Rod Dreher's Wake Up Call

Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option has been out for a few weeks. As a Christian, I’m hoping the book puts down deep roots, that it escapes the fate of most books on the culture, which make a brief stir, then slip off the radar. Dreher’s book doesn’t deserve such a fate.

Dreher has been writing on a “Benedict Option” for years. He coined the term in echo of a passage near the end of Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic After Virtue, where the Scottish philosopher argues that what the West now needs is a figure similar to St. Benedict. Referencing our current state, MacIntyre wrote:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. . . . This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict.

After Virtue is one of the most cunningly constructed philosophical wrecking balls ever to be swung at the edifice of Enlightenment ideology, and MacIntyre's deep critique of modern bureaucratic culture and the “emotivism” that modernity has spawned leads him to put new emphasis on communal practices as the only viable basis for a meaningful ethics. Dreher, seeing the need for a similar return to Christ-guided practices among Christians, and taking the seminal case of St. Benedict as touchstone, slowly began compiling what would become The Benedict Option.

I come to Dreher’s book from a unique place, a personal history that all but forces me to recognize the troubling truth in his main arguments. Dreher insists that American Christians have for a couple decades now been ignoring their real position in American culture. He is right. What’s more, I believe his widely misunderstood ideas about what must come next, if Christianity is to survive, are right as well.

For most of my adult life I counted myself on the left. As a student in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, I was active in the Divest from Apartheid movement and very active in the nuclear weapons freeze movement. My theory-heavy area of study, Comparative Literature, left me with a keen sense of the subtle powers of ideology in discourse, whether political discourse, or literary, or in the everyday. Many lifelong friendships began in Madison, and this web of friends for many years kept me committed to a politically left reading of the world and American culture. That commitment, however, started to crack in 2011.

Already back in university I was something of an odd man out, because I was also Christian. I defined myself as a “left Christian”, of course, often stressing the social doctrine side of the Gospel, and was unorthodox in my speculative, often agonistic, theological struggles, seeking to ground a new understanding of the faith. I had a strong sense of the divine Presence in the world, of a Mystery that wasn’t to be seized in language but must nonetheless be reverenced. Early on I understood that this reverence for God was connected to anything the West might mean by human rights. The faith had a world-historical importance--one might say the world-historical importance--even as it pointed beyond the world. My focus on European literatures gave me in addition a deep respect for the Western tradition.

All through those years, and up to the start of the new century, there were things in the American left I didn't support; causes my peers considered progressive but that I stood against. At that time, back in 1989, in 1995, perhaps even in 2003, this was still possible: I could be a faithful Christian but still part of the American left.

All that has changed. The new century has seen our “left” almost completely abandon the goals that kept people like me in solidarity. Worse, it has seen the rise to prominence of all the elements I didn’t support: the shrill identity politics, the speech codes, abortion “rights” as the meaning of womanhood; and most noticeable of all, the now fanatical fetish of sexual self-definition--the more perverse the better--as the very meaning of "progressive".

As Rod Dreher lays it out in The Benedict Option, what we are seeing in all this is the final, decisive victory of the Sexual Revolution that began in the 1960s, the LGBT movement its final avant-garde:

The advance of gay civil rights, along with a reversal of religious liberties for believers who do not accept the LGBT agenda, had been slowly but steadily happening for years. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Waterloo of religious conservatism. It was the moment the Sexual Revolution triumphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it since the 1960s, came to an end. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian beliefs about the sexual complementarity of marriage are considered to be abominable prejudice--and in a growing number of cases, punishable. The public square has been lost.

Dreher is especially persuasive in arguing that this victory is not merely a matter of the previous culture “loosening up” its sexual mores or expanding the range of acceptable sexual behavior. He sees it rather as a thoroughgoing shift in cosmology, a culture-wide rejection of the Western understanding of our place in the universe and its replacement with something utterly different. What we are undergoing, according to Dreher, is a far-reaching redefinition of the meaning of sexuality and of the individual’s relation to his or her own being. With the Sexual Revolution’s triumph, sexuality is no longer grounded in any metaphysical truth of human nature, but has become a pure expression of the self’s supposed ability to define itself. One’s sexual being is no longer a given, grounded in one’s sex. Thus, in our new order, “We are married” no longer presupposes a sex-based understanding of what that means; nor, with more recent developments, does the statement “I am a man” even presuppose a male body.

One good reason to read The Benedict Option is to get a sense of what this shift means in relation to the millennia of cultural life that came before. Dreher lays out some of the intellectual history that prepared the soil for the shift, but he’s especially strong in his depiction of just how different this new version of humanity is. He is right, besides, that Christianity can make no peace with this revolution. Biblical anthropology stands on completely different grounds, a vision of the meaning of sex as rooted not in individual desire, but in male and female as embodying a supra-individual cosmic mandate. Sexuality in the Christian rubric was not mostly a matter of what turned individuals on, but of how individuals were to fulfill their relation to that divinely given purpose.

How did this revolutionary victory, once realized, affect the culture? Myself I noticed a very tangible shift in the terrain during Obama’s second term. I now attribute it to awareness among liberals and leftists that, with “marriage equality”, the old regime had finally been routed. This meant a new kind of relationship to those like myself who were, on some matters, still part of that old regime. If previously the left could consider me one of them, a somewhat eccentric religious guy whose “heart was in the right place”, suddenly there was a new coldness. In the past it had always been “Well, Eric, you subscribe to a religious interpretation, I don’t”--but our conversation, whatever the subject, would go on. Now any time the discussion, whether face to face or online, got near any part of my Christianity, their point seemed to be that the conversation would not go on. I’d get the equivalent of a scowl, as if even mentioning the Christian tradition was repugnant: all such thinking needed to be finally and utterly pushed out of sight.

I’d always had gay friends, written on gay writers, supported gays and lesbians in their struggles against the anathema conservatives placed on them. I’d always found the bourgeois Christian stigma on sexual sin over the top; it was often cruel and un-Christian--seeming to imply as it did that sexual sin was in a special category that made it worse, even qualitatively different, than sins like pride or greed. I never thought this way myself. But any nuances in my thought made no difference in the new climate. When it became clear to liberal acquaintances that I didn’t agree to their fickle redefinition of marriage, they jumped straight to ostracism. It was not any more that I “disagreed” with them (as I always had on abortion)--no, I had to be made to disappear. Those who held to the old view of marriage were to have no place in our Brave New World. They could be given no place even to speak.

Why such weight put on this particular issue? I’d disagreed with my fellows on the left before, and my right to such disagreement had been recognized. Why now was it suddenly necessary to censor me?

I now see it as related to something Dreher and others have been onto for years. The logic of Enlightenment, the way this logic has been pushed and combined with the Sexual Revolution, has in fact made sexual self-definition the very center of a new cosmology, even a new religion of sorts. On this Dreher has learned much from the brilliant sociologist and culture critic Philip Rieff:

In Rieff’s theory of culture, a culture is defined by what it forbids. Each culture has its own “order of therapy”--a system that teaches its members what is permitted within its bounds and gives them sanctioned ways to let off the pressure of living by the community’s rules, which are traditionally rooted in religion. Moreover, the asceticism in a culture--that is, the ideal of self-denial--cannot be an end in itself, because that would destroy a culture. Rather, it must be a “positive asceticism” that links the individual negating his own particular desires to the achievement of a higher, positive, life-affirming goal. . . . A culture begins to die . . . “when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.” . . .

What made our condition so revolutionary, he said, was that for the first time in history, the West was attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief in a higher order that commanded our obedience. In other words, we were creating an “anti-culture,” one that made the foundation for a stable culture impossible.

That is, instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture built on a cult of desire . . .

“Eros must be raised to the level of a religious cult in modern society, not because we really are that obsessed with it, but because the myth of freedom demands it,” says political philosopher Stephen L. Gardner. “It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality’. The body must be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.”

In declaring myself against “same-sex marriage” in 2011, I was thus offending against the very core of this new Sacred. Soon to follow the redefinition of marriage there came the supposed right of individuals to define their gender, indeed to invent dozens of new “genders” to correspond to whatever their self-mythicization might project:

The Romantic ideal of the self-created man finds its fulfillment in the newest vanguards of the Sexual Revolution, transgendered people. They refuse to be bound by biology and have behind them an elite movement teaching new generations that gender is whatever the choosing individual wants it to be.

Back in 2011, during the marriage debate, what struck me most was the almost apoplectic fury of liberals when faced with any disagreement. It was a visceral hatred, flaring suddenly, accompanied by the most vulgar insults and sometimes even veiled threats of violence. And this from people who knew me as someone more or less in their camp on other issues.

Deep hatred of anyone who doesn’t march lock-step with LGBT dogma is now widespread. I remember once going to a Facebook page in support of Barronelle Stutzman, the soft-spoken 72-year-old Washington state florist now being sued out of house and home because she told a gay customer she couldn’t arrange flowers for his wedding. Here were the two first visitor comments that appeared:

And Barronelle, a woman who’d always treated this particular gay customer well but only demurred on wedding flowers--these people would have you believe that she is the hater.

