You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.
I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.
Granted, there is no formula: there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option. But there ought to be discussion — not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece — of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.
Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target. A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal. One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially. One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one: how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?
And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance. This is especially vexing for Christians. Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed? On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion. It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from. On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?
If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.
We are indeed living in very interesting times. How can one be bored?
Contemporary 'liberals' are not just intolerant, but totalitarian. Tom Nichols makes the case. (Via Malcolm Pollack who is keeping a close eye on events as we spiral down.)
This is the hopeful side of the culture wars—a call for engagement, not retreat. Religious believers weighing the option of withdrawing from a culture increasingly hostile to their values should redouble their efforts to cultivate their ideas within active subcultures that influence the nation and the next generation of Americans. Those who share a commitment to the freedom to think, speak, associate, publish, and express their beliefs may not have the American Civil Liberties Union in our corner any more—but that just means that we get to take up the noble cause, and the moral authority, they have abandoned.
Yes, this can be a dangerous time to be active in the culture. But it’s very hard to make speech codes, safe spaces, and other anti-thoughtcrime measures work in the long term. Sometimes all it takes for the whole apparatus to come crashing down is a handful of people brave enough to speak their minds without fear.
Unfortunately, I don't see a lot of civil courage out there.
What did we celebrate on the 4th of July? An America that no longer exists.
Should this trouble the philosopher? Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a). The rise and fall of great nations is just more grist for the philosopher's mill. His true homeland is nothing so paltry as a particular nation, even one as exceptional as the USA, and his fate as a truth-seeker cannot be tied to its fate. Like the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly Athens is not bound to a geographical location.
And if the philosopher should also aspire to the heavenly Jerusalem, he is all the more freed from an excess of anxiety over the inevitable passing away of what must pass away.
St. Augustine had to endure the twilight of a civilization. In 410 Alaric and his barbarian horde of Goths sacked Rome. There followed the invasion of North Africa and the siege of Hippo where Augustine was bishop and where he died in 430 while the city was under assault. But the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, and as the curtain fell on Rome, Augustine's thoughts took flight, the result being The City of God.
Am I succumbing to an excess of Kulturpessimismus? Perhaps. We shall see.
In the wake of recent events, Rod Dreher renews his call for the Benedict Option:
It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.
This is especially the case, as it seems to me, given the Left's relentless and characteristically dishonest assault on Second Amendment rights. The only real back up to the First Amendment is the exercise of the rights guaranteed by the Second. You will have noticed that the Left never misses an opportunity to limit law-abiding citizens' access to guns and ammunition. What motivates leftists is the drive to curtail and ultimately eliminate what could be called 'real' liberties such as the liberty to own property, to make money and keep it, to defend one's life, liberty and property, together with the liberty to acquire the means to the defense of life, liberty and property.
Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”
[. . .]
It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”
Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.
I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.
Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.
Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.
There is a potential problem with the Benedict Option, however. Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
The idea is that what one has been lucky enough to inherit, one must actively appropriate, i.e., make one's own by hard work, if one is really to possess it. The German infinitive erwerben has not merely the meaning of 'earn' or 'acquire' but also the meaning of aneignen, appropriate, make one's own.
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target. A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal. One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially. One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one: how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?
We are indeed living in very interesting times. How can one be bored?
Dennis Prager was complaining one day about how the Left ridicules the Right. He sounded a bit indignant. He went on to say that he does not employ ridicule. But why doesn't he? He didn't say why, but I will for him: Because he is a gentleman who exemplifies the good old conservative virtue of civility. And because he is a bit naive.
Prager's behavior, in one way laudable, in another way is not, resting as it does on an assumption that I doubt is true at the present time. Prager assumes that political differences are more like intellectual differences among gentlemanly interlocutors than they are like the differences among warring parties. He assumes that there is a large measure of common ground and the real possibility of mutually beneficial compromise, the sort of compromise that serves the common good by mitigating the extremism of the differing factions, as opposed to that form of compromise, entered into merely to survive, whereby one side knuckles under to the extremism of the other.
