A reactionary then is in favor of radical change to reestablish and restore the status quo ante. Instead of just being yesterday’s conservatism, reactionaries seek to ideologically justify and explain the practical basis for the wisdom undergirding the prior regime. And what naturally accompanies that project is the attempt to explain the root causes of what went wrong with the new system and why it resulted in such atrocious excesses and led to political and economic catastrophes.
He has more to say, and he includes a link to his very long essay on Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. In that essay, he writes,
it seems clear that a Benedict Option community should be one in which life in centered around frequent study, learning, and teaching. Like, say, a small ‘campus’ of connected, committed households in close proximity.
That seems inconsistent with, or irrelevant to what the original Benedictines were aiming for, and this new movement for a Benedict option for traditionalists, most especially Christians, strikes me as misunderstanding its historical roots and so misdiagnosing the cure.
The Benedictines were attempting to revive a stagnant and rotting Catholicism from within, not to withdraw from the broader, non-believing world that was growing hostile to Catholicism.
It would seem the better model, at least for Christianity, is the very early Church, which openly embraced suffering and martyrdom, rather than hiding from the persecuting sword of the Roman Empire.
Benedictine communities attracted those wishing to reform and revitalize a fading community from within. In today’s world, a Benedict option seems like it is just placing one’s light under a bushel basket.
The early church was mostly ignored by the Roman authorities, who seemed eager to let Christians get off the hook unless absolutely forced to do otherwise. Even the heavier persecutions seem tied up in “gotta blame someone for that earthquake” rather then firm ideological disgust with the Christian faith. Rome was incredibly tolerant in terms of religion.
Martyrdom of course makes it seem like the Romans hated these people, but this fails to consider the incredibly violent baseline of Roman society. The Christians weren’t that special just because they were executed.
I think your average Christian baker would much much rather have someone with the mindset of a Roman then a progressive once you adjust for modern violence standards. The Roman would ignore him if he paid his taxes. The prog hates him to the core and hounds him without letting up. My understanding is that the Colorado Baker is still being sued into oblivion despite “winning” a supreme court case 7-2. What accounts for that zeal?
What is amazing is just how nice and holy these targets are. In the whole country they couldn’t find a single Christian bigot? Or just a nice person who was bad at articulating themselves. Was there that little to choose from? These people are already saints living the way early Christians did…and they are still targeted. It’s not even just high status or UMC jobs that are targeted. You don’t get much more humble and off the grid then small business baker.
I think Christianity is facing a new kind of enemy it hasn’t before.
I think your argument is a perfect illustration of why Handle is so wrong
The Colorado baker chose to engage in the public debate of a pivotal social issue of our times. He won in the Supreme Court, but the ruling was too narrow to establish a larger set of protections.
The issues at hand were huge. Freedom of association, which is a precious idea, vs the core idea of the Civil Rights act applied to public accommodations, which demands a society where everyone gets to participate. Does everyone gets to live in that sweet public domain of kindness and civility? It sounds awesome, but it wasn’t offered to everyone equally by the scaffolding of decent Northern European Christian society. Being an ethical human being going forward will mean some change and some compromise of ideas we hold dear, because everyone else wants the good stuff too.
Two very important, very admirable, but occasionally conflicting notions of human decency are at stake. This wasn’t about finding a bogeyman to punish. Instead of seeing this as a pivotal conflict that civil society needs to work through, you simply cast it as petty, gross bullying.
The thing you seem to hate about progressives is the sense of moral superiority. Can’t you see that you are doing exactly the same thing? Both sides seem to be more or less equally closed minded to me. Its time we take these issues more seriously.
Ahem…speaking of moral superiority.
Black people in 1960s south were a poor minority that couldn’t get through the day of minding their own business without dealing with Jim Crow. When buying a sandwich for lunch is a hassle people have sympathy.
Gays situation today has NOTHING to do with civil rights. Gays are worshipped by all the powerful people. They have free and even celebrated access to 99.9% of service providers for anything they want no questions asked, including all high status providers. They even have access to these Christian bakers to procure 99.9% of any services they want, except those that directly conflict with the bakers conscious. When his happens, they have easy access to many convenient and equivalent services, many references provided courteously by the Christian bakers themselves. Does that should like what things were like for blacks in the Jim Crow south???
If anything this situation proves that the opponents of the Civil Rights Act were dead right about where it would head in the long run. There are zero limiting principles to the logic of the act, hence why the Supreme Court can’t issue a strong enough ruling without admitting they were wrong on civil rights. So they are reduced to telling the bully and scolds “for God’s sake just leave these people alone” in a twisted logic they can’t really force on the people they just wish would grow some common sense and decency and drop it.
“Being an ethical human being going forward will mean some change and some compromise of ideas we hold dear, because everyone else wants the good stuff too.”