The insults I was getting from my fellow leftists were not far from what these “progressives” dished out to Ms. Stutzman. Which made me realize: Were they actually my fellow leftists in any meaningful sense? Could I in any way work together with people who obviously wanted me in a prison camp?

To interpret such visceral hatred, I now think it useful to focus on the revolution part of Sexual Revolution. We might look at previous political revolutions to get some idea of where we’re at as orthodox Christians. American historian Crane Brinton, in his Anatomy of Revolution, was one of the first to analyze the stages a revolution goes through.

Revolutions are typically won by a coalition of political actors working together. Once victory is clear, there is often a brief “honeymoon period” where it seems to the victorious classes that anything is possible. For obvious reasons, this euphoria wears off quickly. Because it’s not long before those who backed the revolution realize that life goes on much as before: Utopia has not been established on earth. A growing malaise combines with the fact that the revolutionary leaders are used to living in battle mode, and thus comes the predictable next step. Moderates among the leadership are accused of not being radical enough in their policies--“We must not give in to these backsliders!”--a purge takes place, and the radicals take over. The ambient ardor left over from the initial revolution is then refocused on two new tasks: 1) ensuring ideological purity; 2) mopping up what remains of the defeated classes, who are depicted as all that stands in the way of Utopia’s final arrival. Thus begins the Terror. During this immediately post-revolutionary period, wholly new planks are often introduced into the ruling committee’s platform, typically of a more extremist nature than what was originally demanded in the revolution.

If we view the Sexual Revolution through this lens of past political revolution, it’s pretty clear where we are at present. The revolution has been won, sexual Utopia still hasn’t arrived (because, duh, it never can arrive) and the only thing that might keep our successful revolutionaries busy for the next decade is mopping up what remains of those who refused to drink the Rainbow Kool-Aid when it was first served--i.e. us orthodox religious people. Religious conservatives must be mopped up because, according to the logic, it is our mere existence that prevents Utopia’s final arrival.

This is in fact just how it is playing out in America, in our media and in our courts. Note especially the new plank that was quickly added to the revolutionary platform: the trans movement. There’s really no surprise in the meteoric rise of this raging trans craze. All the revolutionary zeal left over after the victory on marriage--something had to be done with it, no? To keep momentum going, the woke among the liberal intelligentsia had to quick set about destroying the very idea of sexual difference. “Yes, let’s invent thirty new genders and demand citizens use new pronouns. Those who don’t will face fines. Let’s put biological males in teen girls’ locker rooms. See how the rubes like that!”

It’s all both supremely perverse and, given where we’re at, depressingly predictable.

Liberals often accuse Christians of being obsessed with sex, but really there’s nothing like the obsessive focus on sex we see in this new mainstreamed liberalism. The reason for it, again, is the need to make the desiring individual the very center of the Sacred. To balk at a man who demands you refer to him as they or ze rather than he is now a kind of sacrilege. And they want punishment for those who don’t conform. (Cf. the struggles of Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson.)

So who here is really obsessed with sex as the Center of all Personal Meaning--Christians or this SJW rainbow crowd? I think the answer is obvious.

None of which is to say that sex is unimportant in Christianity. But the Christian understanding of sex is radically different. Dreher:

In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body “was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. . . .”

Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.

The sexual binary of male and female is an integral fact of this created order. In itself it bears metaphysical meaning: “The significance of sexual difference has never before been contingent upon a creature’s preferences, or upon whether or not God gave it episodically to a particular creature to have certain preferences,” writes Catholic theologian Christopher Roberts. He goes on to say that for Christians, the meaning of sexuality has always depended on its relationship to the created order and to eschatology--the ultimate end of man. “As was particularly clear, perhaps for the first time in Luther, the fact of a sexually differentiated creation is reckoned to human beings as a piece of information from God about who and what it meant to be human,” writes Roberts.

Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together? The legitimacy of our sexual desire is limited by the givenness of nature. The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generatively of the divine order.

Gay marriage, as Dreher indicates, denies this complementarity and thus cannot be actual marriage. “Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female.” Dreher again cites Philip Rieff:

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the Sexual Revolution--though he did not use that term--as a leading indicator of Christianity’s demise. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture and redirecting the erotic instinct was intrinsic to Christian culture. Without Christianity, the West was reverting to its former state.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to comprehend why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitative Greco-Roman culture of the time--exploitative especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage--and marital sexuality--with love.

What we have now, in the West, are two incompatible anthropologies. Worse, those who support the Sexual Revolution are uninterested in classical liberal pluralism, which would allow for space in the public arena for the two anthropologies to compete. After Obergefell, many Christians expected, as the LGBT activists promised, that the legalization of same-sex marriage would not impinge upon the rights of Christian institutions to live by and teach their own understanding of marriage. It is turning out quite otherwise, with a mounting wave of lawsuits that threaten the very existence of Christian schools, universities and charities. The gay lobby pursues these cases with evident glee. It is they who do not want to live and let live.

What then must be done given 1) the post-revolutionary fury with which the LGBT movement seeks to expel orthodox Christianity from the public arena, and 2) the necessity for Christians to remain faithful to biblical principles for the church to survive and thrive? What is Rod Dreher’s advice for Christians at this juncture?

My writing here so far, especially if read by liberals, likely gives the impression that The Benedict Option is little more than a handwringing conservative lament on American sexual ethics. It is nothing of the sort. Rather, Dreher’s book as a whole presents a multi-faceted strategy for revitalizing Christian life through intentional life choices and a renewed engagement with earlier Christian practices--the faith as it was lived and practiced before the 20th century flood.

Part of Dreher’s assessment of current Christian culture is based on research done by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. What Smith and Denton discovered, through study of the beliefs of actual Americans, was that the de facto “Christianity” now practiced in America, particularly among the young, has very very little in common with the traditional faith. They coined the term Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) to describe this new American religion. Compared to the historical faith, MTD is doctrinally paper thin, and can be summed up in a few bland credos, among them: 1) God is looking over us but not much involved with happenings on earth; 2) God wants us to be nice to each other and to be happy with ourselves; 3) Good people, when they die, go to heaven.

Dreher believes, and I agree, that this way of living our faith is both widespread and seriously inadequate. He also believes that the churches--too much in the business of flattering the feel-good vanities of the flock and not enough concerned with forming souls--are deeply implicated in the spread of this eroded version of what the Apostles taught. He insists that we as a people, the earthly body of Christ, stand no chance of surviving the corrosive secularism of this new century if we continue muddling along in this milquetoast therapeutic version of our faith.

Many of Dreher’s chapters are dedicated to studying alternatives to our current state, and he begins, aptly, with a long chapter on the Benedictine monks of Norcia, Italy. This portrait of a group of men, our contemporaries, who’ve willingly given up everything and dedicated themselves to prayer, contemplation and the works of mercy, allows Dreher to delve into what a more authentic Christian understanding of work, community and spiritual life might look like. It proves a good starting point, as it gives Dreher the chance to clarify a general thesis: that we, as Christians, though not all called to monastic life, are nonetheless called to bring our everyday life activities as much into harmony with Christ as we can. We are failing in this, especially as regards our attitudes to community and work, which for most of us have been shaped almost entirely by the secular culture we were raised in. According to Dreher, this inability to let Christ into our communal and work life has made us into little more than churchgoing versions of the late-modern Standard Issue Human: egotistical but lost, ethically without rudder, consumerists dragged to and fro by advertising, fashion, zero-sum-game politics, Facebook “likes”.

The Norcian monks are just the first of many intentional Christian communities Dreher touches on. Another of them, also in Italy, a group that charmingly calls itself Tipi Loschi--in Italian, “the Usual Suspects”--is practicing a radical form of community building and youth education that also might offer no small light to those seeking a Christian way out. Of course Dreher also interviews people in many intentional Christian communities in the US, whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, seeking to answer the question: What does a “Benedict Option” lifestyle really look like? How can one be part of American culture, yet also establish a distance that allows for the cultivation of the soul in a community of like-minded others? Dreher gives multiple examples of the joys and potential challenges.

Not surprisingly, Dreher also addresses one of the starkest challenges serious Christian families now face in America, namely how to raise children in the faith and keep them from being corrupted by the trashy ethos the dominant culture now models for them 24/7. These chapters on youth and education are some of the most interesting in the book, and they address everything from options for schooling (Dreher advises, if at all possible, that you get your kids out of public schools) to the threat posed by smart phone culture.