But if we are now in the age of post-consensus politics, if politics is war by another name, then it is just foolish not to use the Left's tactics against them.
It is not enough to be right, or have the facts on your side, or to have the better arguments. That won't cut it in a war. Did the Allies prevail over the Axis Powers in virtue of having truth and right on their side? It was might that won the day, and, to be honest, the employing of morally dubious means (e.g., the firebombing of Dresden, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the same sort of means that the Axis would have employed had they been able to. One hopes that the current civil war doesn't turn bloody. But no good purpose is served by failing to understand that what we have here is a war and not minor disagreements about means within the common horizon of agreed-upon assumptions, values, and goals.
Have we entered the age of post-consensus politics? I think so. We should catalog our irreconcilable differences. For now a quick incomplete list. We disagree radically about: the purpose of government; crime and punishment; race; marriage; abortion; drugs; pornography; gun rights; the interpretation of the Constitution; religion; economics.
Take religion. I have no common ground with you if you think every vestige of the Judeo-Christian heritage should be removed from the public square, or take the sort of extremist line represented by people like Dawkins and A. C. Grayling. If, however, you are an atheist who gives the Establishment Clause a reasonable interpretation, then we have some common ground.
Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?
No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.
Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):
"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.
Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.
Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."
Response
This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation.
First, we do seem to be accelerating, or perhaps jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up. And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack. So if you owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties. As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it. Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list.
But is the Enlightenment the problem? Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.
The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.
Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed. Now science brings enlightenment and the enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia. Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought. (Ernst Cassirer is worth reading on this.) Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down. The cosmogonic myths were called into question. Doubt, as I like to say, is the engine of inquiry. Doubt is a driver, a motor. Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden. Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious. But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and whatnot that had been handed down, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense. In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment. Doubt, its motor, is therefore good.
Skepsis need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus. But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt. If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle. I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise." (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.) I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment involved a faith in Reason and in the power of Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot.*
Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical. (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses.) Doubt is good. But good things can be taken too far. So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable. Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the self-evidence or objective certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.
I think this is right. But it is one-sided. The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically. It is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following: is it real as people say? Is it truly valuable? Is it true? Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense? Is the explanation truly explanatory? Is a certain hypthesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)? Is there evidence for it? Does the earth really rest on a turtle? Is it turtles all the way down? Does it function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor? Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving it by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing? Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?
So doubt is a god-like power. But is is also diabolical. Lucifer the light-bearer becomes drunk on his own power and blinded by his own light. He will not obey. He will not recognize any authority other than his own will. His mind is not for minding any antecedent reality. He will not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself. He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another. In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates." I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) — not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.) Zwei –> zwo –> two –> duplicity. Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity.
Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition. How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests?
I don't know. I do know that Islam is not the answer. And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment.
The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas. What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry. It needs skepticism. It needs philosophy. What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.
There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world. This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.
To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess. Perhaps Kant's "Copernican revolution" 'paved the way for' conceptual relativism despite Kant's not being a conceptual relativist. That's one example.
_____________________________
*The greatest figure in the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He famously remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787, first ed. 1781), "I have found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith." Now how does that jive with what I wrote in the preceding paragraph? I can't explain this now; it is just too complicated! This is what i call the invocation of blogospheric privilege. Brevity is the soul of blog. This being so, I am justified in this venue of just stopping.
Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating. But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking. After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven. No need to name names. You know who they are.
From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration. Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk. (I am not joking; look it up.) If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.
If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars. Each has a magnitude and a direction. This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.
The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction: the end of civilization as we know it.
