and more of us American conservatives are interested in, and sympathetic to, Hungary. The basic reason, I told them, is that Viktor Orban is strongly anti-woke, and unlike our own American politicians of the Right, actually cares about fighting it (and is good at it, too). The reason Tucker Carlson’s week in Budapest was so important last year is that for once American viewers were presented with an alternative view of Hungary, as opposed to the monotonous liberal — both left-liberal and right-liberal — take. In fact, I am certain that most Americans, if they ever visited Hungary, would wonder why the foreign policy and media elites hate the country so much. It’s a normal place that happens to be governed by a right-wing party that views globalism and the European Union with skepticism. And though it is not a religiously observant nation, Hungary remains, for now, culturally conservative relative to western Europe, especially on matters related to homosexuality.

Because it allows for same-sex civil unions, Hungary today is more liberal than most of the US was fifteen years ago — but the transatlantic baizuo class prefers to characterize Hungary as some sort of troglodytic outlier because its parliament passed a law regulating the presentation of LGBT material to minors. This was such a crime against humanity that the Dutch prime minister demanded that Hungary be thrown out of the EU. Now, think about this: Hungary has been a European nation for a thousand years, after King Stephen united the country and received a Catholic baptism. Hungarians have enriched European culture immeasurably over the centuries. But now, national leaders in western Europe want to excommunicate Hungary from the community of European nations because its democratically elected leaders — who are accountable to Hungarian voters — prefer that Hungarian children not be propagandized about sexual desires they consider to be aberrant.

As we know, sexual liberty is the summum bonum of Western liberalism, the absolute telos. Once you grasp that, so much about the judgment of liberals becomes clear. For example, in Ontario, a school board refuses to allow critical discussion about the sexualization of children via school books, on grounds that doing so is “transphobic”. They cannot understand any opposition as rational (even if mistaken); for liberals, it’s always about HATE. The problem with this is it badly skews their judgment of the motives of their opponents. This is a very human fault; many MAGAnauts believe that any criticism of Trump can only ever be made in bad faith, the result of irrational hatred. This emotivist stance keeps them from reading the complexity of the world around them, and understanding their opposition in ways that could allow them to grapple with it (the opposition), and perhaps defeat it. The foolish sexual and racial emotivism of the leadership class of Democrats has taken the party far to the Left of most Americans (even nonwhite ones), and is setting the party up for an election disaster this fall.  Because the media are of the same class, and make the same assumptions, they too have the same blind spots.

For example, you have probably aware from the media coverage that the GOP is trying to shut down voting rights for blacks and other minorities, via supporting laws that require one to show legal identification when one shows up to vote. Do you know how many nonwhite US voters support voter ID requirements? Christopher Caldwell writes:

Minorities do not seem to like the Democrats’ racialized approach any more than whites do. The political scientist Ruy Teixeira, who has written extensively about Hispanic abandonment of Democrats, notes that 84 percent of nonwhites support the photo-ID requirements for voting that the Democrats’ voting-rights reforms would ban.

It should be noted here that the inability of GOP elites to recognize how much Republican voters had come to despise them opened the door for Donald Trump. Note well that those same neocon GOP elites — the ones who helped lead the charge into the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles — are now damning people on the Right who think it’s a bad idea for America to risk military conflict with Russia over Ukraine. As Glenn Greenwald, a man of the Left, writes, the neocons are back to their tried-and-true tactic of denouncing as traitors those who are opposed to the US going to war. Excerpt:

This rhetorical tactic — impugning the patriotism and loyalty of one’s opponents — is now the dominant theme in American liberalism precisely because liberals are now led by neocons. Under this rubric, anyone (on the right or the left) who opposed Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden during the Trump years was deemed not just wrong but treasonous: a Kremlin agent. That included Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, WikiLeaks, leftist critics of Democrats, right-wing critics of Democrats, and in general anyone who echoed President Obama’s long-standing view that Russia did not pose a serious threat to the U.S. I cannot count the number of times I have been accused of being a Kremlin agent or asset not by random social media trolls but by prominent Democratic Party and liberal media and political figures for expressing those views.

That is now, by far, the favorite attack against anyone who believes that Ukrainian borders are not important enough to U.S. interests to involve the U.S. in a war. The most vocal media opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (though, as usual these days, war skepticism is also found on many Fox shows, including Laura Ingraham’s, where I recently appeared to make that case, but almost never on CNN or MSNBC). Carlson, on an almost nightly basis, has posed the question few others in corporate media are willing to ask: why is Ukraine a sufficiently vital interest to the U.S. to risk lives, resources and potentially war with Russia in defense of it?