But what of Christian politics? How should Christians engage in the political process? This is one of the areas where Dreher’s work has been most widely misunderstood. Far too many have seen in Dreher’s project a call to “run for the hills”, to “retreat” from public life; a call to “let the public arena go to hell on its own” while hiding out in the catacombs. Many of these critics, to read them, seem not to have read the same book I just finished. Their reaction to Dreher’s project might have been understandable before the book was out, but now that the book is on the shelves, I think they might need to take a more careful look at the actual arguments, the double-directedness of the project. On this, Dreher quotes with approval one of the Norcian Benedictines, who speaks of the need to have "borders" behind which we live to nurture our faith, but also the need to "push outwards, infinitely." This double focus has always been implicit in Dreher's writing on the Benedict Option, so it's odd how often it's missed. Some critics, I suspect, are mainly afraid to face up to what's happening in America.

Given our decisive rout in the culture wars, you’d think we Christians would step back a bit and ask ourselves if we weren’t doing a few things wrong. Dreher identifies the virtual fusion in many minds of Christianity and the Republican Party as one of the biggest mistakes of recent decades. A sizable demographic, he argues, came to think of their Church as “the Republican Party at prayer”. The problem here, in my analysis, was not so much that power corrupts, but that imagined power corrupts. How so?

Far too many conservative Christians came to believe that, as long as their governors were in office, or as long as a Republican was in the White House, the Gospel was doing well. This was a grave error. It was an example of bad faith, shirking off responsibility to others, in this case to a political party that was more interested in serving its corporate interests than in smoothing the way for the Kingdom. Meanwhile, as American Christians told themselves that all was right with the world because the GOP held enough seats, the GOP was simultaneously self-justifying its relative inactivity on abortion or economic justice or religious liberty by saying that, after all, they were just politicians, and if the churches could not gather enough public support for what they wanted and couldn’t manage to sway corporate opinion as to their demographic clout, who were they, mere politicians, to do anything risky? After all, they needed to ensure they’d get elected next time around.

The degree to which this kind of mutual bad faith weakened Christian witness in America over the recent couple decades would be hard to exaggerate. Dreher, always an astute political observer (his blog is must reading) saw just what would follow once the corporate world realized that money was to be made in cozying up to the LGBT movement. And so in Indiana, when modest religious liberty protections were proposed in 2014, and the corporate boards decided to virtue signal by threatening the state with boycotts should they actually enact such “bigoted” legislation, GOP governor Mike Pence didn’t stand his ground. Under pressure from the business lobby, the Indiana law was swiftly rewritten to the point of making it toothless. This, Dreher has said repeatedly, is what you will get if you put your hopes in the Republican Party.

Which is why Dreher now insists that putting too many of our eggs as Christians in any political party’s basket is a mistake. When push comes to shove, the Republican Party will sell us out. What is necessary for us at present is to build up solid Christian communities. Because, if our eyes are open, there is little hope in anything else.

In one fascinating chapter, Dreher offers portraits of two famous Czech dissidents under communism, Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda. These men, he argues, offer examples of the kind of “antipolitical politics” we should begin to practice as Christians. Both Havel and Benda realized the importance of resistance at the individual, everyday level. And they understood the necessity of building alternative communities under or parallel to the overarching, oppressive national political order. One gains hope from these examples of anti-communist resistance because, as surprised even them, their steady underground resistance finally bore fruit. Similar dynamics in Poland also saw the Church prove decisive in bringing down totalitarianism.

But we in America are not (at least not yet) under such intense political pressure. Which is all the more reason, according to Dreher, for us to be both strategic and steady in our political efforts. Being joined at the hip to any political party is not strategic given where we’re at. The only cause Dreher insists we should be intensely involved with (as in paying attention and organizing and pressuring our representatives) is the constitutional cause of religious liberty. Because if that is lost, so much else of what we can accomplish, through schools or charities, will be lost too.

Dreher is emphatic about this fight because it is by no means certain that we will win it. It is all too obvious that the new Sexual Identity Commissars are busy 24/7 trying to take away the rights of Christian schools and universities to teach the faith and run their institutions on Christian principles. We must remember that vast swaths of the liberal intelligentsia no longer even believe religious liberty exists as anything other than “an excuse for hate”.

And so I come full circle, back to the question of the threat posed by LGBT activists and their ever-supportive SJW ranks. These people have already gained far too much sway over our courts, schools, and media, not to mention the sway they’ve gained in many denominations. Aside from fighting for religious liberty, how should orthodox Christians meet this threat in the public arena?

One thing I wish Dreher had included in this book are his thoughts on what might be called the rules of engagement between orthodox religious people and the sexual revolutionaries. How are Christians, in the public arena, to communicate with a public that largely supports the “reforms” demanded by Team Rainbow?

My intellectual background convinces me of one thing: Language is the crowbar of ideology. It is language, the manipulation and coining of terms, that ideology uses to pry its way into social consciousness. It is via new concepts, embodied in language, that new ideologies set up shop.

In many circles in America people no longer bat an eye when someone refers to Rob’s “husband”. And it’s growing ever more common for people to refer to some biological female as he or they or even ze. It’s now considered correct to accept and make an effort to use whatever pronouns an individual demands--otherwise one is a bigot. Courts have already come down on the side of people insisting on these new pronouns; fines have already been levied. In Canada, which now has it worse than we do, refusal to use these newly minted pronouns is literally illegal.

The man next to one says: “I’m Ryan. This is my husband Dave.” The woman next to one says: “I’m nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.” My question: Should Christians agree to use any of this language?

This question is not a trivial one, nor is it easy to answer. On the one hand, Christians must show concern and love for others, regardless of ideological differences, a truth Dreher underlines repeatedly. In this vein, how would it show care and concern if one refused even to acknowledge an individual’s married status? To insist on using partner rather than husband for a married gay couple would now widely be seen as openly disrespectful, besides being, in many instances, legally actionable. Perhaps this will soon be true also with the many new gender pronouns. Shouldn’t Christians just agree to use the terms society is using, as a gesture of peace and goodwill? Can’t Christians just maintain their disagreement in their hearts and in the more closed confines of their communities?

It may be best to do so. But the cost is huge. Because, as I’ve suggested, to use another’s descriptive terms is already to agree to the reality they are promoting. To refer to a woman’s partner as her “wife”, even to do it out of politeness, is to agree that their relationship is actually a marriage. To use ze (rather than he or she) to refer to an individual is to admit that there is such a gender that corresponds to that term. And so: When a Christian agrees to use this terminology, isn’t that Christian more or less burning a pinch of incense to Caesar?

I’d be very curious to see how Dreher might answer these questions on linguistic rules of engagement. I was somewhat surprised he didn’t address such issues in his book. I won’t quote the Havel passage in full, but I wonder: Every time we utter one of these demanded terms, aren’t we forfeiting the bravery shown by the greengrocer who refused to hang the “Workers of the World” slogan in his shop window?

I admit that I’m not sure of the right way forward on this. Is it better, on terminology, to err on the side of peace-making? Or should we ensure that our speech always testifies to what we believe is the truth?

Dreher’s Benedict Option is a brilliant call for Christians to return to the basics of the faith, to recognize how far we’ve been led astray in our hyper-consumerist secular culture. He has made a compelling case for return to an earlier Christian understanding, the authentic one, and for changing our daily lives through a more thoughtful, principled Christian practice. The book doesn’t answer every question (no book can) but it makes for a worthy “starter manual” of sorts for those who recognize the need for serious change. I’m hoping the book puts down deep roots.

Check out Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

Check out Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

And for something completely different, check out my Idiocy, Ltd.

Feminists Publicly Abort Jesus in Bloody Performance Art

A few days back I posted on Facebook about the recent obscene provocation to come from our demented feminist avant garde. My post garnered a few comments from friends sympathetic to my disgust, but also resistance from a British atheist friend which allowed me to explain some of my thinking on the key role the Christian tradition plays in our culture. I reproduce the comment thread here, having changed the names of the participants.

Go to this LifeSiteNews piece for an an account of what went down.



My caption on the Facebook post: “Horrendous, but not surprising. These people don't know the divide they're creating.”

Comment thread:

JOHN GREIST: This is just sick.

PAUL WILKS: If ever a group of assholes deserved a smiting . . .

GRACE LEE: Stupidity redefined.

KAREN DORN: This is appalling. I cannot fathom why so many women are choosing to speak out in such offensive, sacrilegious ways. This seems similar to the type of "speech" that is burning the American flag; there is something inherently violent about it. This will backfire. I am deeply offended and saddened that these demonstrations will only erode the diminishing options women will have, especially women of lesser means and resources.

DALE CHATWIN: Why not? Virgin birth? The concept does invite, even require, mockery. If a woman was given this blessing, then the question is why are women 2nd class citizens in most societies around the world? I am a feminist. Any woman who is not, has some pretty serious issues imo.

ERIC MADER: @Dale Chatwin: Don't be such a dull positivist vulgarian.

Two points:

1) If there exists a God anything like God as understood in Western monotheism, then the virgin birth as a literal event is of course eminently possible, as are any other miracles, including the universe suddenly folding up into nothing or being rearranged on entirely new laws. As an orthodox Christian, I view miracles in this lens.