'Dawn' in the title above is curiously inapt in these times of twilight as the light goes out in the West. Indications of decline: fascination with the grotesque and the abnormal; the mainstreaming of deviant behavior; the cultural ubiquity of pornography; the loss of any sense that we are spiritual beings with a destiny that transcends the merely physical; the loss of the belief that there is anything worth living for beyond the gratification of our basest desires; the abdication of those in positions of authority, together with their denial of reality and their routine lying, as witness the brazen mendacity of Obama and Hillary. Vanity Fair, May 2015:
At 55, he [David Mills] is tired of atheism activism, which he’s been doing since the late 1970s, and ready for a career reboot. Recently he became the owner of a RealDoll—the Rolls-Royce of sex dolls, created two decades ago by artist and entrepreneur Matt McMullen. Mills, who learned about them from an episode of the sitcom Family Guy, visited the company’s Web site and was convinced the photos were of models, not dolls, because they all looked so realistic. More research proved otherwise.
“I thought, Well, gee, I would enjoy something like that!” he recalls. “I mean, I love women. God, I absolutely love women.” And especially their legs. “That’s what attracts me to a woman as much as a face, if not more.” Big problem, though: “My fundamental personality conflict is that I really like women but I don’t like to be around people.”
Mills is morally sick with a sickness that eventually comes to seem normal to its victim. For Mills, a woman is just a female animal body. But such bodies have their manifold physical imperfections. So he wants a perfect body, one that maximally excites his lust, whether or not the body embodies a person. To relate to a person is too much of a bother when the gratification of lust is the supreme desideratum. Enter the sexbot, a body that embodies nothing.
What’s an average day like for him [Mills] now?
“Well, somebody will send me an e-mail: Oh, it’s just so sadddd. I know you’re such a sad person with this doll and I feel sooo sorry for you,” he says, mocking this individual. “Well, here’s how sorry you should feel for me: I sleep till 11, and if I want, maybe later. I get up. I sit around a couple hours, watch TV, maybe have lunch with my daughter if she comes. You know, go out to a restaurant and have a good dinner, come back, maybe watch some porn or TV. Maybe have a late-night snack, a beer or two, and go to bed. So don’t feel sorry for me, for Christ’s sake.”
Matt McMullen, above, of the appropriately named Abyss Creations. Look at his eyes. If the eyes are the windows of the soul . . . . Look at his arms, plastered with ugly tattoos, the graffiti of the human body whereby a spiritual animal defaces the temple of the spirit . . . .
While I am on the topic of doom, gloom, and decline, I may as well draw your attention to another fine jeremiad by Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpt:
A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility. Forensic evidence, testimony, and logic have shown that “hands up, don’t shoot” is a complete myth. Michael Brown, fresh from committing a robbery, walking down the middle of the street, apparently under the influence, lunged at a policeman, grabbed for his weapon, fled, turned around and charged, before being shot and killed. He was not shot in the back. Nor did he halt and put his hands up, begging the policeman not to shoot him. Yet the president of the United States often invokes generically “Ferguson,” as if it were proof of police brutality. “Hands up, don’t shoot” is analogous to “the earth is flat” or “the sun revolves around the earth.”
“Mattress Girl” is a Columbia University co-ed who had post facto regrets about once sexually hooking up with a young male student. She then recalibrated their pairing as a forcible rape, and yet was not able to demonstrate to either the university or the police that her allegations were valid. Yet she became a cult-hero. The progressive world embraced her as a feminist icon, as she lugged around a mattress and made an explicit sex tape[2], to further a narrative that could not be proven true. If one assumed that 2,500 years ago Socrates destroyed for good the notion of moral relativism in his take down of the Sophists, think again. The subtext of Mattress Girl’s whine is that even if she is lying, her cause still furthers progressive agendas and thus is not really a lie after all.
Current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. Imagine if Mattress Girl’s male sexual partner had alleged that, in fact, he was coerced into sex, and then he carried his own 50-pound mattress around campus to draw public attention to her coercion. Certainly, he would be ignored or laughed at. Science, logic, probability, evidence — all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment — now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.