It’s bizarre, isn’t it? The only national news and opinion shows questioning the case for war are right-wing ones. The liberal shows are all-in for war, or at least for ramping up hostilities between the US and Russia, and they’re bringing (of all people!) the neocons who led us into the Iraq quagmire to cheerlead for conflict!

That same crowd is now calling American conservatives (like me) who are pro-Hungary fascists. In The Bulwark, the Bill Kristol web magazine, a writer says that the kind of conservatives who back Orban today are the same kind that backed Gen. Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The argument that pro-Franco conservatives back in the day overlooked repressive things about Franco is certainly true, but the author, Joshua Tait, completely overlooks the unhappy fact that the choice facing Spain wasn’t between right-wing nationalist dictatorship (Franco) and liberalism; it was between Franco and Stalin’s lackeys. He also says that Franco was a dictator (which he was), and so is Orban — a judgment so patently ridiculous that it undermines the credibility of his already-shaky argument. You can certainly judge Orban to be a bad man and a bad leader if you like, but the fact is, he has been democratically elected time and time again, and is facing an election this spring that he just might lose. Why is it so difficult for these American critics of Orban to criticize him for what he actually is? As the prominent Orban critic Peter Kreko said at a public appearance I made with him last summer, people outside of Hungary are foolish to describe the Orban government as “fascist.” Kreko has a thousand criticisms of the way Orban and the Fidesz Party run Hungary, but he understands that to characterize them as fascists is simply wrong.

These same neocons, recall, believed that Iraq could be made into a liberal democracy with American help. What makes anybody think their judgment has improved when it comes to Hungary and Russia?

Look, it is possible to think that Russia should not invade Ukraine — that’s my view — while recognizing that Russia is not behaving like some uniquely evil country, and Ukraine is not perfectly innocent (for example, this 2021 report from VICE News showcases a big annual neo-Nazi rock festival in Ukraine). Anatol Lieven, writing in Time, says that Russia has been warning the West on Ukraine for many years. Excerpt:

The point about this history is that the existing crisis with Russia has origins that go far beyond Putin. Russia has a foreign and security blob, just as does the United States, with a set of semi-permanent beliefs about Russian vital interests rooted in national history and culture, which are shared by large parts of the population. These include the exclusion of hostile military alliances from Russia’s neighborhood and the protection of the political position and cultural rights of Russian minorities.

The Yeltsin government protested strongly against the start of NATO expansion in the 1990s and Russia accustomed itself without too much trouble to NATO membership for the former Soviet satellites in Central Europe. But from the very beginning of NATO expansion in the mid-1990s, Russian officials and commentators—including liberal reformists—warned that an offer of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine would bring confrontation with the West and an acute danger of war. These warnings were echoed by George Kennan, the original architect of the strategy to contain the USSR and the State Department’s greatest ever Russia expert, as well as by Henry Kissinger and other leading American statesmen.

There is nothing mysterious, extreme, or Putinesque about this Russian attitude. In the first place, Western language about NATO expansion establishing a “Europe whole and free” implies the exclusion of Russia from Europe and from a role in Europe—a matter of deep offence to Russians, and Russian liberals in particular, especially since this Western rhetoric was imbued with the assumption (a racist one, by the way) that the word “European” equates to “civilized.” And that Russia isn’t part of that idea.

Of course not. Because, among other things, Russia has not been queered. As we know from the way leading European powers treat Hungary, affirming LGBT is the ne plus ultra of a civilized country. If neither Russia nor Hungary want a 4,000 percent increase in their teenagers and adolescents applying for cross-sex hormones and surgery to make them transgender — as the UK recorded in 2018 — then it is obviously barbaric. That, and the fact that though neither country is especially observant in their religion, they aren’t ashamed of their Christian histories.

To recap: Hanania is right — this cold war with Russia is an extension of the culture war within American society, waged by elites against the American people. Once you understand that, and once you understand which class the American soldiers who would fight this war if it ever went hot come from, you are in a much better position to grasp the pro-war propaganda in our media.