2) There are however many Christians who do not believe in the virgin birth as a literal event, who understand it as a myth, but show respect to the story itself as an ancient part of their tradition, that Christian tradition that grounds some of the most crucial elements in their present-day culture: its legal norms, its concepts of history, its notions of justice, its critique of vulgar wealth and power.

On at least this second basis you might at least recognize that in mocking Christianity you are a little like the man high up in a tree sawing away at the branch he's sitting on.

In any case you should have enough of a sense of history to understand the following: All great civilizations have risen up on myths and died when these myths fell into disrepute. You as a person wouldn't be what you are today, and your country, England, wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for Christianity. Many of the things you take for granted--the Western concept of human rights for one--arose from and because of the Judeo-Christian inheritance.

Which is to say: Westerners who think there's any virtue in mocking their own culture's religious tradition are like spoiled teenagers who scoff at their parents, the people who fed and raised and taught them. How do such kids look to you? This is where you're putting yourself with these kinds of statements.

KAREN DORN: Yes!

DALE CHATWIN: Did you mean The Vulgate? St. Jerome? I wager he would have been a laugh. Kind of bloke you'd be itching to share a pint of Guinness with.

Are you suggesting that The Life of Brian should be banned for mocking Christianity?

The Catholic Church: "Christian tradition...its critique of vulgar wealth and power." The Catholic Church is the epitome of vulgarity and obscene shows of wealth. The Vatican Bank. A church with a bank holding a minimum $8 billion. Very Christian. Jesus (or whatever his name was) would have been proud.

ERIC MADER: @Dale Chatwin. Typically, you haven't addressed a single one of my points.

DALE CHATWIN: Oh, dear. I thought I had addressed a few.

I find it difficult to take most of human history seriously, especially religious dogmas. I prefer a pinch of salt over everything.

Doesn't everyone scoff at their parents? Of course in religion, this is often terms for ostracism. Religious indoctrination begins in the home. The clothes worn, the food eaten.

I think you put too much emphasis on how tradition, both religious and secular, has formed my own personal belief system.

Anyone could write thousands of pages on what we, as a species, have learnt from history. The opposite is equally true.

The culture of monotheisms will also, given time, fall into myth.

Which points, specifically, am I missing?

DALE CHATWIN: Why shouldn't Christianity, or any other set of unsubstantiated, unproven, fanciful beliefs, be open to mockery like anything else? Are religious types that sensitive?

Poor dears.

ERIC MADER: Well, in fact if you go back and read my comments starting "Don't be such a . . ." I can't see how you imagine you've even addressed one of my points. Read those comments again, and then realize that your answer amounts to:

1) St. Jerome was a prude and would have been a bore to drink with (or, in another possible interpretation, would have been fun to tease over beers).

2) The Vatican Bank is corrupt.

One key thing that is preventing you from even seeing my points is that you don't understand myth in anything like a more anthropological sense. Your understanding of it is the common one (I dare say the vulgar one) as in: "People once believed the seasons were a result of Hades' rape of Persephone. Now we know that's a myth." In short, in your understanding, myths are essentially things that humanity overcomes via scientific advancements. In my understanding, this is not so, myth is still with us, and always will be. An enormous range of cultural phenomena is guided by thinking that is mythical; even the social thinking of secular, educated people is largely based on mythical constructs that can't be grounded in empirical research and in fact AREN'T grounded--but still prove decisive in culture. What is key, and in my view most dangerous, is that Enlightenment notions of reality have somehow convinced our contemporaries that their secular societies' norms are NOT grounded on myth, that they're based rather on reason and research, that their societies have largely left myth behind, and that progress means leaving more of myth behind. I say No. We have not left myth behind. We have just changed the names of the agents in our myths. Our very notions of the arc of history, of justice, of the power of reason as it relates to social reality and the universe, of progress, of human rights, etc.--all these are based on myths no less flimsy than the story of Hades and Persephone. And it will ALWAYS be so. Why? Because story and the stories we tell ourselves will always guide our group behavior. It is a fact that applies to Dawkins and Sam Harris as much as the Pope. The reason the former are shallow and the latter is not is that the former don't recognize this fact. They don't see the degree to which they're raising things discovered by empirical research to the level of guiding mythical principle. What science discovers about how the universe is structured (and it has discovered a lot) can tell us virtually nothing about existential or ethical questions. Those secularists who try to make science into a cultural guide are not practicing science any more--what they're doing is called scientism. Which is why serious philosophers, and many scientists besides, think the New Atheists are a joke and, in terms of the field of discourse the New Atheists are trying to enter, are in fact way out of their league.

So, to sum up: You still believe myth is something that is to be overcome. That's very 19th century of you. I however know that myth is something humans never overcome. You believe myth is inherently, to the extent it is believed, a negative thing. I believe we can't escape myth, that it is neither negative nor positive, but simply HUMAN, and the key is recognizing which myths show the deepest grasp of the human reality.

You write: "I think you put too much emphasis on how tradition, both religious and secular, has formed my own personal belief system." Sorry, but I think this is extremely naive. All of us, even the most skeptical, have been formed by tradition in ways we can't even fathom. That is what philosophy is for: to help us glimpse our own blind spots. In your case, even the nature and structure of your skepticism, how you see your skepticism as it relates to the relative naivety of others--even this is part of a tradition that you've internalized and modified in some ways. You say that you don't take history too seriously, that you take it with a grain of salt. Sure, but that doesn't mean you have escaped your inscription in history. To begin thinking is to think in language. To enter the realm of language is to be drawn into a lexicon of inherited concepts. End of story.

As usual, I didn't intend to type so much. I'll say one more thing. Given that you're a reader of John Gray, I'm amazed you seem so obtuse on this question of myth and how it is constitutive of culture, how it is inescapable on the social level. My point: On most of these issues, at least in terms of argument re: what myth is or how individual thinking can relate to traditions, Gray would agree with me.

Cheers. Since I took time to write all this, I hope you give it some thought.

DALE CHATWIN: That's a ten-course meal to get through . . . very French. Thanks.

A propos, I do not consider myself a New Atheist. I have no desire to proselytize one way or the other. I became an atheist long before the New Atheists took to the stage . . . long before I knew the meaning of the word atheist.

I searched for religious meaning on and off for years, but came to the conclusion that it really is all random, essentially meaningless, and misery for most of humankind. And who directs this misery? Well, humankind of course.

I believe humanity is a plague.

ERIC MADER: Bon appétit.

* * *

UPDATE: Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, writing on the same Argentine provocation, featured some of my remarks. In the comment thread that followed, various writers argued that I was mistaken in tracing so much of the political culture of the West back to the Christian influence. The real roots of our current institutions, so the argument goes, are classical Greece and Rome. You can check the thread there, but my basic response was the following:

ERIC MADER: Some here suggest that I’m mistaken in identifying Christian tradition as a key ground of our political and legal norms. And so Forbe, above, argues that the cloth of our political culture as Westerners is woven entirely of Greek and Roman materials.

Of course I’m well aware of the classical heritage. But I would say that this pagan heritage, while decisive in providing us most of our political terminology and many of our structural norms, does not finally account for certain huge differences between us and our ancient pagan models. Especially our concept of inalienable human rights, that political doctrine that all people, regardless of class or nation, are created equal and thus embody a fundamental dignity (before the law, before the divine, etc.) that is prior to accidents of class, race or gender. It is this doctrine that allowed the Christian West finally to defeat slavery, and this that explains things like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The classical thinkers of Greece and Rome recognized no such thing. We have it because of the Christian soil from which we’ve sprung.

The earliest statement of such a fundamental equality is found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. And really, there’s nothing else like it in in the ancient world: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:26-28)

Race, class and gender are to take second place to a new fundamental equality? Gee, that stuffy old Apostle was quite radical, wasn’t he? Stop the presses, Slate and Salon! Your grounding social doctrine, the very litmus test by which you judge something progressive or not, is 2,000 years old. And, sorry to inform you, it came from one of those hateful Christians.

The Enlightenment, and the American Founders in particular, merely abstracted this “one in Christ” to “one in being created by the same Creator”. And so we have our modern concept of human rights.

When Rod suggests that these Argentinian feminists are unwittingly undermining the very conceptual ground on which they stand, this is what he means. Not just the radical feminists, but the whole sick SJW crew is bent on savaging the hand that feeds them. I agree with Rod on the stupidity of it. They certainly will not like what their hardball identity politics becomes once the other side begins to practice it. Which is already happening.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Gaslighted: What We Got for Christmas in 2016

We’re now on the very cusp of a new year, and there’s one thing about the passing one that I can say with certainty: THE news story of 2016 is that a huge swath of the American public, stretching from left to right, deeply distrusts both 1) establishment candidates from either party and 2) corporate media. That’s the news story of the year. Period.