Eric Holder called the nation “cowards” for not holding a national conversation on race. But Holder did not wish a freewheeling discussion about the break-up of the black family, the epidemic of violence and drug use, the cult of the macho male, the baleful role of anti-police rhetoric and rap music — in addition to current racism, a sluggish economy, and the wages of past apartheid. Instead, the ground rules of racial discussion were again to be anti-Enlightenment to the core. One must not cite the extraordinary disproportionate crime rate of inner-city black males, or the lack of inspired black leadership at the national level. One most certainly does not suggest that other minority groups either do not promote leaders like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or do not seem to have a need for national collective spokespeople at all.
Really, is there any more pertinent sign for most colleges and universities? Cigarettes manufacturers are required to ornament their wares with all manner of alarming advisories, why shouldn’t institutions of higher education face similar requirements? After all, the noxious atmosphere they diffuse is perhaps even more dangerous than cigarette smoke, which harms only the body. A college education threatens to eat away at a student’s soul and capacity for a healthy, robust, adult emotional life. “You Are Leaving the American Sector.” For many, perhaps most colleges and universities today, that about sums it up.
Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead –- often not recognizing fully what they were doing –- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. 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. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. 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. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 244-245.)
This was written 34 years ago, 20 years before 9/11. It is the charter for Rod Dreher's recent talk of a Benedict Option. Excerpts from an eponymous article of his:
Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.
For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.
The Great Forgetting is taking a particular toll on American Christianity, which is losing its young in dramatic numbers. Those who remain within churches often succumb to a potent form of feel-good relativism that sociologists have called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which is dissolving historic Christian moral and theological orthodoxy.
A recent Pew survey found that Jews in America are in an even more advanced state of assimilation to secular modernity. The only Jews successfully resisting are the Orthodox, many of whom live in communities meaningfully separate and by traditions distinct from the world.
Is there a lesson here for Christians? Should they take what might be called the “Benedict Option”: communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life?
The broader topic here is that of voluntary withdrawal from a morally corrupt society and its morally corrupt institutions. There are various options. One could join a monastic order and live in community. This is the monastic cenobitic option. There is also the monastic eremitic option: one lives as a hermit within a religious context subject to its rules and having taken vows. Both the cenobitic and the eremitic options can be made less rigorous in various ways. One could attach oneself as an oblate to a monastery visiting it from time to time and participating in its communal prayers and other activities (Ora, labora, et lectio are the three 'legs' of the Benedictine 'stool.'). This could also be done in an eremitic way. (From the Greek eremos, desert.)
Spiritual withdrawal is of course greatly aided by physical withdrawal from cities into deserts and other remote locales; but one could voluntarily withdraw from a morally corrupt society while living in the midst of it in, say, Manhattan. (I cannot, however, advise setting up as the resident monk in a bordello in Pahrump, Nevada.)
What of the Maverick Option? As I have been living it since 1991 it does not involve drastic physical isolation: I live on the edge of a major metropolitan area which is also the edge of a rugged wilderness area. Ready access to raw nature (as opposed to, say, Manhattan's Central Park) may not be absolutely essential for spiritual development, but it is extremely conducive to it (in tandem with other things of course). Nature, experienced alone, removes one from the levelling effects of the social. (Henry David Thoreau: "I have no walks to throw away on company." That sounds misanthropic and perhaps from Henry David's mouth it was; but it can be given a positive reading.) It would be the height of folly to suppose that man's sociality is wholly negative; but its corrupting side cannot be denied. Encounter with nature in solitude pulls one out of one's social comfort zone in such a way that the ultimate questions obtrude themselves with full force. In society, they can strike one like jokes from a Woody Allen movie; in solitude, in the desert, they are serious. Nature is not God; but the solitary encounter with it, by breaking the spell of the social, can orient us toward Nature's God.
I will have more to say of the Maverick Option, its nature and pitfalls, in a later post.
Where Jeremiah counsels engagement without assimilation, Benedict represents the possibility of withdrawal. The former goal is to be achieved by the pursuit of ordinary life: the establishment of homes, the foundation of families, all amid the wider culture. The latter is to be achieved by the establishment of special communities governed by a heightened standard of holiness.