Watch this. This is the thing:

The World Economic Forum’s Great Narrative Conference: “The good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more… the bad news is that the majority of people trusted that elite less…” pic.twitter.com/c4I4zlew1p

— James Lindsay, watching narratives crumble (@ConceptualJames) January 21, 2022

The post Cold War And Culture War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Last week I traveled to NYC for an interview with Jan Jekielek of The Epoch Times, regarding my book Live Not By Lies. I really enjoyed talking to him, and telling the stories of the anti-communist dissidents of the Soviet bloc, and the lessons they have for us today. Here’s a teaser for the interview:

And here’s a link to the full interview. Thanks, Jan, and the American Thought Leaders team! The word continues to get out that we are not living in normal times, and we cannot afford to be sanguine about the threat to our liberties posed by wokeness in power.

Order Live Not By Lies here to learn more.

The post You Cannot Hide From Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here’s a really interesting report by the prominent UK political scientist Eric Kauffman, analyzing wokeness and its future prospects. It starts like this:

Western societies are in the midst of a growing “culture war” between cultural socialism and cultural liberalism. The two sides in this conflict only partly overlap with the country’s partisan political divide: the culture war divides Democrats while largely uniting Republicans and independents. It presents, therefore, a risk for Democrats and an opportunity for Republicans.

In a controversy dominated by anecdotes and headlines, it is vital to systematically gather and analyze survey data on public experiences and attitudes toward culture-war issues. While this has been done for universities, this report—based principally on a new survey conducted on the Qualtrics platform—is the first comprehensive analysis of the wider American experience with, and opinion of, cancel culture, political correctness, and Critical Race Theory.

Cultural liberalism is the belief that individuals and groups should have the freedom to express themselves, should not be compelled to endorse beliefs that they oppose, and should be treated equally by social norms and the law.

Cultural socialism is the idea that public policy should be used to redistribute wealth, power, and self-esteem from the privileged groups in society to disadvantaged groups, especially racial and sexual minorities, and women. This justifies restrictions on the freedom and equal treatment of members of advantaged groups.

For some Democratic voters, a commitment to cultural socialism overrides their historical defense of free speech. Most Republicans disagree with that position. They also oppose what they perceive to be the denigration of white Americans and the nation’s past, which underlie their support for a new politics of civil rights in schools and workplaces.

More:

The main findings include:

A majority of Americans oppose cancel culture, but a significant minority—about a third— support it, backing decisions to fire employees for legal speech that they regard as unacceptable. Cancel culture is thus not only about people being afraid to stand up for their rights; it is rooted in genuine philosophical differences in the population between cultural socialism and cultural liberalism.

The problem of cancel culture is going to get worse, not better. Younger people are substantially more likely to support cultural socialism than older Americans, even when controlling for ideology and party identification. As today’s college graduates enter large organizations, they will mount an increasing challenge to freedom of expression.

Look at this. You’ll recall that Google fired James Damore when he responded to an in-house inquiry about the company’s hiring policies by writing a memo criticizing the assumptions in its diversity plan, and making suggestions for other ways to achieve what the company wanted to achieve.

The survey finds that diversity training has no impact on improving relationships within a workplace, and makes people more afraid:

The survey also finds that all people — even Republicans — who go through diversity training emerge more in favor of cancelling others.

Look at this finding:

Many Republicans are insulated from the culture wars because of where they live and work. Democratic and Republican voters tend to sort into neighborhoods, social groups, and workplaces that reflect their values. This helps protect conservatives and moderates from progressive illiberalism and political discrimination, forces that would cause them to selfcensor. Conservatives (including conservative Democrats) living and working in left-wing environments bear the brunt of progressive illiberalism. Democrats in Republican workplaces also report less freedom to express their views but not nearly as much as Republicans in Democratic-dominated organizations, where fewer than three in 10 Trump voters would tell a coworker how they voted.

Well, sure. Most of this tearing-apart of our society is driven by the aggressive hatred of the ideological left, as the survey shows. Conservatives and moderates naturally don’t want to be around them more than they have to be, because to do so is to put yourself at risk of cancellation or some other form of harassment. The story we get from our leftist-dominated media, though, tells a very different story.

And:

In sum, a divide has emerged between a cultural socialist minority and a culturally liberal majority. Among the youngest voters, cultural socialism arguably has the edge over cultural liberalism, suggesting that cancel culture is likely to worsen in the years to come. Issues of cancel culture and Critical Race Theory now rank at the midpoint in American politics and are a high priority for Republican voters and a mid-ranking issue for independents.