But look what our political class and media are up to here at year’s end. For weeks now they been frantically trying to fill that media, both print and TV, with: "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! They’re bombarding us with fake news!”

As a diversion tactic from the true Big Story, you’d have thought they could come up with something better.

To give bite to their claims that “fake news” determined the election, which is absurd on the face of it and absurd down to the bone of it, our leaders last week even passed actual legislation designed to cast doubt on alternative news organizations, legislation that is almost literally state censorship. In America.

What in hell are they up to?

To give yet more bite to their claims, the Obama administration two days ago kicked out thirty-five Russian diplomats, promising yet further reactions to the Russian “aggression” we’ve suffered.

This is major stuff, sure to grab headlines and keep the talking heads talking. Which is just what it is meant to do. Because at present Washington elites’ most important task is to keep us the citizenry from catching our breath and thinking clearly about the year’s real news--namely our widespread and reasonable disgust at these same elites’ decades-long systematic betrayal of our interests in favor of Whatever the Corporations Want.

And here I have to watch non-comatose, intelligent friends on Facebook and elsewhere still debating the question of whether Russia hacked the DNC or, if not, who Wikileaks’ source was. It's depresseing. Because it's irrelevant. It is a diversion from our real story, a strategic diversion that sadly is almost working.

Consider: What if the Russians did hack us? Really--what if? Would there be any surprise in that? Hacking is an integral part of intelligence work. We, the Chinese, the Russians--it's what we do, year in year out. And? If the Russians hacked us, the whole story should be on improving cyber security, not on the question of how evil the Russians are, and certainly not on the question of whether alternative media sources are trustworthy, which is an issue entirely unrelated to cyber security.

In fact the Russian hacking meme was launched in reaction to the abject horror Washington elites felt face to face with the unthinkable. Their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost. Which is not supposed to happen. They thought they were doing so well. And she lost.

In a breathtakingly hypocritical move, the hacking meme was launched simultaneously with the "fake news" meme. Note how these two were rolled out as virtual twins. The clear intent was to create a generalized impression in the public mind: “If we Americans didn't vote for Clinton, it was because the Enemy is manipulating our media!” Which notion is entirely false of course, and doesn't even logically follow from the premise of hacking. Though there may be some evidence of hacking, in fact there is no evidence Russia seeded our press with fake news. (The Washington Post, ever eager to please its masters, did its best to establish a link between the two memes, but failed miserably, as Glenn Greenwald demonstrates. The article is a staggering exposé of just how far journalistic standards have fallen among our corporate media.)

Our leaders prodded these two memes (“Russian hacking”; “fake news”) onto the stage simultaneously in order to make them sing as a duo. That the connecting logic is lacking, that they are not in fact a duo, is unimportant when it comes to manipulating public perceptions. We Americans are being subjected to a sophisticated gaslighting campaign; and frighteningly, to judge by how much media and mental bandwidth space it’s taking up, this campaign is near accomplishing its goal.

Gaslighting, if you aren’t familiar with the term, describes a particular style of psychological manipulation. It seeks to confuse the victim by overwhelming him/her with an ersatz version of reality, a version presented so aggressively and in such an offhand manner that the victim begins to doubt his or her sanity, or at least feels suddenly on unfamiliar ground. The gaslighter befuddles the victim by swiftly changing the focus of attention, and making her argue irrelevant points or swallow illogical givens so as to wear her out. Gaslighting originally describes sociopathic behavior in the context of relationships, but the concept is being used more and more in recent years to describe sophisticated state propaganda techniques. There are many useful articles on the arsenal of gaslighting techniques (here’s one for instance) and if you aren’t familiar with this arsenal, it’s well worth getting up to speed.

In this current instance, which we might call the Great Christmas Gaslighting of 2016, the clear purpose is to obfuscate and confuse the public on five fundamentals:

1) Americans rejected Hillary Clinton because she was the establishment candidate, and Americans had had enough of this kind of politics under the current president. Further, that the mainstream media so clearly sided with Clinton proved to many that she was not to be trusted. Ditto with her and the DNC’s treatment of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. That Clinton could lose to Donald Trump proves just how deep this distrust was.

2) If the Russians hacked the DNC, that in itself did not cause Clinton to lose the election. She lost, again, because Americans didn’t want another corporate-bought Washington insider in the White House.

3) The origin of the data Wikileaks received is not the main issue for most American voters, regardless of what the media says, and in fact it is almost as likely the data was received via a leak from within the Clinton campaign. But again, in relation to the real news story of 2016, whichever is true matters little to most Americans because . . .

4) No one has credibly disputed the authenticity of the emails Wikileaks published, and those emails, without any “fake” elaborations on their content, were already enough to prove collusion with the media, a conspiracy against Bernie Sanders, and pay to play.

5) The “fake news” scare is itself hollow. “Pizzagate”, the only fanciful conspiracy theory resulting from the Wikileaks releases, was not an elaborate piece of Russian disinformation, but merely the product of a conspiracy-hungry western blogosphere. Westerners don’t need Russia to concoct conspiracy theories, and such theories have always been around. Some elements of the public are always vulnerable to BS claims, but that in itself is no excuse, in America, to support programs of state censorship. Yes, we’re looking at you, Mr. Obama. It will be nice to see you go.

And so: What connection does fake news even HAVE to Russia? There is no connection, even though our establishment pundits are babbling overtime to imply one. I guess they know on which side their bread is buttered.

With the level of public disgust at Washington Business As Usual, our government and corporate media elites are now in panic mode. They are, after all, a class of many thousands of individuals whose very lucrative careers are at risk if they lose public trust, and they see they are losing it fast. Their goal at present is to dominate the conversation with an ersatz version of reality and hope the public changes its focus. They turn to gaslighting as a tactic.

Gaslighting:

1) If they see the public doesn’t trust them and their own political leadership, quick--Point to the leadership in Moscow as a dangerous threat that needs to be dealt with.

2) If they see the public doesn’t trust the media they use to direct public opinion, quick--Concoct a “fake news” epidemic to make the public return to trusting to only mainstream media.

3) Do this all at the same time so that the public will get the vague impression that Russia is behind the “fake news”.

So what did we Americans get for Christmas this year? We got gaslighted. And we’re still getting gaslighted, more so with every passing week, because gaslighting depends on bombarding the victim with false claims, repeating them so often and so fervently that the victim starts to repeat them in his or her sleep.

That the concept grew out of the study of unhealthy relationships with sociopaths is perhaps helpful. The American public has long been in a relationship with a lying sociopath, and that sociopath is the corporatocracy in Washington. For decades, our leaders in both executive and legislative branches, from both parties, have allowed corporate interests to outsource our jobs, military-corporate interests to drag us into one unnecessary war after another, and Wall Street elites to rig our financial markets so as to make us, the population, the big losers whenever those markets crash. And if we react in a sane way, by flatly rejecting more of same, we seem them now battering us with 24/7 propaganda about how our real problem is in Moscow.

Under this constant and systematic abuse, if we are to keep ourselves sane, and keep struggling for a functional democracy, we must not forget the real news story of this year. And so I’ll repeat my first paragraph:

THE news story of 2016 is that a huge swath of the American public, stretching from left to right, deeply distrusts both 1) establishment candidates from either party and 2) corporate media. That’s the news story of the year. Period.

At the start of the new year, then, our questions should be: WHY has this distrust grown so deep and what are we going to do about it? Has it grown so deep because of “Russian operatives”? The suggestion is laughable. Are we going to return to trusting the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, are we going to shun “fake news” sources that don’t look and sound like Anderson Cooper? We’d be insane to do so. So HOW shall we proceed to ensure that we’re not systematically manipulated over the years to come by the same band of corporate predators and fake progressives (Hello, Hillarack Obinton) that have been playing us since the 1990s?

Whatever we do, we must keep thinking and talking about our REAL story. It is only on such solid ground that we might think clearly to change the dynamic that has brought us to where we are. Which is not the best of places.

But at least, as 2017 begins, the establishment is in panic mode. Let’s keep it that way.

Eric Mader

Like a little weirdness with your coffee? Check out Idiocy, Ltd., dryest damn prose in the West.

Hey, Clintonites: A Christmas Message

Hey, Clintonites. Why not finally recognize where you're at? Shoulder deep in mud and cognitive dissonance. And still digging. Really, isn't it time to put those shovels down?

First we had all the talk from the liberal press of election rigging, then Stein's recount push. Result: Trump only gained a larger lead in Wisconsin. And as for evidence of possibly systematic rigging, there was some in Detroit: Clinton territory. It didn't make for good optics, as they say.

Then you got yourselves into this faithless electors campaign. Result: Trump lost two electors, Clinton lost five.

What's next? Try to airlift Hillary onto the stage at the inauguration?

Here are the two hard pills you folks need to swallow: 1) Hillary lost this election, as did her party generally. 2) Had you insisted early on that Bernie Sanders be the candidate, rather than Miss Wall Street Baggage, Trump would now be launching a new reality show rather than preparing to move into the White House.