They want to enslave us. They want stuff they haven’t earned because they lack the ability to produce the way we do. They want not just social tolerance, but social aggrandizement, of every decision they make regardless of what it is or who it impacts. It is to be celebrated and subsidized against peoples will with punishments for anyone that doesn’t fall in line. It’s pure evil.
Tom, you’re the one who’s wrong on this. The tension is irreconcilable.
I took the following quote as the most critical part of Handle’s excellent post:
“The problem is that no institution based on values at odds with state law or modern mainstream society can long survive without being selective as to its membership and associations. And that necessarily implies some degree of discrimination which will run afoul of the absolutist egalitarianism and anti-discrimination tenets of contemporary progressive ideology. That’s what’s so pernicious about the principle of anti-discrimination when taken to extremes: there is simply no end to the obnoxious interventions in intimate human affairs that it can justify, no private sphere immune from molestation.”
Freedom of association and Anti-discrimination are fundamentally at odds. One allows individuals the ability (but not legal obligation) to discriminate. The other legally mandates that discrimination not occur.
The modern progressive project is using anti-discrimination as a tool to destroy any discrimination of which it does not approve. Including any discrimination with a basis in reality.
Since you can’t avoid the results of avoiding reality, it is a self-limiting concept, but only in a ‘the parasite has killed the host’ sense.
I agree the two concepts are mutually exclusive, but a society can operate with a tension between the two, and America has for 60+ years. That is my point. The best result, whatever it is, would likely leave everyone somewhat uncomfortable. There are lots of such ideas in conflict.
An example might be someone who is pro-life supporting exceptions for rape and incest.That might be morally indefensible to them, but it may also seem politically necessary, and it often works out that way.
My argument is not that the progressive side should get their way. It is only that we should expect to have to work this out, that it will be hard and that both sides have to get some of what they want. Its tedious to hear both sides whine about how evil the other point of view is, or how hard it is to have their purity polluted by the other side. Neither side has destroyed the other. Neither side has won.
There is still considerable freedom of association in this country. Check out some of the discussions on land use regulations, or public schools. I can still start a company tomorrow, and hire my ten best friends, and they could all be white men, and no one would come and sue me. Tens of millions of Americans go to church every Sunday without incident. Its all still OK.
Rape and incest make up less then 1% of abortions. It’s a tiny exception that really misses the point, and doesn’t represent much of a compromise.
Public schools are going through a new round of attack based on disparate impact. We can see this with Stuyvesant in NYC, Montgomery counties recent action, and my own magnet schools trials and tribulations to be allowed to exist. Moreover, how much of school curiculum and choice is blocked off by the authorities. If you want a good story about freedom of association google Charles Murray’s story about some people in Frederick county trying to start a school.
Land is at ncredibly expensive and zoning arcane primarily because price is the only secondary proxy allowed for making sure your surrounded by the right kind of people. There is a reason we are more segregated today then 1965.
This guy runs a small business and they are after him. Your tiny company might escape view if you don’t make any money, but if it does they will come after you to loot what you’ve built.
Go the the part of my essay that begins
As I wrote in the essay, the historical context of Saint Benedict does not align well at all with the present situation. People shouldn’t get too hung up on the ‘Benedict’ part of it or take the analogy too far; that’s getting caught in arguments about specific details that aren’t important to the big picture. Instead, it’s best to understand that Benedict’s story provides a kind of ‘spiritual inspiration’ for Christians, and that Dreher chose the name for that reason and because of Alasdair MacIntyre’s use of it.
As for which historical context would provide a more accurate analogy, if one is focusing on Christians then one should probably look to eras in which they lived a precarious existence – sometimes tolerated, sometimes persecuted – as suspect minorities under Muslim domination, sometimes with the status of second-class dhimmis paying jizya. There are Copts and Chaldeans and various other groups going back to Islam’s early conquests. Jews living in those lands also provide a closer example, as do pre-emancipation Jewish communities in Europe.
Sorry, there was a lot written in that essay and there was no way I was going to get through it all.
I took Arnold’s summary as a fairly accurate reflection of how most people talk about Dreher’s Benedict option, including Dreher himself. It’s not just general inspiration from history, but an assessment that Christianity (or social conservatism) is irreconcilable with and must hold itself off from society.
I don’t disagree with your second point and the analogy to other times. That’s why I mentioned early Christianity under pre-Constantinian Rome.
Probably the main point about the reactionary right is how little they are impacting politics and they mostly seem to most trolling versus making big impacts. In terms of Trump Ross Douthat noted he is a Phantom Autocrat that takes very strong autocrat positions but really does not seem to move the needle a whole lot. The Wall has not even been started and that was center of his campaign. Trump is more interested in fame and popularity versus power or even money. So Trump removes the US Paris Accords without any real changes in policy as US carbon output is still slightly declining. (Yes outsourced to China, etc.) Or Hungary leader ends Women Studies at 2 universities and blames Muslim Immigrants for everything but does not end free trade with other Europe nations.