Although it can be interpreted as a prophecy of doom, the Jeremiah Option is fundamentally optimistic. It suggests that the captives can and should lead fulfilling lives even in exile. The Benedict Option is more pessimistic. It suggests that mainstream society is basically intolerable, and that those who yearn for decent lives should have as little to do with it as possible. MacIntyre is careful to point out that the new St. Benedict would have to be very different from the original and might not demand rigorous separation. Even so, his outlook remains bleak.
We need to catalog and examine all the options. A man once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. He was the wisest of mortals.
British (Catholic) historian Paul Johnson in his wonderful Modern Times attributes relativism's rise to Einstein! So does Einstein's latest biographer.
There are two questions that must be distinguished. The first is whether Einstein's Theory of Relativity entails either moral or cognitive (alethic) relativism. The second question is whether Einstein's revolutionary contributions to physics, via their misinterpretation by journalists and other shallow people (am I being unfair?), contributed to an atmosphere in which people would be more likely to embrace moral and cognitive relativism. The first question belongs to the philosophy of science, the second to the sociology of belief. The questions are plainly distinct.
The answer to the first question is a resounding No. Since physics has nothing to do with moral questions — which is not to say that moral questions do not arise in the technological application of physical knowledge or in its dissemination or in the construction of experiments, etc. — it is quite clear that neither STR nor GTR nor any physical theory has any logical consequences in respect of meta-ethical doctrines such as moral relativism. And as for cognitive or alethic relativism, far from its being entailed by the Theory of Relativity, I should think that the latter presupposes the absoluteness of truth.
Take the Galilean principle of the additivity of velocities. Suppose I'm on a train moving with velocity v1. I fire my gun in the direction of the train's travel. The projectile's muzzle velocity is v2. The projectile's total velocity is v1 + v2. But STR implies that the additivity of velocities breaks down at relativistic speeds, speeds approaching the speed of light. Now the proposition that the principle of the additivity of velocities fails at relativistic speeds is not merely true relative to STR, but true absolutely. And the same goes for any number of other propositions of STR and GTR such as the one bearing upon the conversion of mass and energy, E=mc^2, or that the speed of light remains a constant 186, 282 mi/sec. Or consider the proposition that motion and rest are relative to reference-frames. That proposition's truth is not relative to any reference-frame or to any conceptual framework either.
In short, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, far from entailing relativism about truth, presupposes, and thus entails the absoluteness of truth. But I don't need to make that strong a claim to refute the thesis that the Theory of Relativity entails the relativity of truth. It suffices to point out that the theory is logically consistent with the absoluteness of truth.
As for the sociological question, I suppose one would have to grant that misinterpretations and shallow expositions of the Theory of Relativity did contribute to the spread of moral and cognitive relativism. But of course that is not the responsibility of Einstein or modern physics but the responsibility of those shallow-pates we call journalists. (Am I being unfair a second time?)
Both. Here is a liberal professor, writing (not very well) under a pseudonym (of course!) who says he or she is terrified of his or her liberal students. But he or she does make a good point when he or she points to the consumerist mentality that prevails among students. That's been in place for a long time now and is one of the reasons I gave up a tenured position in 1991.
One of the phrases one increasingly hears these days is 'comfort zone.' I humbly suggest that if you are not prepared to leave said zone on a regular basis you will never really live.
One needs stress to grow, mentally, physically, and in every way. Stress is not to be had in a 'safe space.'
Glaubt es mir! – das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heißt: gefährlich leben!For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 283, tr. Walter Kaufmann)
There is a website by the name of The Philosophers' Cocoon. You read that right: cocoon. On the masthead: "A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers."
Years ago I answered a reader's e-mail on line, providing his full name. The topic was technical and non-political. A while back he contacted me because he wanted his name removed from an arcane post buried deep in my archives. I did so. But then he started worrying about his name's occurrence in the ComBox . . . .