So it’s time to climb out of the neoliberal pit you're all in. Put those shovels down while we can still see the tops of your heads.

And Merry Christmas! It's the holiday where we celebrate the birth of Jesus, by a long shot the most hardcore social justice warrior of the ancient world (INCLUDING on women's fundamental equality) aside from being, of course, the Messiah.

Sincerely,

Eric Mader

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Russian Interference in Wisconsin Recount: Experts

Eric Mader, The Disassociated Press, Madison, December 13, 2016

Evidence of Russian interference in the recent Wisconsin recount is mounting, according to experts interviewed by the Disassociated Press.

Election and polling experts cite “abnormalities” in the outcome of the statewide recount, and point to Moscow as the likely source of organized meddling that occurred in several key counties across the state.

Final tallies announced Monday showed that Hillary Clinton still had not won the state, and that Donald Trump picked up an additional 131 votes. Final totals put Trump’s count at 1,405,284 votes, 22,748 more than Clinton.

“It is my firm belief that advanced mind-control techniques were employed by Russian-trained agents to throw off this count,” David Swishe, an election expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Agents of the Russian state were deployed outside county clerk’s offices as the recount unfolded," Swishe said. "They used telepathic mind-control to make election workers visualize Clinton ballots as Trump ballots."

“In Waukesha County, at a Starbucks just next to the clerk’s office, a very Russian-looking man was observed reading Dostoyevsky on more than one day during the recount,” he added. “It’s very suspicious.”

Lisa, a Women’s Studies student and self-described polling expert, agrees that the recount was hacked.

“I conducted exit polls on Facebook the day after the election,” she said. “Every single one of my friends voted for Hillary. Really there is no way Trump won. It's scientifically impossible.”

Both Swishe and Lisa conclude, based on their evidence, that Clinton won the state by at least a couple hundred thousand votes.

“We’re starting a petition to push for a redo of the recount,” Swishe said. “And we’ll be placing Mind Protectors around all the sites where the recount is happening.”

“I had to read Dostoyevsky myself in a lit class,” he added. “The Brothers Raskolnikov. Let me tell you first hand, that book sucks. And these Russians we have today suck even more.”

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Clinton Sheep: Non-Stop Baaaaiiiit and Shift

Our CLINTON SHEEP with their blah blah blah she won the popular vote blah blah electors save us blah blah blah it was the "fake news".

Really these people are the sorest losers in shepherding history.

Both Trump and Clinton campaigns ran in order to win the electoral college. And Clinton lost. If the rules of the game had been different, say if winning had been based on taking the popular vote, there's no telling who would have won this election. How many Trump supporters in solid blue states didn't vote because they knew Clinton would take their state anyway? Likewise how many Clinton supporters in red states? We will never know the tallies. The electoral college is how our elections are decided, and there are good constitutional reasons for that. Election 2016 is over.

But not for these pissy Clinton Dems. It's like two teams played a game of baseball and then the losing team came out whining "If it had been basketball, we'd have won. Let's pretend it was basketball."

With each passing day, I am gladder I didn't vote Clinton.

On "Fake News"

I have devoted my life to language and understanding how it works and doesn't work. And really, I say the following with utmost seriousness: ALL news is fake news.

We should not fall into the trap of pretending we can draw a line between real news and "fake" news. Even those who seek utter objectivity in reporting cannot achieve it, because they are already choosing to underline certain facts and ignore others, which is one of the most determinant levers of bias. The existence of intentionally misleading news stories is nothing new. It should sharpen our critical abilities and prod us to check sources, rather than push us to declare which news providers are "fake".

Making blanket declarations--"That site is all fake news"--will only lead people to give more credence to news providers that are already FAKE ENOUGH to warrant suspicion and deeper checking. Cf. CNN, or any of our other mainstream news sources.

Liberal Blindness Destroyed both the Bush and Obama Legacies

It is the major historical irony of our new American century, but one I’ve seen nowhere remarked.

The legacies of both this century’s first conservative president, George W. Bush, and of his left-liberal successor Barack Obama were already in tatters as their tenures ended. The irony is that both administrations undid themselves through policies only made possible by the heavy sway certain liberal myths wield in our political life.

I would call the culprit simply liberal blindness--a blindness deeply ingrained among us and one seen, as I hope to show, most clearly in the liberal mind's fatal tendency to disconnect itself from rigorous analysis of culture. Philosophically induced, our liberal refusal to look squarely at culture destroyed both the Bush and Obama legacies.

How did it fall out in the two cases?

For the Bush administration, liberal thought induced a fatal naivety as regards political possibilities in Iraq. Both the extent of naivety, and the world-historical tragedy it led to, would be hard to overstate. The apologists of regime change and nation building kept repeating: “We will be welcomed as liberators” and “All people desire freedom.” But only a deep self-induced ignorance of the cultural and religious makeup of Iraq could allowed policymakers to assert that the Iraqi state, once freed of Baathist rule, would transform itself into a stable democracy. We know how it ended: millions dead (including scores of our own citizens) civil war, the rise of ISIS.

The culprit here was the entrenched liberal myth that all cultures are somehow naturally “on the way” to western-style democracy. Were it not for the sway this notion held, the nation-building argument could never have been formulated relative to the tense, divided territory called Iraq. Blinded by myth, we proceeded to shoot ourselves in the foot. Both we and the Iraqis are still bleeding from our wounds.

Unaccountably, even the lessons that could have been learned from the recent fall of communist Yugoslavia and the bloodbath of ethnicities that ensued there carried no weight in our political debates going in. A smart high schooler could have seen that lesson (the fall of an authoritarian state in an ethnically and religiously divided territory is a sure-fire recipe for civil war) but our pundits and leaders could not. Mythical thinking prevailed.

The second area in which the Bush legacy was undone thanks to liberal myth relates to the management of the US economy. Free-market fundamentalism, a myth tradition according to which markets are somehow natural, self-regulating organisms, had during the Clinton years led to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Of course Bush and his appointees were fine with that massive deregulatory move, as they shared the thinking that made it possible. Planted in the 1990s, the poison poppies of Wall Street excess burst in Bush’s second term, and on the back of his pipe-dream venture in Iraq, this second liberally-induced disaster ensured Bush’s legacy would be one of massive bungling.

Just as the liberal consensus had failed to consider the cultures of Iraq, so they failed to consider the culture of Wall Street. There was no sufficient thought of what might really happen if the foxes were left to guard the henhouse. Markets, according to the meme, are naturally self-regulating systems.

Those were the Bush years. But Obama’s legacy was similarly undone by liberal blindness. The myth that ultimately undid what could have been the Obama-Clinton years relates to liberal notions of “progress"--specifically that ingrained belief that progress is something that must always occur, being somehow built into the very movement of history.

The Obama administration, deeply corrupted by corporate cronyism, wasn’t about to actually crack down on Wall Street (none of the banksters were jailed; Dodd-Frank was weak medicine compared to the previous Glass-Steagall) and so Obama had to show he was progressing on other fronts. Thus we have the Affordable Care Act. But more importantly, I think, in terms of Obama's progressive cred, we have same-sex marriage, followed by the now raging trans craze--in short, the ascendency of the LGBT movement, to which Obama gave belated but decisive support in an obvious attempt to reenact the Civil Rights Movement in sexual terms. It was liberal myth that made this project plausible. Since “progress” must always be happening, and since we know as a culture what “progress” looks like (namely: previously oppressed groups are given equal rights) this attempt to remake America’s thinking on marriage and gender was rendered passable as an exciting new arena for History, one in which Obama could cement his legacy as a figure comparable to Martin Luther King, Jr. Never mind that the actual Civil Rights Movement sought to undo injustices grounded in specifically modern forms of racism rooted in modern pseudo-scientific theories of race, whereas, quite differently, this new sexual civil rights movement brought with it a concerted ideological assault on much more fundamental human realities: the majority culture's thinking on sexual difference and marriage, both rooted in a traceable history stretching back to ancient times.

The problem, again, was the Obama administration’s insufficient analysis of actual American culture. Millions upon millions of Americans did not in fact agree that redefining marriage in this way was progress. Neither did religious Americans appreciate the heavy-handed way the new definition of marriage was being forced on them. More obviously, relative to Obama policy in the recent couple years, the elevation of a psychological disorder (gender dysphoria) to the status of normal (as if a boy deciding at age six that he is a girl is somehow a previously undiscovered natural development that should lead to immediate name change and eventual hormone treatment) led many Americans to react in justified anger. They saw clearly where this would lead: to a state-baacked LGBT movement dictating to them what boys and girls were, as well as dictating how they were to raise their children. I believe many of these Americans, many who might otherwise have voted Democrat, decided early on to give the whole Obama-Clinton tribe the boot, seeing that this party cabal was pushing into arenas of human meaning where government should not presume to tread. Had it not been for the offenses against religious liberty (again in the name of “progress”) and the rise of the trans craze, Clinton would have likely have won and her party would have held the Senate. Yes, the fury at Obama and the Washington elites over economic issues was certainly crucial, but this cultural blindness of the Democratic leadership might have been the thing to tip many voters into the Trump camp.