More than a third of all workers are concerned about losing their jobs or reputations to cancel culture. More than seven in 10 people say that political correctness has gone too far and that they self-censor their beliefs in at least some situations. Among employees with college degrees, a majority have experienced diversity training, and taking diversity training is associated with a heightened fear of misspeaking or being fired.

An overwhelming majority of voters of all political stripes oppose certain Critical Race Theory– inspired teaching methods, such as separating children by race into “privileged” and “oppressed.” However, there are large partisan gaps over whether students should be taught that the U.S. is a racist country or whether the curriculum should focus more on race and gender. Public opinion on culture-war issues tends to split the Democratic coalition while uniting Republicans, suggesting that culture-war issues are a risk that the Democrats must manage, while presenting an opportunity for the Republicans.

Read the whole thing to get far more details.

What to make of these findings? I have a few thoughts.

First, we must do away with the thought that wokeness is a passing fad. It’s here to stay, not only for the reasons N.S. Lyons identified the other day, but also because, as Prof. Kaufmann demonstrates, it is popular with a majority of young Americans. You would be foolish to think that they will grow out of it. We have to have a long-term plan to deal with it.

Second, we aren’t going to be able to vote this away, but politics can be useful in fighting it. Because of the demographic shifts, Republicans and moderate Democrats will never have a better opportunity to roll back wokeness and all its pomps and works than they do now. It is imperative that GOP voters push, and push hard, on Republican elected officials to go after cancel culture, CRT, and other forms of wokeness. If they don’t do it now, they never will.

For example:

Embarrassing to whom?

They’re destroying the people you claim to represent and working to permanently shift voting demographics and the only consequence they pay is a few snarky tweets from the “opposition” https://t.co/mJsVGkcoWQ

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) January 25, 2022

The media will scream bloody murder about the terrible, horrible, no-good Republican bigots, but as Kauffman’s polling shows, most voters — even independents and some Democrats — hate this stuff, and will stand by the GOP.

Third, conservatives, moderates, and cultural liberals (as distinct from cultural socialists), have got to find their voice and use it within institutions to defend liberal values like free speech. If we wait for Republican politicians to rescue us, it’s not likely to happen. Besides, law generally follows culture. Look to the courageous parents in northern Virginia who raised hell about what the educational bureaucracy was doing to their kids. The parents there led this fight; the politicians only followed. This is a battle to defend basic liberties, and basic decencies. If we sit quietly hoping to avoid trouble, we will deserve what we get.

This afternoon I’ve been having conversations with Christian friends all over the country. A couple of these friends — both Evangelicals, from different parts of the country — are particularly downcast about what they see happening in their church circles. They talk about how the leadership class within their denominations and institutions prefer to avoid making hard choices, and think they are protecting the institutions by avoiding controversial stands, and by staying quiet as senior leadership makes mistake after mistake, and satisfies itself with trying to fight yesterday’s battles, which are irrelevant today.

Speaking for myself, I get especially irritated when fellow Christians, especially pastors and other church leaders, refuse to confront the multiple crises we are living through. I know that many of them are hoping that politicians will save us from the anti-Christian woke militants. It’s a foolish bet, in part based on past performance of those Republican politicians, but also because the primary battlefields in this war are the hearts and minds of their congregations. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party majority in parliament are doing what they can with the law to fight wokeness, but the young generation of Hungarians are being catechized and discipled through social media. A conservative Hungarian woman told me last summer there that her 19-year-old son and all his friends are being radicalized by TikTok on gender matters. A Polish high school teacher told me that there are no institutions in Poland more influential on the attitudes and beliefs of the young than social media. Unless you expect the state to shut down social media entirely, you are going to have to fight this battle for the hearts and minds of your kids, and (pastors) for the kids in your congregation.

One of my interlocutors today, a veteran Evangelical pastor in a Red State, said, “I am convinced 100 percent that the Benedict Option is the only way out.” What he means is that the faith will only survive in small communities of countercultural Christians who exercise spiritual and moral discipline. In other words, this Red State pastor has arrived at the same conclusion that Father Cassian Folsom, the founding prior of the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, shared with me in 2015 when we met. He told me that in his denomination, they depended for far too long on measuring success by the numbers of people in the pews, and by holding everybody together via shared political views. They have been hollowed out from within.