Now I sympathize with the young and unestablished. We live in nasty, illiberal times. I've made mine, so it requires no great courage to speak the truth under my real name. But it requires some, and more need to 'man up' and 'woman up' to confront the fascist scum on the Left. There is such a thing as civil courage without the exercise of which by large numbers we are done for as a free republic. Click on the link for another example of a reader who requested that his name be removed from my weblog.
And if you are unfamiliar with the disgusting Laura Kipnis affair, bang on this. Dreher's piece ends ominously.
UPDATE: A nationally known conservative college professor, a man who is well into his career, and protected by tenure, just wrote to say “it’s worse than you think,” then sent evidence. He said this has definitely had a chilling effect on the lectures he gives, for fear of triggering a Little Empress or Emperor, who will set out to ruin his academic life. I’m not going to quote his post, because I want to protect him and his position on his campus. But he adds:
If I had to do it over again, I would have never, ever entered academia. I cringe when I think of the few young, ambitious, and bright conservatives who are entering the academy now who have no idea of how even uttering their viewpoints will be turned against them to destroy them.
A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. – See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf
A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. – See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf
A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. – See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf
Professor of Government Charles Kesler in the Spring 2015Claremont Review of Books laments that "The culture of free discussion and debate is declining, and with it liberty, on and off the campus." He is right to be offended by the new culture of 'trigger warnings' and 'microaggressions,' but I wonder if his analysis is quite right.
What’s behind the decline? There are many factors, but among the most influential is that dead-end of modern philosophy called postmodernism, which has had two baneful effects. By teaching that reason is impotent—that it can’t arrive at any objective knowledge of truth, beauty, and justice because there is nothing “out there” to be known—postmodernism turns the university into an arena for will to power. All values are relative, so there is no point in discussing whether the most powerful values are true, just, or good. The crucial thing is that they are the most powerful, and can be played as trumps: do not offend me, or you will be in trouble. If we say it’s racist, then it’s racist. Don’t waste our time trying to ask, But what is racism?
Second, postmodernism devotes itself to what Richard Rorty called “language games.” For professors, especially, this is the most exquisite form of will to power, “a royal road to social change,” as Todd Gitlin (the rare lefty professor at Columbia who defends free speech) observes. So freshman girls became “women,” slaves turned into “enslaved persons,” “marriage” had to be opened to “same-sex” spouses, and so forth. Naming or renaming bespeaks power, and for decades we have seen this power rippling through American society. Now even sexual assault and rape are whatever the dogmatic leftists on and off campus say they are.
No truth, then no way things are; power decides
Kesler's analysis is largely correct, but it could use a bit of nuancing and as I like to say exfoliation (unwrapping). First of all, if there is no truth, then there is nothing to be known. And if there is neither knowledge nor truth, then there is no one 'way things are.' There is no cosmos in the Greek sense. Nothing (e.g., marriage) has a nature or essence. That paves the way for the Nietzschean view that, at ontological bottom, "The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides!" We too, as parts of the world, are then nothing more than competing centers of power-acquisition and power-maintenance. Power rules!
This is incoherent of course, but it won't stop it from being believed by leftists. It should be obvious that logical consistency cannot be a value for someone for whom truth is not a value. This is because logical consistency is defined in terms of truth: a set of propositions is consistent if and only if its members can all be true, and inconsistent otherwise.
Don't confuse the epistemological and the ontological
To think clearly about this, however, one must not confuse the epistemological and the ontological. If Nietzsche is right in his ontological claim, and there is no determinate and knowable reality, then there is nothing for us, or anyone, to know. But if we are incapable of knowing anything, or limited in what we can know, it does not follow that there is no determinate and knowable reality. Of course, we are capable of knowing some things, and not just such 'Cartesian' deliverances as that I seem to see a coyote now; we know that there are coyotes and that we sometimes see them and that they will eat damn near anything, etc. (These are evident truths, albeit not self-evident in the manner of a 'Cartesian' deliverance.) Although we know some things, we are fallible and reason in us is weak and limited. We make mistakes, become confused, and to make it worse our cognitive faculties are regularly suborned by base desires, wishful thinking, and what-not.