(The Trump coalition of WWC and economic elite hits me as not long run stable either although the Ds coalition of left elite, teachers unions and minorities is not that stable either.)
There is a lot there is lot that Dreher says about local religion but:
1) It is a competitive global economy so it is wrong to tell young people that communities can take care of themselves and they take of each other. I don’t see how the global economy will change.
2) As the global economy grows, it weakening the power of local communities politics and churches.
3) There is no economic plan for this Benedict Option so it seems impractical to a community.
In terms of the US, I find it weird that the latest opoid drug crisis is hitting the WWC instead of African-Americans, whose communities traditionally hardest hit by drug overdoses and crime. So I do wonder if the areas that are going to struggle the most the next generation are the WWC small communities compared to inner city minorities.
Arnold, you have pointed us to something and not commented on it at all. You seem to think there is something here for us to consider. Can you tell us what it is? Because Taimyoboi seems to have gotten it just right. Handle just wants to go and hide somewhere.
I want to do what?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disagreeing with Handle, only a fairly common view of the what the Benedict Option is supposed to mean.
I do not think it is far off the mark to diagnose Western society as having moved from indifference to Christianity and social conservatism to outright hostility.
I’m just less confident about the proposed cure, and it sounds like I may have a attributed a view of the Benedict Option to Handle that he may not have.
Did you read the essay? It’s very long, and I think Handle is actually advocating the opposite. That “going and hiding somewhere” is not going to work, or perhaps can only work by creating “ghettos” in which political power can be concentrated.
Concur. Handle’s post was a critical interaction with Dreher, and in many places not an endorsement.
As noted above, the ability to freely associate is critical to maintaining a functioning moral group. To the extent the state denies that ability, which it does today, the “go and hide” strategy results in Branch Davidian results, not Benedictine monasteries.
Whether or not ‘ghetto up’ is viable I need to think more about…
And then there’s ‘punch back’, aka Trump.
Since Schopenhauer died this day in 1860, we can turn to his On Human Nature (1851) to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same:
“The United States of North America exhibit the attempt to proceed without any such arbitrary basis; that is to say, to allow abstract right to prevail pure and unalloyed. But the result is not attractive. For with all the material prosperity of the country what do we find? The prevailing sentiment is a base Utilitarianism with its inevitable companion, ignorance; and it is this that has paved the way for a union of stupid Anglican bigotry, foolish prejudice, coarse brutality, and a childish veneration of women. Even worse things are the order of the day: most iniquitous oppression of the black freemen, lynch law, frequent assassination often committed with entire impunity, duels of a savagery elsewhere unknown, now and then open scorn of all law and justice, repudiation of public debts, abominable political rascality towards a neighbouring State, followed by a mercenary raid on its rich territory,—afterwards sought to be excused, on the part of the chief authority of the State, by lies which every one in the country knew to be such and laughed at—an ever-increasing ochlocracy, and finally all the disastrous influence which this abnegation of justice in high quarters must have exercised on private morals. This specimen of a pure constitution on the obverse side of the planet says very little for republics in general, but still less for the imitations of it in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Peru.”
What a gifted polemicist Schopenhauer was–Mencken-like. Or maybe Mencken was channeling Schopenhauer.
I was pleasantly surprised by the length of Handle’s essay–still haven’t read it mostly. I liked what he said about Dreher and how to understand him, for Dreher is easy to dismiss if you are determined to find a reason to do so. Dreher comes across as a paranoid weirdo with an blog full of clickbait (Dreher-bait), but Dreher has some messages worth paying attention to.
“The hermeneutics of suspicion,” by themselves, keep me going backto Dreher, just to hone my skepticism.
I don’t want to say anything more till fully digesting Handel’s latest missive. More grease to your elbow!
The concept of sin and the emotions of shame, embarrassment, humiliation, guilt, remorse, contrition, repentance and atonement are all part of the natural and instinctive arsenal ordering human group behavior. (from the looong essay)
It sounds like “check your privilege.” Is that why SJWism is so popular with so many people, a wonderful combination of moral superiority and abasement?
The contributors at Instapundit talk about “leftist autophagy” but the constant underlying fear that perhaps “I am a sinner beyond redemption” may actually strengthen the faith.
Handle later says, “One manifestation of the “graveyard of the spirit” is a contemporary way of life best described by Milan Kundera’s “lightness of being.” It is a materialistic, consumeristic, and hedonistic existence devoid of sacredness, transcendence, overarching purpose, or spiritually deeper meaning. Though, to be fair, it is also free of the terror of hellfire and damnation,”
SJW certainly seems like an opposite to that.