Of course it is not just Evangelicals. It’s all of us. There is nowhere to hide.

I expect that we will see a big Republican victory nationwide this November, and some respite from the relentless attack of the woke brigades. But as Eric Kauffman’s work clearly shows, this is going to be a battle lasting decades. I strongly urge you readers — traditional Christians and others whose convictions put them on the opposite side of the woke crusaders — to read Live Not By Lies and start setting up Kolakovic groups, and networking with other Christians. As I explain in the book, and as many of you have read on this blog, Father Tomislav Kolakovic was a Catholic priest who saw Soviet domination coming to Slovakia, and he knew that that would mean persecution of religious believers. He spread the word and started groups for prayer, discussion, and action to prepare the local churches for what was coming. He did so in the face of criticism from the Catholic bishops of that country, men who were confident that It Can’t Happen Here. That courageous priest knew otherwise, and kept working. Thank God, because the reason the underground church under Czechoslovak communism was so strong had a lot to do with Father Kolakovic and his disciples.

We Christians and other social and religious conservatives have the gift of time now. Scholars like Eric Kauffman are showing us what is likely coming. A big Republican victory this fall will only slow things down — and that is assuming that the GOP lawmakers actually get off their butts and act boldly against wokeness, as Viktor Orban has in Hungary. So, yes, vote, and get active politically — but by no means let that be the extent of your activism. Prepare your family, your church, and your community for what is to come. The dissidents who survived Soviet communism have so much to teach us.

The post Cultural Liberalism Vs. Cultural Socialism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jerry Falwell Jr. and his minxy wife Becki spoke to Vanity Fair about allegations that the Evangelical empire-builders are closet pervs who enjoyed threesomes with the pool boy. It’s actually kind of sad, the whole thing — a real Preacher’s Kid debacle. Excerpts:

A short while later, the Falwells sat in the kitchen and began to talk about the tumultuous events of the past two years. The wide-ranging conversation was one of many we had over the past eight months. What emerged was an intimate look inside a very public marriage as well as a Shakespearean drama about fathers and sons and the burden of legacy. For the first time, Falwell opened up about his true spiritual beliefs and how they diverge from those of his infamous father, who cofounded the Moral Majority and waged a scorched-earth cultural war for four decades. When I told Falwell that many people thought he, consciously or not, wanted to destroy himself, he considered it for a moment.

“Subconsciously, yeah, I believe that’s true,” he said, nodding. “It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice.” He went on: “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”

Jerry Jr. portrays his late mother, Macel, as a hard-shell Baptist who made him and his late father miserable. For example:

Looking back, Jerry said that his father’s peripatetic lifestyle provided a reprieve from an oppressive marriage. “My dad wanted to travel the world as an escape,” Jerry said. He recalled that his mother’s provincial worldview grated on his father. “She wanted to live a small-town preacher’s life. She didn’t let him mess around,” Jerry said. Divorce was out of the question. According to Jerry, his dad found ways to take the edge off at home, even though Macel never allowed alcohol in the house. “Sometimes he would drink a whole bottle of Nyquil. He called it Baptist wine,” he remembered. Jerry grew up to learn that he too could have a private life that didn’t align with his public persona.

Baptist wine? Holy cow.

Jerry Jr. talks about his rebellious youth, and how he became a Christian:

Jerry was at a spiritual crossroads. He didn’t want to be a fundamentalist, but he wasn’t an atheist either. Jerry said he majored in religious studies at Liberty so he could figure out what he really believed. It was during a course on apologetics—the study of defending Christianity to nonbelievers—that Jerry said he was persuaded it was “rational” to believe Jesus was literally the son of God and the miracles of the Bible happened. “I became a true Christian in college,” Jerry told me. Newly confident in his faith, Jerry decided believing in Christ didn’t mean he had to follow the evangelical rules. After all, Jesus was a rule breaker too. “Organized religion says you have to earn your way to heaven. What Jesus said was, ‘You just have to believe,’ ” he said.

Well, that’s mighty convenient.

The Falwells go on to tell a story about how Jerry Jr. was brought in to save Liberty U. from bankruptcy, and having done so, was named by his father as his heir apparent. Jerry Jr. tells Vanity Fair that he’s not a very religious person. OK, fair enough — but then he should not have accepted the presidency of a fundamentalist university. That is stone-cold hypocrisy. They sure did like the money and the prestige that came with the gig, the Falwells did.