Fallibilism and objectivism
It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason in us, with the question whether there is truth. A fallibilist is not a truth-denier. One can be — it is logically consistent to be — both a fallibilist and an upholder of (objective) truth. What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some (not all) classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of (objective) truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the objectivity of truth.
Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word. To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.
One cannot be a liberal (in the good old sense!) without being tolerant, and thus a fallibilist, and if the latter, then an absolutist about truth, and hence not a PC-whipped leftist!
And now we notice a very interesting and important point. To be a liberal in the old sense (a paleo-liberal) is, first and foremost, to value toleration. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism. (Morris Raphael Cohen) But why should we be tolerant of (some of) the beliefs and (some of) the behaviors of others? Because we cannot responsibly claim to know, with respect to certain topics, what is true and what ought to be done/left undone. Liberalism (in the good old sense!) requires toleration, and toleration requires fallibilism. But if we can go wrong, we can go right, and so fallibilism presupposes and thus entails the existence of objective truth. A good old liberal must be an absolutist about truth and hence cannot be a PC-whipped lefty.
Examples. Why tolerate atheists? Because we don't know that God exists. Why tolerate theists? Because we don't know that God does not exist. And so on through the entire range of Big Questions. But toleration has limits. Should we tolerate Muslim fanatics such as the Taliban or ISIS terrorists? Of course not. For they reject the very principle of toleration. That's an easy case. More difficult: should we tolerate public Holocaust denial via speeches and publications? Why should we? Why should we tolerate people who lie, blatantly, about matters of known fact and in so doing contribute to a climate in which Jews are more likely to be oppressed and murdered? Isn't the whole purpose of free speech to help us discover and disseminate the truth? How can the right to free speech be twisted into a right to lie? But there is a counter-argument to this, which is why this is not an easy case. I haven't the space to make the case.
Getting back to the radical Muslims who reject the very principle of toleration, they have a reason to reject it: they think they know the answers to the Big Questions that we in the West usually have the intellectual honesty to admit we do not know the answers to. Suppose Islam, or their interpretation thereof, really does provide all the correct answers to the Big Questions. They would then be justified in imposing their doctrine and way of life on us, and for our own eternal good. But they are epistemological primitives who are unaware of their own fallibility and the fallibility of their prophet and their Book and all the rest. The dogmatic and fanatical tendencies of religion in the West were chastened by the Greek philosophers and later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. First Athens took Jerusalem to task, and then Koenigsberg did the same. Unfortunately, there has never been anything like an Enlightenment in the Islamic world; hence they know no check on their dogmatism and fanaticism.
Defending the university against leftists and Islamists
The university rests on two main pillars. One has inscribed on it these propositions: There is truth; we can know some of it; knowing truth contributes to human flourishing and is thus a value. The other pillar bears witness to the truth that we are fallible in our judgements. Two pillars, then: Absolute truth and Fallibilism. No liberal (good sense!) education without both.
The commitment to the existence of absolute truth is common to both pillars, and it is this common commitment that is attacked by both leftists and Islamists. It is clear how leftists attack it by trying to eliminate truth in favor of power. That this eliminativism is utterly incoherent and self-refuting doesn't bother these power freaks because they do not believe in or value truth, which is implied by any commitment to logical consistency, as argued above. (Of course, some are just unaware that they are inconsistent, and others are just evil.)
But how is it that Islamists attack objective truth? Aren't they theists? Don't they believe in an absolute source and ground of being and truth? Yes indeed. But their God is unlimited Power. Their God is all-powerful to the max: there are no truths of logic, nor any necessary truths, that limit his power. The Muslim God is pure, omnipotent will. (See Pope Benedict's Regensurg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity.)
The subterranean link
Here is perhaps the deepest connection between the decidedly strange bedfellows, leftism and Islamism: both deny the absoluteness of truth and both make it subservient to power.