Thus again, in the case of Obama, the shattered legacy can be chalked up to a blind indifference to specifically cultural realities: a liberal refusal to look at actual communities and how they hold together; a dogmatic belief in liberal myth, in this case a myth of constant progress, as decisive.

All of this, if my reading is right, should suggest a chastened return to anthropology for anyone who claims to be a political thinker. There is much to cherish in our liberal order, but its mythical excesses, if not recognized, may prove fatal. Liberal consensus is now fraying across the Western world. One of the reasons, in my reading, is precisely this ingrained liberal disrespect for culture. Those who would defend the liberal tradition need to rediscover a respect for the concrete cultures of real nations, and adjust liberal prescriptions accordingly.

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Abedin Emails Reveal Clinton Cabinet Picks: Source

Eric Mader, The Disassociated Press, Washington, D.C.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an FBI source with access to the emails on Anthony Weiner’s seized laptop has informed the Disassociated Press that one email contains a list of Hillary Clinton’s likely cabinet picks. The email in question was written by Clinton aide Huma Abedin to John Podesta on October 4th. The Disassociated Press is unable to verify the authenticity of the email, but has decided to publish the contents as received.

The email indicates both uncertainties on Clinton’s part and, in some cases, unprecedented double appointments. The full text reads as follows:

John:

HRC wanted me to share this list with you and get input. We should have an amended list within ten days.

CABINET PICKS

Attorney General: Loretta Lynch
Federal Reserve Chairman: Lloyd Blankfein?
Securities and Exchange Commission: Lloyd Blankfein? (could Lloyd do both?)
Surgeon General: Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Secretary of State: Chelsea Clinton
Secretary of Defense: George W. Bush
Secretary of Education: Beyonce and Jay-Z (can we do double appointments?)
Health and Human Services: Cecile Richards
Agriculture: Hugh Grant (not the actor; never liked the actor--snooty)
CIA Director: Matt Damon
Secretary of Family and Childhood Development: Caitlyn Jenner
Homeland Security Head: We’ll just use my own server
Press Secretary: Anderson Cooper? Richard Quest? (Either would be great. How many will CNN let us take altogether? Call them)
Secretary of the Interior: Huma
Secretary of Religious Freedom: Rachel Maddow
Secretary of Secretaries: Debbie Wassermann Schultz
Secretary of Bill’s Entertainment: Jeffrey Epstein
Secretary of Pantsuits: Captain Kangaroo



Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Trump or Clinton? Neither!

Happens all the time these days. I post something on Facebook indicating I don’t support Hillary and immediately get this from Jane, a friend of a friend: “So your thought is to elect Trump? And that would be better?”

Instead of writing another editorial, I’ll just give you our ensuing dialogue.

Eric Mader: No. My thought is not "to elect Trump”. My thought is rather: A vote is a vote FOR someone, not merely a vote against someone else. Hillary does not deserve the votes of honest citizens, and I refuse to swell her numbers (and thus the illusion of her legitimacy) by giving her my vote. I will no longer join in the Democrat vs. Republican race to the bottom, but will vote third party. The mainstream Democrats deserve to lose, and I'm willing to take the risk of Trump in office if it will help delegitimize these utter fakes.

Jane Doe: Wow. If Trump wins, our world will be pretty scary, and if you supported the tenets of Bernie you will be in for a rude awakening. Unfortunately, at this time a vote for third party is a vote for Trump.

Eric Mader: You’re just being patronizing, Jane. I'm well aware of what rude awakenings there may be. And no: A vote for a third party is emphatically NOT a vote for Trump. A vote for a third party is a vote for a third party. That's why it's called "a vote for a third party".

Jane Doe: Call it what you will, but a Trump presidency certainly would not "delegitimize these utter fakes". He appears to be the biggest fake of them all. And because you are a US citizen you can express your opinions freely and vote for who you want. Good luck.

Eric Mader: Your response is characteristic. Realizing that I will not be voting Hillary, you immediately change the subject to Trump and how he's a bigger fake than Hillary--"the biggest fake of them all". I think which of these two is the bigger fake is arguable, because they are fakes in such different ways, but ultimately the argument is beside the point.

If a place offered you lunch with the choice of shit in a bowl or shit on a stick, your logic would have to be that the shit on the stick is the only wise choice because, look, the amount of shit in the bowl is larger. My choice is to not eat lunch. Who is wiser? Which is the course of action more likely to put that shit restaurant out of business, yours or mine?

I am not voting for Trump, so I'm not sure why you even mention him. The only way to delegitimize fakes in a democracy is not to vote for them. I'm not going to vote for them. You, however, are in the camp that keeps saying: "Mm, this shit on a stick, it really isn't that bad. Creamy actually. Mm, everyone should eat here."

I worked hard to elect Obama twice, the first time enthusiastically, the second time not so much. For me, this election is not between Trump and Hillary, it's between the possibility of democracy and the reality of corporate control over our whole political process. Whether you can see this or not, it is Hillary who is the consummate corporate candidate, which is why, surprise surprise, so many Republican establishment figures are now coming out in her favor. They're doing so because their Republican commitments, all along, have not been to maintaining a democratic republic but rather to furthering the smooth corporate takeover of our republic--ensuring, in short, that government continues to sell out the population to corporate interests. They know--which is bizarre, isn't it?--that the GOP candidate, this time, is actually a less reliable corporate rubber stamp than the Democratic candidate.

Anyhow, good luck to you. I'm fifty now, and I won't be supporting these people any more. I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours in politics, going back to my undergrad years, and am no longer giving the benefit of the doubt to anyone who's spent as much time sucking Wall Street and the corporate elites as Hillary has.


Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

The "Deplorables" Reply to Hillary Clinton

“Basket of Deplorables”?

That’s what Hillary Clinton called tens of millions of Americans yesterday, claiming that those opposed to her were racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic.

I know the current liberal PC definition of terms like racist or homophobic, and it's likely I'd be called these things by many an unhinged activist. So I'm with the deplorables myself. And I feel solidarity with them.

We see through you, Hillary. Play your PC “-phobic” card all you want. We’re not buying it. Over the past dozen years, liberals have thrown around the word "bigot" so much that the word has lost its meaning. It is debased. All one has to do is disagree with the robots of political correctness on any small point and one is a bigot. I disagree with them on many many points.

We Americans who see what's going on aren't afraid of your smear words because we see the illegitimate way you define these words. And the way you, Hillary, use them to distract people from their real problems. Namely: Corporate control of our government. Namely: You yourself and everything you stand for.

No. Just because we think Black America needs to officially condemn its gangsta rap culture and take more responsibility for its communities doesn’t make us racist. It makes us awake to what is happening.

Just because we think LGBT activists don’t have the right to dictate sex and gender norms for our whole culture doesn’t make us homophobic. It makes us, uh, sane.

Just because we call radical Islamic terrorism by its real name doesn’t make us Islamophobic.

Just because we don’t of approve our elected leaders (your party, Hillary) exporting our jobs to foreign countries doesn’t make us xenophobic.

We see through you, Hillary. We’ve watched official Washington, your party included, sell us down the river for two decades now. Everything we know about you tells us you’ll do nothing but sell the last bit of us left to be sold.

We see that you have nothing but scorn for our values and traditions. Your former boss, Barack Obama, has shown this scorn time and again. We know you are full of such scorn too. Your words yesterday prove it.

In our minds, Hillary, the real deplorables are those who imagine you will stand for working Americans. We know very well you will not. You will stand for your PC special interest groups on the one hand, and Wall Street and the corporate boards on the other.

We see through you. We don’t accept your insulting labels. We are not "racist", "homophobic", etc., etc. We are Americans with our own vision of what our country should be. And we aren’t going to give you our vote in November. Count on it.

Zombies and the Great Cursive Debate

I can’t remember when I first heard about the heated debate going on over cursive back in the US. I do however remember my reaction: “Figures.”

Living as an expat and teacher in Asia, I’ve watched my country from overseas since the mid-1990s, and have learned to expect that if a policy represents dumbing down, most Americans will be cheering it on.

Reading the debate in the press, I found the usual predictable points made by the anti-cursive camp--"It will save classroom time!” key among them, of course. But was more depressed by the often misguided counterpoints made by the pro-cursive camp--"How will kids read their grandparents' old letters?" etc.

Given the lame level of this debate and the generally bad pedagogy in vogue, I could see the pro-cursive camp was fated to lose.

And they did. Cursive is now federally frowned upon. Yet another card pulled from the teetering house of cards.