On the perv question, Becki admits to having carried on an affair with Pool Boy, but they both adamantly deny Pool Boy’s claims that Jerry Jr. like to watch him roger the First Lady of Liberty U. That seems to contradict this audio recording Pool Boy released of a phone conversation he had with the Falwells, in which Becki complains that Pool Boy (Giancarlo Granda) is hurting her feelings by telling her about all the women he’s hooked up with, and Jerry Jr. mock-chastises him. I guess it will all come out in court. It takes real nerve to have been exposed as complete sexual hypocrites, and to blame fundamentalist Christianity in general and Mama Falwell in particular for all their travails.

The post The Falwells: Victims Of Fundamentalism? appeared first on The American Conservative.

This is fairly trivial, but it is such an excellent example of how wokeness has conquered the collective brain of the Left that I can’t pass it by. It was flagged on N.S. Lyons’s excellent Substack newsletter, The Upheaval.

It’s a call for grant proposals by the Ploughshares Fund, a major philanthropy funding projects that combat nuclear weapons proliferation, and advance the goals of peace. Nothing wrong with that. But look at what the San Francisco-based philanthropy is after in the 2022 funding cycle:

“Challenging racism and white supremacy in nuclear policies and institutions”? Like, I dunno, the fact that nuclear-armed powers don’t have their missiles pointed at African countries, thus othering them? What about Chinese nukes? Are they problematic? Should we send nuclear weapons to Africa and Latin America for the sake of equity? Are we trying to avoid a future headline: “US-Russia Nuclear Exchange Causes Global Apocalypse; BIPOCs, LGBTQQIA+ Worst Affected”?

More:

Wow. You can get up to $75,000 if you can figure out how to extend the woke grift to (checks notes) the nuclear proliferation cause. You don’t even have to have experience in the field! Just be a BIPOC or LGBTQQIA+, and be able to string intersectional jargon together, and these agonized woke philanthropists will open their purse and throw money at you.

In case it isn’t clear to you yet that this is a scam to separate wealthy leftie do-gooders from their money, and redistribute it to wokedom’s Chosen People:

What’s funny about this is that Ploughshares signals that it is not serious about spending its resources to figure out ways to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war, which is says is its reason for being. It is more concerned with appeasing its own woke conscience by buying indulgences with woke constituencies. Are the donors — both individuals and philanthropies — cool with that? Look, Ploughshares can do whatever it wants to with its money, but it means something when the purpose for which the organization exists takes a back seat to advancing woke goals. They would rather throw cash behind a third-rate grant proposal that ticked all the right intersectional boxes than actually advance the work of nuclear non-proliferation.

In this, though, they are no different than Woke Capitalists, who are less interested in their theoretical prime directive — making money by providing top-quality goods and services — than they are in feeling virtuous about themselves. It’s fun and easy to laugh at these ideologues for wasting their money on virtue signaling, but the loss of a sense of mission within companies, institutions, and organizations, all led by people who have gone crazy for ideology, is yet another sign of decadence.

The post Nuclear Intersectionality & Woke Grift appeared first on The American Conservative.

A reader forwarded this notice of a Zoom lecture last week to me — alas, too late to sign up for it. My guess is that it’s batshit crazy identity politics stuff, but really, who can say for sure, as this notice is written in a language that seems like English, but was really generated by a lit-crit jargon bot. Can you imagine going to grad school in the Classics because you love Greco-Roman literature, and having that love beaten out of you by these ideologues?

The post Woke Adventures In Classics appeared first on The American Conservative.

Take a look at this:

A Quebec talk show celebrates young children ratting out unvaccinated people to the police pic.twitter.com/mfVnirqkbn

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 19, 2022

Little Quebecois Pavlik Morozovs, these are. Morozov was a Soviet child of the Stalin era who became a national hero (according to the government) by turning in his father to the government for anti-Soviet activities. And now, in a western country, the media are encouraging children to rat out unvaccinated people, and to pressure them until they submit.

In other soft totalitarianism news, a university in Britain has attached trigger warnings to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

More:

Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.

In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

It’s happening. More and more of this stuff, every day. And most of us, we just take it, and take it. Why are young people not protesting for their freedom? Why do so many of them actually want to be told what to read, and what to think about what they’re reading?

The post The West’s Pavlik Morozovs appeared first on The American Conservative.