The pro-cursive camp, I think, would have done better if they'd just stuck to basic truths in this debate, like reminding their adversaries: “You’re all fucking MORONS! Remove handwriting from education? You're fucking IDIOTS! We're going to SECEDE!”

I'm actually convinced this is the only way to deal with these people. Debating them is impossible. Just call a spade a spade.

Then we'll set up an alternative state somewhere else on the globe where watching reality TV is a punishable offense and kids learn not just cursive but also classics and manners and also that there are two genders, male and female, rather than seventeen.

Jump to this month, August. A few days ago a high school friend of mine, I’ll call him Steve, who graduated from the University of Chicago no less, and who, as a technophile, considered himself in the anti-cursive camp, posted on Facebook a New York Times editorial by one Anne Trubek opining that cursive was unnecessary and that “the kids will be alright.” This bit of offensive NYT blather is titled “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter”. And the kids aren’t alright. They already aren’t alright, never mind what they “will be” after a dozen more years of the anomie we’re raising them into.

I should point out that Steve and I have both just turned fifty, that we remain good friends since we left high school in the 1980s, and that we tend to disagree strongly on what are called "hot button" issues. The caption Steve added to his posting of Ms. Trubek's article showed his typical approach of cool optimism whenever such questions come up:

Soon the conspiracy theorists will be claiming that this is yet another example of turning our children into brainwashed automatons. Change is tough. Especially on the old.

For Steve, anyone who points to educational decline and sees the culture going to hell is just being “alarmist”. I’ve written him before about his scary inability, as a University of Chicago graduate, to differentiate between its and it’s and compliment and complement and suchlike things, but carping on English usage to Steve is counterproductive. He replies with an emoticon with its tongue stuck out. If he’s forced to use actual words, they are: “Lighten up dude. Its not important.”

For Steve, people who even use words like civilization are being alarmist by definition. Because, don’t you know, civilization grows on trees. And there are trees all over, dude.

The first two of Steve’s friends to comment in the thread were also in the “Civilization? Who cares?” camp. They wrote:

MARY S.: Oh thank you thank you thank you for posting this article, Steve! I feel like I am shouting into the wilderness when I say that cursive offers no special cognitive advantages over printing, no special ability to "read historical documents" (as someone who actually has read handwritten historical documents, I can assure everyone that older styles of penmanship are so different from our own that knowing cursive is no help--plus, why waste millions of precious learning hours teaching something that only the tiny minority of kids who go on to be academic historians will ever use?), no special fine motor skills that couldn't be better taught by learning to cook or sew a button back on. Change is hard, except for those of us who remember sitting inside on a beautiful day, hunching over our desks for hours a week, papers at a perfect 45-degree angle, meticulously drawing little parallel lines. My son is old enough to have had some cursive in school, while my daughter didn't have it at all. Let cursive go the way of button-hooks, itchy starched collars, and other anachronisms!

ALANIA C.: YES! I hurt my wrist and write like crap and then this. Well played universe, well played.

I couldn’t let all this slide. The Pokemon Go phenomenon already has me in a bad state this summer, and seeing all this on a friend’s wall, I had to deliver a few punches. The thread went on as you see below. What surprised me, this time, is that in the end I actually won Steve over. That is a rarity. In fact I'm not sure I’d ever before convinced Steve of anything.

ERIC MADER: The end of cursive handwriting would be a great cultural loss. The decline of writing on paper is already a serious loss. For many reasons. One of the most basic reasons being cognitive. Studies have shown it.

In general you’re a geek about these things, Steve. But get something in your head: You and your friend Mary and the others in your camp will eventually be devoured by cyborg zombies. And in my mind, the worst thing about this is that you'll probably all enjoy it. Hell, you’re half-devoured already.

I ain’t even gonna debate this with you it's so fucking obvious. I live in a culture where kids, just in order to READ, have to learn three thousand different handwritten characters. We're talking thousands upon thousands of hours of practice. And this basic hard work of learning the writing system deepens their respect for the content they learn and sharpens their skills in so many ways. So that in most other subjects, often even including the foreign language ENGLISH, they could outperform their American peers who over there in the States can graduate high school by learning to wipe their asses and spell their names. I've seen this happen over and over--kids leaving Taipei and going to school in the US and realizing it's a joke. I have kids, in regular public schools here, who study English no more than an hour or two a day and have larger ENGLISH vocabulary and better spelling and grammar than the majority of American kids their age.

“Millions of precious learning hours wasted" on cursive? It’s a fucking joke. Many of my pre-teen students TEACH THEMSELVES English cursive just for fun. They do it in a couple afternoons. After which they'll often hand me homework and essays in English in perfectly functional cursive.

SHAME on America. “Hours wasted” indeed!

STEVE L.: I didnt write the article man. And I guess you didnt read it, because according to the article (and I dont have an opinion on this actually as I dont know enough about cognitive brain functions) what you say is not true when it comes to learning. But hey, take it up with the author. And as for being a zombie, you too will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

ERIC MADER: You posted the article man. And I did read it and have read into the positions of the two sides in this debate. And this NYT piece, in the spectrum of this debate, is simply DAFT. Its arguments are shallow. It's typical of a new strain at the NYT, a paper growing DAFTER and DAFTER every year. Along with the whole country.

When we all hit 70 or so, if we're still around, we're going to see just what kind of culture our "reforms" and “advances" have brought about. The key difference is that you, muttering "Holy shit", are going to be surprised. I'm not.

Resistance will continue.

BRIAN D.: Steve, I don't need cursive to write this: I will wrestle you for food. Cursive is just one stop on the road to anarchy. And no, I don’t need to read the article to register my desire to wrestle you for food. THAT should be a given.

LOUISE B.: Aside from the arguments made in the article, my gut (a pretty accurate scientific barometer, if I do say so myself) dislikes the loss of any learning opportunity. My sisters were forced to conform their writing through hours of repetition. Though I learned cursive, it wasn't perfected at their level. I believe we should throw cursive at the kids just to expose them to the art of written language. Cave drawings, the development of written language around the world, evolution of cursive, etc. Let kids play with it: feather quills, calligraphic nibs, roller balls, the speed of texting and typing--let them play with all of it.

STEVE L.: I would be happy to say the jury is still out. I can also say this: I haven't actually written in cursive in any extended way, save my signature, in years. I also don't think that the merits of learning cursive have ever equalled the seeming abuse left handed writers have faced in American schools. But who knows, maybe learning cursive, just like riding horses (animal empathy) or chopping wood for fire (connection to environment) has/does make us better people. I simply don't know. Apparently you do, on the cursive issue anyway.

ERIC MADER: I haven't done algebra in 30-some years, or much of any other math other than calculating percentages. I haven't worked through a geometric proof either. That doesn't mean I would subscribe to arguments that we should get rid of these basic elements of education just because they aren't "the skills needed for the job market".

That you personally haven't written in cursive doesn't mean much. I write almost everything important that I write on paper, in CURSIVE, and many writers of the books published every year do the same. If I didn't know how to write cursive, my handwriting would be slowed considerably, and I'd need a digital device of some kind to keep recording words at the pace of my thoughts. I'd be seriously hampered if for some reason a digital device wasn't at hand. I short, you take away cursive skills, and you take away a huge swathe of important cultural work, journal writing, personally handwritten notes, novels, poetry, etc., that is better done, according to many professional writers, on paper first. And you permanently link that very crucial cultural process called writing to access to digital devices. Are you sure you want to do all this?

I would have to say that yes, on this issue, I do know the right side.

STEVE L.: Excellent points. Consider me converted. Not kidding. Reason. It is a great thing.

ERIC MADER: Glad to hear. You’ve proven yourself an honest man. But that has a downside. When those cyborg zombies come to finish you off a couple decades from now, if you’re still an honest man, you won't actually enjoy it like I thought.

The arguments of mine that convinced you are really only a small part of the question of what is at stake in this kind of debate.

Anthropologists GET the fact that societies or civilizations hold together in myriad complex ways, often in ways that nobody in the society itself understands or knows consciously. Anthropologists have documented in case after case how pulling out only a couple little rivets is all it takes to cause the whole culture to fall into decline. Pulling out this or that rivet, especially in a practice as central to us as reading or writing, is going to have complex interactions with the whole of the structure. It’s going to have repercussions that we can't foresee. Any change, however reasonable or practical it may look at the moment, may play a role in ushering in things we really don't want.

All advanced civilizations that we know of have taught the young to write by making marks or characters on some surface. Forming these written marks BY HAND. We don't know of any advanced civilization that HASN'T included this practice. The upshot: We simply can't know much about what a civilization based on typing, texting or voice input (which is where it will lead) will be like. Going that direction as a pedagogical norm or goal, we may very well be undermining a whole host of other things in ways we can't even predict. Again: for a certain kind of cognitive development alone I strongly suspect handwriting is crucial.

Yes, resistance may be futile given the fast-growing cyborg zombie demographic. But I would still say: Resist!

Eric Mader

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.